 committee. So thank you for joining today. We had a little snafu with our website that had the link incorrect from the December to the March meeting. So I'm going to give a few minutes for people to get connected. So please bear with us as we give them a few minutes to get connected before we start our formal meeting. So thank you for holding. Good morning. I see we have a few more people join us today. Thank you for coming in. Unfortunately we had a little mishap with our meeting link on the website. So thank you for joining. I'm going to give the invokes just a couple minutes to make sure they have the correct link to join. This is the meeting for the South Dakota State Technical Committee for March 28, 2024. So please hang on and we'll get the meeting started directly. Thank you. Well, this is Pete Baum and can you hear me? I was curious about my audio. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Good morning. Yes, we can. Okay, we've got a few more people to join our meeting today. It is March 28th and the South Dakota State Technical Committee meeting. We had a little mix up on the link on our website. It has the December and the March meeting. So we're working to get that corrected so people can join the meeting properly. We were going to give just a couple minutes, two or three more minutes for people to get connected. So please stand by and thank you for the presenters for holding. Okay. Good morning. Today is March 28th. It is the South Dakota State Technical Committee meeting being held virtually here for South Dakota. And I appreciate you taking time to join us today. We did have a little mix up on our website for the December versus March meeting. So the link was incorrect. So hopefully we're getting people on the correct meeting and thank you very much for joining us today. So I'm Colette Kessler. I'm the Assistant State Conservationist for Partnerships here in South Dakota. And right away I have a couple of housekeeping things before I turn it over to the State Conservationist. So with the virtual meeting in the past, our Secretary Kathy Irving had sent out a mailing, a hard copy mailing. We can still do a mailing, a meeting notification to people by U.S. mail. That's what they would prefer. If so, they need to please notify us that they would prefer some things out by U.S. mail. So the method that we're going about now where we have this virtual option for meeting notification is through a shared mailbox. And that shared mailbox starts with an S.M. for a shared mailbox.spac, which stands for food production, agriculture, and conservation, then NRCSSD partnerships. So if you see an email coming with that name on it, that's from us about the State Tech meeting. So we're handling notifications through there. The other way that is actually better is through the farmers.gov website. So when you go to farmers.gov, and then you go in the upper right corner, there's a place called subscribe. And in that subscribe menu, you can enter your email address. And then you'll go to a whole bunch of options for topics from NRCS. And it's actually connected nationwide, which is really, really cool. So in that list, there'll be an option for South Dakota State Technical Committee. So get your email in there, choose South Dakota State Technical Committee. And then when we publish anything related to the committee, it'll go out to the subscribers of that list. So that's another guaranteed way to get in. The other really cool thing about the farmers.gov subscription list is that it allows you to go down to the county level for notifications. So let's say you're a landowner and you have land in multiple counties, you could subscribe to those individual counties for any updates for opportunities within those counties. So it's really cool. So, okay, just a couple of housekeeping things here before we get started. And now I'm going to pass it to our State Conservationist, Tony Sensari. Thank you, Collette. Welcome, everybody, to our first State Tech meeting of the year. I really appreciate that everybody's taken an opportunity to come and participate in this meeting. I know the weather has been a little crazy over these last couple of weeks. I'm driving back from Sioux Falls, and I was driving back in 77-degree weather, then it drops down to four in Ivo Blizzard. It's just it's been a very interesting year to start off. And I know right now with the weather looking as good as it is, we have a lot of folks that are looking to try to get back out in the fields. I've already seen that across some of the state. The people are already in the fields, they're already planting in some situations. So I know it's a busy time here. The State Technical Committee in general serves as an advisory capacity to NRCS and to me. The idea behind this committee is to bring ideas, technology, and issues to the Natural Resources Conservation Service to see if there's opportunities that from a state level, we can try to put resources in place to try to address issues and topics of concern across the state. And this is why this meeting is important. This is why I value every single one of you being here to to let us know what your thoughts are and if you have ideas or if you have technology that you'd like to share with us. Even in our Code of Federal Regulations, it talks about the State Technical Advisory Committee. And it says the purpose of this committee is to build criteria to be used in privatizing program applications, to help set state-specific application criteria, prioritize natural resource concerns for the state, to talk about emerging natural resource concerns and program needs, and to help advise and build conservation practices and practice standards for how NRCS operates in the state. This is what this committee has the ability to discuss and build. And so while we have a lot of items on the agenda that we're going to be talking about today, there's always room that if there's ideas that are coming from our partners, from our producers, on how NRCS can ensure South Dakota better. This is a venue to talk about that. And I encourage you, even if it's not something that's on the agenda when we have an opportunity for questions or comments, raise your hand and ask us, bring it up. We might not make a decision today on it, but this is an opportunity for it to be raised. We have our technical experts in the room right now that are all listening and wanting to hear from all of you. So if you have comments, this is the venue to bring them up. So before we move further down the agenda, I just want to make sure I'm acknowledging if we have anybody else on the call, any members from our congressional delegation or any other federal agencies that'd like to take a moment to address this commitment. So I don't know, Randy, do you see anybody else on the call there? I'm not seeing anybody on the call at this particular time, but if anybody does jump on, we'll let, okay, perfect. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and move right into more of my update regarding more just South Dakota. So we have had some tremendous success in South Dakota even over just the last few months. One of the big items is staff. South Dakota is sitting better right now than we have for a very long time. We have close to 300 staff on board across the state and we're still growing. And what this is doing, this is allowing us to serve our producers across the state even better. We've made some significant changes in the state even within the last couple of months. One is I need to take an opportunity to thank Jess Malski for her in serving as our assistant state conservationist for programs. She took over that role when Jeff Vanderwilt was promoted into a different position. So thank you very much, Jess, for your hard work in that position. Really do appreciate that. Jess is now moving back into her role as the state resource conservationist and we have selected Val Dupres as our new assistant state conservationist for programs. So she started officially on Monday, very, very excited to have her on the leadership team. We've also made a couple of other selections across the state, again, filling some of these vacancies that we've had. We have selected Paul Drigny is now our resource unit conservationist for our three rivers resource unit. And Eric Rasmussen is our resource unit conservationist now for the Central Plains. So we have promoted some folks into more of these senior leadership positions across the state. Moving in, moving folks into some of these positions do occasionally create vacancies across the state. So we have a couple DC vacancies, but even at this time we have close to 65 offices across the state. So 65 district conservationists. And even with so many offices, we're only sitting right now with three or four actual vacancies across the state for district conservationists. So this is better than we've been sitting for a very long time. And again, this is all to be able to provide service to our producers across the state. So how is our budget looking right now? There's been a big topic over the last couple months regarding where are we sitting with our allocation? There's been talked about government shutdown over the last few weeks and months. And I'm very happy to say that NRCS has a four-year budget. We have a budget that will last us through the end of the year. There were a couple cuts that were made that will be impacting us somewhat. There was across the agency about a $10 million cut to our conservation technical assistance funding. That's the funding that's been providing technical assistance. So that's going to be staffing dollars. That's going to be agreement dollars. But $10 million spread across the agency doesn't impact us at an overwhelming level. So we'll be able to take that in stride and continue moving forward to provide services and still looking at some agreements this year. I wanted to give just a very basic overview of how IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, has impacted South Dakota over these last couple years. So just talking about some of our main programs, EQUIP. EQUIP grew from 2022 from 17, $17 million to 2023, 19 almost $20 million, and now in 24, $36 million. So you can see that that has grown significantly over the last couple years with the Inflation Reduction Act. CSP. CSP grew in 2022 from $15 million to $26 million and $23 to $41 million in 2024. So we are gaining ground on how much funding has been invested into the agency just over these last couple years. And it's expected to grow even more as we enter into 2025. We have a lot of work and we have a lot of opportunities in front of us. And again, this is why this group is so important, is this group can help set priorities for where is this funding going to be looking, or where do we need to be looking at putting this funding as we move into the next couple of years. We have resources, we have the ability to impact South Dakota, and we already are impacting South Dakota. Another item I want to touch on is strategic plan. I first want to come out and say thank you to all the partners that took time to participate in our efforts of putting together a strategic plan. We have the framework put together, we have the comments from our listening sessions, and we have a basic plan. We are still working on trying to get this formatted in a way that I can get it out to all of you so you have an idea of what we're going to be working on. But I did want to touch on some of the main topics that came from that meeting. The main buckets that we were looking at are going to be workload, improving our tools and resources, better communication, building partnerships, and then working on recruitment and retention. Those are our main buckets that we're looking at. We've already started working in some of these categories and trying to find improvements. As an example, we're already looking at increasing the number of archaeologists we have on staff to make sure that we're not creating any unnecessary bottlenecks as we increase our program workload across the state. Internally, in working on tools, we're trying to centralize where our information is held and trying to create more intuitive ways of accessing our information internally, which has been an issue. We're looking at trying to build more of an outreach material library so that our partners will be able to access our materials and get access to our outreach material easier. We're also focusing, making a significant focus on training and onboarding because of how many new staff we have. We already are making a lot of progress and making changes that are going to be beneficial to our employees of South Dakota and NRCS, but that in turn will make it better for all of our partners and our producers across the state. Again, I just thank you for taking your time to be a part of this. Thank you for all your efforts in assisting us to help our producers across the state. Make sure that our resources are being used in a wise manner and that we're going to be able to keep South Dakota in agriculture for the next 100-plus years. So thank you for all your efforts. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this back and we'll continue moving down the agenda. So I'll hand it back to you, Glen. Great. Thank you. All right. So with our agenda, and please know that Randy had gone ahead and emailed that out to everyone and hopefully the website will get updated, but you know what email works too. So that would be there for your reference with the handouts. So with our agency, we've got our conservation and technical practices. We have our programs and then we have partners. So the formal part of our agenda will work through that, but what's fun for us, me, is to include updates from our partners. So I have two guest speakers today and we're going to move forward with their presentations right away here. And our first guest speaker will speak around the grasslands. And the first one will be Pete Bauman, who's with the SDSU Extension range and he's out of Watertown, South Dakota. So Pete, I'll turn it to you. And then after you, we'll learn to Riley Cameron with their project. All right. Thank you, Collette. I'm going to share my screen here and hopefully I'll need some feedback from all of you, whether it's I've got the right got a few different monitors here. So I want to make sure I get the right screen shared. Can you tell me what you're seeing right now? We see you, Pete. You still saw that. That's unfortunate. We see here. I need to move. Let me just see if I can move the presentation to... Okay, you're still just seeing me, not the screen. Hold on a minute. Okay. How about now? Same? Same. Boy, you unlucky, unlucky group of people. Maybe somebody can... I'm not all that familiar with teams. I use do more. So can anybody give me some input on why my... So I hit screen share. Did you have to do anything on your end, Collette? No. Up on the upper right, it has that share button. And from there, you can pick the screen to be shared. Now, okay, it finally gave me the drop down. Okay, now this should work. I'm hoping. Got it. All right. All right. Well, thank you, Collette and Tony and all. Some of you have seen this. I got to tell you that when I've got this on, I can no longer see you. So if there's any questions right now, I can't see the gallery at all. So, Collette, I'd ask you to kind of monitor, chat, or other questions or if anyone's raising their hands. And then after I get through it, I will address any of those questions, I guess. If there's a pressing question during the presentation, that's totally fine too. Just interrupt me. What I'm going to be talking to you about today as a back is the kind of the wrap up of a long-term study that we've done with many of the partners that are on the call here today. Oh, there I do have you guys in view. Okay. So, status and native range lands in Burnside in South Dakota, 2013. I'm going to put the caveat on there right away so that all of what I'm going to present to you is circa 2012, 2013. It's a large data set. It's been a long haul processing data. You'll see why. So what I'm giving you today is what we looked like 10 years ago. So with that caveat, just know or just understand that God's not making virgin prairie anymore. So all of what I show you today just have that little caveat that we're 10 years post already. So we've seen additional changes to the landscape since. Okay. I want to acknowledge our funding sources. It's about nearly 100 or about a $1 million project. But if you can see the contributions by partners has been significant and substantial. And it's really been an incredible level of support. I want to call out specifically since we're on the state tech meeting is South Dakota NRCS with making available the LiDAR data. I can't even put a number on that millions of dollars worth of actual public dollars spent made readily available to SDSU for this. And I've got several people to thank but Vanderwilt in particular, Nathan Jones and his entire team. And then also through South Dakota Farm Service Agency and the partnerships that are represented on this committee allowed us to acquire the what is the non public common land unit data, which is a whole nother story. It's a difficult data set to access if you're not basically a government entity or an affiliate such as PF. But anyway, excellent support all around. So we've been losing grasslands over time. And I'm abbreviating this presentation to a lot of you are aware of it. So basically, there's two big questions. How much do we have left and how fast are we losing our native son? And I'm going to put the caveat on this is what is native as that's even a debate. It's not really a debate. It's a misunderstanding. But a lot of people think that native means CRP, right? And what we're talking about here is actually virgin sod that's never had iron in the ground as best as we can tell. So we're talking post colonization, post homestead actual iron in the ground. Okay. So there's a lot of data I can draw on, but I'm just going to use kind of some some high level stuff. Basically, there's tons of research and data that's come out since about 2007 on conversion into Northern Great Plains. It's captured pretty well since about 2017 in the World Wildlife Fund's plow print. So I'm going to call out just their subset of this that's got the intact grasslands remaining. And if you follow the yellow aerial, you'll see that over the last from 2016, 2021, so about a five year period, we went from about 132 million to 129 million acres of intact grasslands. This report still doesn't necessarily call out exactly what the content or makeup of those grasslands are. But in the Northern Plains, it's a mix of loss of perennial covers, planted covers, and of course, native range land. Um, the reason that it's very hard to tease out using high level data is that satellite imagery mixes up green things. Satellite imagery at the level that we can harvest it for the nas data. Some of most of you are familiar with that term, the National Ag Statistics Service. I've got just a subset of cover types here that get pretty mixed up by a satellite. And so we can get big picture idea of what's going on in the landscape, but we really can't tell you from satellite imagery, whether it's native, alfalfa, a green cover crop, etc. So we had to come up with a different methodology on. So this was developed by this methodology I'm going to show you has kind of been developed over time, SDSU, pheasants forever, Nature Conservancy were big players in figuring this out. But what we've done is in the process of determining what a native range land or native grassland is, you can't look at any one thing and say that it definitively is, but you can look at a whole lot of data to help you decide what is not native range land. So what I'm what I'm showing you is this deductive process that we've developed. And what that means is if you walk through our process starting in the upper left hand corner, I don't know if you can see my cursor, but we take the landscape at a one mile square level and we use all of the resources available, starting with the with the FSA data that cropland data that gets thrown out, water over 40 acres gets thrown out. And then we look at what's called NAEP imagery national aeronautical imagery program I think it stands for. And we look for additional breakages on the landscape. And then we look for all other things big, you know, farmsteads, gravel pits, golf courses, etc, etc. And what it does is it gets us to the end of the line of the boxes that are shown in red is what what do we deduce is likely native range land. So it's not a quality assessment. So it could be pristine native prairie as shown on the left hand box, or maybe I'll just use the word overgraze just for simplicity, range land, you know, not well cared for as shown on the right, but in all things that never had iron in the ground. And it's important to realize this because even that picture on the right with the cattle in it is, to some degree, we're we're saying that that is recoverable, or at least we should we should we should treat it as such, you know, the third thing though that came up in this analysis is the impact of what we call go back acres. And if you're not familiar with that term, it's land that had been farmed in the past that had gone back or reverted back to a perennial cover. Oftentimes that was done by landowners realizing that the land was unsuitable for farming, maybe low class, you know, or five, six class soils, or so it was either actively replanted or passively nature kind of just took took over. And those that's primarily we think about that in western South Dakota that could be like your alfalfa, crested wheat kind of typical go back what we might think, but there's also a lot of go back that is, you know, if you don't know the history is almost hard to define. A lot of those properties were were maybe tilled back in the day dust bowl era or in the 50s and 60s, and have reverted back to some perennial cover. There's also a little bit of a history of hard pan tillage and especially in western South Dakota trying to make those lands more productive. That's had a bigger impact than I think anybody's really realized. And that's sometimes was a very aggressive approach to management. It truly looked like plowed up fields. The idea was that it was going to stimulate things like western wheatgrass, grama grasses, etc. And actually the data shows that it did. But you know, if you look at the results, I'm not sure that we would advocate for such land management today. However, those are important grasslands in South Dakota. And so we wanted to retain we were not throwing those out as saying they don't matter for our grassland cover. So we're we just said have categorized those go back acres in a different way and retain them in the database. Okay, so then the next big thing that we stumbled upon and had I known this 10 years ago our data, this wouldn't have been a 10 year project was the LiDAR analysis. And if you're not familiar with LiDAR in simple terms, it just shoots a bunch of lasers at the ground out of an airplane, it allows you to see the round the topography through the vegetation. And it's a pretty cool, pretty cool system. So this is a picture of a go back field in western South Dakota, you can easily see with the naked eye there. When you're standing on the ground that that pattern of historic farming, you can't see that from the air, you cannot see that from aerial imagery. So this is where LiDAR really comes in handy. And I'll show you what it really looks like in our analysis. So this is a typical pasture area, eastern South Dakota, I'm not exactly I don't remember exactly where this is at. But this is, if we take the LiDAR and we enhance this picture, you can start to see striations and patterns. Even if you look at the stock dam in the middle, it becomes much more evident and clear with the shadowing effect. So it really helps us look deep into the land. I want to point something out. Can I get a nod or a thumbs up from someone if you can see my cursor? Okay, I see Riley's nodding. Riley, I'll look to you then see this striations along the side of this hill. That would typically not be visible in any other way other than with LiDAR enhancement. That's probably cat stepping from grazing, you know, heavy grazing pressure. But it does indicate that there's a pattern to the landscape that we wouldn't be able to see otherwise. Here's another great example of a pasture where we were able to identify, if you look at the patterns from what I've got labeled as unbroken sod, you can see there's very much a random land pattern. And then you get into this chunk of the pasture that's go back sod and look at the striations from previous breakage. So that's this LiDAR tool has been a a tremendous game changer in this analysis. So what does it mean on the land? Well, if you take just an example of like say this is Falk County, we through our analysis, we drop points on about 7,000 acres, 6,600 or whatever, that we kind of suspected might be go back land just in one county. The LiDAR analysis then verified that we were about 88% of what we thought was probably previous broken was. But here's the thing. This is where it really it really kicks in 31,000 acres that we didn't even see that LiDAR indicated in the county as previously broken land. So it's really really made this analysis much more accurate across the entirety of eastern South Dakota. This is this is pretty amazing. So we had dropped points on about 213,000 acres that we thought was probably had some go back history. LiDAR verified about 153,000 of that actually did have a breakage history. So about 70% of what we identified actually was. But here again over over 400,000 additional acres that we couldn't even tell with the naked eye from across all of eastern South Dakota. So pretty significant. All right, at the end of the day, what does it mean for the picture of native land remaining in eastern South Dakota? About 4.8 million or only about 21% of eastern South Dakota is actually remaining native grassland and woodland in total. Or another way to put it one out of every five acres remains as native in eastern South Dakota. That doesn't mean that every one of those native that does not mean that every one of those historically tilled acres is black dirt right now. A lot of it's under CRP. A lot of it might have been returned to alfalfa or other perennial crops, grassland. But so here, so don't get too shocked by this picture, but this is what we call the negative. This is the picture of the reverse of what I just showed you. This is all land in eastern South Dakota that has some sort of tillage history that we've proven. It's pretty amazing impact that we've been able to have on a landscape. Sad thing is we're doing a whole lot better than a lot of other states on that regard. So 20% is quite high compared