 But I do appreciate everybody calling in. Looks like we have a pretty good group today. We have quite a bit going on within NRCS right now. I just got back from the National Association of Conservation District's meeting as well as our National Leadership Team meeting in New Orleans, where it is a whole lot warmer than it is here. But a lot of very, very good discussion. And a lot of our discussion was centered around the Inflation Reduction Act and how are we going to work on getting this investment on the ground across the country? This first year, the additional funding we're looking at for NRCS is, it's not huge. We're talking an extra $2.5 million for Equip and another $2.2 million for CSP. But that's just for this year. As we move into the next couple of years, this is going to grow and we're going to need help from partners across the state to help prioritize where NRCS should be placing investments. And that's a big part of what this meeting is about. The State Technical Advisory Committee as well as local working groups are really put into place to help us prioritize and work with partners to see where partners are prioritizing funding so that we can work on trying to make the best investments possible across the state. As we continue to develop our State Technical Advisory Committee and our local working groups, one of the ideas that we've been throwing around the NRCS side to solicit more feedback from partners is to develop some subcommittees to the State Technical Advisory Committee. So our next stack meeting, not this one, but the next one, we're going to be working on setting up some subcommittee rooms. So the first hour of our next stack meeting will be more of a workshop space. This will give everybody the opportunity to go and join into a room that has a particular topic. It could be programs, it could be easements, it could be technology, and it will give everybody an opportunity or a forum at least to go in and give ideas to NRCS in a more interactive way. And then during our formal stack meeting, we'll work on some committee reports. Again, the purpose of this meeting is to work on getting some feedback from the overall group to me to help me and NRCS determine where these investments should be made across the state. So I'm really looking forward to building on that so that I can hear more of what all of you are thinking as far as what are South Dakota's primary and priority resource concerns across the state. I ultimately need this feedback from you all. And this needs to be more of a two-way conversation rather than just what NRCS is doing on a regular basis. So we're going to be working on developing this and this is just kind of an introduction to this idea and there will be more information to come as we get closer to our next meeting. So I'm really looking forward to getting this feedback from you as we move forward. I'd like to take an opportunity here to, let's see, do we have, I'm just scrolling through the attendee list. Do we have any representatives online from any of our Congressional today? Not seeing anybody get online here. All right. So we're going to go ahead and move on down the agenda. Owen, it looks like you're next on the list for Farm Service Agency updates. That sounds great. Tony, good morning everyone. I come to you from a bluster, a drilled County, South Dakota. And it started snowing here pretty heavy. So I'm thinking we're well on our way to that foot of snow that they're forecasting a few things to just announce or to highlight today as part of my discussion on the 16th of February. So last week, Thursday, the general CRP signup was announced by the secretary. The signup dates have been announced for February 27th through April 7th. That general signup then would also be in conjunction with the available signups we currently have, which would be our continuous CRP signups. We also have some CREP agreements that are eligible or available for opportunities in the respective areas. And to highlight those CREPs, there's the James River watershed CREP, which has been ongoing for a number of years. Updated last meeting with the Big Sioux River watershed CREP, so that's new to the eastern side of the state in the Big Sioux River watershed. And then we also have some Tribal grasslands CREP, and these are targeted to reservation areas on tribally owned or member owned land within the reservation. The two that are on the ground right now are the Ogallala Lakota and Rosebud tribes. Both of those have active Tribal CREP signups currently ongoing, and we're working towards an agreement with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. What this is going to look like is the grassland CRP, so that working land CRP. But what's different about it is that under the CREP agreement, it's guaranteed enrollment if it meets the eligibility, so if it's tribally owned or member owned, it's eligible for signup. They would agree to that conservation plan and there would be no rank and review. Under the regular grassland CRP, they have to rank and review and then be scored nationally to get accepted, but under the tribal CREP it would be a guaranteed enrollment. Ogallala Lakota is targeting one million acres towards this signup, and Rosebud is initially targeting 600,000 acres, and they have a second phase that is being evaluated right now for some reservation ground outside of the county boundaries that currently consist of the Rosebud tribe. Some exciting things going on in the CRP world as far as those availabilities that are out there. We're hoping for an adequate spring with no flooding and no drought so that we can keep our ECP to a minimum in the coming year. So I guess with that I would field any questions or comments, and if not, I'd turn it back to you, Tony. Oh, right. Does anybody have any questions for Owen? Thank you much. And Lori, I see you popped up on camera. Did you have any questions? Oh, shit. Sorry, no. Teams just kicked me off and let me back in, so technical errors on my phone. No problem. Welcome back. All right, so next on the agenda for this morning, we have Clint Kent Liger with the Soil Health Update. Okay, good morning, everyone. Today I'm going to go over here for five, ten minutes our Cropland Soil Health Assessment for South Dakota. And this will be kind of a review for a lot of our NRCS employees. But this is mostly for the partners that may happen to be on. And this is something that our NRCS field offices have been using for about the past two years. And we've provided a lot of training between myself and Tant's Herman and our field support offices on how to use this assessment. So I want to cover this assessment really quickly with you all this morning. Just as a reminder, if any partner agencies or groups are interested in using this Soil Health Assessment on Cropland, we do provide training as long as we can kind of get that scheduled out during the field season. So I'm going to share my screen with you all here real quick. Okay, so this is our technical related to the Soil Health Assessment. And I'm going to quickly scroll through the first 15 or so pages here. And then just so you can kind of see there's a lot of information on how to do this assessment. And this is what we cover over the course of a three day training that we provide. And then that's more of a formal training. And then we have in person trainings that we have provided through resource units here over the past couple of years. And then as new employees or partners come on, then we do this training also throughout usually the summer months. So you can see a lot of information here and this should be included in your handout. So you can look at this after I speak here or if you have questions certainly contact me afterwards. But a lot of information provided and it goes into a pretty good detail on how to do this assessment with each of the indicators. And so if you are looking at your handout, if you have that printed out, it would be page 15 of your of the assessment and page 20 total of the handout, I believe. So this is the worksheet in what our planners are taking to the field and the point of this assessment is two fold. The first is that it helps them to identify four key resource concerns that are related to soil health and those resource concerns are on the following page, page 16 and they look like this. We have compaction, soil organism habitat loss, soil organic matter depletion and aggregate instability. And so those resource concerns, two of them are relatively new and that's the soil organism habitat loss and the aggregate instability. And we didn't have a great way to assess those in the field for our planners and the previous to the compaction and soil organic matter depletion that we tried into resource concerns that have been around for a long time and that our planners have used working with their clients for many years. So when our planners go to the field, ideally they're meeting with a client there and they can go through this assessment with them, but it's not required. They're going to go through many excuse me they're going to go through many of these indicators hopefully with a client prior to just so they have an idea of management. And then when they go to the field they're going to run through every one of the indicators to determine help them determine whether there's a resource concern related to that. So you can see I'm just going to start the top here. There's an indicator timing and use. There's a whole row associated with that and really what that is that tells the planner the ideal time to to review that indicator in the field. Now all of us being from South Dakota and we're experiencing weather today we all know that we're probably never going to be able to find that ideal time to do each one of these indicators in one site visit. So when we are training our employees we basically tell them during the growing season is the best time to run this assessment and really if you want to you can do this assessment just about any time the ground isn't frozen but ideally it's during the growing season and so that's what this indicator timing and use tells you take it with a grain of salt. Okay so I'm going to go through these indicators now these indicators themselves are sent nationally through our national soil health division and then indicators are in the brown lettering and so the first one for example is soil cover so soil cover is something we have to evaluate through this form but how we evaluate it in South Dakota is what we have influence on and so the indicators have to say the same but how they are assessed is different from state to state and I really believe that the South Dakota is one of the better ones and I know I may be a little bit