 I'm going to turn it over to Kevin and we'll get started. Thanks, Mary. And as Mary talked about, you know, the dry conditions throughout the northern plains has been, you know, a big issue for most of our livestock producers in North Dakota. And it's, we don't, we often don't think about the horse owner and the circumstances that they also may deal with. And what most of our horse owners and managers is they do feed a lot of hay. And so I think when it comes to pasture management, we also got to think about hay management and what the outlook is in terms of hay production. So you can lay in that hay early enough. And so this map was created last week and that the new one should be coming out today or came out yesterday. But you can see all of North Dakota is in some type of a drought, but 85% of the state is in a D3 drought, which is probably the largest. We've ever seen at this time of the year, for this time of a drought scenario, and 93% of us are in D2 drought. So we're dry. We have to think about grass production for production. And of course it takes water to grow grass. And so let's talk about some options here on what it would you can do what to think about prepared or if you're going to be looking for. I didn't want to put this slide up, because I think it's important to understand a lot of our hay grow, a lot of our horse owners do buy a lot of hay. And so if you're looking to buy hay, we'll talk about this later on, but you can see the whole Western half of the United States is in some type of a drought. And the North Dakota, you know, Easter month in a D3 area. So if you do need to look for hay, I would, I would probably recommend looking east and southeast. We don't have much of a drought in Minnesota, even in that eastern part of South Dakota looks pretty good. And so those are probably going to be your avenue to look for hay versus going west or southwest. And there's a little area there in south of Montana that looks good. A lot of that hay will probably move into Montana or south. Just something to think about in terms of a national scale, what the drought looks like. So when did the drought start? I mean, you know, I've been raising horses for 30 years. I noticed this last year on my pastures, we just ran out of forage early, because we started getting dry last year. So this drought really started in last spring of 2020, what saved us last year was the wet fall in 2019. Much of the state received 150 to 250% of above normal precip in the fall of 2019. That moisture saved us in 2020, which is why most of our hay growers produced a good hay crop last year. Most of our pastures looked pretty good, at least in the spring and summer. We might have saw some issues last fall. But that's kind of where it started, and we really see in this aspect of the drought really happening from last fall. If you just look at Minot from September to April, they've received, and this doesn't include May here, but this is September and April. They had less than one inch of moisture during that time period. That's 12% of normal. And they only had about two and a half inches of snow reported at the airport. So we didn't have much snow. And we didn't have much moisture coming into this spring. And so you can see why this spring is looking to be dismal because we didn't have much last fall as well on this winter. Now we talk about snow, and when it comes to snow, the biggest benefit of snow is really recharge for water sources. And so if you rely on stock dams for water sources, make sure that they look good. Many of them are going to be drawn down. And when they're drawn down, there's other issues that can occur. And I know Rachel's going to cover the water issues later on, but if there's something that you need to look at, do you have good water? Do you have reliable water? And if you don't, you need to think of some options or all kinds you're going to look at with water and these animals this summer. So I think it's important to know, and that doesn't matter if you're a cattle producer, a horse producer, a sheep producer, on the northern plains, we grow our grass from the May and June precipitation. So if we're dry in that time period, we're going to have a below average year for production. That's both hay and grass. Our second period is really that month of September, and that drives our vigor of our plants and the early growth that occurs in the months of April and May. So I just, this is a graph of three different grasses. The blue dashed line is Kentucky bluegrass. The red line is western wheat grass, and the dotted line is a warm just in grass or blue grass, blue ground on this case. And you can see, we grow most of our grass in that May, June period. Your cool season is to me anywhere from 80 to 90% of the growth of that time period. And we almost always take off that first crop of grass hay by the by late June, mid to late June, our alfalfa has already got one crop off, and getting close to a second crop by the early part of July. You can really predict if you're going to have a good grass here or not on precipitation in May and June. Today is May 12. We've already got almost half the month of May gone. Some of us in the western part of the state got fortunate moisture last week Saturday. The north central and the east did not get that moisture. But even though you got an inch of rain or an inch and a half rain can be blessed you got it. It did a really small part in terms of really impacting in a positive