to Minnesota, Iowa, etc. Western South Dakota, we're doing a lot better, but we have to be very, very careful that we know our history. We know our story. We're going to be destined to repeat it. So western South Dakota, we've got roughly 18 million acres of unbroken grassland remaining about 73% or so. We anticipate that that's going to drop or so that's about three out of every four acres is still native on range land. We anticipate though that that's going to drop to about by about another 10% or so once we're able to actually analyze the LiDAR data. That's the only thing we haven't got done yet on this project is actual western South Dakota LiDAR. We've got all the data are almost all of it from NRCS, but we just ran out of money to actually process it. And the reason that I'm pretty confident in telling that you already saw the story from eastern South Dakota, this picture is all of the points that we've that we've identified in western South Dakota that need a hard look with LiDAR about 30,000 additional fields scattered across western South Dakota. So we're going to see we're going to see those numbers of native range land drop. And this is interesting. This is what we've identified as all of the historic homesteads that no longer exist in western South Dakota via aerial imagery. And that's that even that's probably a much very much underrepresented of what that actually looked like from homesteading and sod houses. But this is what we could actually see from the air just remaining. So and remember everywhere one of those dots is folks had to prove up land. So you got to assume that there's a garden patch or a 40 or an 80 that got broke just to be able to claim make the homestead claim, right? So quite a history there. We all are very aware of what the tillage practices have been in the past and the advancement in technologies. We've got a game changer on the landscape now over the last 15 years, which is simply using all of these great no till tools that we have. You know, and I'll just be honest for grassland conversion. So now it's basically sprayed out planet in the first year you can grow crop. No more breakage just just chemical chemical breakage is what we call it. It turns the landscape so fast, you don't even really realize it's happening. So that's happening. Eastern South Dakota just to we did a we were able to fund a graduate student to just kind of do a sub project just to kind of try to figure out well what have we lost in the last 10 years? I'm presenting data that's 10 years old. What kind of change have we had over time? We're still losing ground. We're still you know if you can if you know your counties, you can see Brown, McPherson, Edmunds, Hyde hand and crazily enough, mini ha ha. Hardest Sioux Falls still losing some grasslands. So about 140,000 acres or so over the last 10 years. It's not a tremendous amount. And a lot of it is due to expansion of fields in the areas that previously didn't. So like this where my cursor is 10 years ago, this red would have been all native. Well, you can see that they pushed that field out a little bit where they had an opportunity. So it's a lot of just small field expansion. Sometimes it's more obvious. This is Hyde County native pasture. Now it looks like this. And in fact, it's gone through in the last 20 years, conversion and then salinity issues to the point where they don't even grow a crop out here anymore. I go by this every time I go to my grassland coalition meetings. And it's pretty much dead soil. But it's got, you know, almost two dozen grain bins. So that's just change in the landscape. A lot of recreational tillage still exists. Just trying to scalp in a crop here or there. This is by Bitter Lake. Sometimes it completely fails. This is Grant County. I'm sorry if these pictures are just a bit fuzzy. But what does it mean? Over the last 10 years, about a three can account for about a 3% loss of native rangeland in eastern South Dakota, more or less, doesn't sound like a lot. But over the next, but if you expand that out to 3% over a nine year period, in the next 90 years, we would lose another 30%. This is where our kids and grandkids start to get affected. And that is equivalent to all of the remaining, currently all the remaining native rangeland on the Prairie Catoe, for example. So that loss is still pretty significant. I'm going to quit there. This data will be completely publicly available to all, not just agencies, but private landowners as well. It's going to be posted on our Open Prairie site. I just got finished yesterday meeting with my techs. We got everything ready to go. So within a few weeks, I think we're going to be able to have this up and available for all of our partners to be to be used. I'm going to end there. And I just want to put a plug in for the Grassland Coalition and the New South Dakota Grassland Initiative. It's going to be over through these two platforms. Primarily, I think that we're going to be able to have this conversation in a real and meaningful way going forward into policy, especially for things like the State Tech Committee. So with that, I am going to quit. Colette, I'll shut down my mic. And I guess I don't know if you want to take questions or how you want to do that. That's good. Well, we're doing okay. We do have an presentation ready, but if there's somebody who has a question, you can either raise your hand or put it in the chat. And we can come back to it later as well too. Anything at this very moment? Okay, then we'll move forward with our next presentation. And this project has been really cool. It's a result of a conservation and innovation grant. And the Elk Creek Conservation District has worked with Riley Cameron. And it's just been a really cool project. So I'm going to let Riley tell his story. And when you're done, Riley, you can just turn it back to me. Thank you. Sounds great. Thanks, Colette. Hi, Tony. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me on. This is my wife, Jimmy, if you don't know her. And let me get my screen on here. We're going to talk about the third year of our conservation innovation grant that we were awarded. And this, that we're kind of finalizing this up and wrapping it up. And excited to tell you guys kind of some of the results that we had. So hang on just a second. Can you see the screen share? Yes, we see your PowerPoint. Okay. Let me see if I, whoops. There we go. So, yeah, this is where we're at. We're just north of Rapid City. And here's my crew of girls, the best help in the world. Pretty proud of them. So this conservation innovation grant came about that, you know, we realized that these old hayfields that we'd been taken from for generations weren't producing anymore. There were mainly a brome monoculture. And the soil was pretty much dead on them. And, you know, I had this idea of what can we do? Can we rebuild these soils and get them back to a more native grass state without applying synthetic fertilizers to them? Can we do it naturally? Can we graze it? And, you know, that was the first part of our context was that. And the second was, can we replace hay feeding here in western South Dakota at the same time? And so that's where this idea was born from. And this talk is a lot about cover crops, but in the context of it, which context I think is maybe the most important soil health principle, grazing management is what we do. And that's our main thing here. So this used to be bare soil here and now we're growing grass. We're, you know, we're taking, our focus is growing, growing forage and grass for our livestock. And we build rest and recovery times for our pastures. We, we would cabin sink with nature on stockpiled forage and reduce our inputs just as much as we can and try to get back our operation back to nature. This picture here is last January, a year ago after a pretty brutal winter. And the snow came off and we've got green grass. And this, this picture summarizes all six soil health principles that we do on our ranch. And we're, we're pretty excited. This is, this is so powerful what we're doing. And, you know, with that, we're, we're able to actually, we graze our cows 12 months out of the year. This is, this picture here is, is 20 below with a pretty stiff breeze blowing and we're able to graze through it. We provide our cattle with all they need, not in the form of, of harvested feed. So in that, we, we, we do have a forage shortfall and both nutrition and quality and quantity in the middle of the winter. And so that's where the cover crop comes through. And, and we started this, we took out some smooth brown monoculture for this grant and we planted full season, warm season cover crops. And this here, this is the first year of the project. And these were daily moves on this. And here's kind of our seed mix that we did this last year. I've, I've been able to play around quite a little with, with certain species and find out what seems to work better in our country. Because we're, you know, rainfall is our biggest limiting factor. And this seed mix works pretty good. But I typically plant this in, in the last half of May and hope to get a rain on it to germinate it and get it through the summer. But these are some of the pictures then of, of us grazing. This would have been two years ago in November with pears. And this would have been last a year ago. Can you guys see these all right? Okay. So this one was last year, a year ago in December. And it's 25 below. And, and these cows are grazing just fine. We actually rolled hay out for them and laid there for three weeks. Because it's amazing these cows would rather go graze than, than actually stand around and eat, eat hay. It's kind of like what they were designed to do, I think. This was earlier, this fall had been late November of this last fall with pears again. And it's hard to see the calves in there. We grew so much feed. One guy commented to me wondering what I was going to do with my weedy sorghum field. Well, you guys can see the, the diverse mix we got in there. And we had a lot of it. This is a picture of a one very happy cow doing what she was designed to. This was, this was last January and, and it was, I think 30 below in this picture and the breeze was blowing in these cows. I couldn't even get a tractor started to feed. And they're, they're just out doing what they love to do. Pretty amazing. Same, same time frame. So, you know, some of the pushback on, on, well, this, this isn't going to work. You know, but what if you get a bunch of snow? Well, we've had a lot of snow ever since we started this project and we just graze right on through it. You can see in these pictures how much snow there is. And long as you got enough, if you leave it there, the cows are going to find it. The biggest weather damage we get, if you can see in the top right photo, is we get a little bit of wind damage from 50, 60 mile hour wind storms that we end up getting, but it still, it doesn't, doesn't seem to affect it at all. And here's, this is the effect, this is herd effect on snow. So we're, we're actually moving these cows every three to five days. So we have them pretty contained. And the herd effect just busts the snow right up and they, they'll dig down in there and they'll get every, every last bit that they can. They just love it. Part of it, we hear is, well, the nutrition is not there. It's going to be weathered. It's going to be, it won't be any good. But here's, here's, I just, I sampled it later this year in January, mid-January, and it still has just almost 9% crude protein, 63% TDN and a NEG of 38. And it, it weathers a little bit, but boy, it holds its nutrition really well. And it's more than adequate for a mid gestation cow in the middle of the winter. And they, they just really thrive off of it. So, you know, part of this project, we did a lot of myth busting on what was out there and, and proved them all wrong. Here's a, this picture is a added bonus that by having this on your place, you can pull big bucks from every neighbor's place in the valley. So that's, that's made it fun. We have had a lot of challenges, drought being one of them, our first year was super dry, but we were still pretty successful, I thought. But here was last year, it was germinated good and looked great in the end of June, completely hailed us out. And here was early August, it bounced right back and, and was just incredible. So part of the deliverables on the grant was we were, we were to have a tour every, every year. And we did three of them. Here was the flyer from last summer. And we had about 85 people show up. And it was great. And Tony and Collette came over and we were super excited to have them as well as delegates from our congressional representatives. And glad to see them there. And to me, guys, this, this project is boots on the ground conservation and, you know, to where we can take a concept and, and show it to people in real time. And, you know, people, people are hungry for this knowledge. They want to do better. And it's our really our duty to take it out and show it to them. We're excited to be a part of it. So Dr. Chris Nichols was our kind of our keynote speaker last year. It was super hot, but it was great. Everybody learned a ton. And I think I'm the first one to ever get Chris Nichols and Ray Ward in the same soil pit together. And we had some really spirited discussion, but it was great. So thank you for all that we're part of that. And so then the question will go to some data