 All right, so our next speaker is Leland Schoen. Leland is driven by his desire for ranchers to gain more wealth for the land. You get a chance to visit with Leland, and I've known Leland a long time. You might find that grazing critters he is referring to are those in the soil. In the grazing perspective, it is rekindling the relationship with landscapes and livestock. He's over 30 years of career with the USDA NRCS. He has a range science degree from North Dakota State University and a farm ranch management credits from Dickinson State University. So he's well trained. His NRCS career has taken him from North Dakota to the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. In his last 20 years, he's been at South Dakota. Most of his career, he's served as a district conservationist. He's currently a rain land management specialist in the Rapid City Field Support Center. He keeps his technical skills acute by applying grazing management to land with sheep and cattle on his land with the help from his wife and five children. They must be getting older little by now, huh? Yeah, nine to 18. Leland is a keen observer of native range land and applies his motto of learn, practice, and teach. Believing that having practical application as a rancher is an credibility to be a great teacher and coach. Leland's talk today is staining out smooth brown grass invasion. So welcome Leland. All right, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Kevin. It's great to be back, I guess, on campus. To be honest, I graduated in 95 and this is the first time I've actually been in a building since 95 on campus. But definitely a Bison fan. So just how I teach my kids, when you have a presentation, you wanna give a good attention getter. So this is it. I'm gonna ask you this, what's the big deal about Big Bluestem with your appropriate pause? It makes you think about, is it really a big deal? Or our two species such as Western wheat grass and Big Bluestem, just what we know of is the native smooth brome grass in Kentucky bluegrass compared to what we originally had. That's just my attention getter. I've got so much to offer in so little time that I really appreciate this opportunity just to share an experience based on some information that I had and studied and stuff. So I have notes, otherwise I get too off track and I probably will anyways, because what I'm better at doing is small groups or individual interaction. And some of you that know me well is if you ask me a question, I'm gonna ask you about three back before we come to a conclusion. And that way we both learn instead of me just regurgitating stuff that I've learned academically or that I've seen on site. But what I'm passionate about is to share my experiences with you because it's gonna change the difference of our bluegrass and our smooth brome grass invasions. And so this last two sessions really set me up well. And if I were to ask you to ask the same questions that you did of Rachel, I'd have some answers of which some were already offered, but there's some cool things. So I'm wasting time here. So thank you again for the introduction. I left here in 95 and I went to Napoleon, North Dakota. It was my first office I went to and it really set the foundation. I had really good DC that he didn't have to push very hard, but he pushed me in the field. I got my boots on the ground. I'd really saw what I learned academically applied on the land and it really set a fantastic my career up very well. I'm a partnered a lot and I value a lot in partnerships, the conservation districts over the years, ducks and limited partners for wildlife with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the grassland coalitions. We're all trying to figure out this non-native cool season invasive thing and whether it be bluegrass, crested or whatever. During these years, I continued to study and read and work at the Mandan ARS or I've looked at their work. Dickinson Research Extension Center and basically what I'm trying to say is all the solutions are right here in the NDSU repository library. They really are. If you dig in and you find them like you offered with whether it's Kirby's stuff or Cetavec stuff or current stuff, it's all right here. We just need to get in there and look at it and I've done a lot of that over my 30 year career. And so I think where credit is due where you're gonna see me go here is the twice over rotational grazing strategy. And it's work that's been done by Dr. Llewell and Manski at a Dickinson Research Extension Center and his work is at the repository as well as other places. And that's where I really think, at least where it's led me is where I wanna give credit to. So with that, what's the problem? Right? If you've been in the field long enough, you've seen this dark green cancer that's trying to spread across our native range land. It's a monoculture native smooth brome that does that. And somewhere I've had 31 years of career with NRCS about my 15th year, I'm just sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old solution that's not working. And so what we're trying to do is repopulate the native soil organisms through grazing strategies. And what I wanna offer here to the left is climate field view, which is a satellite information that's used mostly