 to Tony sincere for some comments. All right. Thank you, Brandon. So I'll make sure. Can you guys hear me? Yes, sir. Coming in loud and clear. Perfect. Thank you much. Well, I first want to just welcome everybody to the August installment of our of our state technical advisory committee. Thank you all for participating. We've had quite a year so far. We're actually closing in on the end of our fiscal year right now, and our field offices are busy wrapping up to equip our CSP program and then also really working hard on CRP across the state. We're still we're down to about six weeks left to wrap up this, all these different programs. And we've actually been given the opportunity to to receive a little bit more funding here at the end of the year and our field offices have graciously taken on the opportunity to get a few more dollars obligated out to our our producers across the across the state. So I really want to start off by just saying how much I appreciate how hard the NRCS staff across the state are working to get our programs implemented and working to to get our producers needs met and helping helping our producers to remain sustainable across the state. We do have a number of of items that have come up recently that we are working through. One of the items that has just recently come up is the Inflation Reduction Act. This is an act that has just made it. I think I think the president just signed this just the other day. The discussion that's coming down through the agency regarding this act is there's going to be an increase in funding or potential significant increase in funding for for NRCS. They're looking at having an increased start in fiscal year 23 with a with a even bigger increase come fiscal year 24. So we're going to be looking at this over the next couple of years as a pretty significant increase. And we've been asked to start coming up with a plan on with an increase in funding. What are we going to do with this funding across the state? So we're going to have some more opportunities as we look at fiscal year 23 and 24 to get even more conservation into South Dakota. With this starting to hear an echo. So this year we did obligate close to 20 to $22 million under our CSP quit program for our CSP program close to $20 million, if not a little bit more. I think Brandon you're on this a little bit later so you can correct me if I'm if I'm incorrect on the amounts that we've spent up to this point. We are and I've mentioned this at our last our last state tech meeting. So conservation implementation strategy. This is this is how South Dakota is moving forward at this point with obligating our CSP quit funding. Really what we're asking for and especially with all the partners on the phone right now. This this is a big opportunity for for all of you to work with NRCS. Most of you have a good understanding of of how NRCS spends money through our equip and CSP programs. And this is an opportunity that if you have projects out there, if you're already working in watersheds, if you're already working with partners and you have a project that could potentially pair with what NRCS does, come talk to us. Bring bring those proposals, bring those projects in. Let's visit with our district conservationists and see if we can't find a way to get our programs to work together because we have that opportunity and let's let's let's leverage each other's funding to help our conservation dollar go a little bit further here in South Dakota. But we're definitely open for the conversation. If you have projects out there, we want to hear about it. We want to hear what's going on. We want to hear what you guys are working on and seeing if there's ways that NRCS can work with you. There were a couple of other items that just recently came out. One is we had an announcement that came out last week and it's the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative. There's about 12, 12 million dollars that's up for grabs right now. And this is for funding for partners to work towards grazing land education and grazing land projects. So there is a notice of funding that's currently out. If you'd like more information on GLCI or that funding, please reach out to Collette Kessler. She has a lot of that information. We're trying to get more information right now. But if you do have more specific questions regarding that opportunity, please reach out to Collette. Also, we had our RCPP program award announcement went out earlier this week. So congratulations to the partners within South Dakota that received a RCPP award. So that's a lot of work that goes into that. And I'm really happy to see that we had a couple that came into South Dakota. The last item I just wanted to mention before handing this over is we are still across the state working through operations with COVID. We still are weekly on Fridays. We end up getting a bulletin that gets sent out to the entire state saying what our restrictions are for the week. And that could be either reduced staffing in an office or if there's a mask requirement. And we have to respond according to what that policy that's coming out each week. There is some new policy that just came out from the CDC that we're still working through as far as what our responses are moving forward. But we're still trying to figure that out because it just came out. But we are still working on remaining fully staffed in our offices to the best of our ability. But there are still some complications with that. And that's one of the reasons that we're not meeting in person this week. I was really hoping that with Dakota Fest going on, we'd all have an opportunity to meet in Mitchell and actually have this meeting in person. But with COVID, we were getting close and we were concerned that at the last minute this county could pop up or Mitchell would pop up on the list as a county that we couldn't all get together and we'd have to cancel. So we just decided to do it remotely. So I do appreciate everybody's flexibility. And I'm really hoping that as we move into our next meeting that we will actually be able to start talking about having some more face-to-face meetings or at least hybrid meetings. So again, I want to say thank you to all of you for participating in this meeting today. I'll be kind of in and out of this meeting. I am planning on going and listening to one of the roundtable discussions at Dakota Fest regarding the Farm Bill. But I want to stick around and hear if anybody has questions or if there's any discussion items. So I guess, Brandon, before I turn it back to you, does anybody have any questions for me right off the top here? Well, if you end up having any questions, don't hesitate to drop a question in the chat or just ask it a different point. Like I said, I'll be here for a bit. So, Brandon, I'll turn this back over to you for now. All right, thank you very much, Tony. Next up on the agenda is congressional updates. Do we have any of the congressional representatives with today that like to present or provide us an update? All right, I guess it looked like this point we're not seeing any if they should join us here. We can circle back. So next, we can move on to FSA updates. I'm going to believe Brandon Walter. You're