 Introduce Terry Heck, our next speaker. He kind of comes from Nevada and Montana, has some previous experience there with NRCS and the BLM. And he came to us in 2004 and was the district conservationist in Oneida and now is our range management specialist in Peer. So I'd like to welcome him to the floor. So thank you. Some of your faces in the crowd. Since taking this position in Peer, I've had an opportunity to be on a lot of landowner's places through the years and it's good to see it. I find it hard to believe that after the last couple years that we've had we're talking about drought and dry conditions. I can remember coming up here and stopping at the field office and they'd give me directions but the directions were not direct. I had to drive way over and around to come around because the roads were washed out or flooded. So that's a great example of where we live. I mean that's as quick as it can turn around. That's the northern Great Plains in general. That's the old saying, it's going to change. So we've all been there. We've all kind of dealt with that in some farmer fashion. Visiting with Neil and Holly here a few weeks ago. They were talking about this meeting and some of the questions they were getting. The big question is, what's the forecast for production on grasslands? Hopefully we'll try to bring some attention to that. But I thought I'd do something a little bit different with this workshop and this discussion. Working in several states, being on a lot of operations, being on a lot of workshops, range tours. I've had an opportunity to work with a lot of landowners. A lot of the discussions were about management, what they do during drought, what they do when it's not dry. I've made notes of all that, developing plans and occasionally I go back and look at that stuff. You always think there's a magic recipe to everything. I really don't run into that, but there's some really good information there that I've kind of gathered from other landowners on what they do and when these conditions come up. I'm going to try to kind of relay some of that to you today. I've never heard of that or that might be something I might be willing to try to make some adjustments on your grazing management and herd management. Like Jess said, hopefully this kind of dry spell we have is just a little kick in the pants and we get some moisture and we can get over this. I always like to talk about that historical perspective and I mean this is nothing new. It is where we live. We go through these dry cycles, we go through wet cycles and sometimes they happen fairly quick and you just have to kind of go with the flow with the roller coaster. I found some real neat information on some dendro-trageological work where they actually looked at some growth rings on trees in the black hills and it's rather interesting. Current conditions, that's where I'm going to kind of talk about what we're thinking is coming up and a lot of that goes back. If you're really looking at grown grass, you really need to be looking at what happened last year and what happened to a certain extent the previous year. So we're looking at 11 and 12 to really make some forecast for what's coming up. But there's some caveats to that and we'll kind of get into that a little bit. And then grazing management, no doubt. I'll say it right off the back. That's the biggest thing you can have in your toolkit for dealing with drought is what are you currently doing, grazing management, what's the condition of your grassland. It really, really dictates how this drought, these dry spells will affect you short-term and long-term. And then drought contingency plans. And a lot of that is some of the stuff I've kind of collected through the years working with other landowners. And hopefully we can talk about some things that are a little bit different, maybe or maybe haven't tried or heard about and so forth. Okay. I'm going to kind of go through this kind of quick. In 92, they went into the Black Hills, Ponderosa Pine. They did increment bores on trees. Basically they core into the tree, pull the core out and if everybody here has cut down a tree or seen a sawed-off tree, you see all these rings. Well, those are growth rings. And as the tree grows, it lays down the ring each year. So out toward the bark is the most recent year. And as you go in, you can kind of age the tree. Well, one of the things that you can kind of come to some conclusions on some of these rings is if they're narrow in size, you can assume that it was dry. There wasn't much roof back here. If they're wider, then it was probably wetter. So if you really want to look at drought patterns, so to speak, you know, we've only been relatively wise keeping rainfall records and everything fairly recent in the last 100, 120 years. You really want to go back and look at some of these drought cycles that have happened through the course of time. Trees are a great way to kind of put that together. Don't know if you can see this or not, but they put together this list of the 15 driest years ranked them. And how they ranked them was the length of the drought and the magnitude. And the magnitude would mean the rings were really close on the dry years. And on the wet years, same thing on the length, but the wider the tree rings were, the growth rings were just how they came to those conclusions. I highlighted number seven here. That's the 1933 to 1942 drought. That's the one that we all kind of remember. That was the dust bowl. That drought didn't make the top five. Number one up here, 1531 to 1551. And I'll admit I had to do a little Google search to find what historical event happened about them because I didn't know. 1531 was about, that was the year that King