on agronomy, but I had the fortune as I worked with a lot of different ranchers as I asked them this, I said, there's some way, because there's just not enough range cons in the world to really go and really evaluate the range land. I said, there's gotta be a satellite way for us to look at indicators, from a computer screen or whatever. So then we can go out there and see what's happening. So I met Hancox, I think it was in 2018. They listened to me at a little conference and they asked me to their place. And so prior to 2018, they basically had a two pasture deal where they're rotating cows. It wasn't very intentional at all. And just focus on this right here. So May 4th, what should be happening in May 4th, right? A lot of cool season invasives. Dark green patch here, smooth, brown grass invasion. I started working them in 2018. We implemented the grazing strategy to really stimulate soil biology in native range land. That was in 2019 is when we started. By 2022, you can start seeing a change. Now I didn't really notice that until I started looking at their climate field view information. Now this is designed for crop land, but he says, you know, I can put these polygons wherever, we'll just put it over this section of range land and let you play with it. And so I went out there and wanted to ground truth it. And the smooth, brown grass was thinning out in four years and we were getting native species back. Primarily, right around this area is where we've been focusing last and just paying attention the last few years is this big blue stem, the warm season component. Now with my experience, what I learned there is what I had been seeing over all these years is with the right strategy that's focused on soil organisms and the proper bite, we're getting more native species back where we don't even have, you know, primarily it's on land that hasn't been taken over by brome or whatever. We're seeing more of a 50% warm season component. So that takes me to this slide, which makes me think of Rachel's talk. Now we have really thought about the seasonal microbial activity and what their needs are. You know, based on calendar date, starting in January, February, March, April, May, June-ish and into September, October. It's very interesting, depending on when you choose to have your cow that the nutrient needs for the cow match up with the growth curve of our cool and warm season native grasses as well as what our microbial activity is. So I just offer that as a challenge to go back and kind of try to line up those growth curves and those needs of the animal or the cows as well as the microbial community underneath the deal. We've learned really good to build habitat on the surface of the soil, but have you really thought about the habitat for our soil organisms below the surface? Okay, rest of my story here. So by year 2013, I had been in South Central, South Dakota for 10 years. Yeah, and I already told you this, I just tired of watching brome take over. So, you know, what's Albert Einstein definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing the same results or whatever. So by this time, I understood what Manskey was teaching through NDSU, I dug hundreds of soil holes and I still do. That's the best tool you can have as a sharp shooter. I studied individual grass auto ecology. I drew parallels of work done by Christine Jones, Michael Phillips and John Sticker. And I'm like, these guys are all saying the same thing. And they're all born at different times, but they're saying the same thing. It all matches the research that's already been done in North Dakota. So in 2018, I met Van, a farmer rancher from Clome, South Dakota. He's asked a question at a grazing tour about how to get rid of smooth brome grass on native range land. The key speaker didn't have a good answer. And so I introduced myself and said, I had some novel ideas. He was interested in giving anything a try. So let me show you what we found out. What are we doing different? This is my co-authors, by the way. Here's Van, here's his nephew Heath. And they opened up their world to me on something I'd always thought about. I just needed some place to try it. Because fortunately, a lot of my career has taken me in places where we didn't have environments that were just totally consumed with smooth brome, but he had this. So this is South Central, South Dakota, still west of the Missouri River, or probably 60, 80 miles north of Nebraska. What we're doing here is we're ignoring smooth brome grass. Smooth brome grass, and there's a couple of different types, but it's really non-micro-isle. So if we didn't learn anything this morning, what we should have learned, is from, if I get his name right, Lanelle's talk is the fungi, and he had in there specifically the mutualist. When we talk about soil organisms, there's mutualists and there's decomposers. The mutualists are the ones that are really doing the heavy lifting. So what did Van do so different? He went to school and he got a coach. That's probably the thing that's lacking the most in the ranching industry is good coaches and consultants that know what they're doing and getting out there really to help. He was so excited by what he was seeing just in a couple of years. I started working with Van in 2018. We