 Hi, this is Mark Walshichek with a new tool to help you plan windbreak work. In February of 2016, South Dakota released an updated windbreak tool 2.0. I put the tool together after the South Dakota Efficiency Committee developed some ideas for the workbook. I'd like to present four tutorial videos to help you understand all that the tool has to offer. I believe you will be more efficient and better technically while using the tool than you ever were before. Let's get started. This is video one, the basic instructions. We'll explore the instructions tab. We will take a look at the workbook maintenance tab and we'll take a look at the tools button. The first thing I want to start out with is telling you that this is the menu page. There's a menu button on every page that brings you back to this spot, so you really can't get lost in this workbook. Let's go into the instructions page and you'll see that everything is explained here and that every tab is fully explained. Here's the establishment tab from the menu. Here's the renovation tab from the menu. Here's the workbook maintenance. We'll go into that in detail and so on. I do want to point out that here is my contact information. If you are interested in contacting me with a question or comments or concerns, go ahead and email me. That'd be fine. Give me a call. Whatever works for you. So I'd like to then show you that there's a tools button on many of the pages. Not all of them, but many of them. And that tools button offers you a lot of ability in the workbook. You can move around readily in the workbook real easily. As an example, let's say we wanted to look to see what species are recommended in a Windbreak Suitability Group 3, or now it's called Conservation Tree and Shrub Group 3, in eastern South Dakota. You can click on this button and it takes me to the information and I can scroll down and look to see that, well, yes, choked cherry is, but so is nine bark. So you can take a look at this information and of course this is for shrubs, deciduous trees. It's right out of the tech guide conifers. So you can move around quickly and then there's a return button and I want to tell you that generally, no matter how you got to a page, whether you clicked on a tab at the bottom or whether you used the tools button to get here, if you click return, it should take you almost all times back to where you just came from. And we came from the instruction page. So that's where we're at now. I also want to show you another thing with the tools button and that is not only can you move around to these various places in the workbook and get information from it and pop right back to where you were, you can also print. And so what you can print is the six E. E is for establishment, R is for renovation. So we've got worksheets for both of those that you can produce in this workbook. You can produce an order list cost estimate and you can print out the example, which is very helpful as you fill out your first couple windbreak design. So check the boxes you want to print. They'll click the box and it will print all that you've got checked. Pretty handy little deal. So let's go back to the menu and take a look at the workbook maintenance section. So workbook maintenance allows you to edit vendor prices. Let's go look at that and see what that's about. I said this workbook can give you a cost estimate. Generally on large plantings you'll want to provide the producer some sort of estimate of what it's going to roughly cost him so that he can plan for that cost in his budget. So here check with your local vendors and find out how they charge and get as close as you can. You're never going to have perfect information here as far as how the vendor charges. Check the one that's closest and put in the numbers that are the closest. This is not supposed to be a cost estimate that he can rely on to the penny by any means. This is simply a cost estimate for planting. You put in cost of fabric, you can put in the cost of hand plants, and tree tube stakes and installation. So I will click the return key here and we'll come back to where we were. The other thing you can do here is to edit the species list. So in our species list are all the trees that are in the South Dakota technical guide for planting in South Dakota. And if you need to add a tree, you can add a tree. If you want to delete some trees, you can delete some trees in the list. What's up to you? I am going to go back and show you how this generally works. When you're in the workbook and you're doing a conservation, South Dakota CPA-6 filling out the design, and you come to a tree species that you want to add and you say, well, let's see, I want to put in Meyers spruce. That's what this producer is interested in, and it looks like it should grow here. Well, no, it's not on our South Dakota list of approved species. And so we've given variances for that in the past, and probably you could get one if you're in Eastern South Dakota in the future. So what you can do is I would recommend you get a variance and then you can go in here and add the species to this list. You pop in here, you jump down to a blank line, and you type in here Meyers spruce, and then go back to the top, because that button said you must click here, so do that, and it'll take you back here, and you're ready to plan Meyers spruce in your planting. So that works pretty slick and pretty fast. Once you use this a few times, and if there's a species that you're going to add for the whole season, you know, put it in and then save the workbook and then open up a blank copy, and it'll be there for you. So that's pretty handy. I want to show you a couple of other things. This basically allows you, I'll go back to the menu here, this allows you to type in where you need to to put information, but if you're going to try to type in a cell that doesn't need information, it's going to generally, I got it set, I hope to always give you a warning, you're trying to change something on a protected sheet, you don't need to change this cell. And so it's locked up to a certain degree, and