here. You know, what about yield? And our first year was our toughest year. But you can see and the last years we needed to revise it down just to touch. But our the production's nearly been tripling on it every year. And we may have reached the upper end of our production. But, you know, I fully attribute that to soil health because it's surely not moisture because in the difference between year one and year two, we actually year two have two and a half inches less precipitation. And we grew three times as much forage. So pretty exciting stuff there. If we look at the data purely on an organic matter level, it's kind of disappointing because actually the organic matter went down. But part of this project we were, we sampled the cover crop fields as well as the hay fields. And if you look on the hay field side, if you can see it, the organic matter went down in the hay fields as well. So I think that organic matter varies quite a little. And I think moisture and, you know, our environment has a lot to do with it. So I'm actually going to continue this project on my own for at least two more years before we plant it back to native because I'd really like to see a hard trend line on this to what it's actually doing. And in the grand scheme of things, three years is not much because we've really been, we've taken from this land for generations. And three years isn't enough to give back. But if we look over here, the one really exciting thing that sticks out to me on this cover crop field is if you look over at total organic carbon and it went up exponentially. So the question of are we storing carbon in the ground? Absolutely. The proof's right there. We look at the hay field as well. And our total organic carbon went up on that as well. But actually, I grazed these hay fields the first two years of the project. And I think this is pretty hard proof that grazing and proper grazing management will add sequester carbon to the ground. We need to do some more studying on that. But, you know, the results are there on that. So the really exciting part was the PLFAs, the soil, the biological component of the soil test. And, you know, we started out with very low populations. And then with a little moisture, it just exploded. And part of that was eating up the root structure of the brome monoculture that flushed it. But if you guys look down, if you can see the total fungi of it, there was hardly anything to begin with. And it went up exponentially up just like a rocket. If you look on the left cover crop field from about 40 up over 500. And the hay field went the same. And I treated that to grazing on that. That's pretty exciting stuff to see. And that was our goal was that if we can bring the fungi back, and we did. And very exciting. Everybody wants to know the economics. So here's kind of what we did last year I run through. And you can, there's multiple ways to break this down to dollars. But we achieved about 125 animal units per acre last year, which is pretty high. Our costs are about $100 an acre, which we include opportunity cost on the land of about 40 bucks an acre to that. So that comes to about 80 cents an animal unit. So if you break that out, what a cow is, it's costing me a little over a buck a day to to graze these cows through the winter versus if we're feeding $200 plus dollar hay by the time we get it to the cow, it's costing us four bucks. So right there, we could be saving about 75% of our winter hay winter feeding costs, which anybody in the cow calf business knows that's our most usually our largest cost in producing a calf is our winter feed. This year we had we had calves on the cows for a little bit and then we weaned them and put them back on. So I estimated they gained about two and a half pounds a day, which the first year of the project they gained just almost three. This year, the quality was down just a little bit. So I estimate that at 275 a pound for 30 days, we figure we increase the value of our calf by about $200. If you break that down what that costs on the calf side is about 40 cents a day to run a calf on this 550 pound calf. That makes our cost to gain about 32 cents per pound versus if I had them in the feedlot, it would be it would vary from $1.20 to upwards of $1.80 depending on where you're at. Those are significant savings. So if you figure all this kind of together, I estimate the net profit per acre on this is about 400 bucks. That's tremendous. There's no no farm fields in the country that are going to net maybe $400 an acre and we're doing this with very little inputs and with cows. We've by grazing management and cover crops. We've only fed about 20 bales through this entire winter to our cow herd. We've slashed our direct costs and kept our overheads down and that's how we're bringing profit back into our business and we're very successful at this. We're still got to go through all the economics to kind of wrap this project up. But one thing that I'm struggling with and if anybody can help, what is the value to add to the profit per acre of the nutrients that we recycle back? And I think that number is very very large. So I guess in short, does this work? Absolutely. And you know we've we've got the proof of it. It's we're beyond the experimental stage and when we're so so excited about this. So here's my contact info. If you guys want to reach out feel free and I just want to thank everybody on the project and Kent Cooley and Valerie Ryder have been there every step of the way and have helped me along and we appreciate those guys and and thank you everybody from state NRCS. So any questions? Presentation. Thank you for sharing. It's quite inspirational for me really. So thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate all the all the all the data you're gathering for us too. That's that's awesome. Cool. Although is there a way we can come up with a value on how much nutrients? We've talked about it multiple times. But yeah yeah absolutely. Pete, did you have your hand up? Yeah I'm gonna just comment on basic how Tony started this meeting and Riley thanks you and Jimmy that was excellent. I've seen your presentation a couple times now and it's where we need to go with a lot of this. If you look at what I presented ahead of Riley and we've got all those go back fields out there right now they're targeted for they're gonna be the first things targeted for recropping across all these landscapes and we know that. Riley and Jimmy have showed an alternative and of course there's been grant support there but I guess I want to challenge us all to think very deeply about this in the future and Riley is probably going to be something weird coming from me. I'm pretty much a prairie purist and I love the idea that you want to go back to natives. But I also really think about ranch economics and I want to I want this group to think about so if you go back to a pure you know those of us that are understand grazing if you go back to a pure native stand it's wonderful for the landscape and stuff but is it going to actually help carry the ranch you know using your ranch as an example Riley over that winter period right and we don't have to get into this entire conversation right now but I do think we need to mark this Tony as the next big point that we need to do in the progression of how we're helping and working with producers on this because I like I said it's going to sound weird coming from me but I'm not sure that's the very best immediate future for a ranch. I think that there's balance that we could discuss in future programs that allows producers this mix of perennial and annual covers and forages on those old go back fields because look at what we're already seeing for soil health we're meeting CRP requirements even you know I'm going to CRP as an example with the soil health benefit all the wildlife and all that stuff comes by happenstance but I worry about ranch economics in the long run um without that safe without that relief valve you know that these guys have already shown and that others have shown as well so I'd like to note that as a challenge for us here in South Dakota I would much rather see a restorative regenerative reprocessing of these old fields than leaving them subject to a decision that says gosh I have to go to natives or else I have to break it and go to crops and uh non-invasive short and long term covers and perennials might really really be that sweet spot for people to stay productive and profitable so I just want to I'm going to share that I guess. Thank you Pete um are there any other ground anyone else have their hand up or comments? Questions for Jimmy and Riley? Okay well thank you very very much for sharing your story we really appreciate it. Thank you everybody. Awesome okay so under this portion of the agenda we are addressing like conservation practices and topics and the next on the agenda we have our uh an update with South Dakota Technical Guide and that is with Jim Reedy our state conservation engineer so I'll turn it to you Jim and after that we're going to go to Owen over at the Farm Service agency. Thanks Colette. Good morning everybody. I just want to say how excited I am to hear how we're using LIDAR. The way you're using LIDAR Pete that excites me a lot being an engineer. LIDAR is just near and dear to my heart so it's kind of neat to see those different ways that our partners are using that resource that's very cool and I have a family my family ranch is out by Phillips so seeing what Riley's doing with the forages and the cover crops and the soil health and all that grazing improvement is just huge so those were awesome presentations thank you very much. I'm going to share my screen real quick. I just wanted to show we have a few tech guide updates I wanted to make sure all our partners were aware of. All right can you folks see that? Yes Jim I'm sorry yes we can see it. Okay okay thanks. All right so this is our South Dakota Fuel Offs Tech Guide our Electronic Fuel Offs Tech Guide and just here between the last technical committee meeting and this one we had three new tech guide notices come out about some standard drawing specifications and a few of our design tools and it's in section one if we move down to notices we have notices posted for every fiscal year so fiscal year 2024 these are notices 514, 515, and 516 and I just wanted to point out here in 514 we had some updates to revisions and a new standard job plan and there are a few revisions here one was with our wildlife escape ladder and our stock tanks and then we added a new one here real quick I won't read all this stuff to everybody but I'll at least point out that you can find these tech guide notices there. We also added a new one for these precast apron sections that we can place around stock water tanks. I'm kind of excited about this one we have some suppliers out there who are pouring concrete apron sections off site at a facility and then they're taking them out to the field and then placing them around tanks so we developed a new standard job plan for that that I think our partners will find handy. Also in tech guide notice 515 this is applicable to section four where we keep all of our conservation practices and our specifications we added a new specification for the use of what we call just fiberglass reinforcement it's called GFRP the GFRP bars in our concrete we have a new specification for that and then there were a few revisions and updates made to a couple of our other specs and the last one because I know that some of our partners like Game Fish and Parks and Ducks Unlimited those folks are all doing livestock pipeline design work maybe some grass waterway design work and I wanted to point out we had a couple of updates to our design tool spreadsheets that we use for those a major update to our grass waterway design tool kind of a new look and feel to that tool with some additions there and new references to a couple of our specs that were updated for SD 27 for waterway and 28 for seeding and then the livestock pipeline tool we had an update to the apron tab with rebar spacing so I just wanted to be sure I pointed those out to everybody who uses these tools and with that that's pretty much all I had if I had any questions I'd take them otherwise I'll turn it over to you call it very good any questions for Jim thank you very much that concludes the conservation practices section of our agenda we're going to move into the conservation programs area and with our guests today we have a farm service agency and and Owen Vengerhaas is going to speak on the conservation program and to you Owen then after you we'll go through our CS conservation programs all right thanks Colette prior to today's call we did get a notice issued on one of our signups that I'll speak about today on some results and kind of a direction that we're headed but I guess first off just to summarize we basically got three suites of options right now for CRP signups we've got the continuous CRP sign up and we've got the general CRP sign up that concludes this Friday the 29th to have offers submitted and we have an upcoming grassland CRP sign up that's targeted for the end of the month in April I believe starting on around April 29th the ones we got the results on today was under the continuous sign up it's unique this year previously county offices were free to approve as offers became complete and get the start dates identified and move forward with conservation planning and all those things but with the