going to be on for us today here giving us an update on CRP. Yeah, good morning, everybody. Brandon Walter and I'm the state biologist here and here on. And I also have the responsibility as the CRP program manager on the NRCS side. Jessica's on leave today. So she asked that as well as Owen Fager-Hoggle. He normally gives the CRP update. So I was asked to fill in and just provide a couple of key points and a little bit of information on what we got going on with CRP and how the workload looks. So I provided Kathy and she sent it out with the invite to join some information, a spreadsheet that kind of breaks down the information and workload by resource unit as well as a notice. And I'll just go ahead and share my screen. I have a couple of things I'd just like to point out and kind of give everybody a little more insight into what that spreadsheet actually says. So, all right, is everybody seeing my screen? Brandon, is it coming through? Yeah, it is coming through all night. OK, I just wanted to share notice CRP 979, which FSA sent out on the 3rd of August. And it's just kind of an update on the timelines that we have for completing conservation plans. So basically, you know, NRCS and FSA work hand in hand with CRP. It is an FSA program. However, NRCS provides the technical assistance, writes the conservation plans and provides all the information that participants need to get the particular practice CRP practice on the ground, whether that be a grass seeding, trees, waterways, whatever it might be. But we do have certain timelines that we have to meet with completing conservation plans so that these offers, I guess, can be accepted into contract. So this table here just kind of shows in the first part here is for all the signups when a participant comes into FSA and signs up that they're interested in CRP within five working days FSA will provide that information over to us so that we can begin work in the process that we need in order to complete conservation plans. The general CRP signup, which I know one gave a little report last, I think the last state tech on kind of the progress on that, but the majority of that workload is done for the most part. We had to have our conservations completed, as you can see on the 29th of July. And pretty much all that work got done. There are some that we'll see on the spreadsheet that are still shown submitted for plan. But in most all them cases, I believe, I actually believe all the cases, the participants either said they weren't interested anymore or we were unable to get ahold of them to complete any of the planning and complete the conservation plan. Continuous sign up 57. You'll see we have a date no later than September 9. And that's a little bit misleading, but what that is for is for any reenrollments, any reenrollments in the continuous CRP, as well as the clear 30, our grasslands CRP all have to be completed by September 9. So NRCS will have all the conservation plans signed by the produce producer, all the documents done and return back to FSA so that they can get them approved by county committee and get them through the process before the end of the fiscal year because reenrollments, grasslands, clear 30, all of them have to be done before the beginning of the new fiscal year on October 1. Other continuous, if it's a new offer, obviously, whether they're doing trees or working on a wetland practice on a new offer, there could potentially be crops out in the field. So basically on, if somebody has a new offer, we may, you know, push that back till November 1 or December 1 as a start date. All continuous offers start on the first of the month after it's been approved. So if it gets approved on December 2, for instance, it'll start January 1. So that's kind of how continuous CRP works. I just wanted to cover that on the notice. We do have a little bit of an extension on, as you can see here through this notice on the general CRP 58. We had a deadline to complete plans by the 29th, but on a case-by-case basis, the state executive director does have the authority to authorize an extension up till this Friday, basically. But I don't believe we have any that we need to do that on. I'll go ahead and stop sharing that. And then I'll bring up the spreadsheet that I'd like to just kind of go over. Is that coming through, Brandon? We're seeing your team's page at the moment. OK, hope it's working anyway. Let me stop and reshare. Does that look better? It's currently thinking. OK, it says on my end, it's presenting, but. That's still black on our end like the pretty big document or something. You're looking at it. Yeah, I'll shut off my camera. Maybe that'll help. I don't know. Nothing yet. I don't know what's going on. Should share. OK, is it come up? OK, all right. OK, this this is a spreadsheet that we that I put together and it breaks down our CRP workload by resource unit. Don Byers with FSA pulls the the actual report from their system, which breaks it down by county, which is basically the same information. However, I I go ahead and put it into a spreadsheet like this by our resource units for our assistance out in the field. Tate Michelle and now mad out in peer so that they can. You know, take a look at the workload and see, you know, where they have some hot spots in the different signups. And you'll see at the bottom, we have all the signups, whether it be continuous, the CCRP, which is showing now we have the CREP, the clear 30, our farmed wetlands are highly erodable land. CRP are safe offers general grasslands. And then we we had ship the last couple of years, but we didn't have a sign up this year for that. But just to kind of give you an idea of what we have, you know, we have the columns completed, submitted, submitted to NRCS for the plan, submitted to COC and then approved. And basically on the NRCS side, we're most concerned about this column B here, the submitted for plan, which basically means, and there's a legend down below that if it's been submitted to plan, that means the offer's information's been referred to NRCS for the planning and complete the plan. The completed column is just basically anybody that comes in. Some of them might just be kicking tires on CRP to begin with. So they may not go anywhere. If it has been submitted, that means that the participant has actually signed and wants to move forward. And then again, the submitted for plan is sitting within NRCS to complete the plans. And then once we complete the plans, the numbers will move over. As you can kind of gather, we'll go to submit to the county committee so that they can go over and approve them and sign them. And then once they sign, then it slips over here to the COC approved, which actually reflects the offers that have been processed. So I'll just kind of quick go through the numbers. You can see we had quite a few approved already through continuous, but we have a lot yet still sitting there. And some of them may be re-enrollments, which need to be processed, I guess first, but a lot of them might be new offers that we might not worry about getting to them until maybe even November, December, January, something like that depending on crops and timelines. So and then you'll see the CRP, which is our