biased with that but I do think we do have a really good assessment for our crop land in soil health. So soil covers the first indicator and how we assess that in South Dakota on crop land is exactly how it states there with the bullet point there and it's surface cover from plants residue or mulch covers greater than 75% of the soil surface and so when we're with planners out in the field they need to know to determine soil cover and the percentage and then as long as that percentage is 75% or greater on the field we would say that that indicator meets the assessment criteria if it's below 75% then they would check no it does not meet the assessment criteria. A residue breakdown this is one where it takes a little bit of experience and some local knowledge on growing conditions and what's happened for precipitation and temperature in the preceding months. So this is a natural decomposition of crop residues or organic mulch is as expected with crop and conditions and so this is where they're going to look at that residue and determining if it's breaking down at an rate. So like last year with it being really dry throughout much of the state breakdown of their residue is going to be a little bit slower because there's not the moisture to help those microbes in breaking it down. So you need to contrast that with perhaps 2019 when we had abundant rainfall and the decomposition would be at a different rate then. So that's one that takes some planner experience and local knowledge of growing conditions. The next one is surface crusts and this is crusting on no more than 5% of the field. And so this is really any form of crusting that the planner can identify. Some of you if you're like myself and it's been a few years since you've maybe been in university or college setting crusting kind of had different definitions especially for agronomists for a while and really they didn't consider crusting to be an issue unless it was impeding the germination of the seed or that crop that was planted. But we're looking at any form of crusting whether it's really thin almost as thin as a sheet of paper or a little thicker up to a quarter inch. We don't care what that level is if it's identified as crusting we are saying that's crusting because what we are evaluating is the ability of infiltration of a rainfall of precipitation and the exchange of atmosphere or oxygen and air. The next one is ponding and infiltration and this is one that we have a really good leg up perhaps on maybe some other states and how we evaluate this and so we have two options a planner does on how to evaluate this one in South Dakota. The first one is just kind of talking with a producer and their knowledge of that field and it's no ponding on non-hydric soils within 24 hours following a typical rainfall event which in South Dakota we classify as one to two inch thunderstorm rolling through in the summer. So if there's no ponding on non-hydric soils a planner can say that that meets the assessment criteria and we don't have an infiltration issue and take note that we have on non-hydric soils so on our prairie pothole regions throughout the state some of our hydric soils after a heavy thunderstorm in the summer they should have some ponding just because of the inherent nature of those soils it's going to impede the water movement through there so we should have ponding on some of our soils. The next one and this is the one that we really prefer our planners use is or an infiltration test says that it falls within none to slight category for ecological site description of that predominant soil and so we have a whole list of ecological sites and so depending on the soil they can find that ecological site and then that ecological site then has a range of minutes of infiltration for the second inch when they run that infiltration test on the field and so for South Dakota we have a whole range of minutes so it's not arbitrary a planner can just say well that went in ten minutes and so I think that's good we actually have a range so for example on a loamy site in South Dakota as long as that second inch infiltrates in less than 18 minutes then you can say that meets the assessment criteria anything above 18 minutes then we're going to say that you do not meet that assessment criteria so we actually have a minutes range that we can fall back on so that planner doesn't have to just kind of base it off of an arbitrary judgment the next one is penetration resistance and this is one that we do differently than other states also a lot of other states in fact most are using a penetrometer and that's probably fine if you're in a little higher moisture regime a more reliable rainfall area but in South Dakota if you use that penetrometer on a field in a average precipitation year compared to a drought year like last year you're going to come up with different numbers and so we do not use the penetrometer in South Dakota for this evaluation we basically use this visual observation the planners are going to get their spade out and dig a hole and they're going to look for a plow layer or compacted plady structure or J shaped roots and that's obviously one where you would ideally have a growing crop or plant out there to evaluate the roots the next one is water stable aggregates this is one that's really being used and certainly used by a lot of soil testing labs as well they have different ways of assessing their aggregate stability but we can do this in the field we can use a strainer method and so they're just using a small strainer like you would have in the kitchen and they're going to take a crumble a clot onto that and they're going to soak it into water till it's saturated and then basically they just plop it upside down on a white board or anything that's a stable structure out in the field and they see if it falls apart or if it kind of slumps down into kind of a puddle of mush or if it holds its form and they can determine that through that method the next one is that we it's something that we took really from rangeland specialists have been using the hornata slate box stability class test for really many many years and this is something that we use in this assessment also this is my preferred method in the field it's really not difficult to run gives you the instructions on our hornata slate box test kits right in the lid and so any planner can really run through it as long as it falls down to the highest two stability classes we're saying that you would meet this indicator and the similar test is something that many of us have seen the slate test is what we call it for a lot of our demonstrations so he's probably seeing people like me at different events that run the slate test and a planner can do this in the field also this would take some free planning obviously need to carry cylinders out with you to the field or take the cloth back to the office soil structure this is a visual assessment they're going to take that spade dig that hole and they're going to look in the a-horizon the top soil and just look if it has that nice granular structure that chocolate cake appearance or kind of that cottage cheese appearance and ideally there should be no platey structure unless otherwise indicated in the official site description soil color this is one that we're evaluating organic matter with keep in mind that this assessment is meant to be done in the field so we fully realize that you can determine organic matter or get an actual reading from taking a soil test and sending into a lab and you can get the percentage but the goal of this one is to assess it in the field and so what we have here is two options they can compare the soil in the crop field to perhaps a fence row or a vegetated a permanently vegetated area close by and just compare the color and if the colors are similar you would give them a yes for me in the criteria but if there is a difference if the soil in the crop is lighter than the fence row or the permanent vegetated area then you would say no it does not mean. The preferred method for this one is the the second bullet point and that is taking that soil series opening up the official site description through a web soil survey or soil web app on their phone and then they look at the actual color that is listed either the wet or the moist in that official site description and then they use their Munsell soil chart soil color chart to evaluate the color as long as it's the same color in the OSD the official site description or darker then you can say it meets if it's lighter then you can say it does not meet because we are assuming the lighter color is a loss of organic matter. The next ones we are looking at some of our soil life indicators and plant roots is one of them and so we are looking at the ability of those roots to form a film or risel sheets and so there is really good photos if you are looking at the instructions earlier on in this tech note they really show what a good risel sheets should look like and so corn plants and our small grains are really good props to use for this one you dig that plant out and you shake it a little bit up in the air and kind of get the big claws to fall off and see what is retained on those roots are they nice and covered by a film of soil or do they show really clean and kind of bright white so there is really no soil to cling to them what we are looking for there is that is an indicator of soil life Next one is biological diversity and this is one that I it's one that we kind of it's in there but it's really tough for us to really get a good assessment of biological diversity in the field because we can only see with our eyes what our eyes can see and so that's the larger living organisms in the soil and so that's our earthworms, our ants wood lice, things that are kind of creepy crawly we see throughout the soil surface under litter layers and then anything that we can dig and show in that scoop of soil that we take out so the thing we obviously can't evaluate is bacteria and fungi and virus that are in the soil so we don't have a way to do that so that's one where if producer or planner really wants to get a better assessment then they would need to send a soil sample into a lab and get that done The last one is biopores and this is basically the openings or the pores within the soil and so those pores are created by soil life whether that's by living roots or old root channels, earthworms anything that can dig through the soil and also those aggregate formations will form biopores as well so once a planner has done all this and checked all the yeses or noes then they move on to determine whether they have a resource concern one of these four resource concerns and so you can see here it's just kind of a flow