extension of the farm bill the national office is now doing batching phases so our first batch process sign up started January 12th and went through March 15th all offers that were in a submitted status at that date were looked at and determined if acceptable and basically all's we were determining is that we didn't exceed our acreage cap for our our national acreage cap under CRP the notice that was issued this morning everything that was in that submitted status was accepted in under the continuous sign up under that first batch anything submitted after March 15th the next batch process is going to be April 12th and then the next one subsequent to that is May 10th so we've got two additional batching dates in our near future for the continuous sign up so those are I guess competing for acres along with the general and the upcoming grasslands sign up grass lay or not sorry general is not as prevalent in South Dakota it definitely has its place but our continuous sign up with our safe practices and our all of our wetland practices addressing the prairie pothole region are definitely the the stronger sign up for South Dakota again general sign up that date is March 29th for the last date to accept offers under the general so we got one day left in that and then as I spoke to the grassland sign up starts April 29th there was a notice issued that I want to touch on with kind of the state tech committee just to put it on record that we reviewed it with the state tech but we did have the chore as an agency with fsa to review our grassland priority zone I'm going to share a map here quickly so this is the priority zone that was in effect for sign up 205 and forward so it will be in effect again for for this upcoming sign up but ultimately the targeted counties the the pasture the hayland the grass acres in those counties could not exceed 25 percent of the total grass acres in the state and these were the counties targeted with consultation with game fishing parks nrcs is kind of our little sub crp committee as you can see up there it's 7,089,395 acres that were targeted in those counties as eligible grassland acres for sign up and I think our total as a state that we could get up to is 7 million and 100 100 and some thousands so we're 20 some thousand acres away from our total eligibility the difficulties were that we have to target whole counties we can't take portions of counties to maximize that acreage in its entirety but ultimately this will be the layer or the the priority areas they'll get a few additional points if they make an offer under the grassland sign up going forward into our upcoming grassland sign up that starts April 29th we did look just kind of high level overview you know swapping out some counties maybe maximizing some other areas in the state but based off our prior sign up successes I will make note that our highest enrollment counties under the grassland crp our west river and as you can see by the map get no additional priority points but we do have the highest amount of acres out west under our grassland sign up so again I think the discussion last year was to target our our expiring crps probably our highest threat of conversion potentially would be in these eastern counties where crop production is more prevalent and so wanted to incentivize those counties with a little extra incentive to rank higher to get accepted under the grassland sign up so this will be the the priority zone moving forward again but just wanted to review with the state tech committee to make that noted any questions comments concerns for myself thanks colette oh pete's maybe got his hand up again yeah just in relation to the things we've already discussed today i would in the path you know i've been part of that selection committee and i are that priority zone committee and i think that i think that we've always thought about that and maybe in the correct way i'm starting to question that a little bit on grassland crp anymore given the the data that we've you know we've of course there's and you can't do nothing about it now but i think you know as a team we might want to think about this a little bit more strategically because our conversion of natives are clearly i mean we've got conversion to east river no doubt especially as we push that out toward the river but i think if we're giving priority points and we're really targeting grassland crp and we're really actually wanting to focus on keeping grass underfoot versus necessarily you know crop fields we may need to think about that in the future um we may actually want to think about putting a point benefit closer to the river and west river on grassland crp but it's something for our subcommittee to think about i think in the future so i just want to share that thanks beat thank you uh any other questions or move on to the nrcs contribution programs update yeah very good val then i'm going to welcome our newest member of our leadership team to the the floor and val i'll bring it to you for programs update please thank you colette um hi i'm val debris's i'm the newest member of the leadership team is uh colette said i'm the i've got some big shoes to fill i'm uh felon jeff angold's prior position so i've got a really great team and i look forward to serving you in this capacity i've been with the nrcs for about 20 years i've served a field position an area position i was prior the the state uh conservation stewardship program manager so i am happy to be here i'm excited about uh programs moving forward we've got lots of opportunities and like i said we've got really great team that offer a nice suite of programs guidance and support so um relative to programs we're kind of in the middle of trying to to um look at raking's on we did a little thing different this year relative to our raking process we're trying to do a continuous raking and having um free approval batches so in january we had a free approval opportunity for offices that had applications ranked that were above um thresholds and then we attempted the same process in february march we've got this process in place through may we're hopeful to have obligations done by uh late may so um you know i think we're making good progress and i've got some program managers on call today that are going to give their individual updates so with that i've got jen on the program first okay good morning everyone i'm jennifer words i am the equip program manager for the state and i don't have any handouts to share with you today like like val said we're in the process of going through batching of free approvals knowing that we have uh you know looking at the numbers we will not have any problems spending the 37 million dollars in equip allocation uh that we did get this year one thing that uh was new this year was the grass excuse me great plains grassland initiative that we are starting we just ended the sign up here and they are ranking applications that were received that that initiative is targeted towards cedar encroachments especially along the lower missouri area so we have ample interest in that as well and i don't believe we'll have any lack of of applications for that allocation of about five million or excuse me five hundred thousand dollars uh again we split up out of split up funding pools by ira funding and general classic funding and some of our cis projects that we've had in the past have gone to ira funding as well as uh you know some of them that wouldn't fit that criteria have stayed in the classic funding so again i we don't anticipate any problems spending the the money that we got we actually did ask for a little additional money uh and if there's any questions on equip let me know uh and you know going off of the presentations we've had so far and i think we need to have a visit with a briley and make me look at a new initiative for the state so great thanks jim um i'm gonna present on the csp update that's next on the agenda and um you know i have a lot of like jennon shared about the different fund pools we're working through pre-approval process i would say that um we've got about half of our applications pre-approved for csp that we're going to pre-improve for the year so we've we've gone through about half of our funding or thereabouts offices are still ranking we've had a successful csp application period we've got more far more applications than we have funding um you know we have some really great opportunities so as you are out and about please share that you know the agency has good program opportunities and we're open for applications all year long so uh we're like i said we're hopeful to have our applications wrapped up by the end of may and and start planning for fiscal 25 so um i'll ask david plenary he's our acting easement program manager to share that eight step reports good morning everybody um as val said i'm david plenary the acting easement program manager for south dakota i have a couple of attachments i will share my screen and uh go over all right did that come through for everybody yes okay so first update we since our last state tech meeting we did get our f y 24 south dakota geographic area rate caps or gark rates approved for w re um a few notable changes we were able to increase our rate not to exceed for any offers that require appraisals up to 9500 an acre previously that has been sitting around the anywhere between 5500 and 6500 um dollar area in the past so going forward for anything that requires an appraisal uh we will be able to be a bit more competitive uh with the the market rates that are out there being so high uh in the past we did have a number of um easement offers that went out had appraisals and were ultimately declined because they just weren't able to to compete with the appraised amount um in addition to that we we were able to increase some of our rates to become more competitive with this uh pretty volatile real estate market uh to note down in the the brookings minnehaha and lincoln county areas in the southeast um we're up into the six and seven thousand dollar an acre categories for crop ground um one thing to note is we do have a few um counties and some of our regions that have appraisals noted for non-crop acres and uh that that came because our appraisers that did the arid market analysis were not uh finding enough data for sales for non-crop ground in those areas in the time period um that they're able to use for their market research um by the time that came to light we didn't really have enough time to go to the national appraiser's office and request a um waiver to extend those windows uh we were already waiting quite a while on comments and feedback from the national office on that so in order to be able to move forward a little bit more efficiently on our fiscal year timelines we elected to switch some of those to just require an appraisal and in the end it turned out that we didn't actually need to exercise any of those non-crop ground appraisals so that that went into the decision to do that as we were noting that it was going to be a pretty minimal additional workload so that's the route we went this will be included as an attachment for anybody who needs to reference it and it should be available on our website as well moving on from there um I'm not sure why this is showing up as equip because I definitely saved it as an ASEP attachment and I was looking at that before I went on this is a breakdown of where we're sitting at for our fiscal year 24 ASEP applications and acquisitions so for fiscal year 2024 um we were sitting pretty low compared to years past and I think that's largely due to how dry things have been lately um we only had 31 WRE applications total now we do take that times two in a sense because we do rank for both farm bill funding and for IRA funding however um as I would have mentioned previously but for those who are not aware unlike the other farm bill programs ASEP is looked at and ranked and selected nationally for IRA funds for WRE we did not receive any funding for fiscal year 24 and we did not also for fiscal year 23 so everything that we're looking at that we're acquiring this year will be through farm bill funds where we're sitting now is we have five offers for WRE that we are moving forward with all have elected to continue and we're working towards the next steps to get to our agreement to purchase we had one applicant that is a permanent with reserve grazing rights we have two that are permanent we have one offer that was a 30 year with reserve grazing rights and we have one 30 year easement that we are converting to permanent that's for a total of about 621 acres a little over 2.7 million dollars for five total 10 of agreements worst noting we left a fair bit of wiggle room in our budget because one of our permanent offers does require an appraisal so we we anticipate that will come in over the guard grade so we wanted to leave some buffer in there to be sure that we're gonna be sitting all right on that I have a little bit of a simpler breakdown for our agricultural land land easements ALE we did have two funded applications through the national IRA fund pool that is for a total of 6,724 acres at 2.87 million dollars so we're pretty excited about that and as well as our entities and landowners and we've been moving through the process with that we are working with the easement acquisition branch with national headquarters to acquire those and we are actually working with Jeff Vanderwilts team so we have a familiar face