Henry the eighth declared himself the head of the Church of England. When you really start looking at this stuff, this really puts things in perspective. I mean, these these events happen. That particular event was 21 years long. You imagine if you were kind of around then and you were trying to grow crops and raise cattle, of course, you probably would have known no different. I mean, it was dry all the time, but you know, that's a long, long time. Again, here, here, here's the the longest, the number one, Wettysbury. And that was 1429 to 1448, 20 years. So you can get the other side. What I want to point out here is back back here in 1933, 1942, you can see it jumps right down here to 1943 to 47 on the wet side. So there are these events that show up on these growth rings where there was that dry cycle for 10 years. And boom, it went to a wet cycle within a short period of time. It's pretty common when you look at that is coming from the Black Hills data. Yep. You actually have trees that old in Black Hills? Well, here's what happened. Most of the ponderosa pine in the hills has been burned or logged off. They did find one tree that was 700 years old, which is very rare. So a lot of this data, you know, when it gets extremely old is kind of based off that one trick. So statistically, there may be a little bit of variability there. But that's kind of hot boil down. You know, most of the trees out there are probably 150. Okay. And most of you know this already, that when you look at the grasslands and particularly in this area, and this is actually a page out of one of our ecological site descriptions for Loney for this for this area, a lot of our grasses for the most part in this northern wheatgrass, needlegrass plains is cool season grasses. And when the cool season grasses typically grow, it's that early time of the spring, April, May, June. 85% of their growth is typically done about June 1st somewhere near. So there's that kind of that peak production kind of, it happens then. And then there's the kind of go dormant. And then there's kind of a pickup again, a little bit in, say, October or September and October. And that's cool season grasses. That's when they produce the most. Now there's the warm season grasses, which is like corn, they tend to do their growth when we're in a little bit of a warmer temperatures coming into July, August, those kinds of. So that's important to remember because that has a lot of direction or meaningfulness when rain comes, when it hits the right time of the year for those kinds of grasses. Okay, this is exactly what I talked about. These are some growth curves. The green is the cool season grasses. You can kind of see how their growth is kind of spiking here right around that April, May, June area. Then they kind of lower off. Then there's a little bit of a kick there in that fall. Here's the warm season grasses. So just by looking at that, you can kind of draw some conclusions. But it appears to me it's kind of important that we get some rainfall in that period, in this period. If you really want to grow cool season grasses. Okay, here's some actual data that I pulled off of Leola Weather Station. And this was at Roscoe. Last or the fall of 2011, Leola. And this red line is actually average. Here's what Leola got roughly in that September, October window, the fall of 2011. Now we're talking production for last year, about 0.62 inches. You normally should get about 3.15. So right there, it was significantly less, 46% of it. Spring of 2012, last year, 4.42. And I'll tell you what, you look at this, this is the actual rainfall in blue. Look at that big spike there in April. Obviously, there was some big rains that come through here right about then. If you hadn't got that, wow, they've been really tough. But anyway, you ended up with about 4.42 inches in that April, May, June window, which you should normally get about 7.8. Running some of our drought tool. Now I'm going to get to that. It actually will forecast or actually give you a percent of normal production based on some of that rainfall data. And it pulls it from weather stations. 65% of normal production is kind of an estimate. And that's looking at right at the first part of July based on these rainfall events. Good on the Roscoe, it was a little bit different. They got a little more rain in the fall, 2.03 inches. You normally get 3.08. Got a little better spring. They ended up at about 85% of them. You know, that's pretty big difference. But it kind of illustrates when those rains come really make a big difference. Okay, this is a US drop monitor. I know we're all kind of watching that. You usually see it on the news. Here's what it looked like October. And I kind of look at what it looked like at the end of the growing season of the previous year. And you can kind of see how it laid out. Here's what it looked like as of a few days ago, March 19. In this neck of the woods, the severe and moderate kind of shifted around a little bit. Down in this neck of the woods, you can kind of see that exceptional drought kind of moved up a little bit. Extreme drought in the western side of the state is actually crept up a little bit. So for the most part, it's still about the same. Really hasn't changed a whole lot. When it comes to grass production, it needs to be really, you need to be really thinking about these months that are coming up April, May, June. Okay. There are some of these maps in the back there. And this is that kind of our projection that we've come up with. And what it's what it did is it did exactly what I kind of showed there is we looked at rainfall based on all these weather stations across South Dakota collected that data and it looked at two years ago. And