 My name is Jeff Hemingway and I'm the soil health specialist with NRCS here in South Dakota. This is our rainfall simulator, our large rainfall simulator, and today what I'd really like to do is talk a little bit more about collecting samples for that rainfall simulator, proper placement of those, so that we can actually do a good job with the rainfall simulator. Okay, one of the first things that I guess I'd really like to talk about is really looking at clicking a pasture or a rain sample properly. The rainfall simulator typically comes with cutters. I don't like to use those mainly because they're difficult to use. What I'm going to actually do is cut in a sample or cut a solid sample out just with a shovel and show you just how to do that. So we're actually going to flip over the sample pan that comes with the rainfall simulator and we're going to just cut around it with a shovel. And you can see that I'm just, like I say, cutting around it with a sample shovel about down to, well, probably about three inches below the soil surface. Of course now what I'm doing is trying to loosen up that side and I don't know if you can actually see that. That side is loosened up underneath. You can remove that pan and just flip over the sample. Okay, what I'm trying to do now is I'm going to actually cut that sample down to relieve the height of the pan. It's a two and a half inch pan. Just take your time. And now once you have it to about two and a half inches, not just as if you had a cookie cutter, you're going to cut around that sample pan with a shovel. Busting the pan down over the sod. And as you can see, we're kind of flipped it back over as a nice uniform depth. And if you have any problems with any issues with it being loose around the edges, any gaps, et cetera. Take some loose material and force that in again so that we don't end up with preferential flow around the edge of that pan. But for the most part, that looks like a really pretty nice sample. The issues that I have that people talk about is can you actually pull a sample in a really, well, a tall grass stand? And the answer is you can. It's just more challenging to do that. And what I mean by that is that as we really start looking at putting that sample in this pan, you're going to try to cut it into that pan without crushing that sample. And that's really the challenging part. So with that, let's just try to give it a shot here. And for the most part, what you're doing is sizing that pan size really without laying it down too much flush. I just loaded, put it down on edge. And I'll be cutting a sample size that's approximately the size of the pan. And now let's cut down and do the same thing as we did before for us using that pan as a cookie cutter. And we're going to cut it off completely around this edge, the bottom and the sides. But really incompletely along the top. Otherwise, we'd cut off the vegetation on the top, which is tall. And that's what we really want to see is that tall grass. We're going to have to tear the side of that sod off along the side that was incompletely cut before. Again, pushing that back in the pan. It just says the other pan that we were talking about before. There's any voids around the edges or anything else. Make sure you take some moves from here and put that back in. The challenge to properly take a sample in a no-till field actually might actually have to do with just cutting through that residue initially. And you can try to drive that cutter through that residue, and it might actually work fairly well. Okay, now that we've actually stopped back to the garage where samples, we'd really like to, when it comes to our conventional till and our no-till samples, we'd really like to dry those for a period of a week, maybe two weeks. And to do that, what I actually do is just lay the sample out on a tarp, and this is a conventional till sample. And you can see we're just spreading that out. We're going to break that up a little bit, and over time probably break it up a little bit more, but get it sped out enough so that it actually drives properly. Make sure that you know what sample is what. We don't want to get that confused. If we use that same principle with our no-till sample, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to lay that sample out. Make sure that you watch the sample as it progresses, but bottom line, it's going to take longer for that no-till. Okay, with no-till samples, in many cases we would really like to get this intact, but for the most part what I found is that even in a no-till sample, what we need to do is we'll properly dry that sample also along with our conventional till sample. So we have a bucket of no-till soil, and as we put that into our tray, similarly with conventional till, what we'd like to do is make sure that the sample is uniform, that we don't have preferential flow around the edges of it as we put together that sample. It seems like it's always a lot easier from my standpoint, especially we've got good granular structure with the no-till sample to get that in the pan so it reacts the way it's supposed to. One of the issues with our no-till samples, and you'll find this over time, is that as we get this put together, we need to put residue back on that surface. You can use it either from the field itself or in this particular case we'll put some clean straw that actually came off this field originally. It's at some point it's not weathered yet, you can see that. But at some point when we actually put that residue on that sample, you can see there's a little breeze out here today. So putting together a sample and getting it placed on a rainfall simulator like that is going to take the headaches out of that sample.