 Good morning everybody. My name is Riley Kammer. I'm a fifth generation rancher out north of Rapid City. I apologize we're running behind and I don't want to hold lunch up but this is kind of where our area is. We're north of Rapid City out towards the foothills of the Black Hills and glad to be here. Glad or honored you guys asked me to come down and talk about some of the stuff we're doing on our place. So that's the crew. I got a herd of girls their home taking care of the place while I'm gone. I'm pretty proud of them. They're my profit. Our vision is healthy land, wholesome cattle, happy family and pretty long mission but we use the resources God's entrusted us with to stimulate robust soil biology, diverse plant communities with regenerative land management practices in order to produce profitable nutrient dense life-giving food from the earth and we've done a lot of changes on our place. We've moved pretty much completely away from the the industrial ag model and moved everything we got to a regenerative model back to the land and hasn't always been that way. I used to do everything that all the experts told me to do right and I was flat-ass broke and going backwards and I was taken from the land and in order to subsidize my business that was unprofitable I had to go look for work. The only thing I could find was I worked for the co-op for three years to help put food on the table and insurance for my kids and it was about that time I was learning about soil health and I got a crash course in it because I got to spend time in a three state region spraying, fertilizing and hauling feed and I tell you what I saw the worst of the worst like that. Looks like the dirty 30s there but that's 2017 Butte County, South Dakota. I saw the worst of the worst. I saw land degradation on a first-hand basis with my feet in the dirt and I saw farmers and ranchers all over the area that were flat-broke and had no answers, didn't know what to do, how are we going to keep going for another generation. I hauled a load of feed to some guy that was completely droughted out trying to feed his way out of a drought in in Broadus, Montana and somebody up there thought it was a good idea to start farming in March probably to plant oats or whatever and I got to watch all of his top soil blow away. I was all by myself and I had made the decision right then and there that if I was going to be a part of agriculture still that I'm going to do this different. I wasn't going to be a part of the top soil erosion, the organic matter depletion, the loss of our biodiversity, the loss of our pollinators, the loss of our wildlife and our bird population. I'm going to do this different and I'm going to be a voice for agriculture so here I am. You see a lot of these it really changes your paradigm. Here's another one that was just a couple years ago down the road from me so we got a lot of work to do. Here's one this is our ground up the draw from me we have continuous long-term grazing with no cover on one side of the draw on the other side we got these guys are no telling but they have no they have no crop rotation so they have no armor on their soil and every time we get a rain it runs and it's cutting a gully down through us so the the the decisions we make on our place affect our neighbors and the taxpayers and the consumers and a nutshell this is what we do we we manage our grazing for our cattle we we move quite often usually a week or less our entire herd not the entire place we were we got a lot of least ground but this picture here was in the middle of a drought before we started changing our management this was bare soil in this draw and now we're growing we're growing more grass than what then we ever would imagine cutting inputs cutting costs and a better quality of life one of the biggest things I did was I changed my calving date to to calve in sync with nature we start now May 1st on our cows we got a lot of brome encrusted you know I hear a lot of East River saying that we can't graze dormant brome encrusted and we love it we got green up through there it's a perfect ration for a cow a brood cow that's center picture I promise you there's a calf in there can't see it we couldn't find him and neither could his mother but that's that's nature's windbreak God gave us the the perfect template for for our livestock production but we choose to do it in a in a yard we had to change we were feeding ourselves out of house and home it was costing us a ridiculous amount of money ranching for profit school changed my life I want quote from Dave Pratt was how do you replace spending money with management that's a tough one because us as ag producers everybody's in our pocket trying to get our money and I keep that money in my pocket now I'm not giving it away so I figured out strategies how to fix this and maybe a list of things that I do do but maybe the bigger list is the things that I stopped doing and right there most of those are all inputs it's changed the culture on our ranch it's changed our lives it's changed my family and my kids for generations to come on the things that I stopped doing my family enjoys ranching now it's not a drudgery if you could cut any of those things out how much better would your quality life be we graze 12 months out of the year snow doesn't slow us down too much that was our first year of changing our grazing management through the winter and we didn't have an easy winter but we made it through cut our hay hay feeding down by 75 percent the first year just by management by by moving some polywire moving our cows quite often so we we were able to expand and come home expand our operation we bought our folks out we're taking over the home place it was homesteaded and 140 years ago but you know I get home and I and I see our hay fields are as depleted as any other ones I saw through the state so states I had dabbled in cover