that'll be helpful, and it'll be hard for you to corrupt it, and that's why I did that. You're going to see an exception to that in the next video, I'll just point that out right now. The workbook contains, and I covered some of that, an order list, and excuse me, I'm going to go back here, an order list cost estimate. So when you have a windbreak plan, we'll use this example, and it will come in here when we do our tree plan, but the species will be listed here, and the number that need to go out to that site, and all the sites I should say for that particular individual, and then the cost estimate, it gives you that here, based on the information you put in earlier in the prices tab. So that's pretty handy. We also have included renovation in this workbook, and we'll go into that in a short video. And so with that, I think I'm going to go back, I'm at the menu, I am going to sign off for this one, and this will be the end of tutorial number one, and we'll see you on the next tutorial. Thank you. Hi, this is Mark Walshichek with Tutorial 2 of 4 in the series for the Windbreak workbook, developed in 2016 for the South Dakota NRCS. In this video, we'll look at how to develop a windbreak establishment plan. And that's pretty simple with the workbook. What we do is we go into the Establishment tab from the main menu here, and on that page you'll have various forms that you can use. And so what we'll start is right away with the CPA6E page one. And I filled out some of it because that would just slow this tutorial down if I filled everything in. But you complete the blanks with the underlines here for the information that's necessary. I'll fill out a couple for you practice. There's dropdowns. We've got Windbreak Establishment is the practice that we're going to use in this example. 380, the number pops in. Conservation Tree and Shrub Group, I've looked that up. And that comes from the table one. And it's based on the soil map unit that you're on. And we've added a couple of blanks here. Resource Concern. A person will have already been out to the farm and taken a look at what the problem is. And that's really what you're identifying here is what that problem was. In this particular case, we're using an example where they had excess drifted snow in their yards. And so then we can put in the purpose. Purposes come directly from the practice. And so we notice there's different practices in here. We're using 380 is the practice we've selected. And the purpose that we're going to choose is manage snow deposition. And that matches up with solving our resource concern. And it should. So then you put in the chemicals used on the plot in the last few years. We had put the year in up here and it automatically knows what the previous three years is. And you fill that up. And then you simply check the boxes that are applicable, where the fallow is needed, and utilities are present, and where the cultural resources have been addressed, and so on. What the site preparation needed is. The method is going to be if it's going to be something else. And you simply check that box. But fairly straightforward, it's going to bring some information over from page 2 in these green cells. You don't have to enter anything in there. And so basically, I've entered the information into the form already. It'll bring. I've put some things in the example already. That's why it's already got an acreage figure and acres planned. But it'll bring this information to green cells over from page 2 when we're done as a summary onto page 1. So basically, the front page is straightforward. And we will then go into page 2, which I can click on from the tab. Or you can pop back to establishment. You can always get around that way and go to page 2. So I filled some of this in already. I'm going to show you why I did that here in a minute. But when you get on page 2, use the example. There's an example for this page. And it's very helpful. I'm going to go to the example for 62. And it's completed. And it's got these comments in it. And it pretty much really goes through what order you should put your data in to make it the most efficient to fill this stuff in. And this is very useful. So I'm going to return to where I was. And basically, it's telling me to put a site number in first and put my isolation within for the north or the west row, whichever the outside row here is. Then it says, put your row numbers in. I'm going to do a seven row windbreak here in my example. I'm going to show you another way to fill that in. You can start here and just drag this down seven spots. And it'll fill your number in. If you get the plus sign, make sure you got not that sign. But when you're on the cell, get the plus sign. There we go. So that's very important. And then you can drag that down. So you notice that this white cell popped in here. It's asking for something when it changes a cell from green to white. And that's what makes this a pretty efficient way to fill this worksheet out. And that is, in between the row spacings, 14 feet, it populates everything below that with the number above. Most of our windbreaks are rectangular. And isolation is the same on both ends. And row spacing is the same throughout. So it just speeds up the process for you. So we're going to create a windbreak here. And I'm just doing this for example. So someone that says, hey, that doesn't meet our standards. That's fine. You should double check me. And how would you double check whether one of these species meets our standard? Well, I said we were in Windbreak Suitability Group 3. And he's in Brookings County. So here's our Windbreak Suitability Group 3. And I know that I can plant a lot of shrubs. Matter of fact, there isn't a shrub on the list. It doesn't fit in Windbreak Suitability Group 3. So that's a good deal. And just return. And so basically what the producer is interested in, what you think will grow good on his site and with his maintenance and so on. So we're going to pick plum. Actually, I'm going to change my mind. And I'm going to pick a cedar for the first row. And this, of