way the drought we need to really get five and six and seven inches of rain to really kind of make up for that losses. So, if the rain keeps coming, you know, we'll be in much better shape. Just know that a time period grows your grass. The second critical time period is the fall really September, early October that produces the leaf tissue that grows the following spring. So if you think about last fall, we did not have any moisture last fall. So our grasses came into the winter stress. Most of those pillars on our pools using grasses probably died. In fact, what I've looked at my surveys, the majority of them have died. A brown grass seems to have done the best I've noticed, but that means you have a delay in growth in spring. And we'll talk about that as we go through this. So we look at drought scenarios and I know we had the fall drought and we currently have a spring drought. It's important to understand not all droughts are the same, and they all affect grass production and grass quality differently. And so if we look at a spring drought like we're like we're currently in right now spring precipitation as the greatest negative effect or lack of spring precipitation as the greatest negative effect on forage production. We can predict by early June, if we're going to have a good year or a bad year. The summer droughts like we saw last year we saw really dry conditions by July and August. That really affects forage quality. And so if you're grazing animals on pasture that looks like this picture here, we're Scott and fairly brown, especially if it's mature protein will be limited and energies usually still fine but usually protein vitamins and minerals become deficient. So if you think about how you're going to feed those horses during that time period if you're lacking protein, and more than likely you're you're also going to be lacking vitamins and minerals in their diet. And lastly, these fall droughts, like we also saw last year, I'm as the greatest effect on plant bigger and next year spring growth. And we already know because of what happened last fall that growth this spring would have been delayed because we'd have lost that lead tiller that grew last fall. So I've been telling producers over the last few months, be prepared for a later turnout, because forage production or at least in terms of phenological production will be delayed. The second caveat is, we also have any rain so it's not going to be delayed, you're also going to not have much biomass. So what happens if we don't get rain, or we do get rain, what are the scenarios you can expect in terms of potential forage production. So we are trend is looking for a below normal spring moisture, all the forecasts that I've seen show normal at best, below normal is probably going to be more likely for this spring. And what you can expect in terms of forage production, whether you're on pasture, or whether you're putting up hay. If we stay dry, expect a severe reduction in forage production, especially on those cool season grasses, which is brome crested bluegrass Timothy orchard grass, as well as alfalfa, in terms of your leg. It looks to me like you're looking at about a 40 to 50% reduction in forage production for 2021. So can your land manage those horses during that time period with that kind of lower production? If it cannot, then you do think about alternatives, provide feed for those animals. We tell livestock producers you can call, you can reduce your cattle numbers. It doesn't seem to be a positive output in the equine industry. We tend to have our animals, we love our animals. So we do whatever we can to feed them versus what we call culling, like you'll see the cattle. So if we do get normal spring moisture, let's say it does continue to rain in the western part of the state, Devil's Lake, Minot area, western, even eastern. The game's on here, it gets some moisture coming up in the month of June. You're going to still expect to see a loss of production because of what happened last fall. So based on the data that I've looked at, you can expect about a 20 to 25% loss of production. In many cases, producers and horse growers can handle that level with feeding different feed sources. If your pastures were overgrazed in 2020, and I hate to say it, but a lot of our horses grazed a little harder. And we like to see, you can expect even greater production losses, even with normal spring precip. If those pastures came into the winter stressed, and came out this spring also stressed, but just think about those numbers are looking. So if we do get a wet spring, let's say that the showers open up and we get really good moisture. You may then see normal for production up to 150% of above normal precip. If you get above 150%, you will probably see more than normal production. The odds of that happening are less than 5% of the time. So in a 20 year period, that will only happen one time. That is the odds of getting that much precip. So don't bank on those numbers to be prepared for the worst. And if it comes along, then things will be half the point. If we get these properly under stock, we get good moisture. We tend to see those actually do very well with even slightly above normal. All right, so when we look at this spring, we're really talking a lot about is when should we turn horses out to pasture. And like any other producer, no matter what you're raising, like to turn out as early as we can, just to get them on. So let's look at, we're going to