it looked at last year. And we come up with some projections. You look down here percent of normal average forage production. You get into this color suggestion that we got about a 70 70% of normal forage production. As you start creeping up into the yellows, it gets a little bit better. One thing you got to remember there is this down here, projected status assuming future average precipitation is average. So this is going to happen if we get April, May, June rains like we normally about seven inches, seven, eight inches. Now I know out working last year in June and July, we started getting some of those rain showers coming through and it got to be about August. And you could drive 10 miles and it looked different. And the crops were better. The grass was better. I was up doing some grass production in July on some grasslands. And normally in July, it gets dry. Cool season grasses kind of go dormant. It was green as can be. Which is kind of unusual. But I was in one of those bands that kind of kept get some of those rains. So when you look at this, there, there will be probably areas that are better than that. They managed to get a few of those showers. Again, April, May, June, we need to get it in that window. Kind of when we got started here. This is kind of one of those lists. I don't know how many tours I've been on and working on different operations, and especially the tours. And you know how it is when they put on a range tour of the district or whoever. You're usually putting them on or you're going someplace where she's always got grass. Even when it's dry, or they're innovative, they're doing something that, you know, that's a little bit different. So you get all excited and jump on the bus and go out and spend some time on the place. The back of your mind and I always do this, there's got to be a hidden recipe there somewhere, you know, of the success of this. And I don't know if I've ever gotten that recipe figured out. But I've collected some ideas and tips related to management, and those kinds of things that seem to be common with all of them. You know, I'm some of the tours up in the North Dakota, some of the innovative things going up there, some of the things in Eastern Montana, that's that's kinds of things I'm talking about. Those operations that always seem to have grass, even when it's dry, there seems to be some commonalities to it. And you know, when I look at this list, as long as it took me to collect it, it's pretty short. It's only eight things. You'd think it would be pages and pages, but really, it boils down to these. And I may have missed a few, but and some of them are kind of a collection of thoughts. But and some of them are very related. But this is kind of it. And we'll go through some of them in a little more detail. Some of them are pretty straightforward. Some of them you've heard about. That's kind of some of the stuff I want to share with you. Okay, this top one, animal forge balance, proper stocking rate. Everybody all understands that stocking rate is the acres that you allocate to an animal during a grazing season. And the acres that you allocate produce enough forage to support this animal for this law. That's a stocking rate. Everybody understands that. Or really serve that little, little tidbit on theirs. This changes as it gets drier or wetter. Yeah, those operations seem to take advantage of that. They make adjustments for wet and dry periods every year. And it's very rare to have one class of animal. I can't remember a time being on some of those places where they just ran all breeding pairs or cow calf pairs. They had some yearlings over here, some heifers over here. And that's kind of how it gives them the opportunity to be flexible with some of their stocking rates. Those marketable animals, they were able to move in and out of the operation. But they were always taken advantage of that. Managed to rainfall and erosion. You don't see their ground out there. And I walk away from the bunch and stumble around and go over the hill and you don't, you don't see it. They're very good managing residue on the ground surface. And we'll talk a little bit about that. Rest and recovery. They're always the ones that were grazing pastures more than once during the grazing season. They always had rest built into those systems. 30 to 60 days, some of them even more. Some of them even, some of them even more year, two years, some of them. A lot of rest understood the value of that. Of course, kind of depended on grazing periods and I'll get to that one shorter grazing periods. And I kind of went through and kind of, you know, writing down how the systems were all working, typically less than 30 days in a pasture at any one time. Very rarely did you ever see them in their pasture longer than that. And if they did, they put a lot of this on house, they have a stock density high enough that it's hard to find patch grazing. And I'm gonna spend a little time talking about that. Stock density is different than stocking rate. Stock density is a number of animals you have at any point in time on the pasture. And lately, the new buzzword that you usually hear related to that word to define that is pounds of beef per acre. A lot of these guys do an ultra high stock density, they're running 200,000 pounds of beef per acre. That's a stock density. A few years ago, it used to be head per acre. All the same thing. And we'll kind of get into that a little bit. Alternate the season of use, spring, summer, fall, they're always changing that up and never grazing a pasture at the same time every year. Some of the innovative ones that have opportunities for winter grazing, they're pulling their some of their winter grazing pastures, they