 Let me stop sharing, and this call is being recorded. So just to be aware of that as we move forward today. So again, thank you everybody for joining us. I'm Jackie Bayam, I'm this Acting State Conservationist here in South Dakota. I'm here to December 5th, and then we're gonna be bringing in another Acting State Conservationist. I was under the impression, I was hoping I would be here until the full-time position started, but unfortunately that's not how it's gonna work out. I do have good news on the status of the State Conservationist selection. So we have worked through the resumes and are scheduling interviews this week and next week. So hopefully we'll have a name for you to share or be able to share a name with you on who our next State Conservationist in South Dakota is gonna be here very shortly. A few updates for you as well. So we do have the update on COVID and staffing. So we are still in our standard COVID stance, social distancing, masking, everything in the field offices. We did recently get approval to increase our staff size or staffing at this field office going from 50% to 75%. So we do have offices kind of in the whole range of things. So numbers in a county are more than one per 10,000. We're going to go down to 25% and then gradually staff back up to 50% and then 75%. So only a handful of counties are under the 75% staffing threshold right now, which is good. Like we're moving our wage, getting our work done, moving forward with that. Staffing, we're able to bring on about 30-some direct hires over the last year during fiscal year 21. Right now we are currently working on our internal vacancies, some of our higher level positions and getting those moving through the system. So Ag Engineers, DCs, Program staff, positions all across the board. So we're working on getting those out and pushing those through the system. We haven't heard if we're gonna get a direct hire authority yet for 2022. We did ask for it. So we wanna get these direct hires or these internal vacancies filled before this direct hire authority comes out so that we can hopefully promote from within and get the higher grader positions filled and then use this direct hire authority to bring in our entry level. Our budgets, we received our initial allocation, our advisory allocation on October 1st. And we're looking pretty good for 2022 here in South Dakota. Our budget looks pretty well able to staff up, continue to push through our priorities on that. We are still working off a continuing resolution until December 3rd. So we are waiting to see what happens with that. So I haven't heard anything recently on the continuing resolution, but right now we're doing pretty good here in South Dakota. Didn't wanna share some of our chiefs priorities, Chief Cosby, he's our new chief of NRCS. He did come to us as our state conservationist in Ohio. So he has a really great NRCS background in history with the agency, really exciting to have him as our chief. So we wanna talk to you about some of his priorities. The first one is ensuring equity and delivery of all NRCS programs and services. Basically, we have to make sure that we have equity in everything we do. So right now we're to achieve this equitability in our programs and our customer service. We're reviewing and modifying our program practices and policies that have an impact on our historically underserved producers. We're gonna be increasing training to these producers as well through outreach and our goal is to make our outreach effort second to none across all agencies, especially within USDA. And so you guys as our partners are very essential to reaching these HU communities. So we're gonna be reaching out, working with you all and seeing what we can do to increase our customer participation and making sure we are equitable in all of our programs. So we also have increased in assistance for climate-smart agriculture and forestry to producers to increase resiliency. So drought, storms, fires, et cetera. These are happening very occasionally or they're not infrequent anymore. There seems like a yearly thing anymore. And so they're heavily impacting our producers. So this is gonna be a critical component to our work in FY22 and working with our landowners and our partners again on climate solutions. So internally in NRCS, we're developing an action plan on this and we're looking forward to that. We do expect it coming out here at the first of the calendar year and working through those actions. The third priority is expanding conservation tools and supports of urban farmers and communities nationwide. So right now the farm bill did create an office in urban agriculture. So right now we're building that out. NRCS is the lead that is housed under NRCS because of our history with working with producers and the locally led volunteer aspect of our agency. So right now we're reviewing policies to adapt to urban and also reviewing and revising our notices of funding opportunities to include urban agriculture as well. Urban agriculture is not being defined by our national office. It's gonna be up to the states to determine what is urban agriculture in their area. And we'll get into that a little bit later with that when we talk about a new subcommittee that we are developing. Those are the three that have been we've had for the last year, but we did recently add two more priorities, which is cultivating a complete and diverse workforce that has the right tools, science and training. Basically we need to uphold the scientific integrity of NRCS and build a culture that welcomes respects and encourages everyone to reach the next level. And our fifth priority is to leverage our innovative partnerships to get NRCS conservation out of ground. Our innovation of partnership, our partnership is what keeps us going. I'm really wanting to leverage your diversity, your innovation to increase our capacity and getting conservation on the ground. Few more updates that I have. Lake Area Technical College. So I am pleased to share that Lake Area Technical College is the newest college to join the C2A3, which is the Community College Alliance for Agriculture Advancement. The C2A3 is a collaboration of Midwest community colleges across nine states. We have joined together to provide quality education, training, demonstrations to future farm producers and agricultural service providers. So last week, a few of us from NRCS, we were able to go to Lake Area and tour their farms and campus and start brainstorming ways that we can work together and what our needs are, what our priorities are. So we're currently working on the memorandum of understanding in its infancy stage, right this, right now, but we can expect to work with them to host training activities, field demonstrations on locally and regionally important agriculture operations and working with us to attract, educate, inspire and prepare students in agricultural industries. So I'm really excited to see this partnership grow. I think there's a lot of really great opportunities that are going to be coming out of this agreement, this alliance. So urban agriculture, I did mention this earlier as one of the chief's priorities. So one thing that we were doing is creating an urban subcommittee for the state technical committee. So as a part of this committee, forming a subcommittee for urban agriculture and innovative production. So we are soliciting members interested in participating in the subcommittee. One of those questions is, what does South Dakota urban agriculture look like? What are the needs, emerging practices, resource concerns and potential partnering entities to support urban, small scale and innovative production? So we have drafted a definition of urban agriculture which is the production of agricultural products in non-traditional settings and also a charter for the group to consider as we move forward. So we would like to have this first subcommittee meeting and coming up in December, January. So if you are interested in participating in that subcommittee group, please let me know. I will be sending out an email after this meeting as well letting you know that if you are interested to please send an email back to me by the end of the month by November 30th, I believe it was the date I'm gonna put on that. And so that is my quick update on state conservationist activities been going on. So before we go into the agenda, are there any questions? All right, hearing none, we'll go on to the next agenda item which is the congressional representatives. So I did see, I do believe we did have a representative from Senator Brown's office. Yep, Jim Selfie here in Rapid City. Good morning, Jim. Do you have any updates or anything you wanna share with the group today? I'm sure most of you are aware that Mike's wife, Jean passed away here recently. So he's been busy with Family Matters but he is back in DC this week working full-time, so. All right, condolences to Senator Brown's and his family on the passing. I will let Mike know, thank you. That's really all I have unless there's any questions of me. All right, thank you, Jim. Senator Thune's office, do we have a representative from Senator Thune's on the line, right? How about Representative Johnson? All right, thank you again, Jim, for joining us today. We do appreciate you being on with us. With that, we're gonna move on with the agenda going on to Farm Service Agency updates with Joe Schultz and Owen. Fingerhound, Joseph and Owen, over to you. Hey, thanks, Jackie. Good morning, my name is Joe Schultz. I'm the Acting State Executive Director for South Dakota Farm Service Agency and sure appreciate being invited into this meeting. Don't have a lot for you, but I would start off, it's been a good year in that getting a lot of things done. CRP's been active. I'm sure Owen will touch on those things, ECP. So I wanna express my appreciation for the cooperation and assistance and the teamwork that we've had with all of our partners, NRCS, the President's Forever and on and on. I mean, a lot of challenges, but a lot of good work done and thank you all. Looking forward, well, let's look at the President for a second. You know, in this role over the past several months and before that in her own capacity, Jamie White as our State Executive Officer is also filling in as the Acting State Executive Director. Well, just this past week, Jamie announced that she's accepted a position in the National Office as the assistant to the Deputy Administrator for the farm programs. So did South Dakota FSA lose a lot of talent? Yes and no, because she's still with FSA and she's got a lot of big work ahead of her. Some of that big work ahead of her was included in the legislation with the continuing resolution. There was a lot of funding for some disaster programs and so yeah, we got our regular business going on. Yes, we do, but coming mostly after the first of the year it's gonna be some substantial disaster programs to assist with some of the losses on the 2021 drought and of course the hurricanes and the floods and the wildfires, but for South Dakota, primarily looking at the drought and some wildfire perhaps. So beyond that, take any questions, thanks for the invite. I'm gonna pass it forward to Owen Begerhog and letting me have the floor, thank you. Thanks Joe. Just a few things. The first thing I wanna touch on is just an update on some activity that the CRP subcommittee through the state tech committee acted on between meetings. And that item is the review of the conservation priority area that is identified and used for our general CRP