 Thank you, Andrew, for recording the meeting and getting that coordinated. Okay, so today we're working on the State Tech Committee meeting. We're going to talk about people and what's happening. We'll talk about practices for conservation across the land, and we'll do some programs update and work with our partners. And lastly, we'll have a section on the agenda for partners. So we'll do some staffing and personnel updates. And with that, I'll turn it over to Tony Sinseri, our State Conservationist. All right. Thank you, Collette. And I definitely want to acknowledge Collette for the time and energy it takes to put together the agenda for a meeting like this. So thank you, Collette, for your efforts on this. It is very much appreciated. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Winner State Technical Advisory Committee meeting. I just want to start with the purpose of this committee is to serve as a vital link between the Natural Resources Conservation Service and our stakeholders across the state. Your expertise and your input play a crucial role in shaping our conservation programs and policies. We're really hoping that we achieve a shared vision of sustainable land management, environmental stewardship, and thriving rural communities. As members of this committee, you really do represent a wide range of perspectives including agriculture, ranching, forestry, wildlife, soil science, and many other fields. Your collective knowledge and expertise provide invaluable insights that help us make informed decisions and guide our conservation efforts effectively. So throughout today's meeting, we will hear updates on conservation activities from NRCS and several of our partners. I encourage all of you to ask questions throughout the meeting today. As having meaningful discussions, exchanging ideas, and exploring innovative approaches to address the conservation challenges facing South Dakota is what this committee is really for. Together, we will work towards finding practical solutions that balance the needs of our natural resources with the needs of our communities. So again, I encourage you to actively participate, share your expertise, and contribute to the discussions as your involvement is essential in shaping the future of conservation in South Dakota. I want to thank each one of you also for your dedication just for being here today. This takes time out of everybody's agenda. We are trying to hold more of these meetings in person. The main reason that we held this one virtually this time is a few months ago I was thinking we might actually have snow about this time of year, but that's not happening right now. So I do apologize for not holding this in person, but I do appreciate the large audience that we do have here today on the call. So thank you again for being here. We're going to go ahead and move right down our agenda. Next on the list is I did see that we had a representative from one of our Congressional's joined the call. Ryan, I'm going to put you on the spot right off the bat if you don't mind. Sure. Good morning, everyone. I don't have much to report out of Washington. We, as you know, extended the 2018 Farm Bill through 2024. So that provides more time to negotiate long term five year reauthorization. It also provides more time for input. So if anyone has any ideas or issues that we that you think we should be taking a look at as we turn to the new year and new Farm Bill efforts, please let me know. I will drop my email in the chat. You can reach out to me separately if you have ideas. And then the other thing I will know is that the Ag Appropriations Bill expires January 19th. So we will need to Congress will either need to extend the existing funding levels beyond them or establish the new levels for fiscal year 2024 here in the first month when we return, shaping up to be a pretty, pretty busy spring for for Congress with lots of deadlines coming in January, February and March, but we are we are ready for it. So we will be off to the races in the new year and the Farm Bill will continue to be a top priority for Senator Thune. So that's all I've got for now, but I would welcome any questions. And I will drop my email in the chat. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you, Ryan. So as as Ryan mentioned, we are we are working through a continuing resolution right now also and work work is continuing throughout South Dakota. We are a little tighter right now in our budget. We're having to to watch excess spending across the state. And that's the main impact that the continuing resolution is having on us right now is we're not a lot. We're not able to travel as freely as we have in the past. So we are hoping for a passing of a full budget here soon. But it's until that happens, we're going to be continuing to work under a continuing resolution that should not impact any of our services across the state at this point, the main impact is just travel. So Ryan, thank you for all your hard work and your dedication to the conservation effort. We really appreciate all the hard work that our congressional delegates are putting in D.C. right now, and we are definitely hoping for a passing of a budget and a continuation or a new Farm Bill here shortly. So thank you. One of the other items that I wanted to bring up from the perspective of a national update is it audits. Since 2008, Natural Resources Conservation Service has been under a an audit through KPMG, which is a private auditing firm. And we were found back in 2008 to not pass an audit, which is a big deal. We had to work on cleaning up processes. We had to work on getting proper people in place. And we've made some significant progress. And 2008 to now, it's been a long time. But I'm very, very happy to say that as of 2023, this is the first year that NRCS has managed to actually pass their audit. And this is a big deal for us. We were a large agency. We've become a much larger budget item on Congress's desk. And we've been working on really building our foundation from the national office to the state to the field. And we've gotten to a point that we can pass an audit, which is a really, really big deal for us. So I'm very proud to come out and say that we do have pieces in place. Finally, we have some of these foundational people in place that are helping us to make sure that we're doing right by the taxpayer to make sure that we're passing financial audits and that we're actually doing a good job with our contracting and obligations. So I just wanted to make that announcement. It is a big deal for us. And I know that a lot of folks outside the agency probably don't know or haven't really heard about this before. And it's just it's quite an achievement for NRCS to get to that point. I'd like to go ahead and bring Jessica Mahalski up. She's going to discuss the conservation practices named good farming practices in crop insurance. OK, good morning, everybody. I'm just going to share my screen here quick. Not a not a huge item, but something that we definitely want to bring to everybody's attention. You do have this handout. It was included in the handouts with the meeting invite. So I just want to point out that there was a fairly significant change that impacts NRCS conservation practice standards in the in relation to crop insurance. So in the changes to the good farming practice determination standards handbook that all crop insurance federal crop insurance uses, the change that was made is that back in 2022, the verbiage both in 2019 and 2022, the verbiage stated that use of conservation practices will have no impact on federal crop insurance coverage. But there was kind of this caveat, right, that was provided the adoption of such practice does not negatively impact insured crops ability to make normal progress to our maturity and produce at least the yield used to determine the production guarantee. So obviously, you know, a lot of that came back and was revolved around cover crop plantings. But we're happy to say that now that verbiage has been removed. And it just simply states that the proper use of conservation practice standards will have no impact on federal crop insurance coverage. So that's kind of a huge win for some things that that we promote with NRCS and we ask our producers to keep that soil covered during critical times of the year. So just wanted to point that out quick and turn it back to you, Tony. All right, thank you, Jess. Next item on the agenda is to just go over some of the NRCS staffing and personnel updates. This is since our August or August state tech meeting. So we have some new additions to our team. Starting at the top of the list, we do have a new state conservation engineer. This is Mr. Jim Reedy. Jim, are you on the call today? Morning, Tony, I am perfect. Could you please introduce yourself and a little bit about your background to the state tech committee, please. You bet. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today as the new state conservation engineer for South Dakota NRCS. A little about me. I am a South Dakota native son. I grew up on a ranch about 20 miles northwest of Phillip. I graduated from South Dakota State University, Go Jacks. And I've been an engineer in the agency in seven different positions, starting out as a student trainee here in South Dakota. And I've worked at the field, state and national design level design center levels in both South Dakota and Nebraska in about a 32 year career. I'm very excited to be back in South Dakota. And I really look forward to working with all our partners on getting conservation on the ground. Perfect. Thank you, Jim. My pleasure. Also joining the South Dakota leadership team, we have Mike Larson, who's joining us as our new assistant state conservationist for field operations out of here. Mike, would you go ahead and introduce yourself, please? Yeah. Hello, I'm Mike Larson. I was born and raised in Russell, Minnesota, went to college at SDSU. Upon graduating college, I took a job as a district manager for the conservation district here in Peer. Worked there for 10 years that I've been with the NRCS for 13 years as a started as a soil contact and Gettysburg in Oneida and then the district conservationist in Highmore than a resource unit conservationist managing Highmore Miller, Gettysburg, Falkton and Westwood Springs. And now I'm back as the in Peer's assistant state count for field operations for the Peer area. Perfect. Thank you so much, Mike. So next on the list of updates is Victor Tushin. Victor is coming back to us as our new state economist. This is a position we've been talking about for a while. Very excited to announce that we have this position filled now. Victor, please introduce yourself in a little background. Yeah, thanks, Tony. Victor Tushin. I grew up on a farm in Salem, South Dakota, attended South Dakota State for ag business and accounting. And then I started with NRCS just as a pathways intern here in Brookings. Became a district conservationist in Belfouche for about three years. I was a district conservationist in Bangor, Maine for about a year before getting this opportunity to come back to South Dakota to be the economist. Excited to be here. Hope to bring a lot of good stuff to the state. Perfect. Thank you, Victor. Very happy to have you back. And last on the list, but definitely not the least on the list is Laurie Dupont, who's who's coming back or coming into a position to help us out with our grants and agreements. Laurie, if you're on, can you please introduce yourself in a little background? Good morning, Laurie Dupont. I was started out the state office, 1998. I was a temporary for ecological sciences. I then moved to being the secretary for ecological sciences, then went to work in 5050 with public affairs and ecological sciences, went through admin staff up there, 2014, transferred to peer as an administrative coordinator. And now, as of November, I am taking over the grants and agreements for the state. I'm looking forward to working with all of you. Perfect. Thank you, Laurie. You bet. All right. So as far as some of the major changes, those are some of our major changes that we have at the state office right now that and we're working on getting all these positions placed to further provide assistance to our customers across the state. And while we have some gains, we also have some losses, unfortunately. We have two critical positions that are taking promotions and leaving South Dakota. And I'm going to give them an opportunity to address the the committee now. Jeff, I'm going to start with you. All right. Good morning, this is Jeff Vanderwilts. It's safe, but I'm in my in my vehicle in Arizona today and not able to get my camera to work, apparently. But I just wanted to let y'all know that I have taken a position with the easement programs division out of national headquarters. I won't be leaving South Dakota, though. It's a remote position and I will be working with the easement acquisition branch on hopefully closing easements across the country. So taking a step up and expanding my scope a little bit to to help all 50 states and not just South Dakota at this point. So January 13th will be my last official day as a South Dakota employee. And then January 14th, I will start the new position. So I'm looking forward to it, although I have to say it is a little sad to go. I've been the assistant state conservationist for programs for a little over 13 years now. You know, pretty much worked with everybody on this phone or on this meeting in one way or another over those 13 years. And it's been great getting to know all of you and just know I'm not leaving still be in South Dakota and still hope to continue to make some kind of an impact with conservation in South Dakota. So thanks. Thanks for 13 great years. And I appreciate working with all of you. All right. Thank you, Jeff. Congratulations on your new position. And you will definitely be missed here on the South Dakota NRCS roles. Also leaving the state on the program's team is Brandon Cotkey, who has also taken a promotion with the National Easements team. So moving forward after Jeff's departure, we will have a acting assistant state conservationist for programs that will be be filling in behind him until we have the opportunity to permanently backfill his position. Jessica Mahalski has agreed to step into that role. We are in the process of trying to find an acting state resource conservationist to backfill after Jessica. So I don't have an announcement for that position yet, but hopefully I will hear shortly. Both are very critical roles. We also, we have a link in the agenda. Have we had a chance to share the agenda out, Colette? Well, evidently, there's something with the way the team's meeting was set up that that it's not allowing the PDF to be put in the chat. It did go in the meeting announcement. So I don't know if you can it when I open the outlook meeting, I can see the agenda there, so I would encourage you all to check your outlook meeting calendar invite to see if it's attached there. And so I'm sorry, this is one of the things with a virtual meeting that I did not foresee. So I can share it on the screen, but I didn't want to take away from the personnel updates. I can do that now if that would work or whatever you prefer. I'll. Yeah, how about we go ahead and try to pull it up? And that way we can at least show people the link to where they can find the contact information for the state. I'll do that right now. So I'll just give you guys a brief description on what we're going to be doing. We're pulling up our agenda. And on our agenda, we do have a link to the NRCS South Dakota webpage. And what we're wanting to show on that webpage is we do have a contact us section. There it is. OK, so there's the agenda. And under natural resource conservation service, South Dakota Updates, you'll see a link that's personal directory contact us. That link will take you to our website that will show you or give you contact information for all of our staff across the state. Pretty much every one of our counties across our state has a local field office and we have a district conservationist as well as other staff that are stationed all throughout the state. And if you have any any questions, especially on on more local matters, I really encourage you to reach out to your local staff and get that direct contact and information from your local office. You always have the ability to reach out to the state office, but sometimes locals a little faster and a little easier. So please utilize the the contact information to to get ahold of your local staff. So thank you, Colette. I'll keep the agenda. Perfect. Several of you have assisted and been a part of our listening sessions for our NRCS South Dakota strategic plan. We are working on getting those those updates put together to get back out to the State Tech Committee and all of our partners and our staff. We're very, very close. We we just had some wrap up meetings earlier this week and we're trying to finalize our messaging. But we do have a handful of action and actionable items that we have in place to get rolling this year. And while I don't have the specifics to share with you right now, they will be coming out during our next State Tech Committee. So sorry, I don't have the information to share with you right at this moment, but it will be coming out at our next tech meeting. And I'm really excited to share what we're going to be working on over this next year. So stay tuned on that particular topic until our next meeting and we'll have an update for you. Collette, can you please talk about the South Dakota Leopold Conservation Award? Certainly. So first of all, the South Dakota Leopold Conservation Award is such a tremendous project that's been around for many years and kudos to the many sponsors that make it happen every year and the financial contributions because it really is awesome. So I want to just say awesome to have recognized the Slavic family from for the 2023 award and then moving forward, the South Dakota Grassland Coalition, the South Dakota Cattlemen's and the South the Leopold Conservation Foundation are accepting nominations for the 2024 award. Those are due March 6th and we will get this this handout figured out why it's not posting. But I'll make sure to get it out to all of you and it will also be posted on our state website and I'll share the link later. But the the Leopold nomination criteria, it will be in that handout for for people to access. And I sure encourage you to talk to your boards, talk to your partners and consider a nomination for for next year, because it really is a tremendous opportunity for recognizing the good work of our people of South Dakota. Thanks, Tony. All right, thank you. Another award that South Dakota NRCS promotes and that we we award each year is the Excellence in Cooperative Conservation Award. This award puts a spotlight on the contributions of our partners to help promote conservation solutions and get conservation on the ground. This year's awardee is the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Ranch, which has been a close partner with NRCS for many years. Since 2019, the Tribal Ranch has worked with NRCS and South Dakota State University Extension to host a range day for producers and students in the local area. The event consists of adults and youth and a youth component. At the beginning of the workshop, the adults, the adult group meets with tribal elders to talk about different medicinal plants on the landscape and how they were used historically. After that, the group does a pasture walk and identifies the different plants on the landscape while discussing their agricultural uses. At the end of the pasture walk, the group shares a meal while discussing the tour and shares their experiences. The youth group then arrives and goes on their pasture tour, including the day with fry bread and a sampling of jams