rotate in and out of the summer grazing. That's pretty every one of them is doing some of them in the fashion of that. And here again to take half leave half, every one of them follows that full heartedly. Now there may be cases, depending on some objectives, they kind of dive in a little deeper than they want. Probably some years to focus on maybe some management objective or something. But then they're putting lots of rest. So they're kind of using these tips and techniques interchangeably and behind each other. And then they always have a plan in place to implement action items when dry conditions happen. Reduction gets to this point. I do this, everyone, eight things that I came up with all those hours of stomping around and going to workshops, well down to that. I'm going to get a little bit into the stocking rate and flex stocking rates. I see people using this in South Dakota. Actually, the old drought handbook that South Dakota had with Nebraska 91 publication, they'll see that. But it talks about flex stocking rates. So in the back there, before I get too far into this, I actually put together a little example of this, we're going to go through this. This is the example that was in that handbook, and how to do the calculations and grind the numbers. And it's pretty easy. I ate math, but it's easy. And then I kind of created an example, I kind of went through it with these numbers. And then on the back page, I actually there's a blank one there. So you can kind of mess around with it. Okay. Okay, this is how a lot of guys are adjusting their stocking rates every year. Here's a typical grazing unit that I probably commonly see up here. 1000 acres, average production is about 3200 pounds per acre. They're running about 159 pairs. Stocking rate of 1.05. Sounds about right now. Somewhere in there. Pretty common. Okay. This is how you could kind of project where you need to be at stocking rate for 2013. And I actually took data from Eureka. And some things you need to know is you need to know what the average precipitation is for area. Most you probably already know that. Most you probably keep records, presep records, and if kept them long enough, you probably have your own averages. Use those. What it looks at is a forage year. And a forage year is different than a calendar year. It's real similar. Well, it's actually what I talked about earlier with the slides of Leola and Roscoe. It looks at that October to September window, that precept that happened in that window. Okay. And we'll kind of go through this. It'll make sense. The precipitation in the year that just passed, you multiply that by 75%. And this is kind of a weighted rainfall. And what that's suggesting is the rainfall we got last year is more is more important. And then the rainfall that you received two years ago within that window, you weight that at 25%. So for this unit at Eureka, in 2011, that October 10 to September window, they received 17.69 inches. That was two years ago. So I'm going to multiply that at 25%. 4.42 last year in that window, you received 11.75 multiply that by 75%. Here's your total 13.22. You divide that by your average rainfall. This is going to give you a stocking rate adjustment based on those rainfalls two years ago and last year. This is what it's going to generate for you. And rainfall is related to production. Now, you got to be real comfortable with these like these AUMs per acre or these numbers of animals when you're going to use this, if you're slightly over stocked already, this may not be enough. This has got to be kind of a sustainable situation. Hey, I'm comfortable with this every year when I graze good or bad, let's get really bad. I'm good. I take half and leave half and I'm leaving residue. I'm comfortable with that. Take the 71% multiply that by the AUMs for carrying on that particular grazing unit. You end up with 746 AUMs. You do the math in 2013, you should be grazing 113 bears. But this is important. This is assuming that precipitation this spring is going to be in your average, which in that area is about seven inches. But you could have been doing these calculations last fall and had some idea of where things were going. Now, I use AUMs here, because when we do feed and forage balances, we do all the conversions and use AUMs, I've seen where if they're if you're comfortable with these numbers, I've seen where people that are using this, they just multiply this times that number of animals comes up to the same thing. You got to be comfortable with these numbers. Sustainable. That's flexible stocking rates. They do that every fall. So they know what they're coming up against. And then they can make some decisions. This is using pairs. But if you had some of those yearlings out there that we talked about earlier, that's where you make those adjustments easier. Those marketable animals. And that's why I mentioned a lot of those operations will have almost every one they have multiple classes, kinds of animals or classes of animals. I did the calculations for what you should have done in 2011. You went through the calculations and pulled in the rainfall data. You should have been at 112% stocking rate adjustment. You could have been running 186 pairs that year. Based on the rainfall that we got two years ago in the year before, probably could have. We had lots of grass 2012 did the same thing come out to be about 99% about right on. But put this big star down here. This is kind of where it come apart. We probably didn't get our average precept when we should have. And this was probably we should have done something that's flex stocking rates. The other method that I've come across that some guys use. Then that probably could be used. You know, you've