crop grazing quite a few years before and I came up with an idea well can we can we rebuild these soils using cover crops and cattle and I applied for and got a CIG conservation innovation grant from the USDA and here now we're in the third year of this so managed grazing is what we do the cover crops filling in a gap in the winter so the the goal of this project was number one can we build soil rebuild soil and semi-arid western South Dakota and two can we replace all of our winter hay feeding with this project and we have we've been very successful with it that's this is the first year that's a hundred and forty thousand pounds of live weight per acre in a in a daily move there this is kind of what we're growing our range tech range con and my daughter there first year we did it with with pairs and those calves gain just under three pounds a day never started a tractor once we fence line weaned this was our first our second tour we had eighty or excuse me seventy people come to this tour people are starving for this knowledge they want a different way of doing things there they're sick of giving and all their money away too so what about snow last December when when it all rolled in we all remember that and we grazed right on through it I I fed them hay and it laid laid there for three weeks cows would rather our cows anyway would rather go graze than stand around and eat hay it's what they were designed to do that picture was 25 below that morning with a 35-mile-an-hour wind and and they're doing just fine here's here's my seed mix for this year we use an 11 species diverse mix mostly 50% grass 50% broadleaf we've settled on these these species seem to do pretty good in our area and we'll keep going with this so about 22 bucks an acre that's the mix there this was June 27th that's June 28th we got completely hailed out this year that was in August it's rebounded so our it can we build soil yes and we're and we'll have the numbers for this bit by this spring hopefully but our soil biology is going up rapidly they did use up some of the organic matter from the brome grass I terminated but we know this is happening because our yield is tripling every year we might have hit peak production here last year we grew we tripled our production on two inches less rainfall in the middle of a drought so there's a lot going on here that's kind of some of the production there there's one plot that we we clip 22,000 pounds to the acre in Western South Dakota with with just some seed and a little help from nature here's this year's tour we did and we had we had 80 people come this year like say people are starving for knowledge I had had Dr. Chris Nichols come down and Dr. Ray Ward had some spirited conversation but it was really good and so I'm going to let dance talk here for a little bit. I was just wondering if you can tell us what you did with the water. First stockwater sure I have I got a pipeline that runs next to one of the fields and we tapped into that and put a tank in and the other field I dug a well and we got a tank there so yep they have open water all winter long and can and can go through it. You rotate fields grazing. We graze through them. Let them rebound back. No this is winter grazing strictly. This is winter grazing this is not not summer or fall no so we're full season we don't get enough rainfall to to do what you're saying most years maybe one out of five right but this this project was a full season cover crop to to graze through the winter time so. With your soil recount do you do any soil testing this season? We do yes well and we'll have all that dad I just don't have it today so we'll have it put together we think we had an anomaly that we're not sure the test kind of went wonky so I am going to continue this project for another couple years so we get I don't know what to do when it it comes in such a torrent like that anything that we try to any structures we put in there is going to wipe it out because the land above us is not holding it's not the moisture is not the brain is not going in it's running off it's beating up and running off comes down there in a torrent I'm willing suggestions I'd love to know other than the neighbors change in their management practices that would be number one so oh yeah it would take this out as much water comes down it would just wipe them out yeah. That particular spot has a pretty large drainage area and like Riley saying by the time it reaches its land of water velocity and volume is such that like I said any any structure that isn't totally concrete like a bridge filler is going to blow out so the fact of the matter is it's a dysfunctional water cycle right caused by management practices we fixed that we fixed the water cycle on our on our grazing land and we don't run any water we took a three inch rain in ten minutes and didn't run any water it's all infiltrating so continuous grazing no till without any cover does the same thing it just runs off so it goes into a antelope creek on to elk creek on to the Cheyenne River so chances are many of you in this room when you show up at a conference like this have seen the rainfall similar so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this but run off jars closest to you the ones that are a little bit more obscured by the front set of jars that are those that are capturing filtration note the amount of water in the front two jars only two jars have water in them continuous grazing and conventional tillage also note the clarity of that water versus the jars that are behind them those jars in the back there is a quarter or a third of the jar has water in the infiltration under rotationally grazed zero water or maybe just a few drops under the continuous grazing full almost overflowing jar of infiltration under cover crop now that's you know under a cover crop not only that but diverse crop rotation soil armor all five