reserve enhancement program with gamefishing parks or FSAs with gamefishing parks. But you'll see we have 114 of them submitted for plan. We've completed 115. Clear 30, which is our 30 year, I guess you call it easement CRP, which are basically re-enrollments. We've completed 15 of them. We have six of them yet to get done and they need to be done, like I showed in the notice by September 9th. FWPs again, highly erodible, we don't have any of them. SAFE, which is our pheasant SAFE and our West River SAFE, it's all combined on this document for our purposes for workload. But you can see through these numbers, here we got the total numbers, but as you page through here, you can see which counties and which resource units have the majority of the work, when you start looking through that. General CRP, which I know Owen went over the acres, the last time he gave a report, this is just gonna show the numbers. These were, this along with grasslands gonna have another column, which is gonna be what we call the accepted column. So we may have had, we had quite a few more offers than were accepted, but the 132 number is the total number of offers. And I know Owen gave the number of acres last time, but you'll see kind of where the majority of the offers for General CRP are at. Lyman has 20 and 22 and Stanley. But most of that works all done, there's still 13 that sit in this column. But like I said, they're either producers didn't respond to inquiries or decided they didn't wanna go ahead. Grasslands, we're just getting started with that. We had a 1,301 of them offers accepted. And we have 1,253 that are submitted over for plan. And this report is of last week, we'll be working on another report this week. So I'm assuming these numbers are gonna start shifting as people start getting, planners start getting the work done. So I guess that's basically the reports that I just wanted to go through just to show the workload. Grasslands CRPs are gonna be hitting our planners pretty hard and to try to get plans knocked out here by the 9th of September. So we have any questions? I'll do the best I can to answer them. Some of them might be more Owen orientated, but if there are some with our planners, I'll sure do the best I can. All right, I'm not seeing any questions in the chat for Brandon. So thank you very much, Brandon, for that update on CRP and everything that you do working on CRP we greatly appreciate it. So the next item on the agenda is our soil health update. So we're gonna turn it over to Kent Fleeter for a little presentation. Okay, good morning, everyone. So yeah, today we're gonna start a new series on soil organic matter. For those of you that have been regular attenders of the state technical committee meeting, last meeting we wrapped up our No Tail Doesn't Work series, which was basically a series on our five principles of soil health. And just kind of the importance of them and what each principle is and really just some of the basics so we all have the same understanding. And I'm gonna share my screen with you all here and I'll turn my camera off to save bandwidth. We can see it, Kent. Okay, is it coming through? Yeah, it looks good. Okay, good. Okay, so we're gonna talk about soil organic matter. This series is going to gonna be probably a three or four part series and how it's gonna be broken down is, today we're gonna talk about really what soil organic matter is. So we're all on the same page as far as its various forms and really just what it is when it's in the soil. And then the next couple of meetings we'll talk about how we lose soil organic matter in our production systems and how we can build soil organic matter in our production systems. And then some of the various practices and methods that we can look at improving upon or adopting in order to do that. So yeah, soil organic matter is the first in this series today and it's basically the basics. And so as often as the case with some of our comics that we read in the newspaper and online, there's a little bit of truth behind the humor in it. And so this is just a really good one. Basically two cows are joking about how their cow pies feed the soil and their soil feeds the grass and the grass feeds them. So really it's just kind of a comic's way of explaining the carbon cycle really. So just a fresh reminder for everyone, these are our principles of soil health. And if we break it down into really two categories for the five principles, the first is one that we as NRCS have been doing for a long time and that's the protection of the soil and that's minimizing our disturbance and maximizing the soil cover. So we know how to do that pretty well. And the other side of the equation is the feed the soil and this is where kind of the trend is today with soil health systems and regenerative agriculture. So that's maximizing our living roots, maximizing our biodiversity and then integrating a livestock into our systems. Okay, so I apologize for the flow charts. And a lot of you are probably thinking I don't wanna come to a high school biology class today but when it comes to soil organic matter, this flow chart really does a good job of explaining what in fact it is. And so really it breaks it down into two categories. We'll start at the top with soil organic matter and then the next line down goes into two categories and those categories are labile organic matter and humus. So the best way to think about those two categories is one is really active, soil organic matter and the other one is really stable which would be the humus is the really stable and not as active in the soil. And so we're gonna go through each one of these today and we're gonna start with the labile organic matter which is really the active portion of the soil organic matter profile. Okay, so this is just the first group here. We've got soil organic matter, labile, which labile really kind of means it's active, it's readily turned over. It's just kind of the terminology that we use and it's broken down into four categories underneath the labile fraction or the active fraction. And so the first one is biomass and that's the living organisms. So that consists of all the things that you think of that might be alive that are in the soil including plants and roots themselves. So here's the biomass slide that I use and I've got an area circled here and it might be small on your screen but really what you're looking at in that circle is you'll see a very fine and thin, almost translucent. Looks like a little worm that's kind of to the left of that darker mass there and that's a nematode. And nematodes are something that are really found quite readily in healthy soils and higher organic matter soils. And for the most part, a vast majority of them are really beneficial to our soils. Oftentimes we as especially agronomists or producers think of nematodes as pests but a vast majority of them are predators and beneficials in our soil profile. So that's one example of living biomass that's in our soils. This next one is really the plant fraction of the living biomass in the soils. And so what you're looking at here is really a zoomed in photo from a microscope shot and the larger white rope looking structures that you're seeing