that we're working with at headquarters to move these through and from here for FY24 through the end of the inflation reduction act any ASAP applications that come through we will work hand in hand with the easement acquisition branch with headquarters to to be able to hopefully move those through very efficiently and then to wrap up this report we have as of right now we are going to be making an offer for one more ALE application for another 923 acres at 562,000 dollars the offer letter for that will be going out either this week or early next and hope to proceed with that I believe that is all I've got if anybody has any questions go ahead and put those in the chat to raise your hand I'm happy to answer those hearing none so far I will let us carry on thanks everybody thank you David I appreciate it and thanks to David too he's in an acting role and we get to keep him for a bit we hope to hire an easement program manager here soon so we're just getting some paperwork back and hope to make selections so uh man for luck is our RCPP coordinator and I'll turn it over to him all right good morning everybody um much like Jen I'm been in the middle of uh batching periods and pre-approval slend and then negotiating ongoing agreements with new projects so I didn't have a chance getting handouts put together for everybody but I want to do is give a verbal rundown of both projects that are ongoing right now with activities and then so where we're at on the projects that were funded over the last NFO opportunity so with the current existing projects the Big Sioux Watershed project which is along the Big Sioux River corridor along I-90 they had their first batching period which closed about a month ago and during that we had there was nine applications that came in and we were able to fund eight projects um with that batching period for a total of about 350 thousand dollars and worth of grazing systems and things like that the remaining one that wasn't funded is actually going to be funded through equip instead so all nine of those applications were funded um we we have about a year left of that project so we're actually going to be opening up a second batching period for in fact it just opened up and it's going to be operating now until May 3rd so if you know any producers in that Big Sioux River Watershed let them know that there's an opportunity to enroll there's going to be about 600 thousand dollars available for funding financial assistance with this next batching period we're going through a process of moving some TA technical assistance funds over to FA which is bumping that up so we have a little bit more money available to producers there with project 2276 which the Lewis and Clark and Lower James River project they held their first batching period and it just finished up and they had five applications for eggway systems come in with that project for just over 2.2 million dollars and their initial financial assistance allocation was only for two million so we were able to fund four of the five projects with about 1.8 million dollars in funding there but we met with a partner the other day and they also are going to be moving some of their technical assistance that they feel like they don't need over to financial assistance so we're going to be able to pick up that fifth project and fund all of them with this so with one batching period we were able to use up all the funding with pride with that Lewis and Clark project which is great to hear it's all eggway systems and we're going to be able to fund 200 or 2.25 million dollars in projects with that one and wrap that up so lastly we have an ongoing batching period in the northeast glacial lakes project on that period it's open until April 5th and there's 1.7 million dollars available for producers up in that northeast corner of the state it includes parts of Marshall, Dave, Roberts, Grant, and Kite in counties so if you know anybody up in that northern end of the Big Sioux watershed too let me know there's an opportunity there there's about 1.7 million dollars I guess that available and that batching window closes April 5th so that's what's going on with current active projects out there a lot of good work going on a lot of interest I mean I was really encouraged to see especially with that Lewis and Clark and Lord James project that there was enough interest to fund all the use all the financial assistance in one batching period so there's a lot of interest out there from producers moving on to the new projects that were funded on the previous NFO I'm just kind of an update so you guys all know where they're at in the in the scheme of things the South Dakota Grasslands Initiative which is an AFA project with Ducks Unlimited and we were able to get the partnership agreement finished and signed off by NHQ and Tony and Ducks Unlimited signed us that project so it's active and ready to go we're in the process currently and negotiating their supplemental agreement for financial assistance so once we get that finished up they'll be able to sign up producers and get rolling on it so that one's moving on pretty quickly along with the South Dakota A-land Trust conservation easement in the Northern Great Plains and we were able to get that partnership agreement through NHQ already as well so it's active and we're going to begin the supplemental agreements next week I'm going to make sure that that one's going to be going on as well as fast as we can and there's a lot of interest to do some easement work along the front front edge of the Black Hills and we're hopefully going to meet that demand soon the making sure of acre counts project with SDSU that programmatic agreement has been submitted to headquarters we're hopefully going to hear back here next week within the next week on whether or not they're ready to move that on to signing I'm going to get that project going as well too so a lot of movement on those projects and we're through the partnership agreement side of things in record time it's nice to see we're able to get through the process quicker there's been some changes down at headquarters to make sure that they don't take so long to get through that step it's working we're a couple months in we've already got three of them almost the signature stage or at the signature stage so the RC's PV program is moving faster than historically did which is good to hear on Monday we received some additional good news agri-pure dairy best management project was tentatively accepted with the last NFO and with some changes to what they're looking at doing and removing some feed additive work that hasn't cleared FDA yet the chief announced that he was going to we were going to sign that agreement and make it active so that's another project that's coming on board with about nine million dollars in financial assistance to dairy producers in the state working with agri-pure and doing greenhouse gas emission work so that was just announced the other day so we're excited to bring that to life and get that program active as well so that's kind of where those projects were at that were signed up under last NFO the reason I bring that up is because we have a new national funding opportunity that's going to be coming out in the next couple weeks so I want everybody to be thinking about that as Tony said earlier with his IRA funding is coming out we have an opportunity for a lot of additional funding historically NFOs that were just dealing with farm bill funds they were about the size of 200 million dollars that's what an NFO would go out for annually with his IRA funding this next NFO is coming out it's going to be for 1.7 to 1.8 billion dollars so that's a lot of additional money coming out that we have an opportunity to grab in the state obviously that's a nationwide amount but you know being competitive as we are in South Dakota hopefully we can bring a majority of that to our state so there's a huge opportunity coming out and that is made possible through that additional IRA funding so we're hoping like I said there was just a call that went on at 10 o'clock and I got a note from one of my counterparts in their state that they're hoping that that NFO it's going to come out either the first or second week of April it's just getting through those last hurdles up in Washington DC and getting blessed by the White House in their places so hopefully in the next two weeks for us that new NFO will come out so any of you partners on the call that are looking at a new project make sure to reach out to myself for Tony and we will sit down and let's come up with a project that we can we can do so with that I just want to wrap up with a quick thank you I glossed over it quickly but we had two of the partners you know John Parker at Minnehaha Conservation District and then Rocky Knippling at James River Water Development District that both of them stepped up with their projects and they're willing to take some technical assistance that they could receive in funding and move those that money over to financial assistance which means more projects on the ground for the state so I just want to say thank you to those two if they're on the call and stepping up and putting our producers first and taking some of that technical assistance money that you guys could receive and putting that in the ground we have the demand in the state so having partners like that to that are willing to step aside and put more money in the ground to the producers that goes a long ways for our state and that demonstrates why our state is so strong so just want to say thank you to those folks quick and with that I'll turn it back over unless there's any questions for me thank you Matt I appreciate it um if there's any questions for any of the program side of things we sure try to brief opportunity for those now all right Colette I'll turn it back to you very good well thank you for the information on the conservation programs um then we also have in the handouts I want to remind everyone that Randy had put in the chat the pdf with the handouts for the meeting from today if you want to revisit that and there was there was a report that David had in there and then also our next topic is the wetland and highly avoidable workload update that report is in the handouts as well and then moving into um agreement update so I didn't put the whole announcement in there but there is the cover page for our conservation south to foot of conservation collaboration cooperative agreement so we currently have this opportunity open right now and it is applications are due through grants.gov by April 29th last year we had 22 proposals and that was really exciting to see that so I'm hoping this year that we also have some really great proposals come in and again I encourage everyone to be sure to make sure if you're going to apply that your grants.gov account is up to date and with all your credentials and also on grants.gov there are are many other opportunities for for federal financial assistance for local projects and one of my one advantage attention is the USDA's urban agriculture and innovative production grants I have a note in the agenda for that but on grants.gov you can find that that topic and with the priorities of our agency you know urban agriculture is one of them and I think about you know my brain goes to Sioux Falls and Rapid City obviously those urban areas but I also think about communities there's a lot of opportunity in smaller communities of South Dakota for agriculture within urban or suburban or smaller community areas very exciting news too a third thing that would bring your attention is that we also had gotten just noticed just yesterday that the USDA NRCS nationally has posted on grants.gov the grazing lands conservation initiative funding opportunity so I would very much encourage you to check through that opportunity for anything related to grazing lands and those are due May 26th. Okay at this point we have a round robin of conservation partnership updates this is a real fun section too and fortunately the agenda there were two ladies that have to go to another meeting so I'm going to go over to the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources as our first guest partnership part of this sharing okay real quick though were there any questions on anything covered to date before moving to partner updates sounds good certainly put it in the chat or we can follow up later too as well so Chris we'll let you introduce yourself and proceed with your report. Yeah hello I'm Chris Dozark I work for the watershed protection program with the Department of Ag and Natural Resources I'm technically our implementation team leader slash 319 coordinator section 319 is a part of the Clean Water Act so it's kind of cool to hear about the RCPPs they're very great partner for our watershed projects and I think almost all of them have an RCPP including the James River, Big Sioux, Northeast Glacial Lakes, Belfoose River so it's a cool partnership to see but I guess today I'll share my screen everybody see that okay so in 2021 I just want to bring this to everybody's attention as a possible help to funding or additional incentive to some different things across the state so in 2020 the Department of Ag and Natural Resources was awarded $3 million from House Bill 1256 basically to help clean up the Big Sioux River and with that using what's been very successful with the Big Sioux River watershed project they call it SRAM but we kind of took from them