done this and yet you're 100%. But we get into those months where we need that moisture. And it doesn't happen two years now, but told me what he does in it and worked for him. It was he takes the okay comes to June 30th, July 1. And we're at 60% normal preset. He added 10% and he destocked he only he destocked 30%. He adjusted his stocking rate 70%. He just added 10 on to the actual percent of average rain. And that worked. So as he was going through the grazing grazing season, he was monitoring that preset. Now that was focusing on current year rainfall, it wasn't so much looking at those past years. That was one way that particular operation was managing stocking rates when it got dropped. That's pretty simple to do. You know, and like I said, they do it in the fall because after October, you think through your rainfall data, grind the numbers. Question on this. Now with those adjustments, are those calves hand away in the same weight in the fall? In this example, it's pairs. And usually when we set up stocking rates, we don't really account for the calves up until they're six months old. And a lot of times up here, the window between when they turn out and weaning falls pretty close to that. So we normally don't make adjustments for the calves. Is that what you're asking? Well, I'm saying okay, 2011 112% stocking rate, let's say the average weight of the calves when you fold them off is 500 pounds. So in 2012, you reduce your stocking rate. Are those calves still 500 pounds? And then going forward, the outlook reduce your stocking weight to 70%. Are those calves still going to weigh 500 pounds? Well, it depends on the quality of the grass and lactation and all that that that comes in the play, how you supplement. I would say if you're de stocking you're in the dry conditions, the quality of the grass is probably down. You're probably not going to have the heavier calves that you're accustomed to. Unless you're supplement. Like I mentioned, there's an example of this for you to try. There was a lot of these grassland conservation planners back there. Basically, calendar, there's a lot of we put in a lot of little reminders as you go for each month, write your rainfall on there. Or the record of livestock grazing. You put a lot of information on there. When you're in pastures, the grass height, precipitation, you want to, you know, adjust stocking rates, having your own rainfall that is fine tunes. And boy, like I mentioned last year, with this streaky rains, we've got then going off the Ola's weather station or somewhere where they didn't get it. You were making probably decisions that here's here's the example that's in this publication. They actually use between 85 and 89. And I know there were some dry spells then that timeframe. So this is kind of how they went through this on a operation and how they use the data, the predictions and the rationale. And here's kind of something I put together. This so you can kind of run through those numbers yourself. Stock density. Like I mentioned, that's different than stocking rate. That's the number of animals you have at any given point in time. Here's probably the three ways you commonly hear it described 810 pounds per acre. Here again, here's that pretty common grazing unit that we see 3200 pounds running in this case, only 135 pairs of stocking rate. Here's what I mean by that that patch grazing. And here's kind of how it all fits together. You have these pastures, roughly 200 acres inside, you turn them out there. cattle are selective grazers if you if you let go around, they'll hit certain spots. And it's what they're looking for the most palatable grasses, certain grasses at a certain time of year, higher quality, the key on those. So over time, some cases, you're looking from the road that that don't look so bad. But then when you get out there, you see all these spots that are pretty grazed off, and have all this grass that I never used. That's what we're calling patch crazy. And you can you see that when you got a little bit of a problem of the stock density. So how do you solve that? Here's that same operation. Here's the numbers. Here's what a lot of those operations do. The red ones are temporary fences. They do a lot of temporary fence, trying something, testing something out before they start building permanent fence. And a lot of them don't like that. You can just kind of put in a fence temporary fence and make it work. And it's a lot easier. But here's what it gets you when you get away, when you get your stock density, and you can kind of overcome some of that patch grazing, that inefficiency, using more of the pasture of grasses, is what happens is when you make them and put those cattle in a smaller area, they become less selective, they will hit more of that grass. There is not too much space for them that kind of hit spots twice, three times when they're in there. The other thing that that kind of comes into play is the length of time that they're in there when they're in there, say 30 days, they keep coming back to those spots, greens up a little bit. And pretty soon, you change the composition of those spots to other shorter grasses. So by increasing the stock density, we go from five pastures to nine pastures, about 111 acres in size, they were 200. Our grazing days went from 33 to 19 stock density went from 810 pounds per acre to 720 pounds or 1720 pounds per acre. That's fine tune in that stock density, utilizing the grass more evenly, less waste. They all seem to kind of be in that realm of fine tuning that any questions on that? I've done some workshops and different things up here. I've talked about stock density before. You need to put some thought into it. Can't believe you're gonna