there, that's a really fine root here from a grass plant. And then if you'll see this area that I've circled there you'll notice an even finer hair that's coming off attached to that fine root here of the grass plant. And that right there is actually mycorrhizal fungi which a lot of us will recognize that name is being very important to the overall health of our prairie soil systems. And we'll talk in detail about mycorrhizal fungi in the later part of the series. And I also like to point out the aggregate that's attached to the plant root itself there. And really our aggregates that form in our soils are really only formed through the activity of our soil organic matter and our soil life. And we'll talk in detail about those as these meetings progress here through the quarters. Okay, the next part of our labile organic matter, our active organic matter is the detritus. And really that's the dead material that's in our soils. And that's basically something that has died recently and you can still identify what it used to be when it was alive. And so a good example of that is what we're seeing here in this photo is all the plant residue from the previous year. And so you can still identify the wheat straw or the corn stocks or some of the leaves, for example. And so it's really that first stage of something that used to be alive and is now dead. All right, the next portion of the labile organic matter or the active portion is a particular organic matter. And so this is kind of the next stage after it was recently died and now it has been broken down a little bit. This is where it starts to be really quite small. You can just kind of barely see what it is in the soil with the naked eye. And oftentimes it's broken down too small for you to see without a microscope or a magnifying glass. But this is a really active and really available part of the soil organic matter profile that makes our soils really quite nutrient dense and this is what provides a lot of the requirements for plant growth, NPNK and our micronutrients also. And then we're breaking down even further. And so now we're down into the byproducts and the wastes of the living critters that are in the soil. And so this would be things like root exudates, bacterial waste, glomalin, which is the byproduct produced by the microasophungi. And so this stuff is really readily available. And if you look at the graphic I've got here, I've got, you know, little syringes kind of coming out of things that are representing plant roots and bacteria and the fungi. Think of this portion as really, it's almost kind of like a quick injection. It's really readily available. If you think about like you're like an IV for a human, it's something that goes right into the system and is easily used by the living parts of the soil. Okay, our next category. So we've talked about the active portion and that's something that's really easy for us to identify and maybe think about, you know, all the life that's in the soil. And so the next portion is the humus and it's really kind of a really an older word for basically the stable fraction of the soil. And really this is the part of the soil organic matter that is really highest, especially in our prairie soils. And so 10 to 20% of our soils is consists of that active portion that we just talked about in the remaining portion. So that 80% plus sometimes is really the stable portion. And that's really why our soils are so inherently productive and fertile in the northern plains here in the prairie systems. And so this is that part of the soil that is, it's so stable really that it can hang around for decades and centuries and sometimes millennia. And there's nothing necessarily special or different about it than some of those last categories we talked about with the active. It's a lot of the particular organic matter broken down really small. And then it's the protected portion of those molecules or the carbon and organic matter. And so what happens is that as the soil organic matter constantly is broken down and broken down and broken down, what happens is that tends to latch on to pieces of the silt and clay and really kind of stains the surface of them and becomes difficult for soil life to access it. And so it becomes really stable and available, really stable and not easily broken down, but it's still able to provide and to really hold on to nutrients that then become later available. Okay, so the last one that we don't necessarily think a whole lot about here, maybe we should think more about it actually I should say is the char. And if you're kind of in tune or you keep track of a lot of what's going on in the soil health world, you hear a lot of talk about biochar, especially as you kind of move to higher populated areas or forested areas and they talk about the benefits of using that as a soil amendment. We hear in the northern plains with our prairie systems burning on a regular basis, prior to Europeans coming over a large fraction of our soil organic matter portion in the soil, the soil organic carbon in the soil came from char and that's from the regular burning of the prairie system. And so when there was a fire that rolled through the prairie, one to 3% of what was burned, of that biomass that was burned turned into char. So it's not very much over the decades and centuries and millennia, it kind of added up. And so there are estimates that for example in forest systems, five to 10% of the soil organic carbon that really stable part of the soil organic matter is coming from char. And so that seems like a lot in a forest system but actually what some research has found is that in our prairie systems 40 to 50% of the stable portion, the humus of our soil is coming from char. And so what happens is that char is really stable, not necessarily quickly available for plant life or soil biology to digest. And so it becomes part of the soil and just forms really great, helps form really great aggregates, helps contribute to the nutrient availability in our soils also. So that is a quick just kind of a quick lesson on what soil organic matter is and kind of how we break it down into the stable and the active portions within the soil. Next in the series, we're gonna talk about how we lose and how we lose soil organic matter over time and how it can happen a little more rapidly than we might be comfortable with. And then also we're gonna discuss how we can start building that back into our systems. So with that, I will open up to any questions as always. If you think of a question at a later date, you can always shoot me an email or give me a call with my contact information there on the screen. So with that, I will turn it back to you, Brandon. All right, thank you very much Kim for that great presentation. Next on the agenda, we're gonna move to grants and agreements with Collette. Good morning everyone. So this year NRCS South Dakota had a conservation collaboration cooperative agreement notice of funding last winter. We ended up having, we thought we would have more funding than we actually received. So we weren't able to go down the list very far for agreements this year, but hopefully in the future, things will be looking up for as far as our collaborative, cooperative