 So as you can see the banners up here, Clett and her staff, all the staff put all these banners together. Rebecca I think did a lot of the work on putting the banners together to talk about our easement program and having it in South Dakota here now for 25 years. So to give you an idea, you know it started back in 1993, the Farm Bill authorized WRP, the Wetlands Reserve Program, and now it's changed titles to ASEP, the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. But essentially it's the same thing and it's been around for 25 years now. The scary part is, I've been in this job for nine, which means I've had quite a few years of this program under my belt, but we want to take a little bit of time here to kind of celebrate ASEP this year and Clett also put together a nice video when the chief came to visit last week as well as our regional conservationists and I'm just going to play this video for you. Celebrating 25 years of easements in South Dakota, that's a great thing. I think of easements as one more tool in our conservation toolbox. We have conservation programs entitled to the Farm Bill that allow us to solve individual particular problems on farms like equip, pay farmers and ranchers to continue their stewardship of their land through the conservation stewardship program, participate in a ten-year conservation reserve program, but now also talking about easements and really protecting land for the long term. Some would say that those lands need to be kept in production, but really they're being reserved for future needs of this nation. It's important to think of conservation reserve easements as really reserved. They're held for a later time when we need, in the meantime they're providing great habitat for important species that need some help, so it's kind of a dual win. It's value for the taxpayers and it is value for individual landowners. It's a voluntary program and that's what's great because we also aren't looking for the best land. We're looking for that land that is not quite so productive or that landowners have struggled to farm in the past. Hello everyone, this is Matt Lohr and I have the great honor of serving as chief of NRCS. I had a chance to spend some time here in the great state of South Dakota this week and what a pleasure it's been for me to have a chance to see the beautiful countryside and to learn more about the issues that are very important to everyone here in the state. The main reason I came out to South Dakota to visit was for me to get a better understanding of the wetlands issues that are faced here in South Dakota with the compliance and highly rotable lands compliance. Obviously this has been an issue that you guys have been dealing with for many, many years and so it was very helpful for me to come and see firsthand. Being able to visit with the farmers who try to farm these areas, seeing their challenges and struggles and being able to work with the NRCS staff on their side was really enlightening for me. The cool thing about being here is even though there's a lot of challenges, NRCS and South Dakota has a lot of programs that can really help our producers work through some of these issues. As you know, EQUIP is a wonderful tool with practices that can help farmers be better stewards. Certainly, CSP, South Dakota leads the country in CSP contracts that can help farmers really go to that next step with their incentives to make sure that they're farming the land to the best of their abilities and certainly one of the best tools that we have to work in these complex areas is easements, certainly the Wetlands Reserve easement program. I know it celebrates 25 years this year that WRE has been in effect, had a chance yesterday to actually go out and visit with the farmer who has easements on his land and be able to listen to him and work through the process and see the benefits, being able to have that better soil health, reduce the flooding, improve the water quality. More importantly, make sure that land will stay a wetland and remain out of production for either 30 years or even forever. As a farmer in Virginia, we have permanent conservation easements on our property because I understand the value and the importance of easements and for my family making sure that that land can stay productive for for the next many, many generations. So just want to say congratulations on all your work. It's great to be here in South Dakota and see the practices that are being in place and certainly want to say congratulations to everyone who's been involved with the Wetland Reserve easement program for 25 years. Just real quick on a couple of things, just to kind of get on a couple of things on these banners for everybody to be aware of, in the 25 years that easements have been offered here in South Dakota, and you kind of saw it on the video towards the end, you know, we've enrolled over 150,000 acres in those 25 years. So obviously this is very popular in South Dakota, and we really thank our landowners that are willing to do that. And you see that it's almost a four to one ratio on the acres of permanent to 30-year easements. So we have a lot of permanent acres, permanent habitat that we've created here in South Dakota on land that probably wasn't the most productive farmland in South Dakota. So I think it's been a benefit for our wildlife as well as for the landowners. The other thing we started to do these last couple of years is focus a little bit more on our management on our easements. I would I would tell you like a lot of things we get a little bit of blinders on and it was all about enrolling acres and rolling acres and rolling acres. And we didn't take time to go, what are we getting with these acres? Are we taking care of them? Are they being managed the way they should? So we've kind of taken a step back the last couple of years