 All right. Good morning, everyone. We're going to go ahead and work on trying to get started. I do. We need it. I think I got everybody with that. Except for Mr. Moorlach. Well, first off, thank you all for coming down to Pierre, for Gary and Liz here. Thanks for coming over to Drifters today for this, for the state tech meeting. This, since I've been here, been here for just over a year and a half now, this is our first opportunity to actually get some folks together. And this is a hybrid meeting. We do have some folks online. And thank you, everybody, for calling in online also. This is an important meeting, or it's an important meeting for me. And this is more than just a check the box type of meeting. I am required by policy to hold at least one of these a year. World Forum a year. And the purpose of this meeting is the first, I'm just getting back to what is this meeting? This is the state technical advisory committee. The idea behind this meeting is more than just a collaborative meeting. This is a meeting between NRCS partners, producers, other government agencies and state agencies to talk about natural resource concerns across the state and our priorities across the state. And to see if we have some solutions that we could work on together to try to solve them. NRCS has resources, but so does everybody else in this room. And this is an opportunity for us to get together and visit and try to find ways that we can work again, collaboratively to work, invest, help South Dakota. So I thank all of you for being here. I guess this is this first row, just like the people just don't want to sit in the room. All right. I think I do the same thing when I go to most meetings. I'll be in the back row. But now I see that there's a lot of this between you and me. But just so that everybody's aware, we are reporting the meeting. It will be available for anybody who wants to take a look at this thing later. So one of the items that we have coming up that I'm really excited about, it is we're going to be putting together our NRCS strategic plan. Our last strategic plan did expire, I think last week or so right now, we're running off an old strategic plan. But we have some opportunities within the agency to grow. And that's what I want to see with this strategic plan. There have been so many changes that have happened just over the last few years. NRCS right now, where we have about 120 new staff within the state over the last five years. But that's tremendous when our staffing levels right around 300. We're almost half of our staff are new within the last five years. We have a lot of opportunities for training. And this isn't just internal. This is internal. This is with partners. We have opportunities. We have more money that's been invested or given to NRCS for the investment across our states through this implementation or inflation reduction act. And trying to find the best way to invest in South Dakota with this funding. We're already doing so many additional producers this year than we have in previous year. We're getting able to work further down our application lists. And we're looking at our regional conservation partnership program. We're trying to find some new ways to utilize that program to work with more partners and do some more innovative things that we haven't been able to do in the past. A lot of this still comes down to having these conversations like we're having today and visiting with each other and trying to find more ways that we can expand conservation across the state. Just going across and visiting my field offices, we're probably working with roughly 15 to 20% of our producers across the state. We have a lot of opportunity to grow. The producers I want to find are the ones that have never even heard of us. I see that as a problem for NRCS. But they haven't heard about NRCS. They're not being given any opportunity to work with us and try to fix potential resources. I've visited with some folks just recently that still were referring to NRCS as ASCS. We've changed a lot since then. They have a lot more opportunity. We have a lot more programs that are available and we need to make sure that and that we have opportunities to help. We have a lot of producers out there that don't necessarily want to get involved with government programs because they see it as welfare. These are prepaid services. All of our services that NRCS provides have already been paid for. It's not a free service. It's not welfare. Our services that we can provide between NRCS and all of our partners, these are all very valuable services that we can work with our producers. We just need to find these opportunities to get out there and make sure that we're being recognized, that we're being seen. And our producers actually know what we do. There's a lot of producers that go and work with the farm service agency and they never walk across the hall of visit with us. So we have some major opportunities and that's one of the big reasons why I love this group is that we have the ability to communicate to all of you what we do and hopefully you can help share this message. Our job as NRCS is to help people who love the land. We're not necessarily one that are out in front all the time but we're the ones that want to make sure that our partner remains successful and that our producers are successful. So I want to continue this meeting and we're going to be continuing to build this meeting into more of a collaborative process rather than just information and change. So as we work on putting this strategic plan together, there will be some partners listening sessions coming up. I should have had all those dates ready to go. I think somebody in this room probably does have some of those days so or at least could probably look them up fairly quick for me. Thank you. So I'll make sure that we give you the dates for those upcoming meetings. We will have a meeting in here. We're going to have a meeting in Brookings and we're going to have a meeting in Rapid City. So we're going to have three of these meetings and we're going to invite