 Today we're at the Larry Wagoner property south of Pukwana, South Dakota, and we're looking at the benefits of native grasslands for insulation of the soil as well as catching snow and creating another layer of insulated blanket with the snow. This is a planted grassland, so it's native planting, an old field, and the benefits of that plant community as far as structure and function is really impressive. Catching snow all winter down here in this Chamberlain, South Dakota area, Larry's told us that we've got about 65 inches of snow so far this winter with freeze thaw. What we were able to demonstrate today is the ability of that snow blanket to insulate the soil. We were able to drive down a typical infiltration ring that we usually use in the growing season months to demonstrate how fast the soil can take water. And here in the middle of winter, hard frozen ground, we were able to move that snow out of the way easily drive that infiltration ring into the soft, soft black soil, and we did our infiltration test and it was only a 40-second, 40 seconds until it took that first liter of water. Which nobody really thinks about. Well, we talked about snow and frozen ground and runoff. Nobody ever really talks about infiltration and the benefit that these grasslands have for capturing so much of that early spring what would typically be runoff from the snow goes right into the ground. This ground, like I said, has not froze yet a lot of it, so it's still infiltrating water and we'll keep doing so with our snow cover. And of course, we're getting late enough that we'll probably hopefully have some spring rains. It's a slow melt of the snow allows it to infiltrate really well and so you get, I would say a hundred percent use of the moisture out of the snow. We were really lucky this year the snow we've got had an awful lot of moisture in it. So it's gonna really give our grass. I'm thinking we're gonna have a good start for grass this year. So what Larry's got out here now is this wonderful duff layer underneath the snow and the structural grass that's capturing the snow and actually sticking up above the snow. It's not gonna melt as quickly as the crop ground around us. This is gonna hold snow probably it could be up to a week or maybe two weeks after everything else is already gone. But that snow is melting slower and it's infiltrating right into the ground and the reason that it's gonna last longer is there's more of it. It caught more. Maybe, I don't know what percentage, but it's pretty obvious when you're out there it caught a lot more snow than the surrounding landscape. Once that's gone, all that grass is still there and the bird nesting habitat is phenomenal for these grassland nesting birds and these grass-dependent bird species whether it's waterfall coming through and nesting or the upland birds or the songbirds everything benefits just the stuff of life that having that grass material is the basis of everything. You know, good range stewardship, you know often you're gonna leave some residual prey or residual grassland. You know, it provides snow catch. You're gonna get more, you know, water infiltration, you know collect more soil moisture but it's also just a good indicator that, you know, you had some good management you're gonna see more diversity in those prairies, more production for grassland obligate species like our prairie grouse they nest in last year's cover. So whatever you leave in the fall whatever's there in the spring is what they're gonna nest in unlike a lot of bird species that are, you know, will nest after there's some regrowth. They nest with what you left so the more you can leave the more successful those species are gonna be. We were talking about the tenants of soil health and one of them is keep the ground covered and that means year-round and so certainly crop residue is helpful but it just can't match what we see in these grasslands and a lot of what we see here is the structural ability of that grass to catch the snow and keep that snow fluffy and penetrable for all life even our small mammals and voles and mice and things like that the snow isn't hard packed you get through that upper layer of crust and it's just powder more or less underneath and that air in the snow is what creates that insulated blanket you know, if it was packed ice we might have experienced something much different but the fluffiness of the grass itself is what keeps the snow fluffy and creates that blanket you know, it's essentially nature's sponge it's where the water's supposed to go when snow melts not down the road ditch so it's a pretty amazing demonstration that way