signups. Try to share the map here quick. Maybe, can we see the map? No, yes. Yes, now we can. All right, so this is the resulting area. It didn't change a lot from the prior year. We were able to include some additional acres based on the new math or updated math on the 25% of the state cropland. So the area in the yellow would be our state CPA. So that's the qualifying area for general CRP signup west of the river. The hash marks, which includes the yellow and the counties identified east of the river get additional points for water and wildlife quality points towards the general signup. And then just a reminder that all of east river qualifies in the national conservation priority area. So automatically eligible based on the prairie pothole region eligibility for general signup. So we had a group come together, reviewed that, submitted it for national office review and have not heard that it was not approved. So assuming we'll go forward here with this new area for the general signup starting in fiscal year 22. Past years signup successes. We had a total of 481,598 acres or 89 acres approved under the signup for fiscal year 21. That resulted in 98,931 of continuous signup acreages, which is all encompassing. We'd have CREP signup within that. We'd have the FWP, the regular continuous. And clear 30, which is a new practice that was announced with the 2018 farm bill. General signup 12,216. And I think that press release had went out previously this year, so you folks are priority aware of that. Grassland signup consisted of 370,235 acres. So one of our larger signups within the fiscal year 21. And then our ship sign up the soil health income protection program. It's again, just a reminder that consists of only five states identified within the prairie pothole region. We had a total of 166 acres get approved under that this last year. So not a real big number, but again, that can only be on 15% of the least productive ground on a farm. And it's a three to five year contract. So that's the interest we had in that and kind of where we landed. But all total, all signups inclusive 481,589 for fiscal year 21. That's just kind of a quick update on where we stand conservation wise with South Dakota. And I guess I would field any questions if there are some, George? Yeah, yeah, thank you. I got lost in the numbers a little bit of that approximately 400,000 acres of new CRP. How much of that is Grassland CRP? So I guess my question is how much is what I'm gonna call traditional CRP? The number for the Grasslands, the working lands program was 370,235. So you'd have to take that away from the 481 and then the balance would be the. Okay, 481 is the total and then how much in the Grassland? 370,000. 370,000? Yeah. So the traditional CRP then if I get my high school math here is about 110,000. New acres. Okay. 111,000. 111,000. Okay. How many acres came out? Where are we at in South Dakota for total? And I'm gonna call it again, traditional CRP acres. Yeah, let me jump over here quick. I think I had a spreadsheet that could identify that quickly, maybe. So in 21, it's just pulling up here. In 2021, we had a total of 110,456 acres expired. So we basically replaced it with our traditional CRP. Okay. And so where does that leave us total wise in the state for CRP? I think I run some numbers earlier this month and we're about 1.7 million. But that includes the Grassland. That's correct, yep, that's all. If you take out the Grassland, where are we at with CRP? I don't know if I have the Grasslands broke down for all signups, but I can sure get that figure for you, George. Yeah, I'd be curious to see what that is. So I'm assuming it's gonna be right around that million, 900,000 to a million acres if I recollect where we were at with Grasslands previously. So we're kinda holding steady then on CRP at just under a million acres. I would agree with that, yes, we're doing well. All right, are you gonna talk at all about the emergency hang and grazing that occurred this year? I can, I guess. I didn't have it on my agenda item, but I would field any questions on that if you had something to need clarified. I guess I'm just curious what the rules were as far as how much could be hailed. How many producers took advantage of it? How many acres did we actually see hailed this year? And I guess, were the mowing dates, did they stick by the mowing dates of I think it was August 2nd? Did they, were they able to do whole fields? Were they able to do strips? Again, I didn't, I apologize, cause I don't know. Nope, that's fine. I'll just give you the high level overview real quickly. 2018 Farm Bill expanded their authorizations for hailing and grazing opportunities on a wholesale basis for CRP. Number one, contracts previously approved could exercise once out of every three years at no more than 75% of the acreage and they pay a 25% payment reduction on that activity. So that's normal non-emergency hang opportunities that all contracts previously approved would be eligible for. They can meet the frequency, they can hay up to 75%. The emergency provisions expanded that if a county is designated in an emergency, a D2 status or greater, D2 for eight weeks or a D3, now I shouldn't say that, a D2 status, they are automatically eligible for 100% of the acreage irregardless of what happened in a prior year. If the county's drought severity increased to a level that qualified them for a livestock feed program payment through FSA, so the LFP payments, which is a separate and distinct program from CRP, that county's designation then fell to only 50% of the acreage on eight eligible practices. And those eight eligible practices consisted of the previously approved prior Farm Bill managed hailing practices. So your upland practices, your ones, twos, four Ds, 18 Bs, 18 Cs, and then the safe practices. So even though counties qualified for emergency and based on the designation of the LFP eligibility, we had quite a number of producers that elected based on their frequency and availability to pay the 25% reduction and pay up to the 75%. Just because it got them more acres available for production in a drought year. The statistics that you referenced are asked about on total producers that participated in it and that. We do have a report due here in December, so we don't have those compiled yet as a state. Counties are currently reporting that to us. But I would say there was a number of producers that exercised the opportunity and hailed the acreage. Did I answer them all, George? I just wanna make sure I kind of got you what you needed there. I think so. I guess I would hope that reporters made available to us once you get, I always think it's good to look at what we did and be able to document that. Absolutely. I guess I don't have any other questions. If something comes up, I'll pop up again. So thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. That's what I had, Jackie, so I'll turn it back to you. All right, thank you very much. Next up on the agenda, we have a soil health update with Kent. Okay, am I coming through loud and clear? Yes, you are. Okay, thank you. Okay, good morning, everyone. Good to be with you all again. Another windy South Dakota day. So I'm gonna change things up a little bit today. We're gonna take a break from the soil health principles and my no-till-doesn't-work series. And we're gonna go through something that I think is very exciting. And hopefully after my talk today, many of you have some ideas to bring forward and contribute to a new project that's just getting off the ground here. So let me share my screen real quick. Okay, so what I'm gonna talk about today is the new project that's through the Beetle Conservation District and in association with Ducks Unlimited also. So it's called the Dale Demonstration Farm. And while the title may not seem like much, hopefully this presentation will get you excited about the opportunity that this new demonstration farm is gonna present us all. So as most of you are aware, I spent a chunk of my working hours doing soil health demonstrations for various groups and at different events. And I really enjoy that part of my job. But previously I worked in the field office and was able to organize field days and field events and participate in a lot of those. And so that's kind of where my heart lies. So if you'll look at the background here, you'll see some of the traditional demonstrations that you'll often see myself and others like me do. So you'll see the middle screen is the all popular rainfall simulation which is pretty well distributed throughout the state and a lot of people have seen it. And you'll also notice that there's a picture of a soil cloud and then there's also on the other side of the screen, that cloud sitting in the tube of water, the slake test. And so these are all demonstrations that we perform in front of various groups and at events. And they're very effective at showing what happens to our soil based off of different management types. And they're very educational. I'd like to think that they change hearts and minds with producers and landowners that we're showing these demonstrations. But even if they do change a producer or landowners, if they change their heart to mind that they are gonna adopt some soil health principles on their operation, they're still kind of left with a now what? Where do I start? Where do I get the information? How can I find out what I should be doing as far as it relates to each one of the five soil health principles? Who do I contact? Where do I find these principles being demonstrated or actually being applied on a land? Well, now we've got hopefully this demonstration farm that we can point them to. So here's some ways that we, in my mind, that we more effectively demonstrate soil health principles. And I'm just gonna go through a few slides here for the sake of time. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time and effort on each slide, but so this is, economically, how do we demonstrate soil health? We've got some equipment in the background and we've got some results in the other slide or in the other picture. So when we say specifically soil health practice on cropland, there's a lot that we all know, a lot of variables, a lot of things that a producer needs to think about if they're going to adopt the various principles of soil health on their cropland. So that involves equipment, that involves seed and seeding methods, that involves fertilizer and fertility application. It involves lots of different things that are a traditional agronomy. And so if we can more effectively demonstrate this on the ground, it's a better way for a producer to learn these soil health principles. Okay, another way we can demonstrate soil health principles, and this is one that's kind of near and dear to my heart is through livestock on cropland. And the importance of that, but it's easy for us to say as technical specialists and conservationists, you should really have some livestock on your cropland. Okay, now what? How does the producer actually implement that? What are the species of cover crop, for example, that they may be interested in or that would work for their operation? How do they manage the livestock on that land? Do they just turn loose and make sure they're fenced in and have water provided or do they manage it a little more intensively? What are their goals? And then you also see that there's the next slide and it's just a fence line view of more traditional native pasture land. How do we manage that? We've got a lot of experience with our agency in showing and working with producers on grazing plans, but oftentimes it's more effective that we can show them different management types. Okay, also how do we demonstrate and how do we show how to manage these very specific resource concerns? And so here you'll see a couple of photos of saline and sodic areas that are really prevalent throughout the James River Valley and in other areas throughout the state also. How do we show how to effectively manage these areas? How do we show how to bring them back into, in some cases, traditional row crop production? How in other cases did we show how to maybe change land use and still leave that as production acres and still make them profitable? Here's some things that sometimes we don't think about if we're not necessarily wildlife focused. And this is where some of my coworkers will often give me a hard time where I really kind of say that if you're adopting the five soil principles, you can solve just about anything and any resource concern or you can meet any interest groups needs. And this is just a photo of a field in Southern Beetle County and it's of small grains. And you'll notice that there's on the photo towards the bottom corner that there is some waterfowl that's been nesting in there. And so this is not the producer's goal or the landowner's goal to increase wildlife habitat but it's more of a side benefit of the principles they've adopted. Okay, and this is one I'm glad we included this in the slide deck for today because it's a little bit on the more non-traditional side of agriculture for South Dakota. You know what I think as an agency we're calling it urban agriculture in South Dakota. We're gonna have to probably come up with a different or better definition for it because we don't have traditionally a lot of urban area in South Dakota. We do have urban areas but we have a lot of non-traditional agriculture that's starting to take place in South Dakota. We have fruit and vegetable production that's taking place in smaller acreages. We have vineyards and orchards that are being implemented and grown throughout the state. And so these are types of production that a lot of us aren't necessarily as familiar with but they're certainly becoming more popular especially as land prices are high. And so if you don't have the cashflow to purchase 2,000 acres and you're looking to get into production agriculture you can purchase five acres probably and make a pretty good living off of that in non-traditional production. So how do we demonstrate these areas? Okay, this is another thing where this is probably along the urban side but it's sometimes we talk a lot about for example pollinators and native plants and how beneficial they are to the landscape and to our world as a whole but how do we really implement those? Can we implement those on a smaller scale and someone's front yard? Do we have technical background in order to be able to help them do that? If we can find areas or an area where we can demonstrate this so people can come and look that's more effective than someone like myself talking to them blue in the face with someone about this is good and you should do it. Okay and then what I'm trying to get across with these slides here is that it's important to demonstrate these areas and it's important to get research and data collected on these areas. So how do we draw in some of our coworkers and some of our partners that are in the research or the extension side of things? Oftentimes they have their research plots and we have specific research farms around the state. Beersford would be an example. Dakota Lakes would be another and they're great. They demonstrate to a lot of different things as far as crop rotation and fertility management and tillage management sometimes on a smaller scale and smaller plots. How do we demonstrate that on a larger scale that's more scalable to a producer that says, that's great you did that on a 20 by 50 plot but how do I implement that on a thousand acres? Well, hopefully we're working towards that now. And so Ducks Elimited and Beal Conservation District had a pretty good vision of we maybe need to find a larger scale area that we can demonstrate this. These conservation practices and soil health principles. And so Ducks Elimited was able to obtain land and then make a long story story to basically they worked it out. So it's now part of Beal Conservation District and there's a management team that will help make decisions on what takes place. And so this is the piece of ground. It's approximately 300 acres south of here on South Dakota. Actually not very far from town just about three, four miles south of town and it's been in crop production and production agriculture for decades upon decades. And I'm gonna show you this is something interesting that one of my coworkers found a black and white imagery from I believe 1952. And so what I'd like to point out on this as I've highlighted with just different color polygons here is there was various land uses that we were able to figure out that happened on this piece of ground in that year. Actually the producer has since passed but his son were able to go back and actually his dad kept production history on this and what took place. And so you'll notice that this 300 acres was divided into several different land uses. So we've got grass hay in the Northwest. There was pasture in the Southwest and there was an alfalfa field. There were small grain wheat, another alfalfa field and there was a larger area of production flax. And then there was grass hay in the Southeast corner with some more alfalfa. I kind of boarded a pothole wetland there. So it's interesting that there's many land uses that this producer had this 300 acres divided into. And this is something we don't see very much anymore as 300 acres divided up into several different land uses. But really this producer they knew what they were doing. They had basically fit the production to what the land was saying was best for profit on these acres. And so here's more of what this piece of land looked like prior to, well, four or five years ago. So it's all basically in row crop production. You can see there's just some really identifiable resource concerns. You can see some saline sodic areas. You can see some seasonal and temporary wetlands that oftentimes don't get planted. And if they do get planted, they oftentimes drown out with a large rainfall event. Really there's many resource concerns that need to be addressed. This is a picture of, this is after Ducks Unlimited had obtained it and this is after a couple of years. I believe this is actually a 2020 imagery if I am remembering correct. So you'll notice that it's very much like a lot of croplands, cropland fields that we see throughout the prairie pothole region of the Northern Plains here. There's really productive soil. There's a lot of, there's a Houdic and Han loams that are out there. There's also some Dudley-Tatanka complex which is a little lower lying and tends to be prone to flooding. And it can be productive, but it's oftentimes too wet to crop. Okay, so there's a new plan with these acres and it's kind of just getting off and rolling. But basically the goal is to adopt all five principles on this ground and to demonstrate practices, sometimes innovative, sometimes older practices that were kind of resurrecting. But we're trying to turn this into an area that is very accessible for producers to show up at any time and even at organized events which hopefully will take place at a regular basis. But this is something that we're not trying to necessarily reinvent the wheel. There's other demonstration sites here, especially in the Northern Plains. There's Dakota Lakes out by pier which has been very instrumental in the adoption of no-till techniques. There's Manokin Farm out by Bismarck which is along the lines of adopting soil health principles. And so we're not reinventing the wheel but we are gonna hopefully make the wheel a little bit different in how we're presenting these soil health principles. So it'll be everything. It'll be operated by a producer. So it won't be operated actually by Ducks and Limited or the Conservation District but they will lease it to a producer and they will be implementing a lot of these practices. So it's very real world. We'll be collecting soil data. We'll be collecting production data, economic data. All this will be available eventually to producers and hopefully make it very easy for them to contact someone related with this farm. If they have questions or they can show up any particular day and hopefully just get a one-on-one tour sometimes or they can show up at organized events. So this may have seemed kind of like a promotional video and that's probably because it was. It's something I'm very passionate about and a lot of the members that have taken part in getting this up and running are also passionate about too. So with that, soil health something for everyone. Hopefully we're able to prove that here with this Dale demonstration farm. So with that, are there any questions or comments? If you think of something later, certainly shoot me an email or give me a ring. So thank you very much for your time, everyone. Jackie back to you. All right, thank you for that. That was very interesting. Looking forward to seeing what that demonstration site comes up with lots of really good work going on out there. So any questions for Kent regarding what we just covered? Not seeing any in the chat either. So we're gonna move along. So next up we have the woody species encroachment and I'm gonna ask Jeff VW to introduce our next speaker. All right, good morning everybody. Just wanted to take a minute here to introduce Dirac Tidwell. He's a professor down at UNL and I got to work with him slash medium while I was acting down in Nebraska. And I thought I would just mention the fact that Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota have all entered into an agreement to work on woody species encroachment. And Dr. Tidwell is basically our science advisor and he's kind of the guy that's helping us determine kind of some of the best approaches that we can use to help kind of combat this woody species encroachment that we've got going on. Obviously it's, well it's not new to the state but we don't have a major problem yet but I think what you'll see is that we're kind of on that cusp of having an opportunity to control it versus having a situation that kind of gets out of hand. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Tidwell and he'll kind of update us on woody species encroachment effort. Thanks, Jeff. I'll probably go ahead and turn off my video once we get going here a little bit too. It's a little slow today for me here in Nebraska. But yeah, thanks everybody and allowing me to share some information for today's state technical committee meeting. It's something that seems to be pretty regular feature now. It's, we've done this for every state as part of that four state agreement and we're really seeing a lot of progress in this area. So I'm gonna share a few things with you here so that we can dive a little deeper into why this is becoming such a big issue and why we're addressing it this way. So this four state agreement really started as a result of the state conservationists from South Dakota to Oklahoma coming together, seeing some of the data and information technology we have and just understanding how big of a issue and resource concern that is happening and how that's gonna amplify in the Central Great Plains in now and into the next couple of decades especially. So I think that's one of our grand challenges that we have that you're gonna hear me communicate about today that resource concerns aren't just how you look at your feet or how we traditionally in rangelands we often took pictures or train people in universities of looking at the ground. What you're talking about now are biome scale state transitions, biome scale threats, biome scale resource concerns. And that's something that is unprecedented in terms of modern conservation profession and challenges that we have on private lands. So what do you encroachment is one of those big biome scale threats that really across grasslands all over the world is being increasingly recognized as a biome scale issue. And we just don't have a lot of examples of large scale success. And so what we're doing is actually creating a science-based strategy so that we can solve this at large scales. So I'll walk you through some of what we know and how that works. All right, so this is what I used to do in terms of building awareness on this issue a couple of years ago. I mean, we just didn't have the kind of technology and data that's now emerged in rangelands. And so what we talked about is that really what's playing out this century that is a big concern is that it's not just about state transition models or what oftentimes we put in our ecological site descriptions and we view that at a scale that matches how we've been trained or how we see our system. What's happening now is that those transitions are scaling up to unprecedented levels. So they might start smaller and they scale up to be regional or biome levels. And examples of that that you hear today are these like coral reef collapses where they go from a productive coral reef to this unproductive state. And it's not just patches of coral reef anymore. We're talking about wholesale coral reef collapse. The same is true all over the world. We're talking about regional scale collapse of grasslands transitioning to woody dominated systems. And of course, in the Great Plains we have one of those historical and rare examples associated with things like the dust bowl. So the point of all this is that large scale transitions they lead to completely unexpected surprising consequences that go beyond our own profession. They affect everything in our society. And that's why we want to prevent them at all costs. It's really incredibly difficult to try and prevent large scale transitions given momentum in nature today. And also to reverse them when they occur. And that's just simply because of the geographic extent of these kind of changes and how impactful they are. So we hypothesize in general in the science that some of the most catastrophic changes we expect are large scale transitions or ones that transcend scale. So think about it like it's, if you have encroachment coming from a windbreak, right? Like that's a very low scale or fine scale type of transition threat. But if that repeats itself over many different counties and many different areas, what you actually see is something that can transcend scale when you're talking about eco region or multi-state type of collapse. And that's where it's so important to not just be ambulance drivers saying, oh, I see a problem here, let's fix it. We've got to do this more preventative approach to conservation if we're going to deal with those threats. Well, what's turned in the last couple of years is like an awareness campaign to where we've been able to make this more real. And we're seeing the NRCS really respond in this. I was a lead architect for what's the first ever biome scale framework for conservation action for the NRCS in America's grasslands. So if you're looking at this, think about like since the Dust Bowl, since a lot of CRP work, what you're looking at is the biggest conservation movement for grasslands since that history. And if done right, it should be the biggest one that's ever been implemented. So there's a lot of different efforts and partnerships associated with the NRCS, but this is our first ever one that's meant to deal with biome scale threats. It also takes a private lands approach that matches the sagebrush biome and their efforts with the sage grouse initiative. So it takes some of that lessons learned and success but applies private lands principles to it. Now it's no wonder that this is happening. We're talking about three billion birds since 1990 and a lot of stuff coming out in the journal science and other top end journals. But we also can start to track one of our most important metrics for the first time in rangelands and that's the impact to the beef industry. So you can combine this agricultural industry with a lot of the kind of wildlife type of conservation. And often that's been difficult in the Great Plains. It's often that those are at ends with each other. Not for woody encroachment, these go hand in hand. So there's a huge opportunity if we recognize what's happening to get out in front of this. Now I mentioned a couple of slides ago that we just didn't have the kind of information to do more of this like generality based awareness campaign. And I really feel like this approach with the sports state initiative, I'm also a core member of the working lands for wildlife science team. And what we're doing is actually creating this highly rapid integrated approach to help with implementation and the generation of outcomes in the Great Plains. So quickly, if you see things like these frameworks that are coming out, these frameworks provide a program neutral umbrella to be able to take some of the strategies that we've learned in the science and apply them under a banner of something like the NRCS. And that informs our technology that's needed. So the rangeland analysis platform has a number of additional products that we're generating in order to be able to deliver upon the promises and strategies in those frameworks. And that technology helps guide implementation. And so you're seeing this Great Plains grasslands initiative or GPGI launched in Kansas last year, Nebraska just did trainings and released their launch earlier this year for this fiscal year, Oklahoma. We're starting the launch for GPGI December 6th and 7th and we're having this discussion now in South Dakota. This is our implementation, right? Every state is saying, hey, GPGI is how we start to think about large scale grassland conservation to biome scale threats. And that's every state is kind of putting under that umbrella of branding, which shows a really unique thing in rangelands. We haven't had that kind of common implementation messaging and umbrella and talking points. But of course we wanna know what those outcomes are. We don't wanna just generate acres, treated, dollars spent. Right, that's not benefiting ecosystems unless we can measure it. So we have again, these measurable outcomes that you're gonna see on the backend and those outcomes drive changes and adaptation or strategy as we learn more, we actually adjust our frameworks and strategy associated with that. And I've just never been part of a team that's done this so quickly. And I think that's what's great in why we're having this conversation in South Dakota. So I'll jump right into it. There's two biome scale threats in the Great Plains. So these are, and these are associated with state transitions happening at large scales. And in the Northern Great Plains or in the Northern half most people know about land use conversion and how much that's been taken out over the years. And the interesting part of it is that woody encroachment which is much slower technically, right? It takes a long time for that to ramp up is now converting land at the same rate as land use conversion. So if we're not paying attention to this double whammy, right? If it's not the tractor, it's the trees, we're getting a lot of grassland that's being taken out of production or that's being lost in terms of wildlife habitat. And of course it's one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. There's less of our grasslands remaining than there is tropical rainforest and greater amounts of conversion. So if you look at this, look at this double whammy, right? Like everywhere that hasn't been cultivated, all these areas with low cultivation risk you're seeing here in green. So huge chunks of South Dakota, the sandhills of Nebraska, the Flint Hills of Kansas, the Gypsum Hills or Red Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma. You're seeing these huge amounts of low cultivation risk and those are some of our biggest source areas that continue to exist to large scales. But look at the warning that's happening in the Great Plains. Like if they haven't been cultivated yet, everywhere of low cultivation risk is getting hammered and has tree encroachment happening on it. And I'll show you some additional information on what that starts to look like over time. So it's really the combination of these maps that we wanna start getting people to think about. And it's easy to see land use conversion because it happens overnight, right? And we kind of get normalized to woody encroachment. It's kind of like my wife keeps telling me my garage is cluttered and I got used to it and don't notice, right? But it is, same thing with woody encroachment. We get normalized to it until we start feeling the true impacts as it continues to ramp up. And that's what it looks like in combination. So you start taking this picture, everywhere purple has been plowed, has some encroachment or you're talking about forested area. Everywhere yellow is these areas that are giving signals that they're at risk to the near term to woody encroachment or they're at higher risk for cultivation. And the green are these more intact cores. So you start looking at this overall, the state of our biome is in great threat. So we have to deal with biome scale threats first if we're gonna have so much of our other investments matter long term, right? Like a lot of the conversation Nebraska's are investments in fencing, are investments in water and other things associated with cattle. Well, what happens if woody encroachment then takes that land out of agricultural production like it did in areas of say, Texas. Those investments are at risk if we don't deal with biome scale threats. So we wanna have an eye to both of those going forward. Now, this is new. We just couldn't track this until a couple of years ago. Good friend and colleague of mine at the University of Montana developed the rangeland analysis platform and allows us to see functional groups that drive state transitions for every baseball field for the entire Western US and it's being expanded. This allows me to see, do we have large scale bare ground problems, large scale woody, large scale annuals, large scale shrubs, like what's changing in our system? And for our system, it's woody encroachment. And I think what's so impressive in watching this is just as we've given this information out on this framework, the NRCS leadership really responded quickly overnight. We're talking about 10 million acres overnight being committed in the Great Plains to dealing with these biome scale threats before we've been able to really train up on this. Interestingly, maybe not surprising, 92% of that commitment comes from Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. So you're seeing this four state initiative really being able to put a bullseye in how we address this issue and how we solve it and our commitment to it. So I wanna point out a big release. I've got a