all of our partners to whichever one that you can attend. And I strongly hope that you all have the ability to attend at least one of these meetings. Got the experience on me. Thank you. September 25th in Peer. I'm assuming we're doing the partner meetings in the afternoon. Yes. Okay, September 25th in Peer at the Red Rosa, starting at 1 p.m. September 26th in Rapid City at the Hilton Garden Inn, starting at 1 p.m. And October 12th in Brookings at the Dakota Bank Center. Turn to the 1 p.m. Thank you. All of these meetings will be facilitated. We've contracted with an outside vendor to come in and help us put these meetings together. But again, I really, I want to hear your ideas. I want to hear your thoughts regarding what can NRCS work on? How can we communicate better with you? As partners, how can we communicate better with producers from your point of view and just help us, help us build to be a better agency? That's the purpose of this strategic plan. In the mornings of each one of those days we will have an employee listening session. Also, we're bringing all of our employees in. Fast, some very similar questions. What are things that the agency can work on to continue to be a great place to work for? And how can we continue to be more effective for our producers and our mission across the state? Any further down the agenda, something I'd like to do is I would like to go through and just do some brief introduction. First times that we've had a chance to get some people together, but I want to make sure that everybody knows who's on the phone and who's in the room. So we do the, we have the microphone up there in the front of this room. But if we go around the room and introduce everybody, just please speak loudly so that folks online can hear you also. So I'll start off. I am Tony Sincere. I probably shouldn't start off this way at the beginning. I am Tony Sincere. I'm the state conservationist for the Network Resources Conservation Service here in South Dakota. So now how do we start? I'm Ben Moorlach. I'm the RCPP program manager. Nathan Jones, state civil scientist. Jeff Vanderbilt, system data conservationist for programs. Matt Richardson, part of the programs here at the UCS. George Randall. I'm the director of the chapter of the program. Good morning, Tony. I'm the deputy director for South Dakota Ag-Magnus Health. First colleague, I'm the manager of conservation programs produced on women in South Dakota. Mark Norton, high access and farm bill coordinator of South Dakota game fishing parks. Larry Olson is one of the fact-finding tour for the TLC. Emily Borer, I'm the state R&D Department Specialist for the Network Services. Jason Moldoon, resource. Eric and the non-point source coordinator for the Watershed Protection Program and the Department of Ag and Natural Resources. Anthony Thomas, the public affairs section, is the financial one. Dean Gawding, system state conservationist for compliance for the RCS. Good morning. I'm Brett Federer, the acting state conservation engineer for NRCF. Sean Kelly, I'm the range field specialist for the SDSU Extension and vice president and liaison officer for the Missouri River River Strangler Association. Laura Taylor. I'm studying the publicly grassland position as the task force director at health beginning update and health board specialist. I should be good to say. I'm Tammy Bermas, the executive assistant for the state conservationist here on the RCS. I'm Jessica Malci and I'm the state resource conservationist for South Dakota RCS. I'm Angel Adler. I'm the executive director for the Association of Conservation District. Thank you. And so we'll go ahead and move to the folks that are online. So the first person I have on my list, if Blaine, do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself and we'll work down the list? Yeah, I'm Blaine Bracky with the South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts and work on the locally led project. Michelle. Good morning. I'm Michelle Burke, assistant state conservationist for field operations based out of Brookings for NRCS. You? Karen? Karen Osman, South Dakota Wheat Growers Association from Peer. Thank you. Rachel? Good morning. Oops. I'm Rachel Fry, the state urban conservationist for South Dakota. Thank you, Rachel. Tantz? Good morning, everyone. I'm Tantz Herman, state grazing land and soil health specialist for NRCS. Thank you, Tantz. Corey? Corey Byerley, rep on the South Dakota Cattlemen's Association today. Thank you, Corey. Tate? Good morning. I'm Tate Lantz. I'm the assistant state conservationist for field operations for NRCS and the Rapid City Field Support Office. Thank you, Tate. Lindsay? Good morning. I'm Lindsay Mater with the Pennington Conservation District. Thank you, Lindsay. Matt? Good morning, all. Matt Gottlob, I am the state coordinator for Pheasants Forever. Thank you, Matt. Randy? Hi, I'm Randy Papka and I am the secretary for NRCS and the here on office. Thank you, Randy. Reed? Can't hear you, Reed. I'm not seeing the muted on. I wanted to just have my computer issue. I still can't hear you. This is Reed Rasmussen. He is the, he's a staffer for representative Johnson's office. Thank you. All right. Rebecca? Hi, everyone. Rebecca Herman, Senator Brown's office. I am the senator's field representative for him and I work out of his Sioux Falls office but travel the entire state. Perfect. Thank you. Kevin? Hey, good morning, folks. First off, Tony, thanks for putting this meeting together. Great group of folks here compiled that. Kevin Robling, secretary at the Department of Game, Fish and Parks. Looking forward to the conversation. Thanks, Kevin. Jim? Jim Selcher with Mike Brown's office and I'm stationed out here in Rapid City and I work with Rebecca to get to all our constituents across the state. Thank you so much. Brandon? Good morning, Brandon Walther, state wildlife biologist for NRCS. Thanks, Brandon and Jen. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jen or Jennifer Wurz. I am the environmental court, excuse me, environmental quality incentives program manager for South Dakota NRCS. Great, thank you. Thank you all for introducing yourselves. We have a great group of people here today. So moving into the agenda. First item we have on the agenda this morning is an update from Senator Brown's office and I think that's gonna be a tag team between Jim and Rebecca. So I'll hand the floor over to both of you. Okay, we drew straws and I drew the short straw so I'm gonna give the update. So I think the biggest thing I can point out is August is a busy month for the senator and his staff because they're back in the state and we're trying to get him in front of as many constituents as possible. This kind of an example of what last week was like, we had him at Dakota Fest all day on Wednesday. We had him at the Brown County Fair all day on Thursday and then we had him out here in Rapid City at about three different constituent events. So that's kind of what those three days, you know, and Rebecca and I were with him there at Dakota Fest, she was with him up at Brown County Fair and I was with him out here in Rapid. So that's kind of how our whole month goes. This is the time of year when a lot of fairs are going on and we focus a lot on the farm and ranchers and those types of constituents, although we get quite a few of the other urban type constituents too at the fairs but the majority of our focus here in August is getting the senator around to as many people as possible. So obviously we're in recess and, you know, the hot topic right now is, well, there's a couple of them. One is obviously the Farm Bill and where is that gonna go? And right now it's looking like an extension. Most of the programs will expire here on 30 September, a few of them 31 December and then there's a handful of them that will just kick into auto mode but it gets real complicated. So it's likely we'll see an extension of the current Farm Bill until they can iron out their differences between the House and the Senate, ag committees and go to a vote and then hopefully a president's signature. The other piece is Senator Rounds introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and this is on foreign ownership of ag land and ag businesses. This has been kind of a hot topic in the last couple of years and it really come to a head when some Chinese entities tried to buy land right next to a military base in North Dakota and so this particular bill will ban China and Russia which are near peer adversaries and of course North Korea and Iran who have been on record that they're not really fans of the United States. So those are gonna be an automatic ban and then every other country has to go through CFIUS which is a committee for foreign investment in the US and that's all part of that process. So I think that's probably the highlights right now what's going on. So I'll go ahead and turn it back over to you, Tony. Thank you, Jim. Really do appreciate the update or you won't take any questions if anybody has any. Sure. Anybody have any questions for Jim? Might be off the hook kind of quick here. That's right. They have my number. They have Rebecca's number. You can always call us. All right, Jim, really appreciate your time and support and thank you. All right, thank you, sir. All right, so I'm going to turn it back All right, so next moving down the agenda we have Owen with the Farm Service Agency update. Yeah, Tony, this is Brandon and I was discussing with Owen a little bit and he had a prior commitment come up so he couldn't make it. So he's not gonna have really much of a report. What he did mention is right now the big push on the conservation end is just to get all the CRP signups across the finish line come October 1st and just to give a couple of numbers what we're sitting at for the general sign up with everything's pretty well submitted to the county committees. There are about 11, I guess you'd say straggler contracts that are sitting there. The plans are wrote by NRCS or partner staff just waiting to get producer signatures on on a couple of them and some of them maybe the producers potentially might even drop out. So as far as grasslands we're sitting with about 800 a little over 800 plans over on the NRCS tables getting wrote and then for total numbers of approved offers and this is all general grasslands as well as continuous. We've approved about 1,220 applications into contracts and we still have about 1,267 of them conservation plans to get wrote and completed and signed by producers. So I was just gonna give some of them numbers but he regrettably had a prior commitment come up. So. All right, well Brandon, thank you for stepping in and covering that update. You bet. All right, so Tans are you ready for your presentation? Yes, sir. Won't take much of your time folks but I want to let's see here go back and share my screen. If you want this one. Let me know when you can see that Tony. I can see it. Okay. So yesterday Tony and some of the staff that are present with you there today joined us just north of Rapid City at the Riley camera ranch. Riley, Jimmy and their three daughters are participants in the conservation innovation grant program or CIG that and those of you that are more knowledgeable about that particular program feel free to chime in or correct anything that I might say incorrectly about it. But essentially this is a place where a partner or an applicant can demonstrate technologies or approaches to conservation that might not be just on the NRCS cost list or under a practice standard. And now everything that Riley is doing actually does fit under conservation practices and is available under the cost list but the approach to regenerate degraded hayland through the purposed implementation of the five principles of soil health was something relatively new. Folks have dabbled in it in various parts of the state and I'm sure around the nation but he really wanted to see how quickly he could turn some pretty low productivity hayfields around like many situations probably several decades ago. The field that we visited yesterday was planted to straight