let me move on. You didn't notice these numbers. Here we're running 135 pairs. Boom, now we're up to 159. Why is that? Get that stock density up and see we're still producing 13 3200 pounds same, you're much more efficient at using the grass you have. Consequently, you can run some more animals. Stocking rate goes up. This is another thing I noticed on some of those operations that always seem to have, always have grass during those dry cycles. You actually see another interesting feature happen when you have wet cycles. Here's a photo of saying I'm standing ruffling the same spot. Here's the trees in the background. This was 2008, kind of after the grazing season. Oh, six was pretty dry or a couple years in the recovery there. Pretty dominant with cool season grasses. Pretty spot on that's probably normal production. Here's that 2011. We got all that rain 12 inches in 2011 in spring. When back out there and took these photos in September. Look at all these warm season grasses that show that well managed grasslands when they do receive additional moisture. The species that are out there that do require that additional moisture like big blue stem and cord grass just. Boom, respond to that. They take advantage of those wet conditions and get after it. That's only a few years down the road there. Nobody planted that. They're there. When I see that, that's just that great indication of a well managed, very diverse piece of grassland that's able to do these big shifts and species compositions when you get these dry and wet cycles. Okay, so are those species growing in there all the time and just happen to express themselves and they don't get great sorghum? Good management allows them to stay in good shape. If you went out there and really looked around, you would find some of them out there. There's yep, they're out there. When they get that moisture, which they really need, they're more of a higher precept species. They take advantage of that. See that all the time. Normally, you see big blue stem probably down through those overflow sites where there is additional more moisture. This photo last fall on a piece of grass. I get asked a lot. What is the minimum amount of cover or residue I should have on my grassland? Does it hurt me to graze my grasses dormant gets into November? Why can't I just turn out there and start grazing again? There's a lot of reasons why and this by all means is nowhere close to what I would suggest having enough cover and actually looking down at the plants themselves. You can see they're already starting to pedestal. A little background ran out of grass pretty early. Started doing some feeding out there on the pastures and this is not what they have. Recovery now is going to be long after this trap gets passed and it'll get passed. There's no doubt about that. So what is the minimum amount of cover I should have out there? There is actually a little magic number for that. And it hits a lot of very interesting points. Let's just say this is pretty true even for I think cover crops Jason. Jason one inch. Go out and measure a grass. One inch is about 200 pounds of air dry weight. Cover crops by about saying 250 somewhere. So you want to go out and measure the grass, grab the leaves because that's what you want to measure not the top of the seed head. Grab the leaves and pull it up and measure it. That's the conversion you can do to see how much grass you have. Pretty quick. Animal performance. Hey, we're back to our 1200 pound cows and let's just say they need daily 3% of their body weight daily intake. So that's 36. They need 36 pounds a day to maintain produce milk produce beef. Here's what grass height does. Yeah. Here's our 3200 pounds. Turn them out there. They're pounds of daily intake. 36 pounds. You notice as the grass becomes less shorter, this intake starts to fall off. You get down here to 400 pounds, which is 202 inches tall. Your pounds of daily intake is down to 21.6. There's a reason for that. And this is probably a fancy way of saying starving cows. As the grass gets shorter, cattle usually graze six to eight hours a day. So there's so many bites in that period. As the grass gets shorter, they have to work harder. They prefer to use their tongues. They will use their teeth if it gets shorter. But if they have to work harder in that time frame, that's less time actually intaking. So the intake goes down. There's not enough grass. So if you kind of look at that, there seems to be kind of a nice little, hey, if it's 1000 pounds, I still can maintain my pounds daily intake that I need. Get down here to soil health, control erosion, conserve water. There's all kinds of data research from here to Texas, how much residue you should have on your soil surface on grasslands. To add organic matter, soil structure, hold water so that it can infiltrate, reduce evaporation, cover on the ground, keep the soil cool, reduce erosion, about that 1000 pounds. And that kind of changes as you go from the short grass to mid grass to tall grass. There's a little bit of a little different number that they kind of use. But for us, it's about that 1000 pounds. Now, Jeff talked about this infiltration. When you got cover out there, you got cover out there, you're getting that rain coming. It's hitting leaf material. It's hitting what's left out there. It's slowing it down. So it hits the ground. And it has time to run in. Now, if you have bare ground out there, the rain hits that bare ground and seals it off. And when it seals it off, it likes to go this way, run across the ground. But if you got residue out there and slow that rain down, and then if it does rain hard enough and decide to move this way, it's running into that debris and litter, and