agreements. So we're still working through those with the grants and agreements team and having gotten things finalized yet for this part of the fiscal year. So yeah, I know it's coming to the end of the fiscal year. It'll be okay. But so Tony had mentioned a couple of things in his opening comments and I just would like to reinforce. And one of them is the Raising Lands Conservation Initiative grants opportunity. So I had dropped the link in the chat while he was speaking. And I think that's a wonderful opportunity for organizations to be doing some outreach or educational or with providing assistance for ourselves for the grasslands. So it is a half of our resource of the state and there's much opportunity to keep it healthy and productive. If you have any questions, I did speak with the grants manager the other day. And if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help you facilitate those application. Another national opportunity is the Conservation Innovation Grants, a CIG that is on grants.gov right now. So if you go to www.grants.gov, you can do a search for NRCS and it'll list out all the opportunities right there. So the CIG is a really great opportunity to do some testing with practices. So we have our field office technical guide, our tribe and true practices that the office is using and they're looking with farmland and ranchers. But there could be some new things out there in the landscape. There could be some things that people are trying and that might be helping their operation that are necessarily in our technical guide, which is what we use for our preservation plan and our farm bill programs. So if you've got some ideas of something, then this national CIG is certainly an opportunity to apply for that and get those tested and maybe it could become an interim standard that we go in our technical guide. So just, I wanted to make you aware of that opportunity because by no means are we the only source of information and there's lots of people out there who are doing really exciting things in the landscape. And just like Kent was showing in his presentation, there's so much exciting things happening in the world of science and soil and agriculture. Then also, I guess the last thing I wanted to bring up is the conservation implementation strategy that Tony had mentioned. So there's opportunities across the state for doing more forwarded planning and looking for local offices. And please, please, we've got ideas, talk to the DCs or talk to the resource unit conservationists and I can help you get connected with them. And if there's introductions that need to be made, then we can certainly facilitate that too. So there's so many opportunities for doing conservation work. The hardest part is just focusing in on what resource concern we get started with. So, all right, if anybody has any questions, I'll put my phone number and email in the chat. Otherwise, I hope we have a great rest of the day. Great, thank you very much, Koleck, appreciate that. Next up on the agenda is the Comple Conservation Information Strategy. So I'm gonna give a little update on that. This year, we did change up our process a little bit as far as we asked for some pre-polls on our projects. We did have 42 of those from that pool. After we reviewed them, we went back out and asked for a full proposal on 20 of those. We got back those middle of the summer year. Currently, leadership team review panel is going through all those proposals and making our selections on which projects that we are going to be moving forward with. I fully expect that by the end of next week, we'll have that finalized. Once it is, we'll get that update out to everyone to know what we selected to deal with. But that's kind of where we sit at for this year with those projects. A lot of good projects to choose from across all of South Dakota. So we're pretty excited about that. As Tony and Koleck had both mentioned, we still are fully planning to move forward with CIS again next year. So as we continue to move into fiscal year 23, we'll be getting out the announcements on our website and everything as we get those identified. We're not there yet, but it's getting closer. So we'll be sure to notify you guys when it is. I fully expect by our next day tech we'll have a great update for you on the projects that we had selected for this year. Yes, Koleck, yep. I just want to interject here if I'm just forgetting, maybe if you want to speak just a little bit about the pre-proposal process, that's one change that was made from the beginning to this year, just the one page pre-proposal for the CIS projects. You bet. So what she is being referencing there is it's a lot of work we understand for our partners and for our staff putting in a full pre-proposal. So we can shorten that process down, cut significantly a bunch of the workload on it to just shorten it up to a brief proposal of this is what our tentative project is. We're just kind of open to cut down on the workload for everybody, so try to make things a little bit easier. So that's kind of where we have the pre-proposal and the full proposals were a little bit longer about 10 to 12 pages of what they submitted everything to us for review itself. All right, I guess that's what I briefly had for you on CIS. Next, we're going to move into the individual program updates. The first up, we do have Krisha Weddy. She currently is our acting RCPP coordinator. She started with us back in early June and has been doing a phenomenal job getting RCPP up and rolling in South Dakota, so we greatly appreciate her assistance there. So that's them all turning over to Krisha. All right, thanks, Brandon. Hi, everyone. My name is Krisha Weddy, and just to give you a little overview on RCPP in South Dakota, we currently have nine funded projects, and these are in various phases. There are six RCPP classics and three AFAs, which is the Alternative Funding Arrangement. And South Dakota is the lead for all of these projects. This accounts for $39 million for conservation funding. The newest one that was just announced on Friday is the Conservation Easements in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and it is sponsored by the South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust. The project was awarded $4.2 million and was one of 41 projects funded nationwide. This project will protect South Dakota farms and ranches so that the land remains agriculture and prevents it from being converted to the urban sprawl, which is happening presently in the Black Hills. I will begin work with the partner. I've got some training here, the first part of September, and then we will be working on getting their programmatic agreement in through the portal. So that will be the first kind of crunch to do with them. Other projects that are actively being worked on in South Dakota include the Big Sioux River Watershed Partnership Project, and they have successfully contracted 26 producer contracts, and I've been very active in working, trying to get those obligated so that we can make some payments out to the producers. Most of those projects were for doing cover crops and improving soil health. The other one that is gaining some traction is the Belfouche River Watershed Project, and they are currently in the process right now working with producers to get conservation contracts. The other one that is the only AFA that is currently up and running is the Ducks Unlimited Project, and that is to improve soil health. And they currently have five applications for doing conservation cover, and I'm working with them to kind of work through that system, since it's kind of a different process. So I just wanna share that RCPP is a great way for the partners to leverage their dollars because it is a one-to-one match. And last year, the notice of funding proposals were announced in January with a deadline of mid-April. So if any partners are interested in trying to leverage what they wanna do with that RCS, they can reach out to me and I will help them through that process. So I don't have anything else if anyone has any questions. Great, thank you very much. You should have greatly appreciated it. Thank you. All right, next up in Equip with Jennifer Woods. All right, good morning everyone. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay, I don't have a handout for you in the packet this morning because we are working on finalizing some numbers for the $2.5 million that we just received late last week. So when we get all said and done, we're gonna have quite a few contracts on the ground which is great news for South Dakota. We did have 31 CIS projects this year that we funded or that had funds available and producer contracts in. Unfortunately, one of them didn't have had a little pickup in it. So it didn't fund any actual contracts in there but those funds got used elsewhere within the CIS projects. Most of the new funding right now is going into the resource units and I will get a summary of final numbers to you at the next state tech. I guess is there any further questions? Lots to come on the new fiscal year and moving forward with CIS at 100%. All right, thank you very much, Jim. Appreciate the update. Thank you. Beth, next up, CSP with Joyce. Good morning, I'll give you a quick update. You do have this report in your folder but I will share my screen with you and run through it quickly. You have an update on the 2022 CSP. Are you seeing my screen, Brandon? Yeah, we are right now. Oh, good, okay. So basically just a quick reminder that we're getting as we've already heard this morning, we're getting to the end of the fiscal year so we're looking at payments for CSP. They are made after the first of the next fiscal year for the previous fiscal year. So October 1st, it's coming right up. So the documentation is due to the field offices and so they're working hard on getting that done and this or the roundup of what's happened this last few months anyway. For the CSP classic, which our application deadline was January 21st this past winter, we did receive 523 applications. There has actually been several allocations made, separate allocations made. We had an initial, South Dakota had an initial allocation of 8.64 million and with those monies, we funded 57 contracts and we had a second allocation on May 9th we received that was $4,004,000 and with that we funded 19 more contracts. Our third allocation came in early July was $2,782,300. We funded seven contracts and this next bullet is incorrect. We actually just got our fourth allocation, a small allocation this past week and originally we had asked for the 2.168 million but we received 1.350 million and so it looks like we're going to fund probably five more contracts with that last allocation. So that my total of course would be wrong on both the funds and the number of contracts with just the exception of probably two or three contracts. So we've kind of had a piecemeal bunch of allocations this year but we're glad for each bit. We've had 1.2 million of these funds have been spent on beginning farmer applicants and 1.03 million went to socially disadvantaged applicants. So our obligation deadline for all of these monies will be September 15th. So the CSP renewals, we had an application deadline of April 15th and we did receive 333 applications. We do not know our allocation amount on that and we won't know it probably till after October 1st and the obligation deadline on those has previously been September, I mean, pardon me, December 30th. So it'll probably be December 30th, 2022 for the obligation deadline. And until after the fiscal year, we won't know too much more on the renewals. And I haven't heard anything on GCI yet. I had understood that we would have another sign up but so far I have not heard anything on that. So still waiting for news for GCI CSP GCI's. So if you have any questions, you can put them in the chat or let me know. That pretty well wraps up CSP for 2022. Great, thank you very much, George. We appreciate it. You're welcome, thank you. Next program on the list would be easements with Marcus Rock. Morning, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. All right, I'll just give a brief update where we're at for our 2022 easement programs. This is also in the handouts as well. So you can refer back to that. Just go over a handful of numbers here for you and what's to come in the near future. So 2022, we are tentatively planning to fund nine WRE offers, totaling approximately 530.3 acres. Five of those were from our Vermillion CIS project that was approved in 2021. Those other projects or offers are scattered around the state, Hutchison County, Roberts County and Tripp Counties. Those agreements for the purchase of those conservation easements should be going out here in the next two weeks. We're still working through a few processes there and getting waiting for the okays to get them out. And as was noted in the last meeting, another change for us over the summer here is that our compatible use authorization timing of hang. We've been told that that needs to be delayed to match the primary nesting season. So we can no longer or have no longer been starting that July 15th, that's pushed back to August 2nd. Looking back on already enrolled easements, whether that be the past year or previous years, we've done some restoration work this summer. That's still progressing. We had four easements, approximately totaling 271 acres that were seeded and five other easements that have seedbed preparation in progress. And that's both under our federal and various landowner contracts. We are in the process here of getting further contracts lined up as well. So we will be doing more here starting this fall. We had a total of 127 acres that were basically reseeded or some partial reseedings done across 10 easements under our Habitat Forever Cooperative Agreement. And then we have also had multiple other practices completed this spring and summer. Those include obstruction removals or baseless weed controller clippings and some wetland restorations. Moving on to our water bank program that does fall under our easement program. We are working on funding 11 of those applications from our 2022 offers and that totals 808.3 acres. And last thing, looking forward a little bit is our Wetland Reserve Enhancement Partnership. Those project proposals are due in by September 23rd. I believe that announcement went out about two weeks ago with