look at two different scenarios. The first one is phenology, which tells you the grasses can withstand grazing pressure. And then production. So in this picture here to my right is smooth bromegrass. I took this picture on Tuesday or Monday this week for two days ago. And it was that three and a half leaves, which tells me that bromegrass is phenologically ready to be grazed by horses. I've been ready for about the last week, based on phenology. It's only about four inches tall, maybe six inches if it wasn't overgrazed last year. So it doesn't carry a lot of biomass yet in the month of May. So you may want to still delay turnout to get some more biomass so you don't raise in front of in front of the grass growth. You want that grass to grow ahead of your grazing. So you always have production and grass growth in the month of July, August, September and October. So you want to try and delay that if you can get some more biomass. The middle picture is actually Kentucky blues, which is common in a lot of our horse pastures. It's common in my horse pasture, as well as the brome. In this picture, it's two and a half leaves. The bluegrass is getting really close to being a lot to be ready. The caveat is really short, even in our pastures, which were not overgrazed. In this scenario is actually moderately gray. It was only about two and a half to three inches tall. It was only a little bit to go to get some more biomass out there before I would turn horses out on those pastures. I'm going to show you two different slides here to give you a feel for what I mean in terms of what happened last fall. Sorry, I have a delay in my slides here. So if we look at this slide, this was taken in 2017. This is Western wheatgrass. Typically grays native grasslands. We have native range. We shoot for three and a half leaves on our cool season grasses. In this picture, this is Western wheatgrass at three and a half leaves on May 9, 2017. The caveat was in the fall of 16, we had ample moisture. So we had good, healthy killers. They survived the winter. We had, even though we were a little dry in 17, we still had good growth. It was about eight inches tall. We look at the very next year in 2018. This is the same area. And my slides are kind of messing up. There we go. So you can see, this is taken about the same time, actually five days later. We had a drought in 2017, the fall. So you come in our grass growth with delayed, almost two full leaves five days later. What that tells me was, was the bottom tiller actually died over the winter. We had to start from scratch. So we're at one and a half leaves and we're only three and a half inches tall. This is what's going to happen in 2021. And this is what is currently happening in 2021 is delay in production. We don't see as much delay in the logically because we were so warm in the month of May of March and the early part of April. So we didn't get a lot of growing degree days that kind of made up, but the production just isn't there in 2021. So what are some early grazing strategies? And so if you're, if you're a horse producer and you have some pastures that are either crested wheat grass, or they're smooth, brown grass, or they're Kentucky blue grass. The bottom to your right is actually old Kentucky blue grass. This is actually quite an ugly picture. This we can see in some of our pastures that don't get grazed at all. You do want to graze Kentucky blue grass or it looks like this. Pitcher to your left is actually metal brown grass. I took that picture yesterday. And so my brown grass was actually at about four and a half leaf stage. It was ready to be grazed. These are your best options. So if you do have crested wheat grass, or you do have brown or blue grass or metal brown, they can be actually ready to be turned out either now or in another week, if you've got the biomass to support it. My pasture, my grass is about 10 to 12 inches tall. And we've had two into the rain though in the last three months or weeks. So I have, we've had the moisture in the valley. So just think about those opportunities in terms of what you could graze early. If you do have a brown grass field, or you do have a crested field. If you want to extend the grazing on that field, you should either strip graze it or rotational grazing. I actually prefer rotational grazing. The rotational grazing here on the back. And you get recovery from where the wreck horse is actually grazed. All strip grazing is means as you move the fence away from your water source every five days. And you strip field, they have access to the whole field. So it's a great way to actually let your grasses grow to get a little more healthier. If you do get the moisture, you'll get some more growth on that. And when you get recovery on this, let's say you graze from early mid-May to mid-June or early June, you give it some rest and you do get rain at that time. Because they grazed it, and you've delayed the phenoloxidization, it will grow. You will actually get really good regrowth from that moisture. It's a great way to not only extend your grazing, but actually produce more grazable feed for those horses to graze. In our studies, we've actually shown we can increase efficiency by 40% which means you can get 40% to 50% more grazing days by rotational grazing versus seasonal grazing. And horses are probably the worst bunch because they're terrible spot grazers. And when they spot graze, they graze areas that are short, so they graze down. And