it's slowing it down and it's giving it some time. Plus you haven't sealed it off on that hard rains hitting it. So you need the water to go down not across during the growing season. And that's what that'll do for you. Okay, you'll take half of me back. We've talked about that. common knowledge that grass produces twice as twice as much amount of leaves that it really needs. So that's why we can remove half of it. When you do when you this by weight, but as you remove more, get past that 50% by weight, you start to have some really devastating effects to the root system. At 60%, the root growth kind of decreases in half. You start getting into that 80% and then get complete die off. So if you're going through a dry cycle, which plant do you want out there? I'll be the one that's got this nice deep root system. And in this neck of the woods, I've done enough utilization, proper grazing use in the fall measuring grass, you know, where's that take half leave half or a lot of the grasses that we have here. And it's about at that 1000 pounds, five inches. You look at all these things that that five inches does for you helps you out with that animal performance, soil health, control erosion, conserved water, plant health and bigger. That's big. You really rent the other way here. Now we're going to have some infiltration problems. We're actually probably have some damage to the grass. There's a lot of those parameters and the big one for you is the animal performance. It's gonna take a big hit. That's mother nature, trying to get her own cover on us. We all hate weeds and now we're going down that path. Okay, Jeff showed some of this and this kind of ties in real justice. It's something real similar. If you really think about it, it's grass, it's grass. Does it make much difference? Well, some of those things I talked about. You're over here on this on this side. We're probably invasive species now shorter growing continuous graze, which means the cattle are probably in that pasture longer than 30 days. A lot of times. So there's a lot of hoof action. There could be some compaction issues that's affecting infiltration. There could be some more there's bare ground because we're getting below that five inches. When it does rain, we get those intense rains in the summer, which we usually do get a seal off. Now we got water running the wrong way. Here they actually similar with Jeff was talking about. They actually here's the infiltration rate under the rotation graze versus the continuous five inches per hour. There's a rotation of grace, just a snitch over a half inch. For all those reasons, look at the different until the depth of the organic matter, the black grazing management, saving that water. It's huge. Okay, drop contingency plans. All those operations has some kind of plan in place where when conditions get to this point, I am going to make some adjustments. So they have some kind of a trigger, which means how bad does it have to get when I'm going to do this? How bad does it have to get when I'm going to do this? Some of them write it down, some of them just know what they you know, that's what they're going to do. We actually are drought tool is we're going to get into that kind of talks about, and it's designed for you to kind of document what you're going to do. Okay, establishing triggers. It wasn't too long ago. That's what it looked like. Someday, hopefully soon, we'll be back. Here's kind of one of the triggers that I commonly see. And honestly, if you're doing a private good job of grazing management, this condition where the plants are starting to show moisture stress, we're starting to get that yellow, I took all these photos in July, the grass starting to get that little bit of yellow tinge. A lot of times that's kind of normal a lot of years here, he starts to get hot and dry. That's kind of that normal phase. And this usually ties into about 75% of normal production. And like I said, a lot of times, if you're doing good grazing, you probably don't even notice these. You may have some issues with water later in the year, because it did dry down a little bit of quality of water. But for the most part, this this indicator of status, you're doing good grazing man, you probably don't notice. Okay, at risk. Here's where you're probably at. Well, we probably were at last year, probably that in between 85 and 90% of normal production, plants are showing signs of moisture stress. See how brown it's starting to get. That's probably where you're at. Probably got a lot of places in the state that are probably going to be at least in this one. Here's some of the action items that I kind of collected through the course of time on some of these operations. And a lot of these, I'm sure you've all heard of before, a few of these back there. This is something we just put together. It's common grazing management in South Dakota. This is kind of the grazing systems we commonly see goes from continuous grazing to rotational grazing to short duration twice through kind of gives a little pros and cons of each. And on the back page, it talks about the drought contingency plan. What phases there are this normal risk and drought that we're talking about. And then on the back stage, the page, there's all these action items that we've collected over the years that we commonly see people use. This one here, the top one, I want to talk about a few of these. Combining herds and allocating all remaining forages in each pasture to one herd, grazing periods will be shortened, maintain cover on the soil. That sounds a real similar to dealing with it with some stock density. You all have those pastures out there where you go out there and there's a lot of grass that maybe they