started working with his first raising rotation in 2019. He was so excited about what he was seeing already. Then he wanted to have a pasture walk at his place. And that was in 2020, then we followed up just last year on more on thinning out a smooth brome grass. So let me bring that here to you. How do you make it work? Basically we ignored smooth brome grass, but when I say that, the cows don't ignore it. They're still gonna eat it, but we're ignoring that from just a mindset. If we didn't have brome grass there, how would we manage the native range land? One thing that's probably different that you'll see just because the amount of biomass from smooth brome grass is we're stocking. Whoops, we're stocking fairly heavy, heavier than what I typically prescribe. So I'll try to come back to that. We're using five pastures. And basically what we're doing here is if you think of it simply as we're stimulating, growing and harvesting our native cool and warm season species, that's our goal. So we're using the twice over rotational grazing system and we're using the first rotation to stimulate those natives. And then our effort, and we saw that this morning we're trying to grow primary and secondary tillers. So that's how you rebuild a population of native plants. And we allow proper recovery through that growth period. And then we come back and we do our second rotation, harvesting, our goal is proper management. And finally, we understand that there's fall tillers out there and we don't wanna overgraze those. So stimulate, grow, harvest. Something else I've seen a lot in my career. These are van soils. It's basically loamy and thin upland, but you look at these state and transition models and basically what we're thinking is that once we have over 30% bluegrass or brome invasion, it's extremely difficult to get back into this more stable state that still has invaders. But what we're finding is we're getting back there fast. Now, I caution van, I say, okay, we've only been at this for since 2019 and we're gonna get down the road here maybe five or six years and maybe we're just gonna really piss brome off and it's gonna come back into vengeance. But right now, where he started, where are my slides? When we started, we were at least at 80% smooth brome grass. I mean, it was really hard. I think I'm a pretty decent range kind. It was really hard to find any native species out there. It really was. And we could have probably crawled around for days but I don't have time for that to find something. But it was mostly just smooth brome grass, okay? So, we did what we should do. We did a similarity index. We looked at range line health assessments. We implemented a plan. That's really important. I think the work or what Dr. Hendrickson offered us the first day was talking about these things. You need to have a plan. So we did that and we came back and we did the monitoring. And what we've found starting in 2021 anyway, is that we're back up to about 42% natives. I mean, you can actually find them and you have fun looking at them and they're flowering and all the stuff is happening that we've been hearing about. So levels of disturbance, okay? I'm not a big disturbance guy. I believe in the health principles when I'm not big on disturbance. But this was something also a teacher for us is observation. So we started this twice over rotational grazing system in 2019 and Van was really pumped about this, right? So he calls me July 5th and he says, Leland, he said, now what do we do? We just had a major hail event. It wiped out my soybeans, wiped out my corn. This project we're doing at Range Land. Everything's destroyed. He says, now what are we gonna do? Well, what do you do when you have too much defoliation or too much disturbance on a plant? What do you do? You need to follow with recovery, right? So his fifth pasture was a mile and a half away from these other four pastures. And I said, have we been there yet? And he said, no, he's still on the plan. Well, I knew that best part of teaching. And I said, that's where these cows need to go. We need to have recovery on this land if we're gonna try to get our native species back. And I didn't have this revelation until after this happened, all right? So I went back there about whatever it was, 10 days later after this hail event. And I could see these light green patterns. I was like, this is incredible. I mean, it could be in sunlight or whatever. And I was like, this is really cool. What is this? What we got going on here? Obviously, if you've been out in the cancer world, you'd know what this dark stuff is, this broom. Well, green needle grass was like, all right? So like I said, we could have crawled around for days and we wanted to found those apical buds and things that were offered earlier this morning. But the hail event stimulated those tillers. So in 2020 and 2020, you can still see these patterns, right? And it's just getting to be more and more native. But the, oh, where am I at? I'm gonna run out of time. All right, so anyways, you can ask questions if you're wondering about more about that. All right, so this is where the magic happens without hail, okay? But those, it's basically right here. And this is work that's been done in North Dakota. Actually, that's why I bought this