chart and if you're looking at compaction you start with the middle bubble the white bubble there and it says surface soil plating and criteria so if a surface soil has any plateness right away you can say you have a compaction problem if you don't have plateness for example then you move over to the rest of the indicators there and if two or more do not meet then you can say you have a compaction resource concern and it flows on like that through the other resource concerns as well most of them have two or more do not meet and if two or more do not meet then you can say you have that resource concern so thanks everyone for your time this morning I would gladly take questions if there are any at this time or comments we are currently we are currently updating this form with some comments and feedback from our field support offices and field offices so there will be some minor adjustments made to this over time and probably by this spring we'll make minor adjustments that we will make our field offices aware of so with that thanks for your time and I will turn it back to you Tony alright thank you so much Kent so next on the agenda this morning we have Colette with partnerships good morning everyone thanks Kent for that explanation and I know everyone in Kent's presentation focused on on soils but I was glad that he brought up helping us to you know bringing it back to the resource concerns because resource concerns are what is the foundation of our conservation planning and the more understanding that we have whether it's a soil or a water or a plant or an animal or energy resource concern then that's how we take the first step toward getting a conservation plan a plan to address that concern and then we can focus our efforts toward that so thanks for that explanations Kent for our partnerships I'm in charge of the conservation collaboration cooperative agreements I don't have any announcements to make yet but hopefully soon we will be having a call for proposals a notice of funding for fiscal year 23 our our request is at headquarters and is being reviewed so I'm hoping that will be published very soon so folks that are interested in working with us are collaborating for mutual for adding value to your partnership projects or to initiate new projects would certainly be willing to look at those so if you haven't done an agreement with us before go to www.grants.gov and there's a whole lot of learning resources there as an organization or entity you'll want to get your account set up and make sure that you're up to date with all your accreditations and that sort of thing so anyway when it is announced on Grants.gov it'll be open for 60 days and then it'll close and our goal is to have those reviewed and selections made and we should know by I'm hoping July or August how successful folks are and then since this fiscal year 23 funds then we would need to have these agreements entered into and obligated by the end of September so just to kind of give you an idea of a timeline so work will not begin until those agreements are fully executed so anyway if you have any questions certainly follow up with me but cooperative agreements are a great opportunity to work on mutual projects we've got more than 50 that we work on with different groups around the state and there's some really cool things happening so that's cooperative agreements now the conservation Collaborate excuse me we do have another program oh I don't see it on the agenda here sorry we have another opportunity through the conservation innovation grants it's CIG and this is the process where if there's a practice that is not in our suite of practices for planning this is the methodology the process where we would work with producers and researchers to test it and to provide all the information that we need to do in order to make it suitable for our suite of practices through EQUIP, CSP, etc so anyway that's pretty exciting too we've had some really cool projects over the years whether it's been with wells and water treatment out west there's currently one underway with a fellow on the western side of the state for renovating K land and anyway some kind of exciting things going on and again that will be the same our request is with headquarters and it'll have a similar timeline where all proposals or all announcements will be on grants.gov and once it's posted there it'll be open for 60 days and then proposals will be reviewed and selected and hopefully we'll be able to start in September so anyway if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out to me or to any other leadership team or if you do if you're toying with some ideas for a CIG proposal just talk with us we'd be happy to visit with you okay I guess if anybody has any questions let me know otherwise I will be turning it back to Tony. Alright thank you Collette so much I just want to acknowledge some of the chat here so I don't know Kent if you saw some of Sandy's comment so you did okay I do see you acknowledge it there in the chat but Sandy made a recommendation if we could make some of Kent's presentation into competition I think this is an excellent idea and this is something that we've been talking about through different groups over these last couple of months is how can we get more students interested more youth interested in conservation across the state this is from the NRCS perspective we're definitely seeing a reduction in applications of folks interested in coming into conservation science not just conservation science but being able to qualify for our specific position requirements having some competitions out there could be a really good opportunity to expose more of our youth to conservation as a whole and this I love this line of thinking so Sandy thank you for making the recommendation there I'd love to figure out if we can actually make something happen here but I'd like to go ahead and move on down the agenda our next speaker this morning is going to be Jeff Andrew Wilt with a programs update alright good morning everybody hope everything's going well today so normally we'd give you a EQUIP and CSP and ASAP program update we are currently in the middle of ranking all of those applications that we have so rather than for you with a lot of that kind of information we thought today we would give you a little update on where we stand with IRA and I'm going to share my screen here second okay so this isn't in your handout because originally I wasn't going to cover it but Tony kind of mentioned this in his opening and I thought you know what I would share this in case some of you hadn't seen it yet but here is the breakdown in IRA funding over the next excuse me four years and as you can see in 2023 you know obviously we have the the small amount or kind of the minimal amount that Tony was talking about in his opening so for EQUIP CSP and RCPP you can see all three of those programs are getting $250 million this year and then ASAP is getting $100 million and then as you can see as you move into the out years especially with EQUIP you know 1.7 billion, 3 billion, then 3.5 billion dollars way out in 2026 so like Tony mentioned this is kind of our ramp up year we're going to do what we can to get ready to be prepared for this rather large influx of funding so I wanted to cover just a couple of things about each program just to share with you kind of where we're sitting currently in South Dakota so in EQUIP we're going to get we did get I should say $2.2 million here for FY23 not really a large amount of money at this point and like we said it's kind of a warm up so the thing about IRA funding versus our normal Farm Bill funding is we have to keep these pots of money separate so in order to do that we have to have a second sign up and so we're announcing a second EQUIP sign up with the batching date of March 17th and ASAP also have a sign up date of March 17th now when I say that these are new sign ups it doesn't mean that existing applications can't roll over into you know from our general normal Farm Bill applications they can roll it over into this IRA funding as well so you don't necessarily have to sign up again for CSP we have a batching date of March 31st to be announced here shortly we just met yesterday to discuss those dates and that was a date that we came up with for CSP we're getting an additional $2.9 million now EQUIP and CSP are the only programs where we are actually getting our own allocation here in South Dakota for ASAP they are doing what they're calling a national sign up and they have prioritized a couple of areas throughout the nation where kind of based on SOFR I should back up just a minute for WRE they prioritize these areas based off of soil types for ALE they are prioritizing based on intact native range land so for WRE South Dakota is kind of level 2 we have a lot of soils that will give us a few extra points we're not in the highest tier with a lot of our soils but we are in the second tier with a lot of our soils for ALE however we are a bit of a target area for ASAP ALE so as you can see by my slide ASAP is getting an extra $100 million now that like I said is a national sign up so we'll take our application and we'll rank them they'll be shipped off to national headquarters for folks up there to to evaluate all the different applications that get submitted and then they will allocate funds out from there so we won't know about ASAP funding for quite a while probably like May maybe late May early June RCPP you can see there's an extra $250 million now this is money on top of our existing allocations for any of these programs so for RCPP we're getting an extra $250 million nationwide and RCPP will continue to be a national scope type program so we will not get an allocation here in South Dakota but what we will get is an opportunity to submit project proposals for evaluation at national level and then selection as we have in the past as well so they haven't really come out and given us any kind of idea about when we will know about a call for project proposals with RCPP there's still a lot of talk going around about maybe doing something a little bit different a little change in the program to make it more of a grant type situation with this extra $250 million so more to come on that we don't have a lot of details on the RCPP side just yet so with that being said what does IRA look like this is in your handout um these are our climate smart egg and forestry mitigation activities these are the practices and enhancements that need to be included in a contract that gets funded with IRA funding so just to give you a little bit of an idea on how this sheet is set up they've got some kind of major categories here on the left side soil health we've got agro forestry