a little bit and came up with this repairing buffer incentive and it was pretty slow pretty slow going until we made a couple of changes years ago and basically Gamefish and Parks was kind of working on some crap in Gamefish in the Big Sioux River and we we thought well why try and compete why not you know maybe throw an extra incentive on top of what they were doing so we yeah basically came up with this extra incentive to where we'll pay basically 120 percent of the federal weighted average or you know what the CRP rates would be on the first 120 feet of this repairing buffer so we kind of went with that and it's been pretty successful in the Big Sioux River yeah so in the handouts just bring to your attention we kind of there's some examples there of what's possible to do and then along with that we applied for some ARPA funds through our department and ended up getting a million dollars and decided to take this statewide and we kind of decided that we've had some really good working relationships in the Big Sioux River working with Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, Gamefish and Parks, some NRCS folks have all come asking questions about RBI so we decided to kind of take this and go statewide with it so I just wanted to bring that to everybody's attention that this would be a possibility you know with some CRP contracts or CREP contracts statewide that we're gonna kind of throw this money as an incentive to you know if somebody's kind of on the fans and they're looking for you know that extra little boost maybe this would be a possibility so like I said there's three fact sheets in the handouts they can explain it a lot better back in at this point and if anybody has any questions or anything you can definitely let me know or Tanner Klossin he's kind of our our point of contact for the RBI project repairing buffer initiative and you can find this stuff also on our website underneath the watershed protection program website so at that at this point I guess I'll I'll stop jabbering on and see if anybody has any questions. Those are exciting opportunities thank you very much Chris so awesome okay great um well honor call today um there is a lady that's new to our to our name is Rachel Bush and I'm going to ask you Rachel if you wanted to go ahead and take the mic today and introduce yourself then after Rachel we'll go over to Blaine Brackie please. Thanks Colette yeah Rachel Bush I am the new grassland strategy director for the nature conservancy I've been in this position since about mid-December but even since that time I've recognized a lot of faces and names on this call so but I appreciate the invite and the opportunity to introduce myself um I guess just you know a few updates from the nature conservancy there that's happening in South Dakota um I know most of you or many of you probably know Joe Blastik he is just you know he asked me to remind everybody that the fire schools are going to be starting here in April um and going into May and those you know everybody I think should have seen those flyers for those um just an update too uh thanks for the update on the programs I know the nature conservancy ourselves worked with three ALE applicants um at this point none of them you know were selected for funding um we do know that you know one of those applications is under direct threat of development around the Black Hills and two of them you know we're working ranches um and we also you know we know there's a lot of interest out there for ALE just you know as a point we know you know I know Matt Moorlach mentioned RCPP we know that's an option um and one we're considering but I also think it's worth pointing out that with RCPP you know those landowners are only going to receive 50 percent of that easement value um as opposed to the 75 if funding were to go through um so I just think it's you know I'm just saying that so that you guys understand there's increased interest or you know interest out there for increased funding through ALE um and then I guess just an update on some of our western South Dakota work um our western South Dakota program has added two additional riparian restoration specialists those positions are going to be really working closely with NRCS field staff conservation partners and local landowners to provide that technical assistance and support for a variety of riparian health and grazing management projects um those positions are going to be based in Rapid City um but they're available to support projects throughout West River um we also have three riparian health workshops planned for the summer dates haven't been determined yet but as soon as we get those dates set and locations that we'll make sure we share it with NRCS and the partners but that's my update from TNC and thanks for letting me join and happy to be working with this group. Welcome to South Dakota we appreciate your multi-state perspectives and assistance muscle okay um Blaine I'm going to go over to you and let you introduce yourself and tell us about your new project. Hey thanks Colette um so my name is Blaine Brackie I work with the SDACD South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts and NRCS on a grant the locally led um project and we are pretty excited to announce we just launched a new website called the Dakota Conservation Network I will share my screen here quick and show a little flyer that we have and I will post this flyer in the in the chat also but um I guess for those on the call um if you have any so what this website is is basically it's a hub of all the conservation resources um in the state in the state we've been around and for about two weeks really about a weekend kind of starting to get programs and resources loaded onto it um but for those of you that haven't heard me talk about this um it is partner driven so if you have uh resources or programs or events to add to it it is set up in a way that um you can go fill out a form um and add your program or resource to it um and this is the website uh home page here um and to add a program you would just go up here in the top left um to the add help button um and a form comes up um if your organization or agency is in there um I've loaded a few of them in there but obviously there's still a lot um that I haven't um you would just add a new agency um and just kind of go through the um as little or as much as you'd like to add um you know the counties that that your program or resources in and submit um without taking you know a good half hour of all your guys's time for it I just wanted to quick um show you this new resource where it I mean it's brand spanking new um you know we're just kind of starting to get a role and so any um any help anybody on this call can provide as far as putting you know their resources in their programs um any other information we please encourage you to do so and reach out with any questions or or more information or feedback on kind of the um how the website works we're looking for um any and everything you guys can all give us so um with that that's kind of all I had to add I will put the flyer in the chat what has my contact info you can reach out with any questions but that's all I have thank you Blaine so this um that form this website that they have is is a really cool opportunity for sharing so thank you for the hard work going into it and I know that Angela Ehlers with the South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts and you have put a lot of work into it along with your the rest of your team so thank you um I would ask um Anzel would you have anything you'd like to add from the conservation district's perspective nope Blaine did a good job but we encourage everyone to get involved thank you very much so super okay um any questions for Blaine and the crew all right great then we'll move on um we'll have Laura Kaler with the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition next and then after Laura will be dual board and then Cindy Zink all right can everyone see my screen yes okay sounds good my name is Laura Kaler director of the South Dakota Grasslands Initiative I got to see a lot of you last week or maybe it was two weeks now at the South Dakota Grasslands Summit I just want to give a quick recap of that and where we're looking at going from there um you'll notice in this picture on the first screen a big talk of the event was the backdrop that we used um it was also utilized at the South Dakota or Pheasant Fest which was held in Sioux Falls and then we got to utilize it again at the Grasslands Summit so that was a really great piece to have there then just would like to give a little bit of recognition to our steering committee of the initiative and the planning committee of the summit these individuals were really valuable and helping pull it all together a lot of meetings went into it a lot of time planning it doing some background work and then at the event as well thank you to these individuals um a few little sorry this is couldn't get it in presenter mode I also am more of a zoom person than uh teams but so if you look at all the information starting at the top left we had 282 people registered for the summit and we had 242 people checked in you can see there we have a listing of the diverse types of attendees that we had and so we were hoping to get that diverse attendance and we did although of course afterwards we're also brainstorming who else we could have invited and for future events that we can include them as well we had 29 different sponsors of which 25 were their present a piece that the vendors really seemed to like and the attendees as well as that the sponsors were the sponsors who were there as vendors also were set up in that same room and so they really got to be a part of the conversation listening to it and then when we had breakout sessions and table groups they joined in the conversations there middle column on the screen you can see our speakers that we had and then on the far right some of the components we had was a social monday evening we had a poster show the poster show included some more research type of presentations as well as the more just project-based seeing what producers are doing on the ground so that was a really nice piece for people to go and look at during breaks we had a coffee time with the speakers I was able to go through and introduce a little bit more about the initiative and our goals which I'll highlight briefly now as well we had a time where attendees got to break out with their peer groups and really focus on some conversations of where do we go from here how can we utilize the resources that we have and our specific roles that support the grasslands and then we also ended with a policy form so overall I heard a lot of great comments on it if you attended and you haven't yet please fill out the feedback form just so we can kind of gather some ideas of what pieces to keep and what to tweak if we do this again in the future so during the day two and I know we're getting tight on time so I'm going to hit these quickly and if anyone would like to discuss them further please feel free to give me a call but in January I went around the state and met with different partners of the initiative there was about a hundred people total that I met with and I got some feedback about what they would like to see the initiative do recognizing that there's a lot of things that could happen for the grasslands but specifically this collaborative network of partners which is the South Dakota Grasslands initiative what could be more successful through collaboration and from that I pulled out five key goals that we're looking at moving forward with the first one is focusing on connecting producers and programs that exist for grassland conservation and we are looking at developing a committee to focus on this area the next goal is partner engagement so keeping that partner to partner communication collaboration and coordination going and so that's pieces like our quarterly monthly meetings newsletters and other aspects that we've been doing goal three this came up a lot at our partner meetings a lot of interest in what can we do to better market the grasslands to make people as aware of grassland loss as their rainforest loss and hand in hand with marketing is also education of both kids through adults producers urban and so we're looking at starting off with a marketing committee and then also having an education committee those two will probably work in communication but a little bit different focus of their work goal for the initiative is using research to support the grasslands so just helping distribute the research that's being done and sharing the information with those who need it and our fifth goal this one I think has a lot of interest right now to move forward with and so we will be developing a committee for it is educating decision makers and supporting programs that sustain the grasslands so both educating those decision makers and then trying to find some policies that they would like that all the partners would like to move forward with supporting together so we can have a little bit stronger push on that if you haven't already if you were at the summit and heard about this or if you heard about it today and you've got some thoughts on the goals and committees that I've listed you can scan this QR code right now and give me some feedback on the committees and goals pretty soon probably in a couple weeks there'll be a form