book up here. It's sitting out on the table over there and I was like, this is really cool. I wanna check out this rancher's guide to grass management. Page 54 talks about grazing readiness. It's right here. It's not my stuff. I mean, all this work's been done right here at this university and we just need to implement it at the right time and it's talked about timing and stages of plant physiology. Three and a half leaf stage to flowering for native grasses is what we're trying to do if we wanna increase them. It releases the growth regulator cytokinin which brings about cell division, roots and shoots, this whole apple bud thing that we're talking about this morning. And you can see it in real life. All you have to do is dig the hole and you start looking. Here's Western wheat grass. Here we have a little bud tiller. These screens are awesome because you guys can see actually what's going on here. And then here's buffalo grass. The other really cool thing is not too long ago just few ago, we didn't dare use the word rhizosphere or rhizosheath because we say that it's too complex but it's all soil organism habitat. Buffalo grass and Western wheat grass, look at the rhizosphere or the rhizosheath that's on those roots. That's the habitat that's the home that these bugs need. And it's using the biological or the biological effect of grazing process is what we're referring to this makes the grassland function at a biological potential for livestock weight performance for their genetic potential. What was Rachel just telling us about? The genetic potential of those cows and this is the way we're gonna get those nutrients back in the gut of those ruminants. All it really is, it's as basic, it's as simple as photosynthesis management. If you go home, you say, that guy's like way over the top. Just think about what do I do to keep my native grasses greener, longer? It's the soil health principle that I will live on and that's the active living root. Well, Leland, these are perennial species, perennial ecosystems, they're living roots all the time. No, they're active. That's our goal, active living roots. All right, it creates more buds and tillers, more leaves and deeper roots, more solar capture to feed soil microbes to root exudates and water infiltration. It reestablishes this rhizosphere that's really lost. If you dig as many holes as I have, you know what unhealthy range line it looks like by soil aggregates and the lack of rhizosheaths on these roots. So April, this is on bands place. Remember, we started the grazing rotation in 2019. We had a hail event recovered from that. The precipitation, annual precipitation conditions that decline everywhere we've been into this so we can't control the rain. But here's a, we stimulated big blue stem. Remember just three or four years prior to that we couldn't even find it. After 40 days of recovery, we have almost 2,000 pounds of green biomass of the blue stem. It's like, where'd that come from? Axillary buds stimulated tillers. Within four years, smooth bone grass has lost vigor. Anyone knows it's been in the bone grass world would know that even in August, where you still have porcupine grass that's a seed head there and some stuff. But anyways, you should be walking through knee high or waist high of smooth bone grass. And that's what we had. We're thinning it out. Not only are we thinning it out, but within four years, our native species diversity has restored native soil function and structure. So I could sit here and I could point out the natives. You obviously know what that one is. But native diversity in 2018, 80% smooth bone grass. 2019, the first natives that we're seeing come back is our cool season bunch grasses. Green needle grass and porcupine grass. By 2020, it was mostly the warm seasons that we're seeing come back. The big blue stem and Psydotes grama, or Psydotes, yeah, grama. And so some of you might be thinking, which I was thinking, I was like, well, where's the state grasses South Dakota? Where's Western? You know, is it supposed to be the increase or is it supposed to be the one that we should be showing? It was the last one to come back in this smooth bone grass environment. It was in this draw that it had a history of being overgrazed, you know. And Heath, Van's nephew texted me a picture. He says, hey, check this out. We've got some Western wheat grass and very small remnants is just kind of these draws in 2021. In 2022, all these other species plus Western was starting to, you could find it about any corner of the pasture on the hills, on the slopes, in the draws, whatever. So by 2022, we're up to 42% natives. We're thinning out the smooth bone grass. So it's matching, you know, the proper timing of our defoliation, especially that stimulatory period between the three and a half leaf stage and flowering and the growth stage of the native grass. So something I learned and I hope you guys ask really hard questions because that's the way it stretches me and learn. But the timing, so you're thinking, well, okay, so what about the brome? Cows are obviously eating the brome. But based on the information I saw this morning that the cows are biting the brome when it's in that reproductive stage. Pete asked a good follow-up question. If it's in that boot stage or