forestry land if you go all the way to the last page of this you'll see range land grazing and pasture the second column is our practice code and then the third column is this name so these two go together 512 is our pasture and hayland planting practice these practices can be contracted through EQUIP or through CSP either one but they have to be included in the contract in order for us to use IRA funding the last column or the last two columns are our enhancement code and then our enhancement name for CSP is only eligible through CSP so like I said we're having 2.2 million for EQUIP 2.9 million for CSP these will be the practices that we are allowed to use I'm going to give you the best example that I can think of on how some of this is going to work so in a typical scenario we've got a lot of producers like to come in want to do pipeline tanks maybe some cross fences to get them to also do the management practice to go with it so in this case prescribed grazing for IRA funding what will have to happen is prescribed grazing has to be included in there as a primary practice and then we can do the pipelines and the tanks and the fences as a facilitating practice to go along with it so what you see here on this list is the list of primary practices but however I should say we can still contract facilitating practices through IRA as long as this primary practice is included in those practices support that primary practice so that's kind of the the catch I guess you would say to IRA funding and how that's going to work this is the list for 2023 we do anticipate the list changing for we've been told several times things could be added things could be subtracted all based off of how these practices are interpreted as far as the effects on storing carbon and mitigating any kind of climate change factors that we're aware of so if you see something missing on this list that you think should be included you know I would ask that you kind of let me know and we can talk about how that practice might actually store carbon or be some kind of a mitigating factor for climate change and we can submit that to National Headquarters to see if we can get that practice added for 24 or 5 or 6 depending on how far down the road we go on the NRCS side one of the things we are doing as well because of this large increase in funding we are also going through a bit of a streamlining process and we're going to be trying some things out here in South Dakota to see if we can kind of speed up our processes to help deal with this large influx of money one of the things we're going to try is called Act Now and we'll be highlighting that a little bit here in 23 basically trying to work out the kinks but what Act Now funding is or how it works is we dedicate a portion of our funding to an Act Now type fund pool where we will then take applications kind of targeted at some specific resource concern or some specific practice and try to target that funding on basically what amounts to a first come first serve basis application comes in we rank it quick if the ranking of that application falls above a specified threshold that we set we can automatically fund that contract if it does not come out above that threshold then it has to stay kind of just stay and hang out there until one of two things happen either we run out of new applications and we get down to that level lower that threshold or it rolls over into the next year because we just can't get to it so those are kind of a fast track type situation with applications versus having to have a batching date get us to a specific date where we get all of our applications ranked and then we make selections this kind of cuts out a bunch of that and just says if your application can get to a certain threshold on the ranking we'll fund it no questions asked moving forward instantly and continue to process those applications so we're going to look into doing some of that here in South Dakota test drive it basically in anticipation of getting ready for 2024 so that's kind of where we're at with IRA funding and what IRA is going to look like here in South Dakota so I do have another topic to cover but because this is IRA I kind of want to stop and just see if there's any questions on IRA specifically so Sandy I see you've got a question about virtual fences I don't have that answer yet I know we've talked about it a little bit but I don't know where we're at as far as actually being able to cost share virtual fences I think and I don't know if Jessica wants to chime in but I think there's some questions about how we what do I want to say how we create that a practice standard so on an Emily through actually they are that's changing waiting for the CIG to be completed okay so Sandy hopefully that answered your question a little bit so Jeff question for you yes sir mr. Robling so how do states NGOs how do our how do your partners help you spend some of these IRA funds what mechanism is out there how do we get you know in a position to help you get these dollars on the ground well I'm I can think of two things right off the bat one is I'll reach is going to be super critical to us especially starting in 24 okay we we absolutely need some some new people to come in the door to start working with us the amount of money that we're going to have over the next couple of years just really dictates that we need new producers to come in and start working with us so how do we reach them to is for lack of a better term I think we also need you know to develop some new partnerships create some new partner positions to just help with the sheer workload that we're we're looking at as well so I know and I don't know maybe Tony wants to chime in on some of that too but you know I I know we're going to you know I I talk about the FA side but there's also going to be technical assistance dollars that come along with that that we can certainly work with partners or or with new positions or even with some of your existing folks you know letting them know getting them involved in some of our trainings letting them know about this list of practices what the funding look like I mean I think we just we need to work as a team and let all of our producers here in South Dakota know that this money exists it's you know like our chief likes to say this is a once in a generation type type funding opportunity for conservation and I think South Dakota is extremely well prepared as far as the partnerships and some of our staffing levels go to be ready to to take this on the real challenges is finding producers that are looking to make those investments in their operations I also I'll throw this out there I I always get a little bit nervous when I start using terms like climate smart right especially in South Dakota here a little bit you start talking about some of that some of the producer just roll their eyes and you know kind of want to laugh you off the place it's just terminology these are the same practices the same things we've been doing for 80 some years 85 years well all this really means for us it's a new way and a new pot of money for us to use to get some conservation on the ground here in South Dakota so black Tony I don't know if you guys want to add anything to my answer but he had like to jump in here a little bit Jeff and first off well said something else that the chief has been commenting a lot on is that he wants this money to be prioritized in a local way he wants feedback from partners he wants feedback from South Dakota outside of NRCS on where what should we be focusing this funding on and this is where I'm looking at the partners across the state right now is where do you guys working on where can you potentially use some additional funding yeah we have we do have some some language that restricts how we could use this funding in a real broad way but it's not it's not that restrictive we do have some flexibility with this funding we just need to know what everybody else is working on so we can try to help support your endeavors also across the state as Jeff was saying this is a once in a generation opportunity this is a huge investment in South Dakota over these next few years we're going to have a significant opportunity to invest in the state and we ultimately need the feedback from the partners on where would you like to see this funding go what are what are you guys working on right now that you could use some extra funding potentially and we can try to find ways to make that make that work so I guess a couple examples of that I mean one being working lands is obviously a statement we make all the time and we're you know grassland conversion programs out there trying to convert marginal roll crops into grasslands perennial grass I mean how does that fit into this you know your salinity program like pheasants forever our working lands program that is trying to really target these marginal acres and put them back into grass how do we leverage some of these dollars to do that so Kevin to I have two ways right off top man one well I'm not sharing my screen like I thought it was to give me a second here I'll put this back up right it's one of the big things right here you can see we've got range planting we've got pasture and hayland planting right these are going to be two of the critical practices these are two of the primary practices that are part of this IRA funding okay something that I probably I'm probably a little guilty of is I get caught up in the whole CSP and Equip and the dollar amounts that we see there that are coming but when I think about ALE right ALE would be a great program South Dakota is a target there's going to be a lot of money for ALE and I don't know that we're well positioned to use ALE two is RCPP right let's find some some priority areas where we would love to go in and target and say hey there's been a lot of of conversion to cropland that you know in hindsight shouldn't have happened and we want to go back in and we want to target this area to go back in and recede a bunch of that marginal cropland back to grass RCPP is going to be a great fit for that as well and that's the nice thing about RCPP and ALE is there's more flexibility to target what the producer wants to target versus Equip RCPP which are basically farm bill programs and this is just another pot of money so I think there's a lot of opportunity and I kind of lose sight about RCPP and ALE a little bit but I think those could be two huge opportunities I think RCPP is really going to reduce the match requirement and make it a lot easier for partners to get some of these funds to do something specific and I also think if partners are willing to come together with any money that they do have and work with entities that are willing