then they don't graze other areas because once they head out, they don't like it. And so you really get much grazing with, if you let them to graze the pasture, these are long. When you do rotational grazing, you become, you become a little less selective and you get better distribution of their grazing, which then enhances regrowth potential for grass and less grass. Hopefully that makes sense. If you over graze the pasture in 2020, your goal is to try and not repeat over grazing it for two years or more. Our grasses are really resilient in the northern plains. They can take a one-year abuse and be just fine if you're different grazing the next spring. Give them some recovery so they can get the roots back healthy and they'll be fine. If you do have, if you're going to graze this spring and you need to turn up the pasture early, start in the pasture that was properly grazed last fall because it'll be the most healthiest coming into the spring. So just think about trying to not graze a pasture more than one year in a row at a heavy use. Last week Rachel talked about rotational grazing and I have a slide on it earlier and I think it's a great opportunity for horse producers to look at ways to stretch the feed. And only we look at with cattle producers, we've got many acres easier to do this, but it's not that difficult to take even a five acre piece and split it into three pastures and rotate those horses through that pasture. I actually like four pastures a little better because it gives you a little bit more resiliency in your grazing pattern. So this works well, no matter what the size of the pasture, no matter if it's horses or cattle or sheep, it's an opportunity to extend your grazing phase by creating more regrowth. So it also creates a healthy scenario. And so we can look at rotational grazing even in the horses. Again, if you have three or four pastures, you can actually then minimize your overgrazing. So you have to overgraze. You can pick one of those cells and graze it a little harder and give it time to recover the next year and it will be just fine, especially crested wheatgrass and Kentucky bluegrass. They're very resilient to grazing. Grown grass is not quite as resilient, so you need to give it a little more time to recover. But it's a way you can actually get by, graze one of them hard, get it recovered and let it defer. If you do overgraze a pasture, remember you're going to impact intake by those horses and you're going to see an impact on performance of those horses. So supplementing feed is going to be necessary, maintain body condition on your horses. And it'll page and cover some of that as you go through the talks. So just think about that and if you overgraze, it's about the health of that animal when that occurs. So what are your best options when forage is limited? And last week we talked about this. We're just going to talk about this. Dry lot feeding is a great tool to use with horses. This is my dry lot that I have at home. You can see it's an area that I have water. It's dry lot. I hate, I hate, I hate hay there and I can let my pastures recover or I can delay turnout with pasture feeding. So you're basically creating an area for sacrifice. When you do that, you're going to get weeds in your dry lot scenario. So think about weed control. What are the weeds? And know that you need to maintain that dry lot just like anything else. So it's clean and safe. You want some growth on there. Because in this case you can see I'm fairly dirt. We're going to have some dust issues. So health issues could be a problem if we stay really dry on a true dry lot like you see in my scenario. I do control my weeds, but I do it mainly with mowing so I can keep a green lush area on those areas. So the green lush weed, but it's still better than the green lush area. And so your best option is going to look, if you are running out of feed, this is an area of my pasture. My horse is like everybody else out there. They love the pack trays. They picked this blue grass, it's like pretty good. And so your best option is going to tell you this now, hay's not going to get cheaper. And if it stays dry, hay will be hard to buy. So don't wait till September to buy your hay. Look for it now. Purchase early, buy what you need. It's going to get more expensive the longer you wait. And purchase what you need for your horses. If you have gildings versus lactating mares, you can select either a grass, a grass that will help you mix and help you mix. Buy what you need so you're not overpaying on high quality feed that you may not need. If you need high quality feed, if you do have lactating mares, then you need to put it right in high quality feeding. And you're going to pay more for that as we get later into the season. And so let's look at some recommendations. If we finish up here, I'm going to go through the recommendations and a take home mess. So turn up the pasture. I think if your pastures are about two to ten inches tall and you're at that three and a half or four leaves, they're ready to be turned out. And so the caveat is that I'd had to call yesterday with a bill from Iowa. He said, should I just delay my turnout with my grass to get more, more cured out. And in the end, that's probably not also the best option because you're going to create a low quality feed that the horses aren't going to like this much. And you're going to get really bad spot grazing. If I would turn out when it's ready and just hopefully if