and jellies made by a tribal member from native plants. So really excited to not to not just nominate but to award the Excellence in Cooperative Conservation Award to the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Ranch for for 2023. So next on the agenda, we have a conservation practice update by Jess Mahoske. OK, I'm going to share my screen again here. So don't need that anymore. All right, I just wanted to give I'm not going to completely go through all of this information, but just wanted to give an update about some important things that that our partners might be interested in noting. So just for a little background information, as a reminder, South Dakota has decided that we are going to try to only make changes. And this goes for both our ecological sciences practices and our engineering practices that we're only going to make changes for to our practices or our technical notes in either October or April each year. And the reason that we're doing that is to just try and make sure that we're not, you know, sending out information, especially to our employees on a continuous basis, but rather have those kind of grouped in those months. So you can see in this most recent update, as far as the ecological sciences side of the house goes, there is some interim practice standards that we wanted to make sure that we brought to your attention that we have adopted in South Dakota. Again, interim practice standards are not something that have been approved at the national level. They are generally speaking anyway. They are something that a state develops. Not always. There's a few exceptions, of course, but the state develops and then other states can can try those interim standards out as well. So one of those is what's called annual forages for grazing systems. The code is 810 and this really is meant to be basically a full season cover crop that's utilized to meet forage demand. So it's going to be grazed. That's the main purpose of it. Then we can use that annual forages for grazing systems practice standard. So we'll be using that here in South Dakota over the next three years. We'll collect data on, you know, whether or not that practice standard meets our needs. If it provides a good alternative to cover crop, if we don't need it at all, that's really the point of an interim practice standard. And the other one that was developed here in South Dakota, and again, a huge shout out to Emily Rohrer, our state rangeland management specialist for heading this one up. It's called strategic harvested forage management. We kind of had a lot of input from national office on that particular name. You guys would better know it as bale grazing here in South Dakota. But again, this is an interim standard that we have adopted to utilize for the next three years, kind of see how it works. And again, we can make payments, and we will be making payments for interim practice standards. So as more information comes out, for example, about the EQUIP program, you can look at that and kind of see what those payment rates are. And then we are utilizing the organic management standard that was adopted back in February, March of last spring. That's actually a national interim practice standard that was developed. So we are using that. I just wanted to remind everybody about that as well. So the other thing I wanted to show quick on this front is that all of these notices, and we're getting some updates made, but they're all publicly available. So if you want to go in, for example, and see, OK, hey, what did South Dakota change or update for the given year? You can go in. You can take a look at these notices. You'll notice that the notice that I was just showing you was ecological sciences. There's also some changes made to some engineering conservation practice standards. And then also a notice about revising our environmental evaluation worksheet. So all of these notices are publicly available. You can see what changes we make in April and October. And take a look at those if you're interested. Are there any questions at all about the interim practice standards or any of this information thus far? Is there anything in the chat, Collette? I don't see anything in the chat, but people certainly could enter a question there or comment. And again, we will work to get the handouts prepared and what you've got on the screen. And after the meeting, when the recording is ready, we will make sure to send that out to everyone so you can access those handouts and the links. OK, perfect. If there's nothing on that topic right now, the next thing I wanted to cover on the agenda was the changes that were made to the Climate Smart Egg and Forestry Mitigation List for this coming fiscal year. And the reason this is so critical, especially to you partners, is that this really drives what we can pay for with the Inflation Reduction Act funds. So the primary practice that we're paying for has to be on this list. Now again, just as a reminder, we can pay for what are called supporting or facilitating practices also that support one of these activities or practices. But what I wanted to bring up is a few really important things that South Dakota should be paying attention to. These are the highlighted activities. These are the ones that were added. Some of those don't greatly impact South Dakota. But what I did want to point out is that some of the things that we were really pushing for here in South Dakota did get approved. They did get added to this list. And they're really critical for our rangeland resource in South Dakota. And that is the fact that these three practices got added for this year. And those are brush management, herbaceous weed treatment, and prescribed burning. Now they do have some caveats with them. They have to be used to facilitate prescribed grazing. So we're trying to especially attack our woody species encroachment here in South Dakota on our rangelands. But we can utilize IRA funds now to pay for those practices as producers are trying to regain the production of their rangeland resource. So just something very, very important, really good news for South Dakota and utilizing those Inflation Reduction Act funds. So again, we'll make sure we get this handout to you if you haven't already seen it. It's been out here since October or end of September. So you should have seen it by now, but again, we'll get it out to you. So if there's no questions about that, I think we will move on to the rest of the agenda items. Sure, thank you for that, Jessica. So on the topic of conservation practices and what Jessica outlined are some newer things that were added to our portfolio for farmers and ranchers. So the next topic on our agenda is the Conservation Innovation Grants, the CIG. So there's national opportunities that can be found on www.grants.gov for opportunities. And then in South Dakota, we will also be having a state opportunity for conservation innovation grants. So the purpose of this program, the CIG program is to work with our people for innovative practices that are happening on the landscape. Maybe somebody's doing something that's really cool and it's been a great practice for their operation, but it's not in our portfolio like the bale grazing. So the CIG is an opportunity where we can help through this program to help pay for some of that, to get it a pilot project, to get it started and find the research we need, the information gathered, the data collected so that we could actually get it into our conservation practice standards. So that's what that's about. South Dakota will be having a CIG announcement. I would expect our grants and agreements division to have that available around the 1st of February, I'm thinking the announcement might happen and then it'll be open for 60 days. So that'll be an opportunity there. So I just wanted to make you aware to be watching for it if you're working with somebody and would like to explore a CIG. Okay, after the CIG on our agenda, we have our more technical updates, then we'll move into programs, then after that there'll be partnership updates. So next will be a technical update and I'm going to bring up Kent Bleager please for a soil health update. Then after Kent, we'll have a couple other technical items. Thank you. Kent, take it away. Okay, good morning, everyone. I'm coming through loud and clear, I hope. Okay, I'm going to share my screen and then we'll continue on with hopefully some interesting technical information for you all. Okay, so we're gonna spend five, 10 minutes here talking about one of the management practices or several management practices. I guess you could say that we are demonstrating on the Dale Demonstration Farm in Beetle County this year. And this is related to interceding and it's a practice some of you or all of you may be familiar or a little bit familiar with or at least heard of. But it's exactly what you see here in this picture and this is, I'm gonna go through a sequence kind of throughout the year of what this looks like and you can see we've got 30-inch rows and 60-inch rows in this photo. The 30-inch rows would be on the right-hand side of your screen, they're obviously a narrower and then the 60-inch rows are double the width and these were interceded on the 15th of June of this year and you can see in the lower right-hand corner of this photo, the piece of equipment that was used to intercede and this is an interceder that the Beetle Conservation District owns and it was the one actually developed out of Penn State so if you've been following interceding for some time you would probably recognize this. The long and short of it is is that it's basically a 15-foot drill and it's set up a little bit higher as far as the seed box and the row units so you can plant into corn when it's waist-high or even chest-high depending on your height and the row units are movable and they're quite easy to move. Basically there's clamps on a bar and you tighten or loosen those and then you can move