to hold conservation easements we could really be a big player in ALE moving forward. I do have a couple of things in the works that I have talked to a partner or actually a couple of partners about trying to help us get better prepared for ALE and I don't want to say too much more than that in fairness to the partner and whether this funding comes through or not but we are trying to get some additional positions in South Dakota to help us be better prepared to use ALE especially since it's a target for IRA so South Dakota is a target for IRA so those are a couple of things that we're working on Kevin to try to make that work as well but think about those two programs a lot I think there's a ton of potential So I want to back to your first statement about outreach. No I appreciate some of this information I mean I think we probably need to have almost like an afternoon session on how we help you help get this money off the ground in South Dakota because we have a lot of people doing exactly what you're doing here just within game fishing parks but ultimately the outreach question that you posed or the statement you about outreach how much do you work with FSA's data set I mean for example as a livestock producer myself I have no idea these funds are available not a clue you know but I do I did enroll for the livestock force protection program or those types of disaster relief programs based on the drought do you have access to those databases I mean there's a whole plethora of information there that do we tap into that So Kevin just to back up a little bit we found out about this about two and a half weeks ago as far as what we're actually getting and some of the details so the quick the short answer is yes the long answers we haven't done that yet because we haven't we just haven't had we haven't had all of our ducks in a row to go that far yet to be honest with you and this is again this is there's not a lot of money this year okay yep so I'm not trying to cause a big stir for 23 that we overwhelm our offices but looking forward this this spring slash summer yes I want to do a ton of outreach and start letting people know that you know hey we're going to get it we're probably going to get double our equip application or allocation next year we're probably going to get double our CSP allocation next year so I want to time it so that it works out well for our field offices being able to get out to producers places you know start doing that conservation planning and get them ready for 24 so this is my point to you guys as partners on here that we will be doing a bunch of stuff this spring slash summer to do outreach but it's you know it's a little bit about timing and it's a little bit about not overwhelming our field offices at a bad time so I know we've got a ton of folks on the on the line today watching because I guess they can't get out to the field today I don't know but that's okay so Jeff my last statement before I turn this over to the others I guess GFP stands ready to assist NRCS FSA in any way we can I mean this is an exciting time for South Dakota no doubt but let us know how we can help you get these dollars off the ground I mean that is something that we want to be able to assist you with I mean and if there's priority areas let us know but ultimately this is this is good news I don't want to fall short of getting these dollars you know doing good things in South Dakota it really kind of is exciting when you look at CREP and and the stuff happening there and then all these IRA dollars it's really going to be exciting so and thank you for that comment Kevin yeah thank you but thank you on the on the whole topic of outreach you know there's so much that can be done and yes we need to have a little gathering where we can talk about all the opportunities but what's really exciting is that many of our partners have existing either events or newsletters or one-on-one contacts that we're never part of so what we need to do is to help you understand which is what we're doing today the opportunities that are coming because you know we've got a choir and each of you have a choir that you work with and you know where are those places in the people where we can get to that to the other groups so there have been several ag groups who are having producer grower meetings this winter and spring and they have invited our NRCS staff to come and give you know a 15 minute update or something or to give some sort of presentation but it's about baby bites of how we can help those producers to first of all you know realize and understand you know where are they with their operation and where would they like to be and then here are some avenues to go there so as you have your partner events your training sessions please we'd be happy to come and speak we'd be happy to come and help people just how do they get to that next step and we'd be happy to work with you on that so please let us know thank you and thanks Kevin for standing there and thanks Tony and Jeff for that I'll turn it back to you okay now I'm a little hesitant I don't know is there a way to actually lower somebody's hand I don't know Pete looks like he's sitting at a bar this could get serious go ahead Pete Jeff so I guess my comment on this is I think it's exciting but I think we have to take a little bit of dose of reality in South Dakota and Jeff's what I'm wondering about is if you can see this money coming can we really flip the script and be a lot more innovative you know I really restoration projects you know you said it very clearly we've got a lot of ground that got flipped that shouldn't have got flipped we got we're still on this hamster wheel of restoration is the fix to poor conservation practices and I'm just wondering like I know all those programs and things are going to continue and we have to continue probably to support them but I kind of go back to what Kevin was saying and what you've been saying and is there time here to be really truly innovative in South Dakota can we get ahead of this can we do we have and I'm asking this is like because I don't really understand exactly how the money will flow or be tagged or earmarked but if we are really serious about this can we get together in South Dakota and you know could we do something like a don't break a campaign can we invest our money into the producers that are keeping their grass versus continually fixing you know the the problems and with ALE and all these things and I look at grassland CRP like is there any way to in our state borders sweet in the pot somehow sweet in the pot for the producers that are actually keeping their grass because you know we all know what SDSU has been working on with our grassland inventory and it's quite dismal and you know this chipping away and losing grass and then putting back on the grass back on the ground is not going to help our larger objectives of you know the grassland road map or the bird objectives or even well even our producer objectives so anyway do you have any comment on that is there anything you can do really innovative and new and different well I have to admit right off the bat Pete I am not the creative genius I you know I'm more of the guy I like to be the guy that okay you got the idea I'll help you get it done so I don't have that idea per se but yes I mean this is the time to do that right and and I'm going to go back to sound a little bit like a broken record but you know our CPP is going to be a great fit to try something like that out with right you know do we do we incentivize it somewhere somehow with with some kind of a special payment through our CPP to to incentive guys to keep keep their grass grass what that looks like I don't know that's where you know if a partner has an idea or a couple of partners it doesn't have to just be one you could guys to work collaboratively you know that we come up with a project and we go into a specific area and we try it out and the idea is that with our CPP it's great if we can make things scalable right go try things out work out the kinks a little bit then make the whole thing scalable is the general idea with our CPP a lot of time so this is that opportunity Pete I would agree it's a matter coming up with that idea and what that idea might look like well I would like to propose to this group then and kind of building on what Kevin Robling was saying is that I think we should spell you know if this opportunity is staring us in the face I absolutely think that the state tech committee and partners should call a special session just on this topic and really get in the same room together and just bounce ideas around with each other before decisions are made on what the best way to go is that that'd be my suggestion yeah I agree you know and our woody plant summit that we had our grassland summit that we had this past fall you know my intent behind that was to generate some ideas on how do we reclaim some of our native grasslands that are being encroached on too because I think they'll be a great opportunity there with our CPP to go in and maybe reclaim you know some of that from all the woody species encroachment so you know I think that's one way but you know that's a small area in a way you know along the river and I'm open to bigger ideas for other parts of the state as well so I'm all for getting together and talking and discussing the thing I'll stress Pete and anybody else listening as far as that goes right the time is now don't don't wait too long I don't know when the RCPP announcement will come out and I'm not saying that's the only program that fits but we need to get the ball rolling because that money is coming real fast so it takes a little time to get prepared well thanks for that Jeff I really appreciate it thanks for all the comments from everybody on this I think that if we're going to do such a meeting it'd be great to know I mean obviously this is a single pot of money or a collective pot of money and there's going to be rules that you know sometimes the answer is going to be like no we just can't do that with this money but I do think that it speaks to the need for and it could serve as a spring board for what we really need to do is have this grassland summit this grassland meeting and maybe you're right we really maybe can't afford to wait to the schedule that we thought so I will I don't know who the appropriate host of this is but I don't think we should let this go either so maybe Kevin and maybe we should bring this up through the grassland coalition and see if they'll host statewide discussion on you know on this topic I think it would be worthwhile yeah if you guys line it up I'll be there okay sure yeah I'd be happy to help facilitate that and get that together