course, you'd work out with a landowner and taking into consideration their needs and preferences. So Eastern Red Cedar, I was going to show you that if you click above this line, it'll go one page at a time for you. And that's a pretty handy deal. So it's moving through these pretty fast for the Eastern Red Cedar. Our standards say if we're going to put the first row to be cedar, we should have a medium-sized tree in the second row. I'm going to plant a Manchurian crab apple. I'm just picking stuff off the top of my head here. So this has to be able to take a lot of snow load, is what you're looking at there. If you want to look at row arrangements and spacing and density and so on, we've got a little clip from our tech guide in here about which rows should be shrubs, which rows should be cedars or junipers, mid-sized trees, and so on. This information talks about still the suggested profile of a windbreak and also looking at spacing. And so this is a nice, so handy deal to pop into. Density is in here also for your different types of windbreaks that you're trying to plant. So then we can go to return. So I am, again, just going to make some stuff up here. For my example, we're going to put pine in row four. We're going to put a hackberry. And we're going to put, I think we kind of don't plant a lot of green ash anymore, but I'm going to plant a row of green ash. I am going to the ponderosa pine row in here. And so if you get to a point where you're not sure, like I want to have a row of Meyer spruce, and maybe I gave this example already, but you can change the list and add that species by clicking this button. I think I did go over that in the first video. As a matter of fact, I didn't save that. So we'll go in here and, OK, we want Meyer spruce in this list here. So I slide down to where it's empty, Meyer spruce. And better remember to click that button at the top. OK, I'm back. Let's put Meyer spruce in here and finish off with a lilac. I think we call that common, if I remember right. OK, so there's our, I got my row numbers in. These have to be numbers. That's the way I wrote the spreadsheet. It helps figure things out by using numbers. So they have to be numbers. And then what's the approximate row spacing? Cedar is 8, and crabapple is 8, and hackberry is 10. And we've got recommendations for these, if you forget by going into the tools and so on. I'm Meyer spruce and lilac. So all right. And here it wants approximate length of the rows. Well, it, white cell, it wants the first row 1,000 feet, OK? Well, it populated everything else based on that those are 1,000 feet. But if one row is longer than the other, you can overtype these. Here's a formula. You can overtype the formula, and that might be 1,100 feet. Now that formula is gone, but everything below it says 1,100. So if you want the rest of them to be 1,000, you've got to change one of them back to 1,000, and then everything below it becomes the same as what you typed in above it. So that's the way this auto-populate works. Now I've over-typed these cells. And so the only way I'm going to get that back, which I've made this setup pretty easy, I can take this one down here, and I can run it up through all the green ones. And I put it back to having formulas, and they repeat from the one above them. So I just thought I'd show you that. That works pretty slick. We'll leave it as 1,000 feet for every row rectangular. Let's quickly put in fabric. Yeah, I'm going to put fabric on these rows, and I can get that plus sign and drag that I didn't really want to put it on that last row without a tree in it. So tree tubes. No, we're not going to put tree tubes on these. However, this hackberry, I think we're in a spot where we're going to put tree tubes on the hackberry. So I can put one row hackberry. OK, so I've got a plan. And it's got the acres and the feet and the rods and everything else down here. It's carried over to show you. It's carried over that information about the planned acres to the front. So let's go back here. That's all pretty much filled out. Let's go to the bottom here quickly, and you have to fill in the section, the township range. And then you can do a little drawing. I placed a bunch of these drawings. You can click on them and slide them up and put them wherever you need them in this section. And you can change the site number on here if you need to. So these are preset little drawings, and you can change the size and the shape and do whatever you want, the length. So use those as you need to. I'm going to slide them back out of the way if you want. All right, I've made this one site one. It is this windbreak, this little green one site two. And I've already filled in site two, you see, for a wet site that has species that'll tolerate the conservation tree and shrub group two. And I've put a note down here. Site two in lower area, green shaded on site on map. Conservation tree and shrub group two. And so we'd switch to this planting when we got to that spot in the windbreak. Hopefully that'll work for when you're changing conservation tree and shrub groups. One more thing I want to show you is I can alternate species with this plant. If you go up to this comment box, it tells you which box to check for that. It's the top box to alternate. And if I alternate, here I'm going to alternate green ash. And let's say I alternated green ash. And just as an example here, hackberry. All right, so that, oops, hackberry. And we'll try that again, green ash. All right, so now half of this row is going to be counted as hackberry plants. Half of it is green ash plants. That's the way it totals it up. So you're going to need 100 plants. 50 of them will be hackberry. 