alfalfa. Over the years, smooth brome encroached from the adjacent fields, pastures and road ditches and at the time that he did a chemical burn down on this field after the CIG was approved to approach this project, it was nearly straight brome. Very, very little alfalfa, low productivity, not adequate water infiltration and a dry year meant no hay. Those of you that have heard from or visited with Riley over the years know that he's significantly changed his operation and management over the past several years. Among those things being changing his calving date from what they would term as winter calving which might fall under the conventional model to now aiming for the first part of May and just really getting beyond the high nutrition needs of the lactating cow in that third trimester, reducing feed needs as well as the quality of feed through the winter months and then putting finished back on those cows before calving on green grass in the spring rather than having to supplement or even substitute higher quality forages right before calving. So if you hadn't seen the flyer, there that is. Now I'm going to show you this. Oh, darn it, I lost my share. I'm gonna have to do that again. courtesy of our area range specialist, Mitch Faulkner. He and Kent Cooley, Valerie Ryder. Kent is our area soil scientist in Rapid City. Valerie Ryder is the district conservationist in Sturgis and Mitch has been really helpful in determining dry air dry production values throughout the length of this project. I'd point your attention to the yellow column over on the right on each one of these. 2021, 22 in the middle and this year's production as of two weeks ago, roughly on the bottom. Note how basically compounding interest has taken effect as he improves those soils through implementation of adequate soil armor, no disturbance because he establishes this via no-till, high diversity in the cover crop mixtures that have planted each of these years. Living root in the soil courtesy of these full season cover crops that include both cool and warm season species as well as both grasses and broad leaves. And then finally, of course, the use is livestock integration through dormant season or winter grazing. So from almost 1,400 pounds to almost 6,000 pounds in 2021 and two, both of which were pretty dry years. Production wasn't near what he had hoped, but it was still adequate enough to get some livestock utilization out of that. And he shared the economics of that, which I did not write down, but a significant savings versus having to feed hay to that same group of animals through those months that he was able to graze. And then finally here in 2023, Mitch and Riley are gonna revisit these clippings because the 2021 and 22 data that was captured just after, well, then a couple of weeks of a killing frost, usually in October, when those clipping values were presented. The 2023 production clipping was done in August, simply for the purpose of that we would have the data for the tour yesterday, but it will be revisited. It may be a little bit less than that. Things are still growing in a few instances, depending on the species. So we could see it remain level or potentially even go down as things dry down, but all of these values are presented in air dry weight. Folks, even in Eastern South Dakota, leaning on 16,000 pounds per acre production is huge. Now that's total production and implementing proper grazing management means he's not necessarily gonna harvest that much. In fact, because of a hail storm at the end of June, there wasn't a whole lot of soil armor on the soil. Thankfully, because of the warm season species in the mixture that things recovered and re-grew to this degree and has continued to grow even since this clipping date. So really, really impressive results of intentional management focused on soil health. That's the message there. I'm gonna end up losing the share again here, but I'm gonna go back to some photos that I have from the tour yesterday just to show you all that was going on. So last Friday, I went out to Riley's and collected some soils for use with the rainfall simulator for the group. And I'm just enamored by the beginnings of soil health and it's usually evident on the roots of grassy plants. Here I have in my hand a sorghum sedan plant and I want you to notice how soil is sticking to those roots. Not all of them. Some of the larger diameter ones don't have much, but look at the fine fibrous roots right by the crown of that plant and how much soil sticks there. That's a direct result of root exudates and active soil biology in that rhizosphere. That area right around the roots where biology, most of which is microscopic and can't be seen with the naked eye is interacting with the plant, delivering water and nutrients in return for some of the, I like to think of it as sugar water from the plant. It's almost like the transaction that occurs when any one of us goes into the local convenience store for a Snickers bar or a Mountain Dew or whatever your tasty treat of choice is, in return for your $2, you get something sweet and tasty. In the soil, the transaction is much the same. In return for water or a molecule of nitrogen or something else that the plant needs, the plant then exchanges its $2 or root exudates. It's really interesting how that works and science is only just now beginning to come to understand all of that. Dr. Chris Nichols and Dr. Ray Ward were both main presenters as we walked through the soil pits and things like that on site yesterday. And Dr. Nichols shared something with me that both struck me as funny and incredibly humbling. She explained that she had gone through 12 years of higher education to get her PhD in soil microbiology. And when she entered college, she was told that science knew about 10% of the species of life that were found in the soil. 12 years later, as she's leaving with her doctorate, the statement was that science knows about 0.1% of life in the soil. So to summarize, she said, all this time we've been getting stupider. That's her word. I think correct grammar