principles of soil health which are referenced in this document if you're not committed to memory and and then no till that which the words that you can't read on that sign up there on the second one from the right is is that it diverse crop rotation again soil armor all of the things livestock integration and then of course conventional tillage I think I do see a little bit of water in there but I've run that rainfall simulator enough to know that the water that fell into that jar in a two inch deep tray was actually preferential flow right along the edge of that tray was accidental water doesn't get through conventional tillage when it has a flower like consistency gonna talk about the slate test do you have a slide on was there one in there this like test some of you guys probably know about that and and the soils from from my cover crop livestock fields lost zero soil they had been there for was it three hours when we finally dumped them and there was no soil at the bottom so our soils are extremely stable doing this and they didn't start that no no it was a dead the soil was basically dead it was a brome monoculture for years decades in fact and we'd exported all the hay the nutrients office for generations so wasn't much left to it and we do the same thing in our annually crop systems when we bail up and haul off the residue and make a habit of it first and foremost if we're gonna if we're gonna try to improve soil health we've got to cover up air soil right mail it all up and take it away with the exception of what's still hankered vertical what's there to protect us from the impact of the rain drop we're this isn't my carizal fungi of course but we are seeing a lot of biological activity it was this was a manure pat that some species of fungi was was taking down in the soil and and sharing it with everybody else and it was it's a neat picture to see so but yes our fungal count has gone up tremendously from where we started I don't have the data today I apologize for that but yeah it will be soil that's sticking to this sorghum sedan grass plants roots that is the very beginning of regenerating soils building soil health I think this wouldn't be new but I'm gonna say it anyhow just in case it is new for you even one person in the room so your plants are leaky right through root exodates they're releasing a sugary substance on the root here at the end of the root tips and soil biology blocks to that spot the most biologically active part of your soils and it's called the rhizosphere if you need to give it a turn and that sticky substance is called the psoil octalate and hold in that position it starts with the individual grains of sand, silt, and clay we start to glue some of those together just like if you stick your fingers in sugar water as that already evaporates off you're still out of this sticky residue on your end and that's exactly what Riley's doing in the soil environment to see and maybe even justify and explain what's happening above ground well we need to use more of our our sharpshooter spades to see what's happening below ground because not all plants do this equally they all do it in some way but not equally so the day of Riley's tour it was at 10 a.m. think that's what it says yep just before 10 a.m. the air temperature was 90 degrees okay we were starting to get uncomfortable I think it got in the midnight just by afternoon thank God we had tents to retire to in the grass cover adjacent to this field this is one of these this would be pretty much your grown monoculture but we have adequate soil armor there was plenty of recovery so the growing season had served the plants well the soil temperature at that same time 80 degrees okay valuable information but so what sorry in the cover crop we're approaching 90 not if not quite as much covered as canopy covers concerned as the grown but it's still very good still works what next I found a gap in the something happened drill skip or something like that over 100 degrees pushing 110 degree soil temperature and just in that top intro to I think Chris you were talking about something that was happening just in the top of your teeth with relative to livestock raising and the pre-plant soil tests for fertility that's where it really matters right when we're sticking new new germinating seedlings in soil if it's unprotected we have large influx or not influx but a large variation in temperature from sunrise until mid afternoon right why that matters if we care about the living part of the soil is that when we get to that 108 110 113 degree mark some of our microbial species start to die and just like us I know I'm not nearly as productive when it's 105 as I am when it's 75 if you're if you're comfortable your soil biology probably comfortable you're starting to sweat maybe get a little lazy looking shade up your soil biology is probably behaving in the same way so that day we were approaching that threshold where some microbial species start dying at 10 in the morning if we had gone and done that again at 2 30 in the afternoon it probably would have been 120 degrees in that bear spot meanwhile under the canopy cover of the cover crop or in the grass cover we still would have been in that acceptable range so so the value of the soil armor and minimizing soil disturbance through any means whether it's herbicide insecticide tillage obviously those are things that we need to really gut check ourselves on because we might be giving away the very life-giving stuff that we have present in ourselves I pointed you to this 11 by 17 page on the rail you didn't grab it on your way in grab it on your way out and think on this a little bit we've got a narrative at the bottom of it the few of us in South Dakota added to this the work of somebody else but are all of those plants have rooted or are all of them fibers through we have diversity in our rooting structures just like we