whatever, what's really gonna happen, let's say two or three years from now based on bud creation under the smooth bone grass. Is that where I said, maybe we're gonna piss it off, it's gonna go gangbusters. So I'm gonna be receptive to that and be watching when these cows graze this year as far as the boot stage or reproductive stage on brome. But that's what's really cool about grazing rotations, right? We have five pastures where you pick the number and that's why we change season of use, right? So if we're looking at this as a long haul and we're just trying to find the answers this first year and we're rebuilding soil health within four years, we're getting enough of our native plant species back and they're getting bitten at different times based on change of season of use, right? Sounds kind of like a scheduled thing but what's really adaptive? If we wanna use kind of the coined words nowadays, what's adaptive or whatever, you know what's adaptive? You know what changes of prescribed grazing schedule is the weather. You get frost, you get grasshoppers, you get hail, you get drought, you got whatever. That's what's adaptive. We gotta do what we can with the wisdom that we have that God's created us and kind of stick to the plan and Mother Nature or whatever you wanna call it's gonna throw out that adaptiveness. So we're also doing some soil sampling. You know, what do you soil sample nowadays because you don't have any money. These ranchers are paying for this. We did have a little bit of soil health money out of South Central RCD that helped this kind of get started but we're measuring at zero to six in the blue. Six to 12 is the orange and 12 to 24. I believe in going deep because we've got plenty of science that shows that in an active root system under bromine, bluegrass, we got all kinds of biological activity. That's fine and dandy, but if we're lacking root depth and density, we've gotta look deeper. And all we're looking for is because it's cheap, is soil organic carbon or basically organic matter, ammonium nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen. So yesterday we were talking a lot about nitrogen, nutrient cycles, nitrogen, nitrogen, nitrogen, but the mutualist organisms are gonna release nitrogen different than the decomposer soil organisms. And so if we're ammonium nitrate heavy and that's where the decomposers win, then we don't have enough protozoa to pee out their nutrients to supply plant-available nitrogen to the plants. It's the fungi that do the work on the nitrate nitrogen. We combine the ammonium and the nitrate nitrogen for a total mineral nitrogen is what we're looking at. This is our results in 2022. Van's really passionate about this. So he was testing since 2019, but what I wanna show you here basically is what you see here. What I'd challenge you is if you'd start doing this on most of the range land in South Dakota or the Northern Plains, it's gonna look a lot like this. We're gonna be heavy with soil or mineral nitrogen in the zero to six and weak on the other two. What we're finding this trend to go is things are becoming more equal. You see that we're having more equal proportions of mineral nitrogen throughout the entire depth. That's telling me that we're getting deeper denser roots. Now we're looking too. We had a couple of soil pits out there and we're looking and we're seeing soil aggregation and root depth and rise of sheath and all that fun stuff. But our goal based on North Dakota research is our goal is to use that nitrogen on our native plants to achieve a hundred pounds of production. Once we're at a hundred pounds of mineral nitrogen released for a native species, that's when we're gonna keep the invasives out. Well, we haven't seen a rise of sheath. There's a cool one. That reminds me, do I have any time left? Oh, wrong. Fine. Okay, fine. Okay, I wanna leave most of it for questions. But so what do you look for? If you've never looked in the soil for the rise of sheath, a good question that you would have asked me to say, so which species would you look for for indicators? I don't know. I'm just a rancher. I'm gonna go dig a hole. I know enough about species that I learned it in 4-H or my kid knows it. What are the species that we wanna look for? Any guesses? No, you're looking for the grass species. Which native grass species would you look for to get there, to look for the rise of sheath to see if you're going in the right direction? Western wheat grass, porcupine grass. You're like, oh my gosh, Leland Bell, you're gonna have porcupine grass out there. You use this strategy, you will. Within two years, you'll have porcupine grass. How about your warm seasons? Any guesses? Someone said big bluestem? It'll come, but the first one, cytoschroma, and if you're on sandy environments, prairie sand reed. Prairie sand reed, it's like Western, it's non-faculate, hateable, whatever, and so it's just gonna have it. But those are the ones to look for if you're trying to say, well, what's this thing even looking like? What's that guy even talking about? Does he know what he's talking about? That's what you wanna be looking for. That's porcupine grass right there. All right, so timing of grazing. This is what, I probably don't make a lot of friends this way, but what I hear