might be more stupid, but stupider with each passing day, we know less and less about what's truly happening in the soil. Now, is that true? No, no, she was saying it kind of ingest, but we are learning more all the time, but it's still incredibly humbling for someone like me who's reliant upon the scientific community to provide data that we can then share with our customer landowners that the things that we know are proven and true and they work, but what is actually happening is that we're finding that we know less and less. So I take pride in the fact that we can rely on the science that we have today and that the community is bringing us more and more data just like through this conservation innovation grant. How can a rancher or a farmer improve their profitability while improving their soils and while improving their livestock if they own them? And I think the cameras are doing a wonderful job of that and sharing them with their local community. And Riley's results with two dry years, but still compounding effects in a positive way followed by one pretty good year minus the hail storm that occurred in late June. This works and that compound interest, if you will, through purpose management is really, really important. This is another photo from Friday, a picture of his looking down at the bucket of soil I collected so that it could be dried for use in the rainfall simulator. Notice the granular structure of those aggregates. It looks like chocolate cake or cottage cheese. That's the kind of soil structure that has a lot of pore space. That means there's room for air and water exchange in that soil in a rapid manner. This is a photo that Riley took. This is a piece of manure from last season, last winter's grazing event. And notice all of the white filaments coming off of that. That's not mycorrhizal fungi, but it is a species of fungi and notice granted, the leaf there, you can see that is field-bind weed or creeping Jenny. Ignore the fact that that's a weed, but instead focus on the fact of how that fungal community is wrapped around that plant and basically using that transaction I spoke about earlier through root exudates from that plant. That fungi is delivering nutrients and value from that manure pat right to that plant and that decomposition cycle is happening even faster, which means that biology is actively working. Now just some photos from yesterday. Here's the kind of the beginning of the field tour with Riley explaining some things about what was planted here, the hailstorm sharing all those details. We had about 60 or 70 folks come this year. Last year, there was also about 70 on this tour. The neat thing about this was it's readily accessible to the public. We were, I think at this field were like something like six or seven miles from the flying J truck stop in Rapid City. So their family is active with the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce Ag Committee and definitely advocates for agriculture and natural resources. Here's Dr. Chris Nichols in a soil pit talking about soil aggregates and the rhizal sheath and mycorrhizal fungi. If you missed it, you really did miss out on a great event. There's the entire group in the field. The neat thing that Riley did there with his trencher in Backhoe was that he dug these soil pits at the intersection of the crop field and the adjacent undisturbed grassland. Now, where half of the group is standing is in the cover crop field. In the other half of the group is standing in what's actually pretty much a pure stand of smooth brome. Management over time will allow that to return to more native species. Once he gets this seeded back to perennials which he indicated is pretty much 90% decided. He just doesn't know yet if he's going to go with a native seeding or tame seeding here. And through grazing management, I believe that that will start to turn around. Right now with dormant season grazing only on the cover crop, we're not gonna have much of an impact on those plant species in the undisturbed areas. I found this interesting. All four of these young ladies, well, the one here on the second from the right is Carly, that's Riley and Jimmy's oldest daughter. She's 15, I believe. These young ladies were just absorbing the conversations and not to take anything away from the other gender at all, but they are going to be leaders in our industry here in the not too distant future. Dr. Ray Ward and the cowboy hat on the left with the microphone in hand. He and Dr. Nichols went back and forth a little bit on some of the topics of interest and it was interesting. I thought it was very interesting that as the scientific community learns more and more, there's bound to be some disagreements. And how do we decipher the data that laboratories as well as field scientists are coming up with thought it was valuable. It was above my understanding in a lot of ways. And I was very thankful. My colleague that was present was recording the audio for most of the day. And I've asked her to share that audio with me so that I can relisten and go investigate some of the terms that were new to my vocabulary. It was a very strong mixture though of produced and even neighbors showed up. It's unusual in my experience where the naysaying neighbors, the conventional operators show up at a tour like this. And I could count one, two, three. There were three neighbors that showed up yesterday because they're so curious about what rather has going on. And because he and Jimmy, Jimmy the wife is there on the right in this photo with the cowboy hat on are so approachable. There's nothing to hide. They're sharing their economic data. They just want what's best for their land and for their community. And I thought it was refreshing and pretty neat that that many showed up. Oftentimes when we hold these events and it's true yesterday too, but at least we had some of the neighborhood show up is that the folks that we most desire our information to reach are the folks that never show up. And then I think that Tony's opening comments about how do we reach more and get