your grass is healthy, it'll take the support that we have as well. So I think if you've got the grown grasses and the crested, they're ready if you've got the production. So I do like to look at crested, crested, the great grass and horses really do like crested in the month of May. Horses love the brome grasses. I actually prefer meadow brome over smooth brome. But if you have either one of them, horses like it and it makes a nice pasture and it is ready. Like I said, most of ours grazed out. And if you do have these bluegrass areas, I think bluegrass should be rested yet are deferred for at least another week. You get some biomass on that grass. If you get some moisture, so those in the western part of the state, your bluegrass will probably pop this week with the moisture you had. And it should give you some pretty good. And so alternative is to turn the auto purge is feeding hay, look at the feed supplies purchase if you need to do more and delay as best you can with what you can. If you're going to have over grazed like I talked about, grab a pasture that was not over grazed last fall. It'll be your safest pasture for 2021. So, and again, minimize this repeated over grazing. And I see a lot of horse pastures tend to get a little short to get a little weedy. And we really could talk about wheat control as well. But if you don't repeat this over grazing over multiple years, your grasses will stay healthier and weed should be less. So my last take on that and I know most hay producers. I'm the most horse producers will feed hay. Don't wait to buy your hay. If you contract hay with a hay grower, contact them early. Tell them what you need. Lock in the quantity. Lock in the price as best you can. Because hay is going to find more than double by the summer. If you need help out for our grass, see what you need and purchase what you need. If you're limited in hay, there are supplements you can use to feed stuff. And page you to cover this as we go through this PowerPoint. There are alternatives you can use to stretch your hay out as well. And from there, I'm going to turn it over to Rachel and we'll talk about water quality during the drought scenario. I'm actually going to turn over to Paige, who is going to talk about water quality and feed sources or feed. Feed quality. Sorry, Paige, I touched it again. If you could mute me. All right. Thank you, Rachel. So water quality is important any season, but even more important during a drought. So poor quality at best can lead to decreased water intake. And at its worst, it can lead to illness problems and even ultimately end in death. If we're not monitoring it. Kevin mentioned about the lack of snowfall and lack of the snow melt to recharge some of our dugouts and surface water supplies. But even if your horse isn't drinking out of a dugout or a slew and has a tank that's being fed by well water or groundwater supply, it's important to test those as well. Visually checking your water sources every day is, you know, just a general good practice to do. Even more important than a drought and then also testing frequently in drought years is also recommended, particularly when moving to a new pasture that hasn't been tested recently. So I want to touch on what we test for so total dissolved solids often mentioned as TDS is one of them. Okay, so TDS basically is a measure of salts and these levels for most livestock, we want to keep under 5000 horses are parts per million that is and horses are a little bit more tolerant to the point where we don't get too concerned until they get up to that 6500 parts per million range or so. However, anytime that you're testing over 4500 we recommend that you send a sample into a lab. TDS levels are pretty variable across the state, and they really vary between water source time of year, the kind of the climate to the weather in your area. You can have TDS levels really high in one dugout or pasture well and a couple miles away be within a reasonable range so you can't tell that visually looking at the water with the quality is or what the TDS levels are so testing is always very important. The state this year XOL even last year the last couple of years and ESU extension agents are monitoring this so if you have water samples that you want tested and get in touch with your county extension agent, bring them a sample, they have the ability to test. So, go on to the next slide and we'll talk about monitoring for TDS and what you need to do that. You can purchase these handheld TDS or EC meters yourself they range anywhere from you can get some pretty cheap ones up to around $100 or so. There's a variety of different kinds out there again get in touch with your county agent and they can help you out with that. When you're testing with these handheld meters again if they're over 45 parts per million 4500 parts per million, we want to get another lab analysis done which we'll talk about in a minute. The general rule sulfates typically make up about 60% of the TDS but that's not true in all places and situations. All right, let's go on to the next slide. The other thing that we want to monitor for is cyanobacteria or blue green algae. This can produce toxins that are harmful knowledge to your horses but other wildlife and humans and pets as well. Both of this bacteria is typically more common as the temperatures increase and our water temperatures increase in July and August but it doesn't mean that we won't see it in late May or June as