but we're going to need NRCS involvement all the way through along with FSA I think these two organizations I mean can work hand in hand if we can get them to work hand in hand it'd be ideal because they got access to the database that we don't and that's something the outreach component of it we got to bring new people into the fold here and the wildlife conservation that's going to be a big part of what we're trying to accomplish so so Barry's got a question in the chat says will future RCPP projects allow for SRAM and have financial assistance incentive payment for some type of buffer okay where does that along with the program like working lands easements where we keep the grassland intact it still allow use I'm going to say yes and especially with the IRA I think the IRA RCPP is going to be different than what we're used to in the past I think it's going to be more of a grant type situation where you're going to be allowed to actually do more innovative things than you were through RCPP originally I'm actually a little bit excited about RCPP again from that standpoint we're supposed to see a lot of innovation with the first one and I think it kind of got stymied with some of the rules and regulations that they placed on RCPP so I think the IRA has a little bit different perspective as far as what are you doing to mitigate climate change and if you can show that you're doing that through an grant I think you'll be allowed to do a lot of different things so I think there's a better opportunity to truly be innovative with IRA as long as you can tie it back to climate mitigation activities okay I do have one more topic so just last call here for questions on IRA okay one last quick update conservation implementation strategy CIS we've been doing that for the past couple of years having a call for projects usually in the fall give you time to write up those projects and make selections in and around May couple things happen this year that's going to kind of prevent us from doing that in the way that I would like to see happen so we are going to put a little pause on CIS for a year and come back this fall with sort of revamped CIS I've been working with Oregon and Montana on a tool a web based tool that allows projects to be submitted probably in an easier fashion kind of a fill in the blank slash drop down option template for you to fill out to submit a CIS project so we're just going to put a little pause on it and we're going to get that tool up and running and fully functional as well as make just a few changes to how we look at CIS and how we kind of implement it here in South Dakota so for those of you that are kind of curious about that it's just we're going to pause it for a little bit we're also going to look at how now that we've got the IRA information how can we tie IRA and CIS together as well and so hopefully this will all kind of come back and mesh nicely here in this fall and we'll make another announcement so which for whatever reason that just jogged my memory one very critical thing I need to share about IRA all those IRA funds that I talked about on that slide they all have to be spent by 2031 by September 30th, 2031 so as kind of a worst case scenario here right we have a contract with the producer and he or she does not have all of her practices installed and paid for by September 30th, 2031 that contract will terminate those funds will disappear that is written into the law and I cannot extend it past that date so well that seems like a long ways off right that's eight years off I get that but you saw that the funding goes through 2026 so when you get out to 2026 and you give somebody only five years to complete their project all of a sudden that time frame can become pretty critical if we do some kind of contribution agreement between one of the partners on here and NRCS that agreement too must be fully spent by the end of 2031 with any of these IRA funds so that is going to become a magical date you'll hear that quite a bit when we talk about IRA September 30, 2031 is the drop dead date to have all money spent not just obligated but spent so just keep that in mind and I apologize for not bringing that up sooner but it did just pop in my head so with that that's my update Tony and I'll turn it back to you all right thank you so much Jeff and thank you Kevin and Pete for the discussion I think there's some amazing opportunities moving forward and I'm looking forward to supporting this effort and NRCS will be here to support this all the way through so thank you so much again for that conversation next on the agenda this morning we have Jess with a technical update all right good morning can you hear me okay yes okay good morning everybody I'm going to try to start including technical updates as a regular part of the agenda on our state technical committee meetings I am Jessica Mahalski the state resource conservationist for South Dakota NRCS if you weren't aware and so I wanted to give you some updates from the technical side of the house I guess the big thing is we are very involved Jeff and I have been working together on this efficiencies related to the IRA funds and getting geared up for those so we're really trying to help see what we can do on the planning and technical side of the house one of those things is to reduce maybe some time spent utilizing some of our computer software and spending more time in the field maybe looking at where we can reduce the number of the amount of documentation or amount of job sheets that need to be completed for given conservation practices so I've been working with our range management specialists I'll be meeting with the agronomists next week so that's something that we are working together on making sure that everybody's on the same page when it comes to finding as many efficiencies as we can definitely don't want to burn out our employees but we know we want to get this money out to our producers we've also been my technical staff if you were to where we update our practice standards based on when the national practice standards are updated and in South Dakota we try to limit those releases to two times per year so we do that in April and October so my staff has been working on updates to the following conservation practice standards that will be released in April and those are the practice standards for deep tillage fuel break fire break grazing land mechanical treatment range planting which Jeff talked about is being one of the primary practices for in its smart list tree pruning those are the big conservation practices and then we'll also be releasing interim practice standards for those of you not familiar with interim practice standards they are practice standards that are basically being tested so we have to provide data back to national headquarters when we use interim practice standards we adopted these practice standards from other states and so other states using them as well many states have adopted or being asked to adopt the 823 practice which is organic management and that will coincide with an organic initiative that will be announced nationally the other two that we are going to be releasing are raised beds we've had a lot of requests for raised beds especially in our high tunnels and those types of systems and then also we are adopting an interim practice standard for low tunnel systems that will be used in many of our small acreage and urban type settings we will send out the draft practice standards to the list that Kathy maintains for those of you that have requested to be on that list you'll receive those draft practice standards if you want to be on the list to receive draft practice standards and you're not currently you can contact me you can contact Kathy Irving and we can get you added to the list the other thing that I wanted to put a plug in for is that my staff is largely responsible for many of the trainings that happen in the spring and summer months but we do we talk about having partnerships and getting everybody trained up and part of that is really attending trainings you or someone in your organization or one of your employees wants to attend one of our trainings please reach out to me I can help you see if we have available slots for those trainings because we really do like to have partners attend those trainings as well so some of those trainings that we're looking at again includes specialty production training culture resource training conservation planning part two our baseline training for new employees and again it's been proven to be very valuable for not just new NRCS staff but new partner staff as well introduction to agronomy conservation planning on grazing lands and we will be having a forestry training out in the Black Hills area with our new forester Laura Bosworth this year so if anybody would like to have again have one of our partner staff attend one of those trainings you can sure reach out to me and I can help get that set up I also wanted to Pete Bowman asked me to put in a plug for the land owner prescribe fire classes and field trainings that are largely led by SDSU but it also include many partner staff help put on that training so we've got some evening classroom schedules February 28th and Mitchell March 7th Chamberlain March 14th and Sisseton March 21st in Watertown and March 23rd in Yankton and then we do have some field day schedules so people producers or partner employees or even our NRCS employees that are attend are required to either attend one of the evening classroom sessions and then the field day or the classroom session that is immediately before the field day and those dates this year will be April 18th and 19th by Brandon April 25th and 26th at the Oak Lake Station and May 16th and 17th at the Oak Lake Station but we can sure send out the details that Pete has provided when we send out the recording for this meeting today so I think with that that's all I need I wanted to cover on the technical side of the house any questions for me not seeing any hands at this point Jess so thank you so much for your update you bet alright so next on the agenda this morning we have a update on South Dakota wetland HAL compliance. Deak is working on interviews this morning so he just wanted me to relay on that the team is working hard out there they've addressed over 3700 requests this season or this year for wetland determinations and HAL determinations they are working on staying on top of that as much as possible Deak will be on at our next call to provide a little bit more information regarding where we are on compliance but I think we're making really good progress in that particular department our next agenda item this morning is partnership reports I'm going to turn this over to Collette