 My name is Jeff Hemingway. I'm the NRCS soil health specialist here in South Dakota and today We're going to talk a little bit more about our tabletop rainfall simulator And we've got it set up here But for the most part what I really like to do today is talk a little bit more about actually collecting a sample Properly for the simulator and at some point it makes a huge difference on what we have and what we're really looking at To get that sample and have it react like we think it should So let's go grab a sample Okay, we place our cutter. We remove some of the residue because of hairpinning Potential and and that's gonna like to say it is a lot of times residue, especially if it's moist will move Along the edge of that cutter will not cut off completely, but if we remove some of that residue On the soil surface and set our cutter try to drive it in very uniformly putting pressure on the corners again part way in We want to remove some of that material out in the front so that we're not bending up our funnel out in the front And then we're going to continue to drive in that cutter Okay, so you're going to drive it in Uniformly down to that soil surface is actually at the front of that that funnel in other words even with the front of that funnel And then we're going to actually remove that sample And try to keep the material in it. I'll put that 2x4 on the top of it Again, I'm not digging a hole all the way around everything. I'm just taking out enough so that I can get my spade underneath Cutter itself and to the bottom of that sample Take it off as uniformly as possible. In this particular case We end up with we've got a plated layer down in this no-till system. That's an area of compaction We can actually see that That it's fairly uniform on the bottom. It should actually be a nice granular structure all the way down We'd like to see that but in this particular case, it's not that's not the case We're going to uniformly shear that off An interesting thing to me is that you can still see that we have some pretty good macropores through that plating this Still going to infiltrate fairly well for a no-till sample, but you'd like to see a lot better granular structure and a lot better Soil development that's an issue for this producer Coming out underneath that cutter In this particular case, we don't have to cover anything. We've got good residue cover We've got two good structure because of that rye And again, just as we were in that pasture type situation That written for development We've got our soil hanging on the bottom of that and then we can go through and shear that off to the bottom We did end up a little hairpinning along the edge. That shouldn't really bother just too much But I think you can see that cell structure and then if we take our knife and then Pick that a little bit at the bottom making sure that our back reports are open to the So the bottom we should have really good infiltration with this sample Again, I'm gonna move enough soil on the edges of it so I can get My shovel up underneath it as I mentioned before keep that two by four on the top of it so that that soil is Stays in place as much as possible Okay, so now we're gonna lift that out and you can see here That it basically sheared itself off unlike the other sample we had And I don't really have to shear it off just too much But the interesting thing of course is as as we start rolling this over and start looking at it training not to lose any Material these the structure is a lot different on the bottom very few of any macro pores at all Because of that soil structure It's really not going to infiltrate water very well at all It's just not and in fact as loose as it is on the soil surface and we'll put this over here on my Two by four normally I take a like a wet newspaper I'll put that down And you can see inside that some of the material that Sound the surface is this moves around. We'll put that back And we have stored those samples all the time and the way we actually do this is I do this Outdoors out in the field, but I'll box on my sample so they don't dehydrate. They can't dry out The example here is I'll take a plastic bag and put it in a box something like that And we'll take the sample itself and ideally you can store them in the cutter itself. I have pressed them out That's really a challenge to get them back in and not have that preference Preferential for what the box is about but for the most part what we're talking about is the best way to do that is that to preserve those samples as in Is to seal this thing back up?