well. Blue green algae typically and often most often occurs and stagnant still water so again our ponds or dugouts without a lot of water movement or stream flow but doesn't mean again that it couldn't happen in the stream or river as well. It's common, well it shouldn't even say most common but a lot of times people associate that blue green algae with like a bright teal scum that's on the surface of the water. In the first picture you can kind of see it along the edge of the waterfront that teal color on the surface and then there's a little bit of cyanobacteria coloring around some of the rocks and that's second picture on the right. Sometimes it's really really obvious and other times it's a little spotty. We can't tell just by looking all the time what it is so we want to consider sampling or should consider sampling. If we suspect we have some cyanobacteria in our pastures, even more important than sampling is if you think there's some algae there is to remove your horses before they drink that water. Blooms can occur very quickly, they can be there one day or not be there one day and the next morning they're there the next day they're there so they can be hard to catch. The signs of the poisoning from this can appear within a few minutes after drinking up to a day or so and some of those symptoms are pretty general you know weakness staggering muscle tremors difficulty breathing convulsions and then ultimately it can result in death if they consume enough of it. So it's a pretty serious issue. Let's go into the next slide and talk about how we're going to get these waters tested. Many commercial laboratories including the NDSU that diagnostic lab can come brought in do testing for the things that we're talking about today. The cost at the NDSU lab is around $25 or so a sample. And when you submit samples you want to make sure that you follow the sampling protocol. I see that Mary's dropping some of the links into the chat on where to get that detailed information. It's also on the image here. Most of the TDS or the analysis for livestock water samples and for your horses as well are going to include the TDS total dissolved solids, pH nitrates and sulfates, and then the cyanobacteria is a separate test as well. And they have different testing protocols and ways to ship to the lab so make sure that you're following those instructions for whatever that you're you're testing for. Of course your extension agent is always a good resource for that as well. But first remember that annual testing is usually a good idea, and then particularly in years like throughout you may need to test more frequently throughout the season. I'm also going to touch just briefly on testing your hay and we've covered this before in previous presentations and those are recorded in document but we want to remind you that, you know, if you're going to be supplementing feed with hay or dry lotting. It's always a good idea to know what you're feeding, especially when it comes to wanting to stretch our feed resources. So quick few steps to sample your hay, gather the materials that you need most county offices have a hay probe that you're able to check out. Grab a representative sample from your hay lot so 10% or a minimum of 10 to 20 bales whichever is more is a good idea. Drag the sample send it to a lab get the equine analysis done, you'll get those results back and you know exactly what nutrients are present in that feed. Go on to the next slide and we're going to talk just a little bit about how to stretch your hay resources so what if it comes down to you can't find hay in your area this year. One of the other areas is either difficult to do or you're not able to find that either here are some options so you can replace with a pelleted cube your vacuum pack forage that is available at most local feed stores. That's an option, you can replace with a complete feed and that's going to be a feed that's going to have a forage as well as a grain concentrate in it. You can feed hay with a concentrated feed, so maybe you're able to see those slightly less forage if you increase us the amount of concentrated grain type feed that you're feeding. You can feed older Hater horses so a lot of times horse people are known for wanting the highest quality possible. But if that's not an option this year and you're not able to find 2021 hay, you might be able to get access to hay that was put up in 2020 or 2019. But again, test that older hay so you know exactly what's in there. Typically there's going to be a little bit more waste and older hay the outer parts of those bales depending upon how it's stored is going to have some higher levels of mold or dust in it, typically. Some of those older Hayes are going to be deficient in vitamins, particularly vitamin A. Another option you have is to feed lower quality hay in a free choice free choice form so that you're sure that your horses are getting enough intake and enough roughage enough in their digestive system to keep them busy and happy throughout the day. But then maybe you're feeding a small amount of a higher quality hay so an alfalfa or a good grass hay that provides more nutrition. That's an option as well. Reducing waste in drought years, I mean it's always a good idea to reduce waste for your pocket book, but in drought years if you're really limited on your hay supply. You might want to limit feed your horses rather than giving them as much as they want to eat an around milk feeder. Maybe you