to please lead discussions under our partnerships good morning so part of our theme for this meeting has been collaborating with our partners and hearing from you what your organization's priorities are what you're working on and then hopefully we can see ways that we could amplify what you're working on or we could work on something new and great so with this section our first person who was going to be providing an update is Lori Brown so I'm going to turn the camera to her if there would be anyone else who would have some other updates just please just turn your camera on or raise your hand and we'll recognize you and then get you in the queue thank you Lori here we are to you thanks Collette I'm Lori Brown and I am with the nature conservancy I share my time between Belafouche and Rapid City and I was brought on through the NRCS through a CCG agreement and originally started off office thing out of an NRCS office and now I've evolved to a more TNC focused position and I work in western South Dakota as well as more broadly across the northern Great Plains up into Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska and today I'm going to share with you a brief overview of two CCG projects that are ongoing efforts to address riparian and stream health in western South Dakota and when we talk about riparian and stream health what we're really talking about is this broader picture of landscape resilience our waters, our streams our small wet meadows out here are what connect us and they're what connect wildlife habitat in this semi arid region we have out here in the western side of the state these wet areas occupy a really small part of the landscape but play an outsized role in supporting ecosystem services including livestock water and forage which is a big reason why this has become a focal area for partners in this landscape and this riparian health initiative that we've developed over time has been largely driven by landowner input as well it's landowners coming to TNC and asking for help and support and assistance so today for the sake of time I'm not going to go into all the details of the work we've been doing out here but I do want to make sure to share with you guys the highlights from the NRCS funded CCG projects and I provided a few handouts today for you guys as well the first handout is a project where we developed a landowner extreme health guide and you'll see the cover photos for that document as well as some graphics that are in that guide as well as I mentioned earlier we developed these documents and this guide based on meetings with partners and meetings with landowners and meetings with NRCS field staff and we all came together and saw that there was a knowledge gap in this landscape we felt like there was a lot of information and resources available to better understand mountain streams, trout streams large river systems but there was very little information available for these small headwater prairie streams and these streams occur almost on almost every single ranch out here in this landscape everyone has a stream or a draw that runs to their property and they often are in poor condition out here so this landowner guide that we developed is based off of surveys that our TNC science staff did they looked at over 100 stream sites across western South Dakota to create a truly South Dakota specific resource for landowners and staff out here this guide covers broad topics like what is a watershed it also covers more complex topics like riparian ecological site descriptions and straight state and transition models the graphics that you see in the handouts are to help folks understand and read the landscape to help them understand and read their plant communities and to help people get a sense of what sort of functional state their streams and riparian areas are in this landowner guide also includes a riparian plant guide a monitoring worksheet that's based off of adaptive management as well as a series of landowner feature stories that profile folks out here who have made management changes and seen improvements in their riparian health we have hard copies available that were printed by SDSU as well as a digital copy that I think is on one of those sheets the link to it is and over the next coming months I'll hopefully be able to provide hard copies to field offices in the region so if anyone on the call here is interested in those just send me an email or give me a phone call and I can make sure to send some copies out to field staff as well as to producers along those same lines we're also interested in hosting trainings and outreach events for both staff as well as landowners in the area to help them better utilize the guide and understand what material is in it and on that note as well Mitch Faulkner in the Belfouche office is the NRCS technical advisor on our project so folks can reach out to him as well if they would like to receive hard copies of the landowner guide or would like to set up a meeting to talk about riparian trainings or workshops or things like that our second ongoing CCG project was built to complement the landowner stream guide it's an ongoing demonstration project to better explore and understand novel and innovative stream restoration practices and techniques and we're specifically looking at methods that are low cost implement and don't require expensive engineering designs or heavy equipment the goal of this project is to demonstrate and explore the applicability of techniques that are scalable and user friendly for producers and field staff to implement these techniques are called process based restoration and they use local natural materials to help jumpstart stream health processes that do things like increase meandering and increase connection to adjacent flood plains and more broadly this demonstration project is about trying to restore diversity, complexity and resilience to the small intermittent and ephemeral stream channels and a lot of this work is based off of efforts that have been done through the sage grass initiative in states further to the west but haven't yet been applied or explored in a prairie or grassland ecosystem and so far we have 10 demonstration sites across both public and private lands in western South Dakota and are working with SDSU to conduct monitoring to evaluate conservation outcomes including soil water availability and forage productivity and we're also working on a pilot project to develop soil carbon monitoring for this work as well this project like I said is ongoing and hopefully I'll be able to report back to you guys in about a year or so when we complete the demonstration phase of the CCG project and with that I will turn it back over to Colette thanks for that update Laurie would you mind putting your contact information in the chat please when I looked at the handout in the state tech I didn't see it listed in there but anyway that'd be great in case somebody wanted to follow up with you to learn more yes and we do look forward to and the photos in there really do help explain things a lot so good work thanks Joe Dickey did all of the photos and graphics for us so the same guy who does your grassland videos yes well good good good okay so I have a couple people who are asking for some time so the next one on the agenda or in the queue would be Barry Berg so Barry I'll let you have some time with the group and then after that we'll have Cindy Zink alright thanks Colette can you hear me alright awesome I just wanted to mention that the Big Suriver project since you guys brought up this stuff about the the new dollars coming in in the future here with the IRA and stuff that the Big Sur project is going to be throwing an event out this fall I think I talked to you very shortly or briefly about it at the Soil Health Conference but the event is going to be a grazing event and we have started to put together speakers for that event and basically the the overlying title of it we haven't come up with a complete title yet but it's going to fall on the lines of something like this is our water and the interesting or neat thing about this event is it's going to be more producer driven to where we're going to personally invite 50 to 60 producers that are within that watershed or close to it and this is the Skunk Creek watershed that we've been targeting with a lot of our programs but we're going to I'm going to personally meet with those guys 50 or 60 of them and then we're going to keep sending invites or reminders along with that but the event is going to be held out in the field we've already got tent and chairs and tables and stuff booked and just kind of a different different setting but we want to do it out on one of our original seasonal riparian area buffer sites and we've already I've been talking with that producer and he's all in on it so we want to get on the site talk about how that program has helped him and then bring some water quality things into it we got a couple speakers lined up we have some other time that we'd like to collaborate with you or whoever from NRCS that would be willing to sit down with me a little bit maybe in the upcoming months here this is going to be August 23rd so we have time but to maybe put our heads together to bring some other things into it since there's going to be a lot of producers and these aren't necessarily the producers that come into the office all the time these are guys that rarely come in they come in to certify acres and that's about it so I want to get the guys that you guys were talking about the ones that don't normally come in to do business or look to find project programs or anything for them and just get it out there so maybe I can open some new eyes but it might be a great opportunity to kick off some of this IRA stuff or more information about it to the guys that are going to be there because I believe that if we have a different group of people that's not normally associated with coming to these events or doing stuff like this they'll spread the word like wildfire in different directions than we've seen before so I think that would be a benefit to both of us and also who else from NRCS ways or which people to invite I would like to be around that 90 to 100 people for this event but I do want to have it strong on the producer side and so I will be mad at myself if I do not get a minimum of 40 producers there so it will be heavily driven towards them got a few talks about grazing we also would like to maybe do infiltration ring right on site right where we're sitting so that they could see what the SRAM program has done for one of the pastures over the last 10 years and actually get to see it in person real time so I think it's going to be a neat deal but I just wanted