to those folks that have never heard of the natural resources conservation service or never heard of presence forever. Now you've probably been living under a rock if you haven't heard of PF. And I would say the same for NRCS if you work or live in agricultural states like South Dakota. But the fact remains that that is the truth that not everybody knows about us and together through this partnership effort we need to show up at one another's events and we also need to help spread the message about these public tours and events, learning type of atmospheres where we can share. Next couple of photos are of soil temperature back on the tour here at just before 10 a.m. I took this screenshot from my phone. It was 90 degrees in Piedmont where it geolocated me. I don't know if we surpass 95 degrees for the high yesterday or not but soil biology responds much like humans do as far as our comfort level with their living environment. So I took three different soil temperatures just in that top inch or so of soil and here we're in the grassy cover adjacent to the field. Notice how much plant material is there. The soil surface is shaded roughly 80 degrees. That's fairly comfortable. I think we would have all been happy if the air temperature was 80 degrees yesterday. It was probably closer than 95 or more for a good share of the day. Right here we're right next to Sorghum Sedan plant in the field and it's about 85 to 90 degrees. Still most soil water is used in the plant for growth. It's gonna be given away 15 to 20% through respiration. That's a plant's manner of sweating. If you compare it to the human condition a plant is going to release water through its leaves the stomata and the leaves in order to stay cool and regulate temperature. When soil temperatures are above that 70 to 80 degree range it's going to incrementally lose more plant water simply due to soil temperature. Now here's a spot where no plants took and had some sunlight exposure on the soil surface. There may be some reasons why there's no plants growing there now especially. 110 almost, let's see here, probably 115 degrees roughly. That's pretty darn hot and there's a reason why we see the cracks in that soil surface and things. So think about those microscopic creatures and earthworms because we can identify those readily. They're looking for a place to hide when soil temperatures get that hot so we've got to keep that soil covered. One of the main principles of soil health. This one, this photo I found very interesting. I hope if I zoom in that you'll be able to follow with the screen share. Notice this plant root that Riley's holding in his hand here. I did not realize that creeping Jenny or field bindweed got, you know, this is a perennial plant. I didn't realize that that plant could put such a large diameter root in the soil because when you pull them you just get that filaments string type of root coming out of the surface. No wonder it is so resilient in our cropping or disturbed type of soils because it's got quite a bit of energy reserve in a root that large. We were retired to the shade because it was getting pretty warm in the field and continued the discussions. And I believe that is all. I did take a recording but that's basically what I had to share. I just wanted, it was so recent and so impactful that I thought that this group would appreciate hearing from us on what has been happening in the soil health world between Kent Liger and myself and the soils team underneath and Jones. There's a lot of upcoming events. Soil health school is next week. The final grazing school for 2023 is middle next month at Chamberlain. And we want to see you, your staffs or some of your customers at these events where we just basically have a circle of learning occurring. And thank you for the time and would welcome any questions but I know you've got other ground to cover. Yes, before I let you off the hook, Tance. Had a couple of opportunities to visit with some of the landowners and some of the amazing landowner voices we have for soil health. One of the questions I asked some of these neighbors of Riley's, what started you on your journey to improving your soil health? And each one of them I asked, they all said, I saw that rainfall simulator. And once I saw that rainfall simulator, you can't know that once you see it. And that was just, that was very powerful. They had a chance to actually see what's happened to their soil when just something that they wouldn't have thought would have happened. And once they saw it, it decided they had to make a change. I said, even the neighbors that don't make a change after they see something like that, it's, they still know it. It's still in the back of their head. They didn't even make an excuses for whether to continue to do what they do, but they've seen it and they know that they should probably change. Something else that Riley said yesterday that I thought was really cool. So Tance hit on, this cover crop was hailed out. It was decimated. And we had a chance to see some of these pictures of this field, there's nothing left. And when we're out there standing in the still yesterday cover crops, we're up to here, they're just huge. And both Riley and Jimmy both said, the problem that they have right now, they got too much feed. And that's from their standpoint, that's a great problem to have. But they're having to reevaluate some of their operation, because they have so much extra. They talked about this last winter where they'd have to go out normally, tractor out a bunch of hay through the snow for their animals to eat. Said that they only spend about 16 hours on a tractor total this last winter, because their animals actually wouldn't even need to hay. They were out there pond for the cover crops instead. But this is cool. This is really cool that this is, that it's working out for them this way. They're one of the best looking farms out there. The best looking field out there as far as how much forage they have available. This stuff works. They may not work perfect every year, but that's also