continuously is, and that's why I say ignore smooth brome grass. We're trying to pound the hell out of this stuff. And what we're doing, especially on native range land, is we're hurting our native constantly. If we're out there in late April or early May when these native plants are trying to grow, we're nipping them off too. Either that or else we're not describing what we really mean by grazing brome grass or bluegrass off in May. You know, maybe we mean to graze it higher, but people are getting the wrong impression. So here's an example. I mean, this is only four years. I mean, this range land is not even healthy yet. Scurvy, four inches, mid-May. Porcupine grass, eight inches tall, mid-May. Coneflower, five inches tall, mid-May. Our non-native plants are becoming less competitive. We're getting this native diversity back in that's been driven by, we're repopulating soil organisms is what we're doing. You know, what about the rest of the season? Heck, it's dormant or it's whatever. So long as we don't have snow cover, we're just gonna graze it. No, fall tillers are a very special and important component of this. And I hear the information coming out of this college. And it's important. It's bringing attention to fall tillers. So we went out there, ah, heck, why don't we go out in the field? That's fun to do anyways. We clipped 450 pounds of dry matter in January. Fall tillers and look how green they are. That was 2021 probably. The spring of 2022, we're out there May 24th. We're actually before there, but look at this, American vetch flowering at five to six inches tall. If we're out there trying to pound out that brone would be eating that off. We'd be throwing it backwards. November of 21, porcupine grass right here where my finger's at is where it was grazed. Probably three inches tall. The rest of the stuff sticking up here is plant recovery. We had built into the plan to have the recovery time and you can see it there. That's photosynthesis. That's going to continue to create photosynthesis and feed the soil organisms through the winter. They don't just die or go dormant. We have winter soil organisms too. They can withstand temperatures down to 30 degrees below the soil surface. So those lead and fall tillers are super important. We can't just think that it's free grazing or something. So Provenza, Teague and Baskin probably say it better than I can. In Provenza, Spread Provenza's book, Nourishment. And that's basically this. You can keep this mindset as you travel around and think about managing rangelands properly managed, foraging by livestock can enhance biodiversity of rangelands as the plant they consume nutrient life below ground and above ground while sequestering atmospheric carbon. You know, that message right there should satisfy everybody in the world, right? Whether they're grazing or not. And using the right timing, the right mechanism to biological effective grazing in the twice over rotational grazing system is the way we're going to restore these native rangeline systems. I'm confident of it. How many of you in the room are real life ranchers? You got livestock at home, means it. Okay, all right. So what this research has shown and I've tried to validate it in numbers because I'm a rancher too. From a rancher's perspective, especially these fall tillers are important, one animal unit might equal 780 pounds. You know, for 30 days is kind of what we're looking at. But anyways, we're increasing forage production by 42%. We're increasing water holding capacity by 44%. Our nutrient density for our forage, therefore our livestock performance is increased by 14%. And our rhizosphere weight, right here out of North Dakota is 176% compared to where we're at right now is about 30 or 40% on most of our dysfunctional rangelands. So that's me. That's my story. That's my experience. So some of the questions might be like this, but I'm going to, and feel free to offer your questions. But I'm going to say this is whatever mechanism you choose to use on your native rangeland or as you do as a, as somebody's coach or consultant, whether it's fire or hail or, or a Degelman disc or something, after you think you've solved the problem and you have healthy rangeland, then how are you going to manage it? So I'm not, I'm not saying that fire and those things aren't the right tools in the right environment, depending on what your situation is. But once you think as a human that you've achieved that goal, then how are you going to manage it? It's got to be managed biologically. And we have the data, over 30 years of data right here out of, out of India, you out of North Dakota that supports what I just showed you and it's working. So what Van wanted me to leave you, my co-author is, is so excited about this, is he wants you to know that you're all invited to come look. And he got frustrated a few years ago and he says, why don't, we'll see this, why don't they come look at it? He was getting so frustrated. I said, we'll just have to show them. That's all we can do. So if you can't travel down to South Central, South Dakota and he'd love to have you, follow me on Twitter. A lot of times I have a lot of, you know, stuff that I'm discovering out in the field or I want to show it off. You know, check that out and, and come look.