have diversity in the leaf shapes leaf links and even bloom period the color of the flower the whole host there's diversity above ground and below ground we need to be sure that we're reflecting that in our crop rotations if we're cash croppers because if we don't our soil is slipping away maybe not literally it might not be blown away it might not be washed away although that could be possible but what's slipping away is the function of life in our soils what happens if you fast for a week fast night all you're allowed is water are you gonna feel as good on day seven as he did on the afternoon of day one what if he continued it for another couple weeks or three months you can challenge me if you want but look at the growing season the frost region South Dakota pushes on 260 280 days along your cash crops grow 90 maybe 100 how are you feeding your soil biology the rest of that 260 or 280 days we can do it with diverse crop rotations with cover crops behind your small drains I'm not foolish I understand that your own crops don't have generally enough of a window to plant a cover crop behind but have you considered flying so on if the conditions are right this is how you can enhance the function of your soil just some ideas go ahead it just so happens that there's four young ladies focused in this photo one of them is Riley's daughter the future of agriculture these young ladies were soaking up the conversation of Dr. Chris Nichols and Dr. Ray Ward as well as the neighboring ranchers that were asking questions that day and those who are going to control what's happening here to show up so I'm really glad you're here I bet all of us wish that we could have loaded up three of our neighbors that really need to hear stuff like this but showing up that's fine so here we are this is last week got pairs on there I still yes I still have calves on the cow we're targeting 60% utilization that's before and after with a single strand polywire so I just was doing the numbers again this morning you know if you don't do it for the soil health benefits do it for the money it's costing me about $1.25 a day to run a pair on this I know that the calves will gain two and a half to three pounds a day so if you break those numbers down my cost to gain is 10 cents a pound any feedlot guys in here feedlot cost to gain is $1.10 plus right now I'm doing it for a fraction of that you run those numbers back again and just the added value of the gain on my calves is $500 an acre for doing this that's not counting the nutrients that we're cycling back into the soil so it is at work absolutely and we'll it's going to continue to be part of our winter strategy I threw this slide just a second circle I challenge the the conventional mindset versus regenerative mindset quite often with people and and this one is a challenge is the the assumption that that we go dormant in the winter and this is not true this is after the snow went off in January last year and this is well rested pasture that's covered and tillered and it's absolutely not dormant it's growing and thriving and this is what we try to nurture on our place we with our I should have elaborated that earlier but our grazing is we're short duration high intensity and we rest these pastures for 12 months before we come back and we're going to measure again this next year but we're pretty sure our forage production has doubled just from management changes no inputs yeah it's in the last five years so enough in fact that we're able to add a stocker opera stocker enterprise this next year so I mean this is this is what we do we we protect the land and the plants that's more important than the cows cows are a tool to harvest that I failed to introduce myself my apologies started in because we wanted to get this content to you my name is Tans Herman I'm grazing lens so I was working in the service field office when Riley first spawned this idea we got kicking it around and then went on into this project Valerie riders in the room she's the district conservationist now and has been offering support and help as well this is a partnership effort now CIG conservation innovation grant is just that we're testing semi-unproven methodology right and three years data were convinced and providing you a presentation in under 30 minutes maybe doesn't totally convince you but as we get into the growing season don't be afraid to put on some miles and get to some workshops go to the Seoul health conference go to the South Dakota no-till association meetings and learn this we can stand up here talking to a blue face but I know that we're working because you have a trustee relationship already built you can reach me I'm pretty easy to find we'll land on the slide with Riley's yeah that's my contact info you had a question we need to do it yep sure anything for germination of all the plant like wildlife plants bees we have we have bees on the place yeah yeah not ours of course but yeah what did you start with or where did you we're just say this is we're going to start point this over shooting on the cover crop or cover crops on flat land or rolling hills did you have native graft buffalo grafts these were these were traditionally hay fields that we had that the one in particular was some summer fallow wheat ground in the 70s and 80s and then we put it back into hay these are all basically hay fields so on on relatively flat ground yeah so these are these were monoculture hay fields that are that were completely depleted and it's and it's easy to some of you might say well just fertilize it well I was an applicator for quite a few years and and I was applying nutrients that came from Ukraine so we can send corn to China yeah it made zero sense to me yeah so I just I knew there had to be a different way and a better way to do it and keep it keep it simple so does that answer your question okay the end goal with this is is back to