the row units to the widths that you need them to be at. So this is what it looks like on the day that it was interceded, you can see the residue is quite heavy. The field last year had rye, was grazed in the spring followed by a cover crop that was planted and so you can see it can plant into quite heavy residue with relative ease. The mix we used was listed below, I don't have percentages but the percentages are basically highest to lowest as they're listed here. I'm not necessarily promoting this mix for all uses but this is the one that we went with and mostly for comparison purposes. Okay, this is an interceder that was built by a producer in Beetle County, Joe Fritchie. This is one that I think has some potential for design design has potential. The 15 foot drill that the district owns that was just shown in the previous slide works really well, has some great advantages but the biggest disadvantage of that one is that it does not cover a lot of ground very fast. This one designed by Joe is an old 30 foot planter bar and you can see he set up row units and it's on three point attachment there and he can move through the field. We don't have time for a video but he can move through the field quite quickly. He does a lot of his own corn. He does some custom feeding in the winter on his lands, that's what he uses it for and then he also does some custom seeding for producers that are interested in this practice. Next in the sequence, so like most of you, we were really dry April through May and into the first half of June. So when we planted this, we interceded on the 15th of June here, we were planting into the dust and kind of everything was telling us oh, you shouldn't do this but we had the seed on hand and the district had the interceder so we went ahead and did it. You can see a little less than a week later we had a half inch of rain and you can see how fast some of these species we have in our mix. These would be a couple of the brassicas like the rapeseed and the radish. They germinate really quick when the conditions are right. So this is 24 hours after a rain and the radish and the rapeseed are starting to germinate already and you can also see the residue thickness that we planted into. This is a good photo of that. Okay, this is several weeks later and the Dale demo farm which is what most of this presentation is focused on is on your right-hand side of the screen and the left shows Cain Creek which is a smaller demonstration plot a mile or two to the south of the Dale demonstration farm. And what I'm trying to show here is that we use different amounts of rows that were interceded between 30 inches. You can see at Cain Creek we put three rows in and at the Dale demonstration farm we have two rows. And what I'd like to point out is that the Cain Creek while we interceded three rows, you really can only see the row that's in the middle. And there's just a little bit too much competition for moisture and mostly light when those outer rows of the three row planting are right next to the corn plant or within eight inches, which is what these were. And the middle row is the only one that was really growing and successful while at the Dale demonstration farm we only planted two rows and they are 10 inches evenly spaced. And so you can see this is one of those things as you gain experience and trial and error with interceding this is one of those things that we are showing some interest in and figuring out what is the right row placement to maximize our production and meeting our resource concerns. And then also economically which one of these is achieving our goal to maximize production for forage which is what we're gonna talk about here soon. Okay, so this is another photo point of that same area from the first slide. And you can see this is after we had several inches of rain over the course of a couple of days, five inches actually over the course of a couple of days which really kind of made our crop and are growing for the year as we as we dried down after that. But you can see how the growth difference between these two, the 30 inch on the left and the 60 inch on the right. There's a huge difference in growth between the cover crops. This photo is only taken several feet away from each other. So you can see the 30 inch, obviously there's a lot of shading going on with the canopy closure of the corn that's occurring. And with the 60 inch row, we have a lot of production. You can see the broad leaf that's flowering there is buckwheat, which has a pretty rapid growth rate. And this is exactly what we're looking for to show a difference in production. All right, so advancing several months down the road. This is just before harvest in later October. And you can see there's obvious difference in total production. You can see that the 30 inch is really starting to catch up, but not really fully at all. But once the corn starts to dry down, there's more light in between those rows. The 30 inch cover crop starts to come on. You'll only have a few species that are able to tolerate that shade well. Radish and rapeseed are two of those species and annual ryegrass, those seem to be the three species that we've used in this mix that are really doing well. Whereas on the 60 inch rows, there's a lot more light exposure. So pretty much every species is gonna get enough light to have success and that's really demonstrates here. We're not gonna talk too much about the numbers, but there's an important one and you'll see that on your screen. And this is the dry matter biomass production for the cover crops. And this is the difference between the 30 inch and 60 inch, a little over 1600 pounds per acre in the 30 inch rows and just shy of 5,400 pounds per acre in the 60 inch. So why is that important? Well, there's several reasons. The first is that we obviously have more living root out there and it's growing well into the fall and we've got more species variety that's growing in the 60 inch compared to the 30 inch. We have more production for our livestock, which is what this producer is using this for right now. And I know a lot of you are probably thinking, well, what's the yield difference? So on the right hand, you'll see a yield map of the corn harvested. The left is not the numbers from this year, but last year I don't have those numbers all crunched out here for you yet. So sorry about that, but last year we did a smaller trial of 30 inch rows and 60 inch rows side by side. And as you can see on the left hand side of the screen last year, the 30 inch and 60 inch, there's kind of a wash as far as yield comparison. The yields themselves aren't super impressive. We had that July 5th derecho that came through and really kind of took out a lot of our corn, but this is what was left for harvest. So you'll see the first side by side, the 30 inch and 60 inch was actually higher yield on the 60 inch. The second in the green was a higher yield on the 30 inch and the final yield under the orange highlight there was basically a statistically no difference in yield. So we didn't really learn a lot last year. The only thing we did learn is that maybe there's not much difference in yield between the two planting types. So this year we had field wide on this 80 acres was a hundred bushel per acre average, which is not really great. But if you take out all the areas that were not planted, the wetlands were not planted, then you take out the areas that were planted but drown out because of heavy rainfall, then the actual harvested acres, the average yield goes up a little over 145 bushels an acre, so a little bit better. So this is just something that I thought everyone might be interested in learning about. If you're interested or would like to know more details on numbers, you can certainly contact me and either through email or by my work phone. I'd love to talk about it with you and just keep this Dell demonstration farm in the back of your mind. There's a lot of interesting things that'll be happening out there. We're crunching a lot of numbers as far as production and economics and what's going on with our soil changes that are happening over the years out there. So with that, thank you very much for everyone's time and have a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Thank you very much, Kent. Would anybody have any questions for Kent? If you do, please don't hesitate to put them in the chat or to open your camera and such. Again, we will have Kent's presentation with those photos and such in the handout. And Kent, would you please put your phone and email in the chat? Yes, I sure will. All right, so we're gonna be moving to conservation programs of the FarmVille next. And before we leave the technical updates in the handout, there will be an update for the South Dakota wetlands and highly-rotable workload update. And Dick Habig is the Assistant State Conservationist for Compliance and he is on the meeting today. If anybody has any questions, you're certainly welcome to ask or to put something in the chat. What I'll do is I'll make sure that is in the handouts and we'll keep going. Okay, so moving over to the conservation programs update, I'm going to ask Owen from the Farm Service Agency if you would please take the mic. Thank you, Clout. Mine's gonna be fairly brief today as was indicated at the beginning of the call we're working under a continuing resolution. While that turned on some of the authorities for CRP, we are still patiently waiting for authorities to accept new sign-up and conduct new business. So to date, we're busy with maintenance and cleanup and compliance checks and things of that nature with the contracts that are on the books, but do not have any authorities moving forward with new continuous sign-up, CRP sign-ups, grasslands or general. So kind of like I said, real short and just general applicability, but we are waiting for additional authorities from USDA to continue with business as usual. But I sure can field any questions and or concerns conservation related to the CRP program if there are any. Thank you. Thanks, Owen. Okay, so for the Natural Resources Conservation Service programs update, so unfortunately, Jeff is out of state, so he's not able to provide that, but we're going to ask our new person, Jessica Mejowski, the acting right now to handle the NRCS Conservation Programs section. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks, Glut. Yeah, and like Tony said, I will be acting Assistant State Conservationist for Programs. I will be returning to my regular job as a State Resource Conservationist, but we will have an acting State Resource Conservationist for a couple of months until we are able to hire a permanent person in the Assistant for Programs role. So with that, I would like to first turn it over. Let's see who's first on my list here. It looks like we're going to go to Jen Wertz with an equip update, so take it away, Jen. All right, good morning everyone and Merry Christmas. There's not much to report on the equip side right now. We had our batching date earlier in the fiscal year. We are working through rankings and our process this year is to have monthly ranking deadlines of the applications that we've received to try to help speed up obligations throughout the year so that we can get pre-approvals done as they're ready. And we're working on pre-approving a few applications right now. So I don't have a lot of numbers to share with you or anything like that on the program side for equip, but we are working to get some starting on the pre-approvals. We'll be doing those monthly ranking dates through May and in May we're going to gather up any funds that haven't been utilized by each of the resource units throughout the state and then redetermine where we can use those funds. And probably around February, we're gonna take a hard look at what applications have been ranked already, funded, what's remaining and determine if we're gonna need to have a second sign up in order to use all of the funds that we have in the state this year. So lots to come yet for programs on the equip side, but not a lot to share right now. So unless there's any questions, I don't have a whole lot else to share on the equip side. All right, thanks, Jen. All right, next we will go to Val Duprez. Val is our Conservation Stewardship Program Coordinator. So go ahead, Val. Good morning. Excuse me. Oh, yes. Val, I'm gonna interrupt real quick. I just see in the chat that Randy was successful with getting the handout uploaded. So I'd invite everyone to go to the chat where they can see your handout, Val. Perfect, that sounds great. So if you have an opportunity to open that handout, we're on page 28 is the CSP report. So we had a pretty successful year for fiscal year 23 for CSP program in South Dakota. It was a big lift, big challenge. The field offices took it on with eagerness and they worked with producers and were able to obligate the money that we were allocated plus a little extra. So the field offices did great. We were able to enter into a lot of different types of projects. So looking forward to 2024, we started our renewal process. We've kind of run into a bit of a snag. The Farm Bill was extended through September 30th and as we worked through renewals, the contracts were five year contracts. So now the fiscal year 24 renewals are now being obligated under the same Farm Bill as their initial contracts. So we're running into some issues with our multi-year payment limits. We've obligated about a third of what our normal renewal contract obligation would be, but we've gone out and worked with producers and it's been their choice to defer and be considered later when they'd possibly have additional payment limits to operate under. So as we roll forward, our CSP program is going to follow the way Jen explained how the EQUIP program is. So we're going to have multiple opportunities for field offices to rank applications and obligate so we can keep that process moving along more quickly this year and help those field offices kind of smooth out some bumps in the road. Before our timeline didn't always allow field offices to move from one action to another due to some batching timelines and ranking timelines, but this year we're smoothing that out, providing more flexibility to the field offices so they can start work on a project from start to finish without a long delay in the middle. So I expect that CSP will probably run behind EQUIP a little bit. We'll be running through our CSP obligations in that March, April and May timeframe. We hope to have all of our CSP contracts obligated by the end of May. So from an allocation for South Dakota for fiscal year 24, we're pretty well on track to what we were last year with opportunity to request more funds. So we've got a lot of those inflation reduction act funds available for use and I know that the state will do our best to service our customers and support conservation to the fullest extent possible. All right, thanks, Val. Any questions for Val? All right, if not, we will move on to our easement update and would like to thank our acting easement coordinator, David Flannery, and he'll give the report. Thanks, David. Good morning, everybody. Let me just share my screen real quick here. All right, did that work? It did, yes. Okay, perfect. So I just have two very brief updates. One, just to kind of let everyone know where we're at as far as our FY24 signups go. Our IRA rankings were completed by December 8th and are currently under review by national headquarters. All easements, WRE and ALE will first go through review by EPD and they'll be making their selections for IRA funding and letting us know which projects they want to move forward with. And then after that, we will then dive in on our farm bill rankings and make our state selections. So we're at a little bit of a standstill, just kind of wrapping up some farm bill rankings while we wait to hear back from them. We're supposed to have notifications by this Friday the 22nd on what they're selecting. And then we'll kind of go from there. And the only other update I have is we're still waiting on approval for our FY24 GARC rates but we do have our draft rates in the attachments with the agenda. I included our draft map to give everybody an idea of how things are looking. And I also included our 2023 versus 2024 rates just for comparison's sake. There was no standard percentage increase across the board. It ranged anywhere from about five to 15% depending on the county. There's a few areas that require appraisals because our area wide market analysis did not come up with enough sales for that year to come out with a firm average rate. So we do still have a handful that will require appraisals. However, we were able to get a rate lockdown for most of them. And then of course, as I mentioned, pending review, we are hoping to hear by January so we know for sure and can continue our planning processes accordingly with the budget allotted. But this is what we have right now. I also noticed you can disregard the last two pages. I mistakenly left in some notes from our 2023 one on the original attachment. So that's outdated information. If you wanna look at it, you can just kind of discuss is what we look at for neighboring states and what their rates look like compared to ours when we're putting them together. So with that, I believe that's all I had. Unless anybody has any questions. All right, any questions for David? All right, if not, we will have a RCPP update with our RCPP coordinator, Matt Morlock. Good morning, everybody. I'm gonna share my screen really quick here as well. Just have a couple of brief updates for you folks. Last State Tech Committee, I presented on the proposal applications we had come in for last fiscal year's NFO. And we had a total of eight projects come in last year during the NFO process to be ranked and evaluated. But now today I can talk about the results or what we got back for funded projects. And we were pretty successful this year. This is going around. We were one of the lead states. I think we were third on the list out of all the states for total funding in this NFO. And we were in the top five for number of projects funded. So what we had this year was we had four projects selected that we were the lead on. Then we had one that we were not the lead on. The first project we got funded was with South Dakota Agland Trust and that's for conservation easements in the Northern Great Plains of South Dakota. And what that project is gonna be doing is pretty minimally restrictive agricultural easements on projects within Butte, Lawrence, Mead, Pennington, Custer and Fall River counties that fall outside of the Black Hills National Forest. The next project that was funded was a Ducks Unlimited proposal called the South Dakota Grasslands Initiative. That was for the full 25 million. And that project will be placing perennial vegetation and grazing infrastructure on lands. But it will also be providing a three-year rental payment on any projects that are doing these activities not only funded with the RCPP but also projects that were funded by other partners or other programs outside of CRP. This project will be able to provide a three-year rental establishment payment per se while the grasses that are being established and the projects are becoming viable. The next project that was funded is making sure every acre counts. This was through South Dakota State University. And that's a continuation of the every acre counts program that they have had on the ground since 2017. This project is looking at return on investment and profitability of farming operations around the state. It's available statewide. And then it's taking that data from the actual yield monitors and actual farms costs and identifying lands that are not returning a positive ROI. And then this will provide alternative uses for those acres and provide cost share for perennial vegetation or other practices to be