link to this at the end, but the first big benchmark or goal as part of this four state initiative was I was tasked with really developing a science-based strategy to help solve the problem. As all ecologists, we did a really good job of talking about consequences, mechanisms, but we didn't have solutions necessarily for you. Now we really strongly have that. This has commitments or representation from nearly every land-grade institution in the Great Plains. For rangelands, that's incredibly rare. We're talking about an entire umbrella of commitments, an entire umbrella of shared vision that this is our better approach to dealing with woody encroachment. And if we're gonna win, we have to reduce risk and understand what makes them vulnerable to get ahead of it. So this guide is really the result of this four state initiative and really puts our best management practices going forward. And part of what we're going to do as a group in terms of training up on this and understanding how we just can better win, especially in place like South Dakota. Nobody's acted so quickly, but if we don't look at managing risk and vulnerability, I already know what's gonna happen in South Dakota. We've been studying this in Nebraska, Kansas and Texas for decades. It's clear what's coming. If we're gonna get ahead, we have to apply those lessons learned from those other states. And this is what this looks like. So let me show you a little bit of the data on this. This is what our biome looked like in 2000. So this is the Western boundary of the Great Plains where you see all of those kind of red patches where the traditional forests start popping. You can see the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Pine Ridge of Northwestern Nebraska, the Halsey National Forest in the middle of the Sandhills. And you can see this Eastern boundary. That Eastern boundary looks more like Halsey National Forest when you go east of there than it does like our past grasslands. And watch what happens over 20 years. We're talking about biomes here. In 20 years, you are seeing the shrinking or collapse of our biome. We are living it. No groups ever lived through this scale of biome collapse that wasn't an intentional land use conversion. So this is a huge amount of change playing out. And you're seeing that warning signal manifest through South Dakota and even Eastern North Dakota. And we can actually, we have this publicly available on the wrap. You can see where things are playing out across different areas of South Dakota, these early warning signals of large scale transitions. The Flint Hills of Kansas burns 2 million acres of year and they barely made this biome scale signal flinch. We just do not have our controls and treatments in place to deal with this scale of a resource concern. And that's the point of these conversations. I mean, good grief. We spent $177 million in last farm bill. We spent it in the red chasing this problem and it got worse over time. We have to get ahead of this if we're going to conserve our largest big grasslands that are left. And that's part of our effort and initiative here. Now, maybe you don't care about that from a working lands or beef production or just our biome standpoint. What we're showing you is this generalized system early warning signal. So this is a paper coming out in ecological applications from my lab by Caleb Roberts. And what you're seeing is in Kansas, we were showing how greater prairie chickens, they have reduced safe operating space or their usable habitat is becoming increasingly close to where then they will totally abandon the sites. So as you're seeing this signal, we're giving you long-term abilities to get ahead of this and deal with these types of transitions because our wildlife, our ecosystem services depend on it. And that's what we now have for the first time. You can see how this is playing out and we can avoid some of the denialism that really challenged us in states south of here. Another product that we have coming out is showing you from a biological standpoint, what's at risk? So everywhere green on this map is our best model estimate of what's truly intact and is not contaminated by the source of the problem, which is seed from encroaching woody species. Everywhere that's yellow is within two football fields of a seed source. There was new data out of Nebraska that we were able to generate that showed 95% of recruitment into our intact grasslands was within two football fields of a seed source. So those individual mature plants, right? By letting them persist on the landscape, it's the biological mechanism for encroachment. So what do we do? We wait until there's a sufficient amount of cover, then we treat it, but what happens? It's full of seed. It has that seed bank still there, so it comes back and then we have to treat it again. The horror story, and they call it a joke, but it's definitely not so funny, is that while I was doing research in Texas, ranchers were increasingly saying that they've sold the ranch three times to pay for brush management. That's how it starts to feel. Well, that's a result of our guidance and that guidance comes from the science. We missed the biological mechanism that's so important here, which is that there's so much seed produced in these areas, we're not managing the exposure to the problem. That's why the Flint Hills isn't working even better. They have more and more area that's just close proximity to seed sources. So they now have to have a really high maintenance grassland to keep up with it. If we keep these big areas intact, we can manage low maintenance grasslands, which is great. That's what we wanna do in South Dakota. But all these yellow areas, we're telling you that they're increasingly becoming higher maintenance grasslands. So the producer investment's gonna have to go up to prevent it from turning red, which is our more mature woody encroachment sites. And this isn't just something of where our vulnerability and risk is playing out, this means something. So we have data showing how much is being lost to agricultural productivity or range land productivity. We lost 170,000 tons due to woody encroachment in 2019 in South Dakota. So if we're not calling it a problem yet, I'm sure that we started showing this to our representatives, the agricultural sector, like our South Dakota cattlemen's. I don't think we wanna, we can afford losing 170,000 tons or more of range land productivity from our beef system and that beef sector. And this is only gonna go up because guess what? Nebraska used to look like South Dakota and we've now lost 530,000 tons of productivity in 2019 and one of the most intact true prairies in the world, Sandhills is now dealing with it at unprecedented scale. And when I moved here in 2013, they said, we do not have a woody encroachment problem in the Sandhills. And I said, well, that's an interesting hypothesis. Look at what it looks like now. There's a ton of that area that is no longer intact and we now have to figure out how to deal with that. And of course, Kansas used to look like Nebraska. Kansas lost 2 million tons of productivity in 2019 and look at that Flint Hills area. Even though that's the last remaining Tallgrass Prairie region in the world, you're talking about very little that doesn't have close proximity to seed sources. And Doug Spencer in Kansas actually went through there, these green areas actually have individual trees across most of them that isn't picked up by satellite technology. So it's not even as good as what it looks like on here. There's a whole lot of yellow, which means there's grasslands largely intact, but that are at risk. How do we get ahead of those issues across this state? That's why Kansas acted immediately. And of course, Oklahoma used to look like Kansas. They lost 7 million tons of productivity in 2019 and it leaves them with maybe five core areas left. And in Oklahoma, Professor Dr. Dave Ingle in the 90s was saying this is our biome's biggest threat. So this is the future of Nebraska. It's future of South Dakota. It's a huge issue. Woody encroachment and things like Eastern Red Cedar take land out of agricultural production. And it takes land out of wildlife habitat and it results in increased wildfire danger, issues with water. We've tracked it with school funding here in Nebraska and we're gonna do a study that expands on it. It affects every citizen in our state in weird ways because our biome is collapsing. New data shows stuff associated with increased West Nile virus is tied to Eastern Red Cedar habitats more than deciduous and grassland habitats. There's increased in Lodestar tick disease expansion associated with this. So South Dakota has the opportunity that no other state has had. And that is to be the first state that commits to getting ahead of a biome scale threat and dealing with this and increasing our technical guidance and figuring out how to design programs that scale and that aren't just on 10, 20, 40 acres. So that's really where we're moving from. And I think a great way of doing this is we will have this better data for you. This range land production statistics will finally look like the rest of agriculture. So we will give it to you for the state like I showed you. But we can show you every single county in South Dakota and I can show you this, this is what I'm concerned about. If we start seeing this drop in yield, that's called yield gap. All of agriculture does things to try and prevent yield gap. We have to start doing the same thing in range lands. So we wanna avoid when this bottom trend starts to happen. Even though this isn't a lot yet, right? It's gonna keep going down. So how do we actually scale it up? That becomes the issue. We will have this for you for every county to empower you all to be able to get this message out. And it's proven, this is how we win. We don't chase the problem by chasing and working in large areas and then chasing that tree encroachment and the leading edge of the seed source into our best grasslands. We anchor to intact grasslands, manage the seed contamination and then work into these bigger areas. It works, landowner groups that are doing that are reducing risk and vulnerability and they're winning. And what's nice about that, it's cheaper and it prevents that land from being taken out of range productivity. It just works better. And we just didn't have the right science guidance that didn't trickle through the technical guidance in our programs to help make that happen. We always waited until it became a major problem. And unfortunately, you just can't do that on biome scale threats. So I really feel like what we're doing at this discussion was rolling from local discussions on this issue, where we're talking about moving from awareness to action. And that's what GPGI, these Great Plains Biome Frameworks are meant to do. And it's important because we still have some of the most intact grasslands remaining in the world right in our backyard. We actually have a paper that looks like it's just getting ready to be accepted that shows the importance of the sandhills, the areas of like central and western South Dakota, the Wyoming basin area. Those are some of our most intact prairies in the entire world. And we haven't told that story. We've been telling the story that in eastern Nebraska, 97 to 99% of that's converted. We forgot to tell the other side. So if we can keep these intact, that's some of our best hopes for large-scale grassland conservation this century. And we will be able to measure these outcomes. We have modeled