50 of them will be green ash. And I say that because we can go over here now and take a look at the cost estimate. And here's the order list. If somebody's going to have to order trees for this planting, here you go. Here's what we need. If they're going to load them up prior to going out to this site, it's all the trees we need for those two sites. Here you go. Kind of a handy deal. This thing's at the prices that are in here. It's going to cost about $7,500 to plant over 2 and 1 half acres of trees. So there's some good information for the producer to get an idea what ballpark he's in as far as what this is going to cost him. So let's go. Let's return. If I'm not using the alternated with column, I can use this in a different way. When I go to check out the planting, maybe the vendor ran out of hackberry prior to planting this one, but checked on a substitution and we agreed to green ash here, that type of thing. So I can input that green ash were applied rather than hackberry. So I can use this column in two different ways, not both ways at the same time, but I can use it in two different ways, one or the other. So then let's check out the planting. So I'd come over here and to complete the check out and say, what was the isolation? Well, in this case, I'm going to say it was 10. And it's asking me for information in this white cell here, what is the row spacing? Well, it's 14 just like it was planned. Well, that's great. So it completes that information. What's the in row spacing of the trees? I'm going to, in my example, say we checked it out and the plants were planted just like we planned. And so just to show you how this works, if you have some different number, you should put that in there when you're measuring them out. And you wouldn't measure every tree. I usually would walk off 100 feet and count the trees and then I would divide it out. And I'd know about how far apart they were planted. The length of the row and feet, we're going to say it's 1,020, a little longer than it was planned. So it'll complete everything here. And it'll put 1,020 in every row you can make. Like I say, you can overtype the formulas on those if there's something different. And then over here in fabric, they got formulas in them, you see, but if you check this box, that will complete all of these feet for having done fabric if there was a yes in this column over here. So it was planned. And you said 1,020 feet was the length of the tree row. And you said, did you put the fabric? Yes, but I can change the length of fabric if, in fact, they only got half of a rural fabric or something. Tree tubes works the same way. It'll put in the number of tree tubes based on the number of trees with these figures that you put in here on the checkout. And it'll fill out only those rows that you said are planned to have tree tubes. If one got applied and wasn't planned, you could type over the formula again and put the number of trees in there. So there we've checked that out. And so I think with that, we'll pop back to the menu. And we have finished the establishment tutorial. We'll talk to you on the next tutorial. Thank you. OK, here's our third video in the series of how to use the Windbreak Workbook 2016 from South Dakota. And I'm going to, in this video, talk about the renovation portion of the workbook. So we'd start on the menu, and we could click on renovation. And when we go there, you'll see there's some options that we can choose. We have an instruction sheet, and it describes how to complete the South Dakota CPA 6R, R for renovation, with page one. So I'm just going to pop over there. And I can return back to the renovation and go there lots of ways. But I'm just going to pop over to the next sheet. I filled most of it out because it's just filling in information. There's a Windbreak type. I think that's important to fill out properly, because really the purpose of Windbreak renovation is to restore the Windbreak to its original function. And so the type of Windbreak that you had probably is an important thing to record. In this particular example, we're going to do row removal and replacement. And to keep it simple, that's all we're going to do here. You could do a number of these things, actually, in a Windbreak renovation. And you'd check the appropriate ones. It says here, for any renovation method, it includes new trees and shrubs. A CPA 6E form will be completed. Well, that's the planning form for the new Windbreak, new trees, and planting. So that makes sense. So I didn't check any of these, or I would be filling in the blue cells here. But here, row replacement and removal, here's I'm going to do it. On April 15th is the plan. It's 1,000 feet long. The Windbreak is. We're going to use a cat and scraper and stumps and ruts to be removed, yes. And the brown cells here, or the green cells, they'll be filled in from calculations based on the next page. And this sheet, South Dakota always used, but it wasn't very complete. We've got a 1,000 foot Windbreak, but we don't know how many rows we're going to work on. And actually, the rows here will come in from the second page. So we'll pop over here to 6R2, second page. This is basically like building a plan for a Windbreak, but this is the existing Windbreak you got. You measure these things out. Oops, excuse me. You have site 1. And you have an isolation. It was 12 feet. And don't sweat the details. If you go out and measure, and there's hard to tell how much isolation was there from the first row, do your best. But we had a, generally, you can tell how many row of Windbreak you had. So we had a six row Windbreak. Spacing between the rows was about 15 feet. OK, so there's basically your plan. And then it's asking you to fill in, well, what species do you have? You may choose to do different things, depending on the species. For example, I got some honeysuckle in the outside row. And maybe those are OK. I'm just making this example up. And you've got various other species in here that have deteriorated over time. They were planted 80 years ago. And you've got some Siberian Elm involved. You do your best to identify the species. If, in fact, you don't know, you might have some unknown species. They are so far gone, it's hard to tell what you've got. But you know you had a row of something in there. So you do your best to identify the species that were in here. And you can see I'm just kind of making this up. And maybe it's the last row just filled with buckthorn. I've got