and said, let's spend some money on on improving our acres. And some of what we've done, like you can see here, we've done 3,700 acres of of seeding to benefit pollinators. OK, so that's one of the things where we just went back in and said, let's do a more diverse seed mix on some of our easements and create a little bit better habitat. So we did that on 49 of them. If you look at the one all the way to the end, you'll also see that the kind of the middle map there is going to show you if you get up there a chance to read it, how we've also done some stuff to improve infrastructure on some of our easements. So that the only option is a pain. OK, I'm not here to bash hang easements by any stretch of the imagination, because that is something we can do for management. But if you can't believe your talk a little bit, you heard him also say that we have to integrate livestock. And one of our biggest issues with our easement was there was nothing out there that would allow us to integrate livestock back onto our easements. And we found that to be something that we really needed to to go back and talk with our landowners and say, hey, are you interested in integrating livestock back on your easements to help improve habitat and just the general condition of your easements? So we've done some work over the last couple of years. You can kind of see the counties where we've been doing that work. I know it's well over 50 easements on that as well. And we're continuing to to try to work with our landowner to continue to do that. So I think it's a really great thing. And then all the banners in between just give you the basic reasons why easements are a good thing here in South Dakota. All the different things that easements can provide to not only to our landowners, but to just everybody, any resident here in South Dakota, right? They give us an opportunity to improve water quality, infiltration, help reduce some of the flooding, which we all know that's happening this year. So I guess for me, I'm really proud of my staff that works on all this. Most of them aren't here today. You saw a picture towards the end where a majority of our staff was in that picture. And I can't say thanks enough to them for all the hard work that they have done. Obviously, there have been a few people before me that have also worked on easements, because I have not been here the whole 25 years. But they kind of set the foundation. And I can't stress enough how much NRCS is really interested in working with landowners to just make these easements great habitat for them, for the state, and also for all these other benefits that you see up there. So I thank you guys for being part of that. Some of you were here for the whole thing. And some of you only been here for a few years to help us with this. But, you know, kind of your promotion, your guidance, you're talking to folks as well about the benefits of easements is really important. It doesn't fit everywhere. And that's OK. That top map over there, if you guys want to take a look at that, we'll show you how many acres in each county that we have for easements and whether the perpetual or 30 year easement. So these banners are in your handouts as well, so that you can take them home with you up. And I'm sure we will be getting the video and stuff like that on the website here before too long as well. So if you guys want to show that at one of your events somehow or some way, you'd certainly be welcome to do that. So anybody have questions on kind of our 25 years while we've done? OK, so the last thing I'll touch on then is 2019 and what we're doing this year. We have 80 applications this year again. So like I'll go back and say again, interest is high. We've got five point two million dollars. So that's only going to allow us to fund 11 of those 80 applications that we got. So we have asked for an additional three point six million dollars, I believe it is that we can fund some additional easements as well. If we if we were able to get those additional funds from another state, that's not using it. We had three ALE applications with agricultural lands easements. Those are kind of more of a working lands easements. We had three applications. We really didn't even have enough money to fund one. So we've asked for the additional money to take to fund that one application, our highest ranking application. So with any luck, we'll get those funds and we'll have one ALE easement to enroll this year as well. So that's kind of a quick update on where we're at with easement status this year as well. Any questions on on that? Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Jeff. And I'm very proud of the easement team and what they've done over the years. And I'm also proud of all of you and the groups you represent, like Jeff said. So one of the things that we're going to want to do is with this 25 year celebration. Rick, I'm excited. We find it full. I found a program that's older than me, but I wish. But the key of it is we want to say thank you to the producers. So we are going to be putting out some things to kind of recognize them because none of this happens without them, right? I mean, you heard from the chief, you heard from Kevin. It's a voluntary program. And so if it wasn't for producers saying I would like to put this program on my operation because it will have value for my operation, none of this would happen. And we want to say thank you. These members, these producers are members of your organizations. So how could you help us share that message with them? So I'd like to have you think about that a little bit, visit with Collette because we'd like to share that. Thank you, right? We can you guys help us push that message out. So again, it really all goes back to back to landowners doing those positive things in the landscape. So thank you to them.