data that is ready to be able to actually measure these metrics and say, how much are we able to prevent loss of rancher income, maintain populations of different wildlife, reduce wildfire danger, prevent these big corridor transitions. But it really depends on us as a group of creating these large-scale demonstration sites on private lands. And that's really the discussion I'm hoping to have as this launches in places like South Dakota, down to Oklahoma, how can we actually show what success truly looks like? Because right now I only have a couple. And I don't have time to show that today, but there's two big success stories so far. And the ranchers in those areas, they wouldn't call it success yet. It just looks better than elsewhere. So thanks for the opportunity to meet on this. I'll copy these links and put them in the chat for you so you can see some of this work and dive into it more. Otherwise, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. I thank you, Dr. Tidwell, really do appreciate your presentation. In the interest of time, I think if we have any questions for Dr. Tidwell, please put them in the chat so that we can get along with our agenda. I really do appreciate that information. If you would put those links in the chat, we would appreciate it. Thank you very much. So moving forward on the agenda, we have Collette Kessler. She's going to talk about the next two items, which is conservation innovation grants and the conservation collaboration grant and cooperative agreements. Collette. Good morning. Are you able to hear me okay? Yes. Super, okay. So in the handouts with the meeting, if you go to about page eight and nine, I believe, that's where there's a summary of the comments that I'll have right here today. So the conservation innovation grants are a really cool opportunity for us to try out practices on the landscape. And they've been around for quite a while. And with the forthcoming opportunities with climate smart agriculture, there'll be some additional opportunities to test out innovative practices. So I guess part of what I want to do today is just ask our ag groups. If you would please, as you're talking with your memberships to ask them about practices that they're doing on their landscape that might be outside of what we have in our technical guide, because that's what this conservation innovation grants program is about. So there could be something that's working out there that we don't have in our portfolio of practices. And anyway, if you, as you get those conversations started, please talk with your local offices or contact me or any of the technical staff and we'd be happy to start addressing those new ideas and see how we can get them integrated to our portfolios, our suite of conservation practices. So that page has the two proposals that were submitted this year and were selected for funding. We're excited about those. The other page has a summary of our conservation collaboration cooperative agreements and our conservation collaboration grant agreements. So unfortunately this year we had thought we would have more money than we did for agreements but we were able to fund 11 agreements and the summary is on that sheet right there. I won't go through all of them, but in the future, please consider ideas for how we might work together for our partnerships for South Dakota and how we can continue to get some conservation practices on the land. It is likely that we'll have a call for proposals that'll come after the first of the year and those that call for proposals will be open for 60 days. So everything that we do will be posted on grants.gov so that you can go there and set up your account and set your notifications for South Dakota and also we'll do a news release and have a distribution announcement too but I just wanna make sure that you're aware of the grants.gov opportunity for notifications as well. So if anybody has any questions, please let me know. You can contact me offline or ask them right now, thanks. Thanks Collette. Do we have any questions for Collette regarding our grants and agreement opportunities coming up? Not seeing any. Thank you very much. Next up, the next two agenda items are gonna be Jeff Vanderbilt and his team giving us updates on the conservation implementation strategy and program update. Yeah. All right, good morning everybody. So the conservation implementation strategy just kind of a quick update on where we are with that. November is typically the month where we make our announcement for new projects for would be 2023 in this case. Gonna have a little delay based off of some feedback that we got from the signup we held in 2022 or excuse me, 21-4-22. We need to make a few adjustments and I've been working with the leadership team on how we're gonna make those adjustments and exactly what those adjustments are going to look like. So please bear with us. There'll be a slight delay in us getting those out but we'll hope to get that out the first part of December. Just another quick thing to mention about CIS is that we have funded 16 projects each year for the last two years. We have a total of 32 projects that we have funded so far. Our first 16 are up and listed on our website and we are in the process of getting this next 16 getting all the documentation and GIS stuff put together so we can get that on our websites that all 32 projects will be listed on our website and you'll be able to look at those. I would tell you that as I've been working on the budget here for 22, we have three projects that we're able to pretty much use all of their funding last year and therefore are now in the phase of waiting to see the results of the hard work that they did on those projects to get practices obligated and now hopefully they're getting implemented. So we hope to see some results from those projects here before too long and we'll have something that we'll be able to share with you guys about the successes that we've had in those areas. So that's kind of a quick update on CIS. We'll be putting that new information out. Basically what we're trying to do is limit the size of the proposals that are being submitted. We've been getting some pretty large 50 to 100 page proposals submitted, which is not quite what we're after. Kind of a lot of extra informations being put into those proposals and we don't want them to be quite that elaborate or that difficult. So we'll be working on that and getting some of those sideboards put out so that you guys know kind of what we're after. So look for that and we'll let you know as soon as we've got it ready, we'll get it sent out to the entire state tech list that you guys are well aware that it's out and on the street and hopefully you can get your proposals put together and we can get a chance to work together, partner together to do some great conservation work here in South Dakota. I'm gonna skip ahead just a little bit. I'm gonna cover our CPP instead of GenWertz and then I'll turn it over to GenWertz after I talk about our CPP here as well. Again, these are just a couple of quick updates. First and foremost, I would tell you that we anticipate an announcement coming out for new proposals for our CPP. In all honesty, I think headquarters had hoped to have it out by now but they are working on getting the approvals they need from the department to get that out and on the street. So keep your eyes open for that, hope it comes out soon. But I don't really have any specifics on when it might be as they try to work with the department to get the approvals they need to get that announced. I would tell you that we now have a total of nine projects here in South Dakota. Eight of them are actually administered here out of South Dakota and then we are a partner state on one project. We did have two new proposals under the Alternative Funding Arrangement or AFA. We had two of those funded recently. One was with the American Coalition for ethanol and that is just for South Dakota, kind of the southeast corner of the state, I would say. Is their target area where they're going to work on developing some techniques to produce low-carbon corn for ethanol, which then hopefully will be able to be used as low-carbon fuel in some of the low-carbon fuel markets across the country. The other one was with the National Fish and Wildlife Federation. That actually is a five-state project that includes us, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, and Nebraska. Now that these are new projects, we're trying to get all the agreements and everything all get into place and then make some announcements, but the NIFWF one will be fairly similar to some of the stuff that NIFWF has done in the past. They're actually going to do several works with the funding that they have in order to fund some different projects throughout those five states. So NIFWF will actually make an announcement for that funding and hopefully be able to get some projects here in South Dakota funded where we can get some conservation on the ground that way as well. The other projects are all on various stages and I anticipate that most of them will have signups this year in 2022. And hopefully then we can start getting some conservation on ground through our CPP as well here in South Dakota. So for those of you that don't know, RCPP was kind of revamped in the 2018 Farm Bill and we went from having just about, I think we had three RCPP projects before to now we're up to nine. So RCPP is growing rapidly here in South Dakota which is pretty exciting. It does require a partnership which I think speaks volumes of the partnerships that we have here in South Dakota and how we're able to work together to get conservation on the ground. So really excited about that. And like I said, I'll keep letting you know when the new opportunities come around so that if you've got some ideas, we can work together and I will, I will honestly help you discuss your projects, what will be a good fit for RCPP and what won't. I can't say that I'm batting a thousand but obviously we're doing fairly well with the number of proposals we submit versus the ones that get funded. So again, continue to try, continue to think about projects and I'll be happy to work with you on those projects to make sure that we get something that fits pretty well. So that's kind of a quick update on CIS and RCPP both. So with that, Jackie, I'll turn it back to you. Or excuse me, I apologize, I'll turn it over to Jen to talk about it. Sorry about that. Good morning, everyone. I hope everyone is having a good fall. I'm gonna shut my video off and share a handout of how we wrapped up fiscal year 21. This should be about page 10 of the handouts that were attached to Kathy's invite. This first page kind of breaks down some of the national initiatives that we had with the National Water Quality Initiative, Sage Grouse. We had Honey Bee Pollinator Initiative and then statewide, we had the Soil Health Initiative and the Northern Plains Grassland Bird, Working Lands for Wildlife Initiative. And then we did have some fires up in Perkins County, Jones County. There was two up in Perkins County and one in Jones County that we did some fire recovery for as well. And excuse me, the initial allocations and number of assessments that were able to be funded and those are on this page. Along with kind of just an overall summary of where we sat dollar-wise. And I'm guessing that this handout is a little bit small. But we had about $21 million that we got. We were able to get $20 million, $20.6 million of that obligated into contracts with a