 My name is Kent Vleager and I'm the state soil health specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service here in South Dakota. And I'm here today to do the rainfall simulator. And you're going to see this thing go back and forth and spray some water on here just like a simulated rain event. And then we're going to observe what happens. Okay, so we've got the first tray you'll notice we label it as continuous grazing. Where if you have livestock, you turn your cattle out in the past year, let's say April on a typical year, and you leave the herd out there all summer all the way until October, for example. There's no rest. The cattle are always out there. They're always able to access the green plants whenever they want, and they're always taken from the plants. The next thing we have is called rotational grazing. Rotational grazing is a little more involved on the rancher or the farmer's part. And so what that means is they have to monitor the grass. And when the grass gets to a certain height or an established level, they take the cattle off of there and move them to a different pasture. And when they take them off, it allows that grass to rest. Okay, and then they don't come back to that pasture until the grass is fully recovered. These two soils here have been in a no-till system for over 20 years. And he has a three-crop rotation, actually four-crop, corn, soybean, spring wheat, and then winter wheat. And he follows that winter wheat with the cover crop. So what you see here is the cover crop example, and this is the after-wheat harvest. The last tray we have is a conventional tiller system. And so what this producer does is he farms corn, soybeans, rotates between those two crops, and he does tillage in the fall and tillage in the spring. So what we're going to see today is when I turn this on, you're going to see what happens with these front set of jars and back set of jars. The front set is going to show you everything that runs off. So if water hits here, it rolls down the tray, catches through and funnels into this. That means that it has not gone into the soil. It's gone off on the surface. The back set of jars is going to catch everything that infiltrates. That means the water goes into the soil, goes through the pan. These are what these pans look like when they're empty. You can see they're all perforated on the bottom. So when the water hits here, through here, it can go through the holes. And then we have a catchment tray in the back that funnels it into one hole and drops it into those jars. Okay, so the first thing I would like for you to observe, when a raindrop hits the soil surface without any cover, it actually breaks apart the soil aggregates. And so aggregates are little pieces of soil that are bound together by the plant roots and by the glues and things that the low ground life exudes. So when it hits that, it breaks them apart. And it breaks the sand, soap and clay particles into small little individual particles that you can't actually see with the naked eye, especially when it comes to clay and silk. And when they do that, it clogs up the soil surface. So it can't get through where the roots are infiltrating, where the worms are infiltrating. Okay, so you'll notice, you'll notice we've got this one right over here it's starting to run off. And this one's running off, right? But it's not running off on the middle three. The ones where there's a little better management, the soil cover is better. So we've got the continuous grazing. So while that one is infiltrating, it's because there's constant livestock actions. We've got some compaction on the surface. We've got the soil a little bit exposed. Those last two trays were bone dry. I reloaded those trays. The soil was all dry. It goes to your logic that you think that it's really dry. It should be taking in the water really fast, right? But it's not. We've got one that's running off quite a bit of soil. And jar's not even catching all of it. You guessed which ones we're going to infiltrate the most. The rotational graze one did. The cover crop took in. And the no-till one took in. So keep in mind, like I told you, these three already had a bunch of rain on them just half an hour ago. So this year when it's really wet, everyone says, well, the soil surface is saturated. We can't take any more water. At some point, the soil profile does fill up. But in most years, we should be able to infiltrate just about any rainfall that comes. And you can see these trays are about two inches deep. So I'm going to need a couple of volunteers. So what these two girls are going to do is show that the influence of management and land use can do on your soils. How you can actually benefit yourself by having more diverse application, by practicing no-till, by doing better grazing management. Because in most years, we're wanting rain. That's the first thing you notice. Okay, so this one kind of looks like wet chocolate cake or like black cottage cheese. Right? Right? Like a mud pie or a cow pie. There we go. And what's this one? So this is dry. So this is one way that we can encourage better management. Now in years like this where you have plenty for rainfall, maybe you're not going to see as much difference. One other plus that you'll have in this is this better soil structure. You can actually get in the field earlier in the spring because it can support your equipment waste better.