want to use a net on your hay again to reduce that amount of waste. I haven't already talked about really resisting that urge to turn horses out to pasture, just because they slightly greened up a little bit, or they're starting to sort of grow if your horses get ahead of that grass. We've already talked about just the detrimental issues that happen from that. All right, thank you very much. Rachel is now going to talk about dry lining. Okay, good afternoon everybody I know a lot of people are preparing. Dry lot areas in their own in their own pens to make sure that any pasture that they have that's either been overgrazed or maybe isn't ready quite yet for turnout. You know they're looking at at managing the dry lot that they have or possibly putting one in. Maybe myself included I'm actually looking at putting in a dry lot so that any of the pastures that I have can be saved, or at least given time to recover because they were overgrazed last year and that's one thing that I really want to make sure that I have in the future so this is one thing that I'm using to protect those grasses now. So, when I talk about managing a dry lot. You might hear it called either a dry lot or a sacrifice pin or maybe an exercise paddock. A lot of planning goes into these so if you're actually using this as part of a rotational grazing system on, you know, finding space off of a current rotational grazing pasture or working to put in maybe some cross fencing in your pasture to get a rotational pen setup, you know finding space in that pasture to create a dry lot pen might be in your best interest so these are just kind of some some things to look at some things to do, prior to getting that pen setup. So ideally we want them attached to adjoining pastures or a rotational grazing system but that's not necessarily something that everybody can do. Maybe you have a space elsewhere that you can do a dry lot system into but at least you have a place to start on make sure if you're setting up these pins that you have, you can do access with equipment to either clean out the ground or bring in a bale or anything that may help you kind of manage that dry lot pen. Also consider walkthrough gates when you're looking at something make sure it's something that maybe a wheelbarrow can get through so that you can manage the manure in there as well. And then make sure that pen is also properly drained we don't think about it this time of year this year because we're in a drought but if you're using that pen also for a really wet season. You want to make sure that it doesn't get too muddy. So what are we looking at when we look at dry lot pens. So the needs in that pen are shelter, water, a space for feed and then also space for those courses. So ideally, when you're looking at shelter if you don't have, you know, kind of windbreak setup or a space for a place for shade or that shaded, you might be looking at a shelter that's three sided. And it depends upon the size or how many shelters that you have in there depend on how many horses you will have in there. So if you have one to two horses, a 12 by 12 three sided shelter is something that would be appropriate for that and then if you get any more you're going to be looking at either a larger shelter or more shelters for those horses. So those are, that's one option. Making sure that you have space for both your water and your feed, and that there's good distance between them so that if it's, if it's during either a wet year. If you're not mudded down too much, or in a dry year you want to make sure that there's not a huge risk of erosion either. And when they get too close together, you end up with a lot of traffic through those areas. And then when you're talking space for these horses. For an average horse, which is about 1100 pounds, you want around 400 to 500 square feet of space for each 1100 pound force. So if you have horses that are larger or horses that are smaller, you can adjust for those as well. So it's all depending upon size, and this 400 to 500 square feet would not include your place for your water, your hay or your shelter, that would be added on. So make sure that there's enough space for those horses in there as well. I'm, and if, if you especially you have horses that don't get along, you might be looking at more space as well, so that horses are able to get away. Some of the things we want to look at are some of the benefits that we'll see with our dry lotting as, as both Kevin and Paige have have pointed out. You know, it definitely gives your pasture some of that must much needed rest in a rotational grazing system. Those those pastures that they're coming off of. If, if we're in a regular season where we get enough rain, you're looking at possibly a two week rest on some of those pastures depending upon how big and how many horses were in there. So much needed rest going into your next pasture rotation. Sometimes you have to wait a little bit. So putting them on to a dry lot is an option. This also provides space during that, like I said, extreme wet or extreme dry conditions. It's really good to have dirt for that rotational grazing system so you can really get, you know, give those pastures a good rest and a heads up. And then it also provides outdoor spaces for horses who might have some metabolic issues that can't go out on grass or or have some other things going on. And you don't want to turn them out into a larger pen or pasture. And as we're managing dry lots, we