to throw that out there so that it's on the radar somewhere that everybody knows next fall we might have something that could be different and cool but I think it's going to be a great thing to do because we're going to be in the box and then we are serving lunch of course so that will be another thing we're looking at about 9 in the morning until 2, 3 in the afternoon so but that's all I wanted to add for now I'm sure I'll be in touch and talking to you guys so I think thank you for the time and just in case there's people on the meeting that don't have a contact information would you mind putting that in the chat please and then they'll have it in case they'd like to follow up with you individually so great okay thanks Barry and alright I guess we'll move next to Cindy and then we'll pause for just a moment in case there's any questions so thanks Cindy can you hear me click sure can and thanks Tony for the meeting today it's been a good meeting I just have a couple updates from the soil health coalition the coalition in partner with USDA NRCS and STS extension and grassland coalition in the conservation districts we did release our growing connections app so that app is a mentoring tool and it provides a resource for producers who can in the palm of their hand actually ask a question provide a resource that they may be read on an article the growing connections can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store or it is also a website so if you aren't on the smartphones there's quite a few producers that I work with that don't have them so they are utilizing it on their web on their web platform so growingconnectionsapp.com is where you can do that and I do have additional handouts so if anyone wants those any partners that hasn't seen it I will be doing a technical Thursday for NRCS people that are on the call with Justin Holsky coming up on Thursday and the second thing I just wanted to touch base on is our soil health awareness is coming up fast and hopefully the storm will all be built over this on Monday we will be promoting soil health awareness and all the aspects on all land bases throughout the week and utilizing those five principles for that week it's in conjunction with something that's really exciting it's not really our project but we did help put a little information in it that I want everyone to know about is the Ag Heritage Museum is releasing their their area on Joseph Hutton that I know they worked with the USDA and NRCS with too and they are having a private public opening next week too so anyone that wants more information on that I'd be happy to too but that drowning in dirt information I think is very valuable for South Dakota just to realize the importance of Joseph Hutton's history and moving forward as we look at some of the funding that we could maybe help with some of those resource concerns today so that's just a little update from the Soil Health Coalition we did have our conference in January and I want to thank everyone that helped make that a huge success especially NRCS so thank you for the time Collette and if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them but if you haven't checked out growing connections I do think it is a useful tool like I said I will be doing an update with NRCS here this coming week so Awesome, I'll pause for just a moment in case anyone has questions Thanks Collette Yes and please be sure to put your contact information in the chat as well I think you're well known but it would be good and I just want to also clarify the growing connections app really is a cool deal and partners are invited to engage with it as well because that's why we're such a cool partnership on our state because you know there are some technical staff that can help with the planning some people help with the seating some people help with this that or the other but maybe you know it comes time to turn the cattle out to graze that cover crop another producer who has had livestock graze covers crop is the best resource and that's part of the idea behind this growing connections app is to help people in all different capacities to phone a friend or text a friend or through the app and to find someone that can help them with their question when they're on the spot so we're really excited about it thanks Cindy for carrying that forward in the coalition so also I really appreciate you bringing up the Joseph Hutton project because that looking back at history does help us to look forward and there's much to learn there so okay well unless anyone has any questions raise your hand or turn your camera on and ah hello Bruce so yes please proceed I'll turn it to you thank you Colette thanks for the opportunity to chime in here this morning can I share my screen a little bit is that something I can do with this or certainly see if it'll work here can you all see that we can all right perfect I just kind of wanted to quickly highlight our current RCPP project currently open with our second sign up here in eastern South Dakota the map especially just so you all can see what our priority geography is there with this sign up this is the second year of our scaling soil health the Prairie Papo region RCPP project this is delivered through the alternative funding arrangement framework so one of those kind of flexibilities that Jeff was talking about earlier these are these are agreements with Ducks Unlimited kind of gives us flexibility for some new language in those agreements and also utilize them some different you know funding opportunities through through rental agreements that are kind of supplement the traditional equip style practices for example in this sign up we are encouraging grass restorations with that with a range planting practice in addition to that we can we can provide a an annual CRP type payment for a three year period while that grassland establishes kind of takes away the incentive to get cattle in there too early also gives the producer a source of income while that land is essentially sitting idle and by by year four or five it's ready to roll into into an operational grazing system so pretty pretty neat opportunity through that AFA framework I've heard there's some changes on the horizon how that how that flow through the next RCPP RFP here but we'll see how that goes anyway just again back to this sign up what we're looking for our larger grass restorations 80 acres plus or soil health kind of transition project so crop lands that will be implementing the soil health system so that's cover crops conservation crop rotation minimum tillage and at livestock grazing so we'll have five year management plans for those sorts of crop fields and of course having opportunities for grazing infrastructure on both of those both for restored grasslands and for soil health systems as well we do have like a just a PDF flyer available if anybody is interested you can sure reach out to me and I can get you this this can be emailed to producers they can fill it out either scan it and get it back to us or mail it to our office so if you want one of these let us know it's basically six pages we have just a kind of a one page summary that kind of gives some description about what the project is about what kind of practices are available through this sign up we have an application page just general producer information what kind of practices are they looking for and then we have a screening criteria basically at the end that kind of helps us weed out the best of the best practices in this sign up like I said this will be available to anybody that's interested in this geography current batching period is open until March 31st after that we'll kind of go through and rank proposals and select the top projects for funding in this cycle with our batching period last year we selected five applications and four of those are still moving forward I would anticipate somewhere in that five to ten projects in this sign up as well this is a three state proposal South Dakota is a little further ahead of North Dakota in Montana but North Dakota will be moving forward on a sign up here this summer and hopefully Montana is not too far behind as well but anyway I will stand by for questions if anybody has any questions on that or drop my contact information in the chat box as well. Awesome thank you for that update and this is exactly what our state technical committee meeting should be about as an opportunity for partners to give some updates and then how can we help each other to get more good stuff happening on the landscape so thank you for that update okay any questions this is Kathy Irving would you please send me the link to your copy we'll clue that in our minutes and also just have it on our file thank you we'll do thanks Kathy we're coming close to the end of our agenda unless there are any other partner updates then I will probably just let you all go for the day and Tony, Jeff any closing comments for the meeting today well first off thank you Colette thank you so much for the partner reports I really appreciate hearing that we have again as has been mentioned several times throughout this meeting we have some amazing opportunities moving forward and I'm very excited about the conversations that we've had today and looking forward to putting together a meeting a little later this year so we can have some more formalized discussions regarding what are we doing with this investment opportunity I appreciate Bruce thank you for your update on the RCPP FAA I think that we have some opportunities that we might be missing under that RCPP program and opportunity this is an opportunity that's not just open for NGOs or other governmental agencies this is also an opportunity for even private corporation or other folks to come in and partner with us in trying to find ways to utilize this funding I did notice as I was looking through our attendance list we have a couple of folks from some co-ops and some seed companies that we're listening in today and so there's opportunities out there for you also and if you'd like more information on our RCPP program or opportunities you can either reach out to Colette or you can reach out to Jeff and or Will to provide you guys some more information on how you might be able to find ways to partner with NRCS to help us get more conservation on the ground so thank you everyone for your participation and calling in today it was a great turnout and I'm looking forward to furthering this meeting or this type of meeting in the future to get more partner feedback and just thank you all and really I hope you all stay warm and safe through this winter storm and I'm looking forward to talking to you all again soon so thank you all so much and have a great rest of your day