total of 355 contracts that we ended up obligating. When you, if you do the math and you add up some of these assessments, it's going to be over 355. And the reason being is that with our new ranking system through the conservation assessment and ranking tool, we can partially fund an assessment through multiple fund pools. So these numbers will show that if there's an assessment in another part of the fund pool funded, we may result in one contract obligated for that producer though. The next couple of handouts and this breakdown are general funding fund pools, the individual reservations, animal waste, beginning farmers, socially disadvantaged, forest. And then we had one fund pool with all 16 categories for our resource units. And they again, break down by where we ended up dollar-wise in each of them, how many that we funded, how many assessments were totaled in there. Our organic on-farm energy, high tunnel wildlife, we did have SIG. And I don't show any of the cost overrun. We did have a little cost overrun, monies that went back out through a few modifications. The next page on that handout covers the 16 CIS projects that we funded last fiscal year and the results of where we ended up with those. And this is showing just the fiscal year 21 part of the budget. So some of these will also continue into fiscal year 22. So that, and this is a breakdown of just the American Indian fund pools that will be used for our Tribal Advisory Committee as well tomorrow. So before moving on to anything else, anybody have any questions specific to equip from fiscal year 21? Okay. Just to let you guys know our batching date for basically everything that is on this sheet for fund pools is going to be December 3rd for funding in fiscal year 22. And right now we had our initial allocation. We're getting about 16.4 million that is going to be broke out between these fund pools, our 32 CIS projects. And any other initiative that comes down the way on that. We have in addition to that about 121,000 that will go specifically for the National Water Quality Initiative and 400,000 going specifically for Sage Grouse. And I know another popular one program that we had or sign up that we had going on in South Dakota was for the Honey Bee Pollinator. Unfortunately, we are no longer receiving national funding for that. So that Honey Bee Pollinator is going to be wrapped up and incorporated into our wildlife funding pool. So producers still can choose to do Honey Bee practices providing forage for the Honey Bees. It'll just be in the wildlife funding pool for funding. So one other thing that you may have heard is that we have a coronavirus agricultural relief payment as carp, those are a payment for the spike or excuse me, price spikes that happened in 2021 due to the coronavirus. National headquarters issued a seven practices that would be mandatory to get these practice or get these price fight payments. And then there's an additional 18 practices that could be used for that. And I just say that the practices in South Dakota that we would be looking at are our roofs and covers irrigation pipeline, lined waterway or outlet, livestock pipeline, channel bed stabilization, animal mortality facility, forage and biomass planting, pumping plant, re-front off structure, livestock shelter structures, saturated buffer, subsurface drain, underground outlet, vegetated treatment area, wetland wildlife habitat and structures for wildlife. Now, the caveat is that the practice had to be installed in calendar year 21 and it had for the top seven that I named off, those will get a percentage payment. The bottom 18 will depend on what the payment rate was for the fiscal year of the contract that it is installed under. So there's some that may get a payment, may not. And the total payment going out to the producer needed to be a minimum of $300. So that was just something to make you aware of that we're doing that as we can manage through the CSP payments that are happening right now as well, the payment can be for carp can be made into January. So once we get the final numbers of practices installed in calendar year 21, we'll have a more detailed list of what we could have done for carp. So any other questions I'm going to stop sharing here? The only other thing that I wanna add, we're gonna hold a equip subcommittee meeting here in the near future. I don't know exactly when yet. My understanding is the conservation incentives information is going to be kind of released to us today, shortly after this meeting actually, at which point then I'll want to convene a subcommittee on how and what we're gonna target with this new effort that's gonna come. I don't have a lot of details yet, but we'll certainly share those with the subcommittee and then the full committee when we get a chance. At our next meeting. So if you are interested in being part of that equip subcommittee, please let myself or Jen know so that we can get you invited to that meeting. Thank you. If you've already signed up for our programs, subcommittee for state tech, we will invite you as well. If you have not signed up for that, please let us know. Thank you for that. Joyce, looks like you're up next. Good morning. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen to give you the view of what's happening with CSP right now and be a little bit short this morning, but we're in the middle of our 22 renewal sign up. The right application deadline was April 7th and we received 357 applications for the 2022 renewals. And the allocation we received was $6,628,000. I mean, yeah. $6,628,000. The ranking deadline is actually this Friday and our obligation deadline is December 17th and these are 2017 classics and renewals and they have to be obligated before the end of the year because before December 31st, excuse me, because that is when they, that is their end date, sorry, my brain, some days doesn't function right. So this is basically how our allocation was spread out through our resource units, the beginning farmer and the socially disadvantaged to get 10% of our initial allocation. And then the other allocations were spread out according to historical funding levels. We also have a little bit in there for the private forest. Sometimes we get an application for those, sometimes we don't, we'll see what's there this year. The GCI, Grassland Conservation Incentive Program under CSP, that 2022 signup was October 15th. The letters were sent out in August from national headquarters and they are currently being worked on that obligation deadline also is December 31st. We had a South Dakota had an allocation of 83,000 in that and usually that covers whatever applications we do get. And then the CSP Classic 2022, that application deadline is December 3rd. How long has Jen mentioned that that's also equipped? And so we moved it up this year, trying to get things completed on time, how to give the field offices time to get to the field and get these things reviewed and ranked. Our initial allocation right now for the CSP Classic 2022 is 8,640,000. We also have an organic allocation of 200,000 and the ranking deadline we have placed at March 18th with the obligation deadline of April 29th, 2022. So that's where we sit with CSP Classic, CSP right now. So if there's any questions, I'll take them. Otherwise I'll turn it over. All right, thank you Joyce. Go on to Brandon. All right, good morning everybody. I'm going to share my screen here right away. Well, it's that time of the year when we get to sit down and discuss the easement compensation rates for the year. This is included in your packet. Some of you might notice a little bit of a change on the map. This year we are gonna be doing things a little bit differently in South Dakota. We will be conducting individual appraisals on parcels that are tentatively selected for funding. We did have a few factors that kind of roll into the decision that we made to go this route. One of the first ones there is we did see a reduction in our allocation for easements for this year. Again, we're sitting right about 3.5 million, which is quite a bit lower than we've seen in previous years. Another factor is we actually do have an existing contract in place to conduct these appraisals, and we do already have funding within that contract. So kind of mixing those together, we have some options available to save some funds and move forward with the appraisals. As you can see on the map here, what we're proposing is a GARC rate of 90%. This is the similar rate that we have used since 2016, and we have a not-to-exceed rate of 5,800 per acre. A few of the questions that we've received so far from some of the landowners as we've been going through this, the big one is if they as an applicant would have to pay back the appraisal costs, the answer to that is no. That is not one of the costs that is associated or charged to landowners should they cancel. It's part of our preliminary due diligence. And the other one that I've had that several times already is if we move to appraisals, do we always have to do appraisals? And the answer to that is no as well. Jeff and I have discussed several times. We're gonna go through the individual appraisals for fiscal year 22, and we'll see how it goes, test it out, and if we want to move back to the area wide market analysis, that is something that we can easily do. I'd say from what I'd seen across our neighboring state so far, there's some others going this way as well, mainly due to the same reasons with funding and whatnot as well. So I guess if you would have any feedback specifically on our GARC rate of the 90% or not to exceed rate, if you could provide that to Jeff or I by next Friday on November 26th, that'd be greatly appreciated. The next thing that I was gonna show you guys is a little bit here on our water bank numbers for fiscal year 21. So this year we did have 30 applications for water bank. As you can see down here, we had 20 of them that we were able to select for funding, which covered about 1,832 acres here in South Dakota for just about $877,000. So again, that program's only a total of $4 million for North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota. So we got a pretty nice chunk of it this year. Included in your packet as well is some examples of a WRE and ALE ranking. I'm not gonna go through those with you folks, but I just wanted to provide those since it's been a little time since we've seen those. All of our ranking are posted on our website for WRE and ALE and water bank as well. So if you ever wanna look at all of them there on there, if you have questions on those, I'd definitely be more than happy to answer them when you have a chance to review them. So I guess, Jackie, I turn it back over to you unless anyone has any questions for me on GARC rates or easements in general. All right, thank you, Brandon, and program's team. Any questions for any of the program's team on what they covered today? All right, hearing none, let's move along. Next up, we have Deek Habek with the South Dakota Wetland HEL Compliance Update. Deek. All right, so I'll start off just going over, last year we did 1,184 certified wetland determinations. That was actually down a year before we did about 1,500. Then we usually average around 1,400. So it is down just a little bit, still getting plenty coming in. As you can see, we got 14 on the 5,69 potential violations. Includes carryover, so we got 14 in progress. We did a completed 17 last year. So we still got some work to do there. A lot of those 5,69s get delayed until after crops are out, so we can