agriculture. It doesn't work perfect every year. Riley and Jimmy, they're able to do a lot of this and they're doing a lot of research. One of the reasons we're out there looking at this is with a conservation innovation grant to work. And this is something that we were able to work with them to help them with doing some experimentation, to build a show that this works. They're completely bought in. It was so cool seeing Dr. Nichols out there and Dr. Ward out there and climbing down to the pit and having some level of debate while they're in the soil pit. It was kind of fun. It was a really cool opportunity to see that. The other thing that I just want to point out too and Riley made a point to say in this yesterday, Riley's been a program participant for quite some time. He's been involved in our conservation stewardship program through NRCS. And he made a comment yesterday and he told me also that the CSP program helped keep them afloat a couple of years. They were having some struggles there and just having that little extra income and being a participant in the CSP program. Allowed them to keep doing what they were able to do. We have some really cool programs too. And I said, again, back to the summit opening comments. We just need to make sure that folks across Africa go to know that these programs are available. And that we're encouraging them to be a part of it. And there's a lot of stuff that's going on out there right now. We heard some comments even yesterday. A lot of fear regarding the 30 by 30 stuff. Our programs are voluntary. Our programs are producer driven. NRCS is a locally led agency. We're not forcing anybody into anything. And our job is to work with producers to help meet their objectives. But we just need to keep getting that word out too that there's a lot of resources that are available and especially over the next couple of years are going to be even more resources available for folks. I'm looking for, I want a lot more applications over these next couple of years. We have so much funding coming to South Dakota. And I want to make sure that we don't have to send any of it back. We have the opportunity to invest heavily in our state over the next couple of years. And I just, I want to make sure we're doing it. So, Tance, thank you so much. Thank you for your presentation. And again, I didn't want to say in front of this group too. Tance does a great job running that rainfall simulator. He's a very dynamic speaker. And I'm going to say this is atypical for somebody that's normally part of the soil science team. I say, sorry, Nathan. Soil science. Well, it's kind of in the same ballpark as some engineers. We have some great engineers too. We have a very, very dynamic team here and it's exciting. It's exciting to have folks that can get out in front of a group of farmers producers and have a conversation and be able to talk conservation, not talk over anybody's head, give a great presentation and get people to listen. That doesn't happen everywhere, but it happens here. And I'm very, very proud to be a part of the team that has the ability to go out in front of producers and have these conversations and get people on board, get people to see what we're trying to show them. So, Tance, thank you so much for what you're doing for us. It is very much appreciated. Thank you, Tony. I appreciate you making the time to come and join us. All right. Well, if there are no questions for Tance, I'm going to let him off the hook. Any questions? All right, Tance, thank you much. Now today or this afternoon, I get to go talk to a group of gardeners in Rapid City. So slightly different audience, but same message. Perfect. Love it. All right. So moving down the agenda, next item we have is to talk about some partnerships. Do you want to cover this one, Jess? Unless you want to. Please do. I would love to share it with you. Or that's not in tune, but. What contacted me, she couldn't make it today. So I'm going to cover the partnerships report. So first of all, South Dakota NRCS is excited to host some national NRCS cooperative agreements. One of those through the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative or GLCI. The three partners for that are South Dakota Grassland and Coalition, Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. So that's exciting that we'll be assisting with those projects. I am the point of contact in the Grassland Coalition agreement. I'm not sure who are the contacts for the other two. You guys know? You guys are not helpful. Okay. Story of my life. Anyway, so that's exciting to enter into those. Laura's going to give more of an update about the Grassland Coalition later on in the agenda. The conservation innovation grants, we limit those at $150,000 total that we're going to do for CIG. We did select one of those for funding for about 100,000. First, we can't really announce anything like that until things are final. So just know that we did select one for funding. With Conservation Collaboration Cooperative Agreements for CCCA, we had a lot of proposals. We had 20 proposals for that for over $12 million. And those are just now being worked on. Tony finished his final selections here a month or so ago. And so we'll be working with those to get those agreements in place by September 30th. So that's really, we've been pretty quickly to get those done. I think we ended up making selections for that over $8 million of grants. There will be a 2024 notice of funding opportunity likely after the 1st of January. So just keep a lookout for that. As far as what we're looking for or what Tony's looking for in the CCCA agreements, it's really to expand our technical assistance for NRCS. We're going to need the help with the increase in funding that we're getting through the Inflation Reduction Act. Any help that we can get from partners or different partners or current partners with more assistance, those are definitely going to be what we're going to prioritize like forward. One other thing that I wanted to mention is the partnerships for climate smart commodities that was