installed along with a rental payment or providing other alternatives for that producer to take those margely productive lands that are not returning a profit for them and finding alternatives that those acres are providing an income as well and providing the conservation benefits. The last project that we had funded as a South Dakota led project is AgriPort Dairy Producers, a best management project. And that is going to be providing reduced tillage payments and the nutrient application reduction payments and things like that for producers that are delivering dairy products to the AgriPort Cooperative based out of Lake Norton. And then lastly, we have a project where Nebraska is the actual lead state but that is funded through the Nature Conservancy and that is improving grassland health and connecting resilient lands. It's a broad geographic area, it's covering six states and that project will be providing grazing management plans, prescribed fire design, brush management and activities like that around grasslands. So those were the projects that were funded through the last NFO. It was for a total of just over $61 million. So we did quite well. Like I said, we were at number three on the list of states for funding with our CPP. So we'll be looking at a timeline of getting the programmatic partnership agreements in place with each one of these by March 15th is a deadline we have to have them submitted to NHQ. We're hoping to be ahead of that pace in the state. And once we have those active then we'll be able, the partners will be able to start enrolling producers. So we're hopefully gonna have that done and completed by the summer and have them able to enroll producers in this project. So we're accelerating these timelines pretty fast compared to previous years. And that's because we're gonna be seeing a new NFO come out shortly. We don't have an exact timeline that's when that's gonna take place, probably sometime in January, is when that NFO is gonna come out for a new signup period. And this next one's gonna be very large. It's gonna be $1.8 billion is what we were being told. So there's gonna be huge opportunity coming forward and that's why I wanted to bring it up today. I don't have a lot of specifics on the exact timing of it yet, but I want all the partners on the call to know that this opportunity is coming and it's gonna be a very large opportunity. So if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to reach out to myself or Tony. And we'll start those discussions because our job is to help you with these proposals and make sure that you're successful. So with that, that's all I have unless there's questions for me. All right, thank you, Matt. Any questions for any of the program staff? All right, if not, I look forward to working with you probably over the next couple months in a different role. So back to you, Colette. Well, thank you. So I would ask please for, especially on the importance of working with partners. So Matt, just in case some of the partners don't have your contact information, it will be in the handout that will be posted on the website. But also if you'd put it in the chat, that'd be great. Your phone number and email please. Okay, so Matt had talked about the importance of working with partners. So we very much value our partners and all of you across the state. We will be having a Conservation Collaboration Cooperative Agreement, a CCCA for fiscal year 24. The Grants and Agreements Division hopefully we'll get that posted on Grants.gov. It'll be a no-fo and notice of funding opportunity. And then it'll be on www.grants.gov. So anybody who'd be interested in working toward a cooperative agreement. Yeah, hey, like Matt said, let's reach out to us and we'll help you and it'd be great because that's the whole point is that it's a cooperative agreement. Any new applicants will need to be sure that their accounts on Grants.gov are up to date and there's some steps in there to take before your accounts are fully active. But anyway, let us know. Okay, so with this part of the agenda, what we're looking at is some partner announcements and there are some of folks who had indicated they'd like to speak. So I'll let them go through the agenda. If there are any others who would like to make some announcements or share some information about the organization, please you don't raise your hand, turn on your camera, put it in the chat because that's what our meeting is about. It's a chance for partners to share technical science slide information with all of our organizational contacts. So the first one I have on the list today is the South Central RC&D with Jewel Bork. Would you please take over? Good morning, thank you, Colette. I am Jewel Bork. I work for South Central RC&D which stands for Resource Conservation and Development. We are a 501C3 nonprofit. We are kind of like a grassroots organization. We work with the people in the four counties that we represent, which is Jones, Todd, Tripp and Millette. We work directly with people. We provide them technical assistance with concerns that they have in the areas of land conservation, land management, water conservation and community development. We were awarded a CCA this fall. And so that one covers Woody encroachment and it's an education and outreach agreement. And currently we have got some workshops set up. We are going to have an educational booth. We have Sean Kelly as one of our speakers on the control of Eastern, our Woody encroachment. Then we also have two informational meetings set up for February. One is in winter, that will be February 6th and another one in mission on February 13th. Those posters just went out Monday or yesterday or yeah, Monday with that information on working with Angela Ehlers and her non-resident land owners program. And she is going to take a postcard that we have put together and her staff is sending information of those two informational meetings in February out to on their, with the names on their emailing list and contacts. So this morning I visited with the radio station so that information is going out. We'll be working with that. We'll also, we're getting some plat maps made so that we can see in a broader spectrum where the Woody encroachment area is and we'll be contacting producers. I'm going to be visiting with the commissioners in every one of these counties and also the fire departments to kind of tell them what our program is about and what we are doing in those areas. So right now that's kind of, we're just organizing and getting the word out. Great, thank you, Jewel. Does anyone have questions for Jewel? It's really cool to see you working with the conservation districts because you know that locally led conservation and communities, that's what's really important. So, okay, yes. Next on the agenda, we have a Ducks Unlimited with Cassie. If you'd please introduce yourself and your project. Yeah, absolutely. And you did a perfect transition to what I'll highlight today. So my name is Cassie Aux and I work for Ducks Unlimited as a biologist based out of the peer area. Like I said, Collette did a perfect transition. Excuse me. So today I'm going to talk about what Ducks Unlimited and a lot of partners in the hand and hide area recently accomplished with what I would consider a three-step meeting that was really seeking input from the local producers as to how conservation staff and programs can support producers in that region and further programs or just different needs in general. With that being said, I'll just go through the three steps briefly. And I did create a document that outlines this process more in depth that I'm more than willing to share and I'll drop my email in the chat box once I'm done. So the first step was a planning meeting where all the partners in the region got together and identified what we thought were resource concerns, opportunities and different opportunities for growth in the conservation world for this hand and hide counting area. And as we went through that process, we were keeping notes and also talking about different statements we hear in the field from producers as to why or why not conservation practices may be implemented, such as rotational grazing, fear takes too much time or I love cover crops. They can be positive and negative but the most important thing was to compile all of those notes from our side and what we hear in the field in a very neutral tone and create what I'm going to refer to as a conservation, sorry, a conversation guide for the day of meeting with producers. So once we had all the notes done from our input, we put them into different topics such as grasslands, cover crops, water, trees, communication efforts, things of that sort. And then we just created those neutral statements which then acted as the guide for the night of conversation with producers where a moderator is the only person that was speaking to the group. So that's important I think because I took, I kind of hybridized to back up a step, I hybridized this format for this meeting and hide in Han County to emulate what this format called peers and pros 360 is that I learned about at America's grassland conference where it's one moderator speaking and then peers are getting together in discussing their thought process and concerns and things of that nature together to really have that intimate experience versus that typical lecture experience that a lot of us have success and also have ran into issues with hosting. So this was just a new format all around. I'm not a professional by any means. So take that into mind whenever you look over this document but choosing the location I thought was really important to encourage an open and relaxed atmosphere that would offer the opportunity to have collaborative conservation and conversation. So we actually held it at the Turtle Creek Saloon in Miller. So people were able to go grab a drink if they would like and we provided advertiser platters to after that free food