a native grass seeding I didn't say that earlier but that is the end goal this is the next on these and then we'll the other depleted hay fields we'll go through how much did we cut hay feeding down we on 340 head of cows we we fed 60 bales of hay last year we had a lot of winter not as much as maybe some of you guys did but we had a lot of winter so yeah we're absolutely cutting expenses yeah I I used glyphosate I used a high rate of that and since the termination we just are at a very low rate of glyphosate 24 ounces what I used last year so native grass yep we're yes we're putting we're trying to put root mass in your organic matter back to it to build the soil biology to go back to a successful native grass seeding but yeah you can go you can you can take out bromine plant grass but it doesn't do anything in our area is as airy as we are it it'll just sit there and the plants are the plants aren't healthy because the soil is not healthy and by resting our pastures there's some that will disagree with that the long rest but all the health problems went away on our cattle when we we let the plants become healthy we just we don't have any troubles anymore they just all they all went away so there's more going on here than I would I can explain but I know what I see oh don't get me started on grasshoppers they sprayed 800,000 acres of grasshoppers in Mead County it makes me sick it's the environmental travesty of our time I know some of you will disagree with me all they're doing is creating more grasshopper problems because they they're killing the predators off I sprayed IGRs they kill everything I have natural predators on our place I don't have pictures of them today I have we have ground spiders about every three or four feet in our rain land and when we start getting grasshoppers on every they have a little web about like this every one of those has a dozen grasshopper carcasses on it okay so what's the first thing that's going to die when I put an IGR on the on the range land those spiders aren't going to make it I'm sorry they're just not the other reason we have spiders is because we rest our pastures okay we have a lush green we have a canopy and it keeps that soil cool look around us nobody cares about grass they graze it to the dirt it's like they want to kill it and we have bare soil and we you know you seen the thermometer that soil heats up what does it do to the biology it kills it and we are honestly conventional agriculture is a culture of death we're trying to kill kill kill insecticides herbicides I hate herbicides I still I have to use a little dose if anybody's got a better suggestion I'd like to know I absolutely will not till it when you start learning the stuff you can't unlearn it and you can't go back to the old ways you can't sorry I got a little long there yeah it's not new talking to a rancher here today but if they're not part of your operation and you have no interest in owning cattle that's okay work with the neighbor look up with the grazing exchange Cindy stepped out of the room but soil health pollution has a grazing extreme find somebody with livestock that's looking for grazing and and get the value Chris's information supported what we've observed on Riley's place this morning that livestock impact on the land when grazing management is done pro-furtherly on crop helps it certainly doesn't hurt so yeah another one on on the grasshoppers what we noticed so I absolutely would not let them spray with the airplane on our on our rangeland and it was early August the grasshoppers went away and the crickets came by the thousands crickets are on the IGR label if we just sprayed we killed the natural predator one of the other natural predators of the grasshoppers so I look at things in a completely different view than most people I mean most people they they they they're out of feed for one and they panic and that's the first thing they do is spray so pardon where they go we're gonna hear in about a week and a half we're gonna wean them and then there the the calves are gonna go back to this cover crop field I'm reserving 30 or 40 acres for them and the cows will go to another one and then we'll have them the calves weaned killer they're on the gain they won't lose any weight through weaning and then we're ready to market them whenever if this market decides to pick up here this next month so yes sir two to three days I gave them a two-day allotment yesterday and they'll be ready to move in the morning again so I gave them 10 acres yesterday morning so there I gave them a little more they're using about four acres a day on this so yeah they would walk it off they would they'd go the herd would go from one end to the other and they just would stomp it off and you wouldn't get the harvest use utilization like I'm showing there so we're trying to harvest about 60% we're leaving the other 40% on this on the soil surface yeah because that you could see they mashed it down pretty good that's what I want is armor I can't go I've tried to push it to get a little better than that and they'll they'll get to pushing on my fence and trying to push through so that's where that's our target right there Chris did you have a question I don't think the research is lacking I think there's enough out there it's just we have to change the paradigm of how people see things and willing to change and do things different that's kind of why I'm here you know to raise awareness of other things we can do so here that's up in the foothills the black hills this is those are pine trees and and scrubboats there that's that isn't our place actually at least that so no those are those are native plants yep do any plant additions trees grass do you do anything else I haven't I haven't it's hard to get trees to grow where we're at so haven't haven't planted much so well Riley and I plan to join you all for lunch so thanks everybody