haven't touched. This is how they're kind of dealing with that. Some of them kind of initiate some of that when it gets drier. They get more animals get that stock density up, use those pastures, all the animals together. It's kind of easier to watch things and just kind of keep moving. Weeding calves early that I run into that all the time. In fact, I got an example that I got a series of photos of these risks or these conditions and kind of what that landowner did when those conditions hit. This is commonly used weiner. That makes a big difference to switch those cows, get the calf off. They don't have to produce that milk. Their intake isn't as high makes a big difference. Culling early removing 10 to 20% you know when you're getting into these conditions. Hey, if you're flex stocking rate, you know, you probably already dealt with that problem. We use the number we place in the heifers plant and graze cover crops. Jason, the plug in for you. Here, use range management techniques to distribute livestock more uniformly. This is doing that but using herding, placing salt in the right places, pulling them in the areas that they normally don't graze. You're trying to use all that forage that you have up there's probably a lot of forage that doesn't get used. You're just trying to target some of that. Get better distribution, temporary fences to do that. Okay, this is the kind of the bottom end. We're starting to get pretty dry. We're less than 85% of normal production. Plants are looking stressed. We had a lot of that here come fall. A lot of the operations when it gets to these conditions. If you look at a lot of these, they're talking about removing out a big percent 20 to 50%. They move the cattle off the past years and start feeding. Don't try to feed through a drought. That just bad, bad, you know, unless you got a lot of hay and maybe, you know, if you can stretch it out, but don't try to do that. And don't feed on your pastures. That's that's not good either. Talk about that. And then market the class of stocks such as yearlings. You know, that's why those operations run different classes of animals because they have that option. They can quickly get rid of some market. Here's an operation in Hughes County. I went out to take photos. You're in Jason's time to take it up with him. Just quick. And I'm not going to get to the drop tool. But here, there's this back here. It's a user guide for that. It's got the link. It's on our website. It's easy to navigate to. And it's a step by step guide of opening it up, point and click kind of a thing. Okay. Pretty easy. You have any questions? You just called your field office. They'll help you get through that. Okay. You probably want to call. Sure. Everybody call. I apologize for that. I really want to talk about this. Here's a photo that I went out and took these photos right after they got out of this pasture. So this was the end of July. 2009, we're about 85% of normal preset. He weaned early that year. And he normally grazed till October, end of October. He ended grazing the first part of October. And that's what it looked like. Five inches there easily. Here's 2011. Above average. Look at all that. That's when this thing started to turn, though, in the fall of 2011. Look how dry it got. He happened and he's moving the time of the year around in these pastures. This was the end of September when he got done here. But look at all that grass. The rains came in that nice window April, May, June. Then it got hot and dry, dried it out. But it still grew grass came at the right time. Didn't do anything here. Here was last year 55% of normal. He reduced his herd by 30%. And he only grazed till mid August. He shortened his grazing season. And that's when I went out there shortly after. The point is, still no bear down, bare ground. He got off there. Cut the losses. Fight another day. Leave it in good shape. Make those adjustments. That's Houston County, by the way, an example of ongoing plan with action items when they kick around and round we go. It's kind of where we live. It's nice to be here. We were here not too long ago, but here for do have plans. Been on a lot of your places. And I know you do. We're coming into one of those dry ones cross our fingers. We can get some precept we can we can get some production, you know, 70% better for some others. All right. I went over. Do you want to go ahead and address the question? fertilize it. Last year when we got that hot March, I knew some guys that went out and fertilize her down. Didn't help when it got dry. Plants shut down. They didn't take it up. Not whether it'll be some residual of it. I don't suggest sterilizing the brain of pastures on a dry cycle. Plants are active to use it. It's a function of preset doesn't get rain. But when it's normal precept, justifying it's a little easy. Not so much made of grass. But it'll be a great opportunities for the invasive species really like the nitrogen. So they get really helpful invaders. For a treatment to maybe deal with an older burden of say, blue grass, put a lot of numbers on there, knock all that perch residue down, get it cycling, and then go back to something at this point. The question was, is if I'm opponent of ultra high stock N speeds, there's there's time place for it. You just really need things high number of cattle in a small area. Shocking. The last thing I've got this time, they're doing some work with it. South Dakota States working with some operators on ultra high stock entity. The question is the sustainability of it. Can you long term do that? And still be viable, produce those pretty staggering pounds of beef. How does the grass respond to their work? Right now, we're kind of using it as a treatment.