a lot of old ring brakes that are that way. Here, let's do our best to estimate what these were. Not terribly important, although it's not really terribly important, I don't think, in the scheme of things. You can't even tell this. But you figure that was a shrub row, that type of thing. OK, here, this is kind of important here. How long was this windbreak? Well, it was 1,000 feet. So fills in all that information. You change these distances for each row if you need to. This is the actual whole windbreak. And we may be working on a portion of it. Or some rows are OK. You'll see this. Is the row functional? Let's just say this one is. And the rest of these are not. And so because the rest of these are not, we're going to do something about them. The first one, what are we going to do with the first one? We're going to do nothing with the first one, because it's functional. Things like these, this can happen. The next one, we already said we're going to do row replacement and removal. And so with this particular one, we're going to replace these rows. But we're going to leave the honeysuckle in the ash right now, so he has some protection. Typically, we don't take whole windbreaks out and leave a farm place without any protection. And most producers don't really want that. So we may be going to do these three in the future. But right now, these are the worst. And we're going to do row replacement and removal of these right now. And so that's basically how you account for each row in a windbreak and what we're going to do and so on and so forth. So this is not going to be planned on the CPA6, obviously. And these are not either, but these certainly are. Yes, we're going to replace these trees. And so basically, I have a windbreak renovation plan put together. Oh, one thing I'll show you here, when this fills in these with the next number, just click on this little arrow here and say copy sales and it'll straighten that out for you. So there's my windbreak renovation plan. Here's my acres. And I already actually showed you how many we got done. So I filled in the applied as if we were done also. The plan would only be done to this point. Yeah, and so this green cells carry over from the front page. I can put the person's cell phone number in here if I want to add another phone number so we can get a hold of him. And we can tell when it's applied and the date. And I can also put my drawing in here also. So basically those two pages amount to a renovation plan. And we want to print that, of course. Remember, we can go to the print menu and here's the CPA6R. I have page one and I have page two. Page three was the extra page. I don't need to check that. OK, so I'm not going to print here while I'm demonstrating. Yeah, that pretty much is what we have for the renovation example. And so I'll end it there by going back to the menu and we will say good luck until the next video. OK, the fourth and final video in this series. We're talking about here the technical information that is embedded in or linked from the Windbreak Workbook 2016 from South Dakota. And so let's go from the menu into the technical information tab. And you'll see there's a wealth of information in here. And some of it we've already popped around in the worksheet using, which I guess I didn't show you, the conservation tree and shrub group descriptions are here. I did show you the expected tree heights. We went into those sheets. There's a list of cultivars that are available, improved varieties of trees, you might say. There's a setback design, which is kind of handy. It takes the information from the technical guide practice, it should say practice description. And it puts it into a visual format from you and how far we should stay from roads and so on and different worship boundaries of the area to protect where you should plan your windbreaks. It's a nice little diagram. And it gives some definitions down here. And I think it would be a useful thing. I put it together a couple of years ago. And so I think you'll be able to make use of that. The other thing that's in here is the technical notes. And I actually have 37 in here. And then the others aren't in this worksheet, but there are links to them. And so just click on the blue links and you'll be able to go and go directly to them. You know, obviously, we have so many woodland tech notes and you can't keep all this information in your head at any time. So these links are useful to go in and read up on this or if you have a question and so on. Here's a good one on renovation that most people haven't read. So we've got a list of fact sheets that are in the various locations. And I've put the links and I've put, you know, some of them come from Lincoln, Nebraska, some of them come from North Dakota. So this was recommended by the DC committee that worked on trying to improve our technical abilities. And it's a good idea to have this information accessible in one spot. Then there's some general information that you could possibly give to landowners if they're going to be possibly interested in a field windbreak. You know, here's some information for them to read, that type of thing. And lastly, there may be more videos on here in the future. But right now there's a video link that's on our YouTube. And it's an old video, but an oldie but a goodie, as they say, techniques for better tree planting. And it's, you know, the things you need to pay attention to while you're planting trees is basically the same today as it was 20 years ago. And so I recommend any time you have new employees planting trees for districts or, you know, however that works out that they get a chance to take a look at this video. It's very good and very useful. And they'll learn something from it. I can guarantee that. And so you can see there's a tremendous amount of information here and use it to design your windbreaks. I'll take you back to the menu. And I think with that you'll be able to use this spreadsheet to your fullest ability and to its maximum efficiency. So I'll say to you good luck and thank you for watching these videos.