start doing surveys to determine if there's a violation or not on the site. So far, I mean, we're completing about as many as we normally would, pace-wise. We received 44. I would say that we're probably gonna get still clear of that 1,000 by the end of the year because it kind of goes in waves. Harvest gets done, people come in. Holidays are over, people come in trying to figure out, make decisions on what they can do, what they can get set up. The request age is kind of the nice thing. I mean, it's fairly stable. We got a few more that bumped into that four-month range, but for the most part, anything six months, that's dealing with some obstacle of some sort, whether it's having to evaluate different factors for false positives or negatives for a variable that's affecting a call of hydrology or soils or vegetation. But overall, I mean, we're still sitting almost close to 70% there in that three-month range. And I kind of strive in as these requests, you know, a few of them come in. I really hope we can get, we're always gonna have something sitting in that six month. I just believe that, but hopefully we can get it down to like 1% would be nice. And then our highly-erotable land workload, I mean, that's a fairly significant workload. We did 1,878 highly-erotable land determinations for participants last year. This year, we've completed 20 so far, we got 293 outstanding. And then, you know, sitting here at 168 new breakings. Last year of that 1,800, about half of those were new breakings, which is pretty common. That's all I really have on compliance as far as numbers and what we usually discuss if there's anything else. Let me know. All right, thank you, Dick. Appreciate that update. Any questions for compliance? Right. So new to the agenda, we decided to add some partnership reports, partnership updates, different things that's going on in the partnership to update us, give you a time to get feedback, provide information to us, different things you wanna spotlight on that. So we did hear from Blaine Brackie with the South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts. He's gonna give us a short presentation on some locally-led success stories. Yes, hello, everybody. Can everybody hear me? Can you hear me, Jackie? Yep, we got you. Perfect, well, I'll see if I can share my screen quick. There we go, can you see that? Yes, you're good to go. So for those of you that don't know me, Blaine Brackie worked with a grant called, a CCD grant called the Locally-led Project through SDACD and NRCS. We do all kinds of different work, but mostly centered on locally-led and resource concerns and working with conservation districts, NRCS, on a lot of different stuff. One of the, a new part of our project that we're starting to work on are these locally-led success stories. These would be more centered on video, making some videos for promotional work, social media ads, stuff like that. And right now we're kind of in the stage of trying to identify projects to focus on. So I'm just going to run through a quick few slides on kind of what we're looking for to see if any of you that are on this call have any ideas or projects in mind that you would like to be a part of this project. So kind of the, what is this part of these success stories? So be anything with locally-led origin. So your CIS, RCPP, 319 watershed projects, conservation districts, game fishing parks, any of those kind of partners that involve a lot of different groups. So what these videos kind of the vision behind them is the part of the stage that we're in right now that'll focus on kind of the project as a whole. We really want to focus on the people and the partnerships that are involved in making, say like a CIS happen or something along those lines happen and just be able to tell that story that to people that might not already know how these projects come together and to be able to showcase what everybody is doing, statewide, all the work that goes into putting a project together and the teamwork and partnerships that are made for those to happen. So that's kind of the big vision of these to involve people, I guess would be the main goal of it. There'll be a total of eight videos by the time we're said and done, at least that's what we're shooting for, on like a four to eight minute range, just kind of depending on what kind of content we get for them. Again, so these would be like local origin so you would have everywhere from your community, just community members that are non-producers to producers, county commissions involved or any other organizations, kind of the more partners, the better and that can tie back to say that this was started as a local effort through people coming together to want to address an issue. So, and we also need to have identifiable resource concerns. That's another part of the video we'd like to focus on, how these resource concerns were identified. That wasn't just NRCS or a district saying, we need to fix these. It was producers or community members or a partner, all coming together saying, hey, we have a few issues and we'd like to address them. So that would be kind of part of the story that we'd like to tell. And again, down at the bottom here, the story would be people, relationships, teamwork, they go into making these projects happen. It'll be a little different from say, soil health videos or grassland videos where they kind of focus on one producer. We'd like to focus on, of course there'll be producers involved, but it wouldn't be just one. So it's just kind of just general quick and dirty of what these videos are about. If I can go to the next. Who is going to be involved? Kind of went over some of that already. Community partnership stakeholders, project coordinators, so not necessarily just NRCS or conservation districts. It wouldn't even have to be a project that was initiated by NRCS or conservation district. Could just be something conservation related. It was started in your county and your district and several counties wide. It's kind of, we're kind of an open book on what kind of a project we would be willing to take on this. People that would be involved, we would need them to be able to participate in interviews about their involvement with the project. So kind of ideally, yeah, participants in the project are also willing to speak about it. So there again, producers, NRCS, conservation districts, urban ag demonstration farms, any and all conservation related. The greater number of partners, the better for this project. So when would we be looking to do this? We are hoping that this next spring we could start doing some shooting. So that would be with maybe three or four projects starting in the spring of 22 and we can start the others in 2023. Some of these maybe they're just, if it's a CIS it's just getting started. In the spring, we could still do some shooting and then come back the next year and kind of finish it up with interviews or after shots, whatever that may be. But if any of you have any ideas we can be really flexible on what kind of schedule that we go with depending on everybody else's schedule since so many, ideally so many folks will be involved. So why would we be doing something like this? The big one is just to increase that public awareness and kind of inspire others to get involved as I became part of this locally led project and kind of initiative. We saw the need that a lot of people don't know what say NRCS does or conservation districts do or what's happening in their backyard and how these projects come together. They just see things happening, but they don't know how. So that's where this came about. Social media commercials, education conferences, in schools we can for sure show these things kind of anywhere the word would be good to get out. So how are we going to tackle this? So we have Joe Dickie, some of you might have known him or heard of him. He does grasslands videos, soil health videos, many others worked with in South Dakota for many years and he's hired on as our videographer. So he'll be back and forth South Dakota a lot doing videos for lots of other projects next year. So we'll be real flexible with him. They'll cover large areas, many people. We won't just be able to come out in one day and shoot. But again, like he's all over the state. So we can work all that out later if you are interested. Kind of the big thing on this, we'll need the teamwork. This video project would be just as much a part of the project that we're featuring and the leaders of that project. These videos would kind of just be as much a part of them as say, as my team and the videographer. So we'd need a lot of teamwork, both ways to get these to the finish line. And then I guess to finish up, here's my contact info. I'm the locally led project coordinator with SDACD and then Katie Youthy is our communications coordinator. She can also answer any questions. So if you have any ideas, I guess if I can leave you with anything today just something to chew on. If you have a project in your area or something that you've heard about that you think would be a real cool, if you don't plaster it all over the place, but videos to showcase and some people involved have some interesting stories. We'd love to hear about them and see if we can work something out. But yeah, that's all I have for you today. If you have any questions, feel free to ask or shoot me an email and you can go from there. But that's all I have, Jackie. All right, thank you, Blaine, appreciate that. You know, we're really great at getting the work done, implementing our projects. We're not great at telling our story. So really think this is a great idea, a great project to look for and getting our message out there to our non-traditional customers, those that don't necessarily know who NRCS and the districts are. So thank you very much for that. Thank you. All right, so we have a few minutes left. So are there any other partnership updates that you want to provide? Anything going on in your respective areas that you want to share? Jackie, can you hear me? This is Sandy Smart. Yes, Sandy. So I just wanted to say hello to everybody. I'm starting my new role as the Ag and Natural Resources Program Leader at SDSU Extension. And so I'll be trying to attend as many of these kinds of meetings as I can and looking forward to work with folks from NRCS and all over as ways we can increase the capacity of conservation in South Dakota. So I just wanted to say hi to everybody and looking forward to meeting people in person as we can. All right, welcome Sandy. Thanks for coming on. There are updates or questions regarding anything we covered today or something we may not have covered. Not seeing any questions or any hand raised. So I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up. Thank you all so much for joining us today. We really do appreciate your input, your feedback, your participation. Partnerships is what makes us successful and we've been doing great work here in South Dakota and I know we can keep it up into the future. If you have any questions throughout the next quarter, we do have our tentative dates scheduled for our next state tech meeting, which is February 16th. So mark that down on your calendar. We'll move forward with that date unless something comes up that we are unable to move forward but right now tentatively save the date is February 16th for our next state technical committee meeting. Again, thank you for joining us. Do appreciate you and thank you for all the work you do for conservation in South Dakota. Have a great afternoon.