component. And then at that planning meeting it's important to identify the moderators and who all plans on attending and have appropriate representation for each organization. And then it's really important to have note takers the night of as well. So then the next step would be to actually host that producer meeting. So like I said, we had ours at the Turtle Creek Saloon in Miller and we had 14 attendees and every single one participated in the conversation which I thought was incredible. How I started the evening was just asking where did you guys hear about this event at? So that opened up the door to conversation as to what kind of media should we be using to raise awareness of different events and overwhelmingly a lot of different opportunities came back where there was a print media, social media, radio, things of that sort. So then the last step really after that evening happens with the producers and everybody's taking notes. You meet up with all of the regional partners and staff again and just do what I would refer to as a follow-up meeting and just compile of the notes and the insight that producers gave us on the different topics and those neutral statements and questions. And then try to identify actionable items and requests that were made from those landowners. And what we found is sometimes those requests from landowners were kind of hidden in a lot of the conversation. So we had to pull out information on our own and try to figure out, well, is there a role that these conservation professionals can play here in supporting landowners in what they were requesting overall. So, and then the next important step was to match what partner is able, sorry, is able to bring those requests to life. So that's really the rundown of how that event went. Like I said, we have 14 producers come out and I was really enthused with that number and the participation level. And another thing that I thought was really interesting is that the producers that did show up all represented a different range of conservation programs experience. We had people there that, this was the first exposure to conservation programs and we had people there that had worked with multiple partners over several years and have held multiple contracts. So that was really fascinating to hear all of the different insight there. But like I said, I will drop my name and contact information in the chat and feel free to reach out if you would like to check out that process document or if you have any questions right now I'm open to that. Some peers, pros and partners, I like it. Thank you, Cassie, that's good. So all right, any questions for Cassie? All right, and I think Cassie, you could try, if the permissions are set, you could certainly try to put your hand out in the chat and see if it can be accessed there. Otherwise, we could certainly add it to the, when we post the recording in the minutes of this meeting, then we can add it to that as well. So okay, next we'll have the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition and then after that will be the Association of Conservation Districts. So with that, Cindy, the floor is yours. Thank you, Collette, and thanks, Tony, for the invite. Apologize for my voice, I do have a little cold yet, but I'm fighting. So a few things that I'd like to update from the coalition, one of them is we were very thankful for our newest agreement with NRCS in that focus is the small-scale urban agriculture, as Jessica and the group have gone over, there are some new practices that are eligible, and with the new agriculturalists that we are working with, we needed some new staff to be able to reach and help not only the offices, but also the agriculturalists with their endeavors in working with NRCS, FSA, and all of the partners being able to put conservation on the ground. So Chris Goldaid is our newest staff person that has started with the Soil Health Coalition. So we're excited about that. Most probably quite a few of you on this call know him, he has a long-standing history within the conservation field, so we're excited about that. And we do have his information on our website, and I can provide that link to everyone as well. So Chris is excited and he will be a welcome part, being able to have that urban focus in teaching people about soil health on that small scale too. Another update that I wanted to share is something we're very excited about that's coming fast and furious. After the holidays here is our conference. We invite all of you to be there. We're excited to partner with many of the people on this call for that too. So conference is January 23rd and 24th. We have a great lineup of speakers, numerous topics, including all land bases. So not, you don't have to just have cropland or grassland or forest land. There will be conversations with all different people with those types of land bases too, whether you have livestock or whether you don't. We hopefully, we'll see you at conference on January 23rd and 24th. We will be West River this year. It is in Rapid City at the best Western. Kent did a great job of explaining soil health at the Dale Farm, and we're excited to partner with them for soil health school in 2024. It is August 26th and 28th through the 28th in Huron at the Beedle. We're gonna be working with the Beedle Conservation District and Kent on the two research farms there and have soil health school there. So we're excited about that. And another update Matt went over was the RCPP. We're excited about partnering with DU on that RCPP too. So we have some new things that are happening with the coalition and wanted to thank all of our partners for that. So thank you so much, Collette. Yes, lots going on. That's great. And thanks for putting the links in the chat and then also sharing your website. So, okay, let's see, we'll go with the conservation districts next. And after them, we have a note in the chat from Chris Dozark with the ANR. So Angela, if you'd please take the floor and then we'll pass it to Chris. Good morning, everyone. Just a few updates. We are working, one thing I'm rather pleased with is the success we've had so far with our Healthy Soil at Home program which emphasizes soil health in the urban environment. And we were at the South Dakota Municipality Convention this year and we had what I consider very positive numbers. We had 95 engagements that lasted over five minutes with each of the persons. So there was a lot of interest expressed by the community officials, both how to get local landowners within the community to implement soil health practices as well as how to implement soil health practices on public property. As a result of that meeting and that program, we've been invited to make a presentation at our National Association in San Diego in February. So we will be taking that on the road to show them we're working on and setting up the program. We're making some positive environment which is sort of ignored in the past, unfortunately. We're also working on creating a website, partners programs platform that everyone will be able to load up their programs, their partnerships. We're working with McQuillan created group out of Aberdeen to create that. So when we get it up and running, we will let you know, we'll invite you to be participants in it. And then another outreach activity that we're heavily invested and involved in is pheasant fest and quail classic which is coming up in Sioux Falls. We will have about a hundred feet of exhibit space as you walk into the Sanford Premier Center to emphasize the non-operating landowner, our tenant relationship and working on that as well as Dakota, I guess it's the Great Plains grasslands and working grasslands for wildlife as well as the need to protect our grasslands. You got a lot of other people to talk. So if you wanna hear more, let me know. I know I need to reach out to a couple more of you because I know I've got emails that I haven't responded to and I apologize but been busy. So thank you. Any questions for Angela? Yes, it has been a very busy time of the year and we really appreciate everyone today. So Chris, you had some updates from your department, please. Yeah, Chris Dozark with South Dakota Department of Ag and Natural Resources under the Resource Conservation and Forestry Division. I just wanna give three little brief updates, one on RBI Repair and Buffer Initiative. We got funds, DA and R receive funds from the 2021 House Bill 1256 to implement best management practices to try and improve the Big Sioux River watershed. So we were kind of struggling with that but in October, we sent out 1300 mailings to landowners in the watershed and it has kind of taken off a little bit now. So we're working on about, we're up to about 20 agreements that we're working on. I just wanna give a shout out to all our partners, game fishing parks, private land biologists, Ducks Unlimited, pheasants forever, 319 watershed coordinators, conservation districts and NRCS employees have all kind of been involved in some or all of those projects. The Conservation Commission was updated on the current loans and balances and they also approved 19 grant applications totaling a little over 300,000. Then they also took action on increasing docket prices for tree shrub plantings, fabric and forest stand improvements. And then the next meeting will be held virtually on January 31st and an agenda has been sent out at this point. And then just to touch on our 319 funds from the Clean Water Act, we had two project applications come in, both of them got funded. One was in the Belfoose River Watershed Project. They received 899. Well, I have to go through, we have to go through the Board of Water and Natural Resources still to get this approved but staff and our non-point source task force approved funding for those for the Belfoose at 899,000. And then the South Central Project, which is pretty much the entire James River as well as the Vermillion River and parts of the Lewis and Clark