want to think about, like I said, space again that 400 to 500 square feet. When it's too small, not enough space to move around and not really a good enough space for them to be in constantly. But when it's too big, it gets actually harder to manage. Kevin had mentioned about weed control, you know, needing to use a little bit of weed control in there. When it gets too large, it's going to be a lot harder to do to do that. But also keeping a good balance for the horses that you have. So it's, it's something that you might have to get into and try and see how well it works for you. But at least keeping that four to 500 square feet per each horse that are in is in there. And then when you're looking at a dry lot situation, you want to have a good fence for those horses. So permanent fencing situation or maybe some good heavy duty panels are what you might be looking at. For a temporary space, but you want to have something that's good and heavy duty so that your horse just can't push it around or that they can't get out of easily. I know a lot of horses once they know green grass is growing they want to get out of that pasture and get to where the green grass is because, you know, grass is always better on the other side of the fence. But we want to make sure that we have a good permanent fence for them so that it isn't an issue. That they're pushing through or, you know, keeping them safe in that pen to so that they don't get hung up or, or injured because of it. Now as we're looking at dry lots, the ground, you know, footing is, is a lot of there's a lot of places we look at footing in the horse industry, you know, we want to make sure we have good footing in our, in our arenas but the ground in your dry lot is also important too. We want to remove manure regularly this will also help with fly control on Mary's going to talk about a little bit more of that manure management here in just a minute. I'm sometimes dragging that pen and you want to this is going to be conditional you know how when conditions are right. Drag drag that pen to to maintain a level surface or to make sure that the drainage is there correct so that you don't end up with weird uneven footing. And then when you're looking at high traffic areas, those areas around the gate around where your feed sources around where your water is or sometimes even in those those pens you might want to look at high traffic pads to control both mud and erosion. Just to make sure that that it's a high quality area for your horse horses to be turned out in. And that also helps with if you have shot horses in mud situations, then you'll like less be less likely to lose shoes or have any issues with that foot. And now we're going to turn it over to Mary, who will get us into the manure management consideration. And so we're going to just talk very briefly about manure management. And so when I say, okay, so when I say briefly I just mean we are literally just going to touch on these and then we can go into them more next week. And I kind of everybody that spoke today touched on a few of them already and so we won't spend a lot of time here. One of the first things when we have a manure stockpile one of the first things I want us to consider is site selection. More so from an aspect of soil type. What do we have. What kind of soil do we have. And what are we. Oh, wrong way. And what are we looking for as far as leachates and how is that going to potentially affect our surface and groundwater manure collection, we do want to collect like Rachel said we want to collect that manure. We want to decrease fine festations and older issues. Are we putting the manure stockpile in an area where it's easy to access or we can easily get there, but it's out of the way so we have less flies. It's not too close to our area. So here we have reduced orders. So where is the manure storage area relative to the dry lot or the sacrifice area. And if you think long term, how will you manage the manure storage area. So is it just going to be constantly piled up. Are you going to try to turn it every 10 to 14 days and, and kind of compost it. Do you just plan to put it in there for nine months and take it out then and spread it so just some just some questions this week I'm just asking you some questions and things to think about. Excuse me. So will you compost the manure will you spread it fresh if you plan to spread it fresh. Will you do it or will you hire a custom applicator, and if you're going to hire a custom applicator. So the land spread it on. And is your manure storage area large enough for their equipment. Or can you move the manure to an area where they can actually get in and do their business. And so just all things to consider again just some questions for you to think about in review of today. So will you monitor your grass production throughout the season. What is your plan to supplement when you run out of pasture. Do you plan to test your water sources. Hey, will you dry lot your horses. And what's your manure management plan what does that look like. So like I said next week we'll go more into this. As far as the manager management goes but the rest of the things are just questions that we really want you to take home it and ask yourself. What am I doing right now what's my plan and how can I prepare for future so that we don't run into a situation where Kevin suggested that if we get to September and we have no hey left and there's no hey to purchase. What do we do then.