various information then there on what's needed. There were some attachments and everything else. So if you have any questions, feel free to let me know. And that's all I have for you today. Great, thank you very much, Marcus. Appreciate the update. Next topic on the agenda would be compliance with EPE. All right. So all this should be in your handouts there. It's just our normal compliance workload I hand out all the time. You can look at over 569s about the only thing that's a little dare seems like we're getting a few more potential violation. We are investigating this year compared to most other years. Not a lot, but it's definitely noticeable. Oh, your 1026 is, that's about on course. I mean, we'll probably land just shy of a thousand. So it's down from kind of the 10 from 2014 all the way through 2019 was 1400. So we're still getting a fair number of them playing to keep a person busy. Request age though is nice. I mean, we're sitting there where the majority of them are still here in that first month and then we're getting the rest of them pretty much completed by within four months. The older they get is usually dealing with where we got to go on site and see or evaluate something. Highly rotable land, these evaluations were up to just over 1500, 19 outstanding. We got 673 new breakings. We don't track acres on that just that it's a new breaking. And out of that, there's 164 that were determined, highly rotable. That's all I have for that. Any questions whatsoever? All right, thanks Brandon. Thank you, he could appreciate the update, sir. Next topic would be partnership reports. Do we have any partners on the call today that would like to come on and provide us an update of what they're doing? I'll go ahead and speak just a moment while people get organized. So if you would like to give an update from your organization, please turn on your cameras. The Judge Jessup of the South Dakota Grassland Coalition was unable to be at our meeting today, but he did ask if we could give a little update on some of the outreach activities. And it looks like it's the Chamberlain Grazing School which will be held September 13th to 15th. And it's a really great event for producers to attend whether you're beginning or season. So just want to put that plug in for the Grassland Coalition and whether there'd be anybody else that would pair to speak. Yes, Cindy, I'll turn it to you. Good morning everyone. Can you hear me? All right, great. Thank you for the opportunity Brandon and Colette. The Soil Health Coalition has been had a busy year already. We do have some upcoming things. Our Soil Health School will be coming up here soon. And we also have been doing quite a few different, just either field tours and we do have another one scheduled in Roberts County that will be coming up in September. We have an events calendar that we keep updated as well as our social media. The staff has been working a lot with producers out in the field and working on conservation implementation through our 319 grant. So we do have funds for cover crop plantings as well as some grazing management practice installation as well. So one date I want to put on everyone's calendar is our upcoming conference, which is January 24th and 25th and that will be in the Sioux Falls area next January. It's coming quick. So I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, Brandon, Colette. Thank you, Cindy. Appreciate it. Pete, I see you're campus on. Do you have an update you'd like to talk about? Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yes, sir. Okay, I hit the wrong button and totally got myself off the meeting about two seconds ago. So yeah, I gave this brief update yesterday at the Grassland Coalition meeting and I hope Jeff Vanderwilts on, but he might not be. But this is a gift to Jeff that I promise I won't ask him for very much money for the next six months or so. Because we've completed our initial mapping of all of South Dakota now on the potentially undisturbed mapping project. NRCS has been a huge supporter of that financially and with other resources, including LIDAR, Assas Game Fish and Parks and just a host of other organizations that are on the call today. So I wanted to let you all know that we've completed the technical part of that, the initial technical part. So all of South Dakota has been and now initially mapped, reviewed and gone through our kind of our vetting process. We'll be working over the next several weeks to put out a version of that publicly for you all to use in both PDF, JPEG and shape file format through the South Dakota Open Prair, SDSU's open prairie site. So please don't inundate me with too many requests prior to the release of that, but we did talk yesterday and I think I obligated us to release the information prior to the final report that will actually go into a much greater depth of describing the information because we're very confident in the coverage. And so what I've planned to release when appropriate here and like I said, the next few weeks is that coverage with just a brief, maybe one pager on what it is, how to use it. And there's several folks that are recipients of this, but I believe NRCS, FSA and others will then be able to work it right back down their chain to their employees for really immediate use within those GIS systems. Going forward, we're still going to be completing the Western South Dakota LiDAR review. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on that right now, but what that is is a second step refinement process that will help us just understand that when we release this Western South Dakota is going to have still quite a bit of go back land in that layer and then we'll be working with LiDAR to kind of tease that out over the next several months, but we want to get this initial data out. The other thing is we've got a grad student working on a change in that. I get a lot of requests, folks wanting to know how much grasslands do we have we lost or will we lose or what's the projection? And so the question we'll be able to actually answer probably for the first time ever is a pretty good indication of what we've lost for native grasslands over the last 10 or 12 years. What we won't be able to answer with any confidence is what type of loss of total grasslands as far as conversions of CRP and other previously cropped land. So I just want to clarify that. And for those of you that don't understand what I'm talking about, it'll become clear in these reports and stuff. So was there one more thing I don't recall? Collette, was there one more piece of that that we had talked about yesterday that we're going to be working on? Yesterday that I missed. No, that sounds great. And hopefully if your schedule allows, maybe we could preview the report, maybe the state technical committee meeting coming up. If when it's released and fully accessible, then if you wouldn't mind, we could maybe have that as a piece of topic. I think we should plan. So do we know, do you know generally when the next state tech is, see it's August? So the next one will be December, mid December, right? November, December. I can't feel how those, those that information and we can get it to you. Yeah. And if that would happen to