watershed received about $1.2 million. So that's my three updates. And I do want to give a shout out to Kristen Cassie for putting on the Private Lands Biologist Forum. I thought that was a great event. It was amazing to see everybody in the state that puts conservation on the ground. So just a shout out for that event. That's my update. Excellent. Yes, that was really cool. So did anybody have any questions for Chris? Okay, great. Well, thank you for that. So next on the agenda, I had a note in the chat for Sandy Smart with SDSU for an update. Hey, good morning everyone. Sandy Smart from SDSU Extension. And I just wanted to provide update on the South Dakota Soil Solidity Summit we held back in on May 31st last summer. We did basically awareness opportunity of the problem and then we did some breakout sessions and I provided, collect the summary of those breakouts as we kind of brainstormed of the ideas around awareness, actions, barriers and then opportunities and needs. And then we kind of voted on them as what we would rank as priority. So collect can share that word document out with everybody after the call. But I just wanted to let you know that there was a research group that was meeting prior to the summit for probably a year that Dr. Bill Gibbons was overseeing. And then when Bill stepped down and retired from SDSU, I kind of overtook it for a while. And it was clear that there are some folks interested in research opportunities. And I believe Dr. Clay's lab has been successful in getting some USDA funds to do some research in that some multi-million dollar type projects. And you saw it also with the announcement that Matt Moorlach made that the for every accounts program that Anthony Bly, Matt Deerson and Kristen Weber are doing with Feds and Forever is a fantastic project. That really goes a long way to address these marginal lands, especially the ones that are subject to soil salinity problems. Just kind of off a happenstance, I was talking with Ryan Eichler from Ag Spire and I met him at South Dakota Cattlemen's. And one of the things that they were interested in doing is they've got that climate smart commodity grant with SDSU. And one of the aspects they're doing is obviously trying to bulk commoditize the best management practices that go in reducing greenhouse gases and that carbon footprint. And it's kind of just like doing a mass balance equation rather than maybe trying to do specifically marketing. So one of the things that he brought to my attention that I thought was really interesting is that if those enhance those areas that are marginal that are affected by soil salinity could be put back into some permanent perennial forages. And if those lands were grazed, then that would kind of count towards this mass balance of the equation of reducing greenhouse gases and by not having, and Dave Clay's lab found that there's a lot more nitrous oxide going up on soils that are impacted by a soil salinity. So getting those back to perennial cover would be really important. And so I just, I think that his group is looking for outside entities come to him to Ag Spire to be able to put those kinds of things together. So that was just a neat thing as all of us as we learn or we know very well about South Dakota and being a small population state that we kind of, it's a small world and we, there's a lot of opportunities for making progress in conservation. So I just throw that out there that I think there's a lot of opportunities to kind of work on finding solutions. And like Kent had said at the tour that was, that Anthony had organized last summer, it's just basically the water cycle is broken in a lot of these areas dealing with these soils. And if you go through Brown County, it probably used to be great cattle country long time ago. And with the problem with having such a high water table, it's caused these issues. So anyway, we'll continue to keep working in this area with extension and with our partners. And there's a lot of very interesting things that people have brought up, especially identifying through web soil survey, potential salinity risk, also things just about crop insurance and precision crop insurance, those kinds of things. So lots to be solved and lots of things to work on. But I just wanted to provide that update. Great, thank you, Sandy. If you too would please put your contact information in the chat if you haven't already. And then as I was scrolling back, I see there's a note from the South Dakota specialty producers in the chat regarding their upcoming event. And Rick, did you wanna speak about any of that part of it or just bring attention to the meeting? Sure, we're busy planning the conference. We're working through the speakers and presenters and such. So it's coming up in Chamberlain, February 8th and 9th. We hope to see you there. If anybody has any questions, feel free to contact me. My email's in the comments. Very good, it's nice to meet you, Rick. And thank you for working with the specialty producers for the Urban Egg topic. So that's a really important one in our state too. Okay, all right. Are there any other partners announcements or notices that we should be aware of? Okay. We did something a little bit different with the agenda for the State Technical Committee. At the end of it, if you could actually access the agenda and the handouts, which the PDF will be there. But we added a section for the upcoming State Technical Committee dates. So those are listed in the handout of March 28th, May 22nd and August 27th. And in the past, so our support staff, Kathy Irving at the State Office had a database of people who had signed up for announcements for the State Technical Committee. And with that, we have some new technology available. So in addition to that database, we've been also emailing out to people that we think should be interested or might have announcements or updates for state tech. And we're going to be encouraging people to use a email electronic notification through farmers.gov. So if you haven't already, go to farmers.gov and scroll to the bottom where it says subscribe. So what's really cool about this is that they've coordinated between NRCS and the Farm Service Agency for updates from the agencies. And I'll thank you, Andrew, for pulling it up on the screen. He went to farmers.gov and right down there at the bottom is where you can subscribe for updates. And so it's really neat because you can go through the topic list for the Farm Service Agency. You can go through the topic list for NRCS, whether it be grasslands or programs or whatever. And you can go down to the state level. You can pick South Dakota. And then at South Dakota, you can go down to the county level. So if you have land in a particular county that you'd like to get notifications for, you can sign up for those updates. And what's cool, thank you, Andrew, for pulling that up, is that there's a box in there for state technical committee. So what we'd like to do is encourage you to select that state technical committee box so that when the recording is posted to the website, it'll automatically update you that that recording and that the handouts are available. And then when the meeting notices, the news releases are sent out, that'll be on that list as well. So it's farmers.gov and subscribe. And we will continue to use the access database and our email as well, because we really do want our partners to be involved with the state technical committee meeting, because there's practices and programs, but when it comes down to it, it's really about people and how we can communicate with each other better and be more effective and efficient. So with that, on the end of the state tech agenda, there's a couple of links for NRCS, South Dakota State Technical Committee webpage. We will continue to refine those. And there's also a calendar of events. So in the future, so we did go ahead and put some events in here, like the no-till associations, educational events coming up, the Solar Health Conference. We will be hosting a USDA open house on January 31st at the Black Hills Stock Show. And the whole idea is to increase our outreach efforts and hopefully provide an opportunity for people to ask questions about engaging with conservation on the land. AgFest is an event in there and that'll be on February 5th. And then there's a few others that will be listed as well. The last one I have on there is the South Dakota Grassland Summit. And is Laura Kaler or Judge Jessup on the call today? If they are, I'd invite him to speak about it. In short, the Grassland Coalition and Laura Kaler as the Director for the Grassland Initiative will be organizing, are organizing, hosting a South Dakota Grassland Summit March 18th and 19th in Oakoma, South Dakota. And the idea is to bring together all the facets of people that are interested in grasslands for South Dakota and give it a place where we can communicate, give updates, and look at forming a strategy to improve the health and welfare of our great grasslands. Lastly on the agenda, there was announcement through the Risk Management Agency for a livestock road show that was posted. And they have some virtual sessions that may be of interest to our agricultural partners as well. They specifically, there was some livestock risk protection and some pasture land, rangeland and forage land opportunities there. So those dates are listed on the agenda and go to the Risk Management Agency and website and they'll have the news releases and such there too. So, okay. Would there be any other announcements or notifications for this meeting today? By golly, we're gonna get done in an hour and a half. Sounds good. Great, okay. Well, thank you all. And if you have any questions or anything, please don't hesitate to connect. And we do wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year and wish you the best and we'll see you in 2024. Thank you and merry Christmas to everybody. Thank you everyone. Thanks, merry Christmas.