going out that if you would like to serve on one of these committees you can apply to do that but if you're not ready to commit to serving on a committee there's still going to be plenty of ways that you can support the initiative and these projects even if you're not a committee member and so then our third way of being involved with the initiative is to continue to support what others are doing sharing what's happening and making everything more impactful so that is my synopsis any questions on the summit or what we're looking at doing next all right I'll throw my email in the chat in case anybody does want to reach out to me otherwise I'll hand the floor over to Joel thank you Laura and next we have on the question on the city committee is jewel board please oh you're muted try again jewel you're muted right now there can you now yeah there you go gotcha thank you okay all right all right thank thank you everybody um I'm jewel bork I work for south central rcnd currently we have a conservation collaborative agreement with nrcs to do education and outreach um for with woody encroachment um in the counties of jones mullet todd and trip so we have began we did some education um meetings in february um with in um mission and in winter um and from those meetings we had about 28 at our mission or winter meeting and 29 in our mission meeting and from that we did some survey and um we have a lot of producers that wanted to learn more on brush management also um along with eastern red cedar control so um currently i'm putting together another workshop to be held in mission and we're going to be doing more focus on um snowberry um control and um with yucca and sumac that seems to be some of the issues um of the plants that producers are having in their rangeland so we're going to be focusing on that um we've met with the tribe and visited with them on some encroachment control um and then we are going to be doing some outreach at some um community events this summer we've got some set up in winter and in white river at some rodeo events that they have coming up and again in august and then at the um summit that i attended in okoma we met with dirac twidwell and he had done um a workshop on woody encroach our eastern red cedar encroachment a couple years ago in white river um and uh wanted to do a follow-up workshop so currently we're going to be working with him and seeing if we can do some a follow-up um with him maybe in the next maybe next year and do some more fall smaller breakout sessions with him too because he would like to do some more work down in the area um down in our area with that so um and then um the todd county school district has gotten a hold of south central and they would like for us to come and do some education with their school system and so we're going to be visiting with them and um doing some outreach there so um that's what we can have on our calendar here for the next few months coming up uh you're a busy lady thanks for the update so all this stuff okay living on we've got cindy zenk with the south the clitoral health coalition please good morning thank you tony and colette for the invitation and i just wanted to give a quick update i know they did put in the handouts a new resource that everyone can request from the nrcf state office we worked in partnership with them it is called the cover crop poster um marcia deniki and the tech committee um continues to update the table one which is a useful tool if you are utilizing cover crops in your rotation and we just thought having that updated uh table one was so important for people that we wanted to make sure we could get that in the hands of not only the farmers and rangers but also the partners to be able to use as how to make a good cover crop mix so the cover crop poster the main focus obviously is the table one that nrcs keeps updated um it has the just the pertinent information that you need when you're making a cover crop mix um this qr code goes directly to the nrcs website on cover crops so it has that additional information anyone that wants one can contact the nrcs state office in randy papka has a supply there um the local offices will be getting them i don't know that she's had an opportunity to get them out yet so please um if you're wanting to you can check with the local offices in in a short time here um another aspect that's new on our poster is just a little um infographic that we thought everyone wanted to see some of the benefits but also what we don't necessarily see in the cover crops is what's below the ground and what really is impactful on our ground in our soil so we appreciate all the technical people from sdsu and nrcs assisting um in updating the poster so if anyone has any questions um the coalition appreciates all the partners assistance with this new poster but it i do think it'll be a very useful tool having out in your shops and for you to hand out to producers as you work with them awesome thank you cindy i know that the soil health coalition has a lot a lot of things happening so i'd encourage everyone to visit their calendar of events page on their website and follow up with the articles on there because they're they've got a lot of things going on they're really great so thank you very much cindy any comments any comments for the partners so far i'm not but i'm going to ask um matt uh got a club to please uh set forward for the nezzan's front work update thanks for the time colette and tony great to see everybody um i do not have a handout to share with everyone but just uh we'll give a verbal update so i want to give a big shout out to everyone including many of you in the room and on the call today and uh your help in making pheasant fest uh success so march 1st 2nd and 3rd in sue falls uh it was a great great event highly successful um general public in attendance was over 35 000 people um so that was great on that side of things but maybe even more so on the backside as far as partnerships and meetings so had an nrcs uh partnership meeting there um tony and myself spoke on the success of the partnership here in south dakota and shared a lot of the great work that my field staff do on a daily basis in working in partnership with nrcs and other partners across the state so i had a couple other meetings throughout the weekend as well um had a partner's working session aimed at recruitment and retention of field staff um in the field in general so had uh sdsu staff there as well as nrcs game fishing parks and lots of other conservation partners uh from the state so thanks again to those of you on the call and off uh for attending as well also had an access workshop that friday morning of pheasant fest as well uh talking about using some of the vpa hip funding through the federal farm bill as well as state programs across the country excuse me and uh yeah another very highly highly successful program and we shared excuse me sorry inviting a poll to hear pretty much since doesn't pass but uh yeah shared on the success of our our program here in south dakota our public access to habitat program which pairs on the game fishing parks walk-in area access program so again had a lot of important people there throughout the weekend usda uh under secretary robert bonnie was there was on the show floor on saturday and made an announcement there as far as the northern bobwhite pilot project so some kind of exciting things nationwide going on there had some other good social events throughout the weekend as well including a partners in conservation event and uh an upland rally on friday night and a national banquet on saturday night with uh decorated um biologists and outdoorsman donnie venson so i also want to thank some of the staff on the call here as well that spoke at a couple different things going on specifically for landowners throughout the weekend one of them was a prescribed fire panel which we had a daily um presentation on that on friday saturday and sunday so big shout out to pete bowman shon kelly and cody gruing um as well as uh some other staff of mine that helped fill in as well um that uh had a had a lot of people and attendance at all the presentations all weekend long uh also want to thank the conservation district for their help in um planning and funding for the um those beautiful displays that laura had pictures from the grassland coalition so um i definitely should have taken more pictures throughout the weekend to be able to document that but uh i might be able to track some of those down from my team so absolutely incredible uh display there in the main entry way leading into pheasant fest there so absolutely um again incredible can't say enough to thank colette and angela for their parts and making that happen uh really really crucial showing the importance of the importance of grasslands here in south dakota and across the country and those displays really keying in on the woody encroachment and those issues here um really really hats off to them again so um just a couple other things from pheasant fest so we also had our habitat help desk there and uh want to thank game fishing park staff that attended as well uh had fish and wildlife service uh employees around as well providing technical assistance to landowners and we reached over 500 landowners from 15 states across the country and uh provided technical assistance um and over 23 000 acres throughout the weekend so really highly successful event uh other things going on here in south dakota with pheasants forever we applied for some grant funding uh to help with the prescribed fire effort we want to get off the ground in targeting woody encroachment so uh hopefully we'll find out in may on our status of those applications hopefully we'll have up to eight staff getting on the ground here in the very near future again aimed at tackling that woody encroachment through providing technical assistance uh writing prescribed burn plans as well as tying into some of those prescribed burn associations across the state also we'll have two positions with our every acre counts program um as uh working through sdsu uh extension through that rcpp that map map moorlach excuse me shared on earlier so um that's kind of what we have going on here and again thanks to colette and tony for the time and uh appreciate here and all the other partner updates and would take any questions if anybody has them very very very good lots going on with your organization as well so um are there any other partners on the still on the call that would like to provide an update or anyone that would have questions okay well this is this is a really enlightening section of the agenda for me too is hearing what our partners have going on there's so much happening around the state and it's just it's really great to have a forum where you can share your ideas there um there are a couple things before i let everyone go and close the meetings uh the south clinton grassland coalition uh did have a new joint project just as the cover crop poster with the soil health coalition is now available the south clinton grassland coalition is working with us for a children's coloring book on grasslands and it's called um already open up on the screen it's like a it's really fun coloring book that's available now it's on the website as a pdf we're waiting for hard copies to um to arrive uh from our distribution center but it's it's again it's a really fun little exploration of uh aliens as they come down into the grasslands and they explore different facets of the of the grasslands and from the microbial life up to the larger life so really fun um also there are um there's a conservation planning get started with uh usd programs guide that's it's been out for a little while but i'm not sure that people are aware of it and there is a flyer about it in the handout and the last little thing is currently there are some national wildlife federation um mini grants for education outreach available and the flyer is in the the handout too so uh lots of opportunities we just need um maybe more integration of uh how to get all these exciting opportunities integrated to our outreach efforts so thanks again for everybody tony would you have any um final comments for the day just that i really do appreciate everybody's time today again i know that everybody has extremely busy schedules and this is been almost a three hour meeting so i appreciate everybody's time and just being a part of this because it really there's not a single organization that we have across south dakota that can do it all this really is a partnership between all of our organizations to actually be successful and trying to beat all of our different resource concerns that we have across the state so just thank you for your efforts thank you for what you do for our researchers across the state and i guess we're working on scheduling our next meetings already so it looks like we have a in-person meeting in pier it's going to be may 22nd do we have a location for that one yet no okay so we'll be working on getting a location for our may 22nd meeting we'll also have an in-person meeting here and here on august 27th so those are our next two dates for our state technical committees so with that i just want to say thank you again and any other closing items of what yep that's all i think thank you all and we'll have this recording posted also if anybody else wants to see this but uh thank you again and have a great rest of your week thank you all thank you bye bye