conflict, we could do it at the second quarter. Yeah, I think we could try. I think we should definitely plan on the next one and we can deal with the details going forward. So anyway, a big humongous thank you to these, all the organizations that are on the phone today that have supported this in any way, even with just letters of support for grants and other things that's been a, it has truly been a multi-multi-partner effort and it will continue to be, but we're really happy. Oh, the final piece of this, I forgot, this is the good part. When this all comes to fruition, we're working with Game Fish and Parks as a place to house this information for professional and public access over time and space to continually work on the dataset. I'm not going to go into a lot more detail on that now because there's still some things that we're working out. But again, amazing step up from partners on this to take this data. If it stays at SDSU, it will probably be less and less accessible over time and we wanted to put it in a place that really has a living public access type of GIS footprint in South Dakota. So Game Fish and Parks has agreed to explore that with us, so many thanks to them. That's it. All right. Thank you very much, Pete. Appreciate that great update and we look forward to seeing that product here in the future. And the answer to your question is we are currently looking at about November-ish for the next date date meeting, but we'll definitely update as we go. So next up on the list looks like Bruce's got an update, please. Hey, good morning everybody. Bruce Toy with Ducks Unlimited here just thought I'd provide a little more update. Krisha mentioned our RCPP project earlier that's been a bunch of our focus here over the last few months. Our last meeting I mentioned we had a sign up period here in mid-June and collected about 15 applications here across the Eastern and South Dakota that screen high and we're eligible for funding. So our staff spent a bunch of time over that period meeting with these producers and putting together potential plans to get in the field for those projects. We set up a ranking criteria to kind of score each of these applications. Really honing in on what's important for producers and for wetlands and for wildlife. So focusing on areas with high wetland densities and grass restoration and soil health principles and that sort of thing. So in that process, we had five applications that really floated to the top based on those scores and really checked all of those boxes. All of those improving soil health on crop lands by reducing tillage and incorporating cover crops and increasing crop diversity. I think all of them had a significant grass restoration component and all of them had grazing infrastructure needs on crop land and grass and grazing system. So really checking all of our boxes and those are the five we've decided to move forward with in this first funding cycle. Looking at a footprint of right around 6,000 acres with those applications and looking to spend our initial guesstimates here right around that $800,000 range for our first sign up. Well, so with that being said, over the next few months, this is a new process. So just kind of figuring out how these RCPP agreements are gonna look like through the alternative funding arrangement, getting those agreements put together and hope to have practices being delivered here in the spring of 2023. So then also through that process, hoping to have another sign up here, probably late winter to get more producers in the door and start looking at the next phase, if you will. But if anybody has any questions on that, feel free to reach out to me. Thanks for the time this morning. Thank you, Bruce. Appreciate the update. Do we have any other partners that would like to come this morning? All right, Tony, what's your... Morning, everyone. Tony Life, South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust here. Just give a brief update. Krisha did mention the great news that we learned of within the last few days about being awarded an RCPP grant. We're really excited about working with NRCS on that. Of course, NRCS has been a key partner of ours all along the way since we formed just three years ago and we're excited to get to work with them on that. We did accept our first easement earlier this year, back in March of 762 acres of grass and forest range land that's located just outside of Spearfish, South Dakota. I do have an additional two easements where the landowners are committed to donating those easements to the trust. One of those in Custer County and the other one in Brule County. Also have a couple other possible donated easements that we're working on, but we're not accurately engaged in putting the due diligence work together for those just yet. As I mentioned before, and Krisha mentioned that RCPP funding that we received will be for easements within the Black Hills. And as she mentioned, those of you that have lived in that area, visited Black Hills, realized the accelerated rate of exurban growth that's occurring within the Black Hills. And we're excited to maybe to help a couple landowners, maybe work on putting those easements on that property. Look forward to working with NRCS to put that programmatic partnership agreement together. And that's something that will become a priority of mine to make sure that we step through all the proper channels to ensure that we can funnel those dollars out to producers in our state. Lastly, our first newsletter that was just published within the last month was pretty widely distributed. Hopefully all of you on the call saw a copy of that. If she didn't, please shoot me a note and I can sure get a copy of that out to you. It's an electronic distribution that we're using to get that out. Lastly, thanks again to NRCS for the funding commitment that we received with in the past and this new funding. We're hoping to also see some favorable news eventually on the ACEP AIL, the agricultural land easement program. We do have a couple producers that we submitted applications for with that. And hopefully for some favorable news on that funding front here someday also. So with that, I appreciate some of your time this morning. And thank you all for the partnerships that we do have in South Dakota. Thank you very much, Tony, for that update. Any other partners out there at the top that they'd like to discuss this morning? All right, I've seen anyone come online here. So I guess that kind of brings us to the end here. I guess I'd ask if there's any other questions that anyone has at this time or any other brief topics you'd like to discuss. Okay, well, I'm not seeing too much in the chat. Thank you for all the presenters today and going over your respective topics, I appreciate it. Thank you everyone else for your time and participation in today's State Technical Committee meeting and as we get the next date set, we'll be sure to get it out to give you all advanced notice on when that's gonna be. But like I said earlier, we're looking at November at this time. So I guess with that, again, thank you all. And if you have any further questions, don't be afraid to send an email or give me a call. So have a great day, everybody.