funded through USDA. We have several of those that are either going to be, South Dakota will be the lead state or South Dakota is at least a partner state. I am the point of contact for those partnerships. However, a lot of things are being done on the national level and with contractors. So we're still in the learning phases. I'm definitely learning what it's going to take from me from some of my staff when it comes to looking at environmental evaluations or cultural resources or those types of things. They also have to be compliant with Welland and HCL compliance. So I'm sure Deke might have to get involved in that a little bit. But we're learning as we go. They are getting those final agreements in place. And I know there's at least one individual that I talked to at Dakota Fest that their signups are starting soon. So I guess that's all I had unless you had anything to add as far as partnerships is concerned. So it's not just much as far as partnerships is concerned. We are continuing to build our staff across the state. I think currently we're still working on hiring between 1340 people right now. Some of these positions that we're working on one is a grants and agreement specialist that can help with some of this process. We're hoping to take some of the burden off of some of the leadership team members of making sure there's always a point of contact for any of our agreement builders to be able to reach out very quickly and get an answer. I know sometimes that ends up being a little bit of a struggle. So we're working on trying to build this up to make sure that anybody who's meeting with us just is gonna be a little more effective and maybe a little faster. Any questions? Thank you, Jess. Yes? Rain might not help, so I'm a very good question. All right, so I got a couple of folks that couldn't make it today, but I'll share their reports for you. So on my easement staff, we're having a fun fall or late summer, I guess. We got a call yesterday, day before Tuesday about potentially some additional easements getting funded, so he's back working on trying to get those taken care of because of IRA stuff. So with that being said, here's where we're standing as of today for WRE. As you can see, we had 45 total applications and the different categories that we offer between the RGR stands for reserve grazing rights. So when you see that on there, that's the reserve grazing rights. So we had a total of 45 applications, a little over 6,200 acres total. Out of that, we were able to actually fund seven. And you can see we kind of split them between the different categories. We had one that was a permanent or perpetual easement for reserve grazing rights. We had three permanents, and then one 30-year reserve grazing right as well. And then unfortunately, just in these last two weeks, we've had two canceled. So at this point, we're only gonna end up actually obligating five of the easements for WRE. And then ALE's finally taken off here in South Dakota. It's been kind of a long go, but we're finally getting to the point now where we are actually starting to get some, some ability to get ALE on the ground here in South Dakota. So we had- Excuse me, what's- Yeah, yeah, no. And I get a very bad habit of speaking down the talk, right? So I apologize. So WRE is wetland reserve easements and ALE is agricultural land easements. So I apologize, George. I'm sorry, I apologize on that. It's- I forgot what I was talking about. You bet, yeah. Yes. So ALE can be any type of land, crop, aid, range. We take all that kind of land. So we've got two applications that we're trying to fund in ALE for just shy of 2,400 acres. Now I say that we've actually got a couple more coming out because of IRA funding. Like I said, Brandon is back working on getting those put together. So hopefully I think in the end, we're gonna end up where somewhere closer to six ALE easements if everything kind of comes through. Being this late in the year, it's a little much ago. We only got to the end of September to get some of that allocated. So I kind of hope that we can get there. You know what? I bet I didn't share with the folks online, did I? I forgot to say that you're- Yeah, yeah. My bad. They should have done that right away. How about that? That better? Yes. There you go, see? All right. I had it right here in front of me. Let's see it just fine. Okay. So for Water Bank, Water Bank kind of, it died there for a while and they brought it back here about 79 years ago. So we've been having the Water Bank signups. It's only in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota that Water Bank is available. And there's a total of 4 million to be shared between the three states. So in a way, it's kind of a little bit of a multi-state signup. All of us submit our applications and then headquarters divvies out the money based on the number of applications that each state gets. So we don't actually get an allocation until we submit our applications in. So you can see we had 20 applications this year, pretty much kind of a normal signup for us. We're usually right in that ballpark somewhere, give or take. We funded 11 of them for a little over a half million dollars. So I will tell you that nine times out of 10, Minnesota has zero to one applications for Water Bank and North Dakota probably has 80 to 100. So obviously a majority of the funding goes to North Dakota, but we usually get somewhere in that half million to maybe three million dollar range. This year we're at the half million dollars. So that's where we're at at Water Bank and ALE and just for the sake of sharing and I will put this back up to see, you'll see the number of applications. So any questions on easements or Water Bank from anybody? Okay. I'm also going to cover CSP. A lot of you may or may not know, Val DePres is our new CSP coordinator. She started four or five months ago. And she's not able to be here today. She's doing a little training and I don't believe she was able to join us online either. So I'll just cover this quick for her. We start out the year doing renewals. That's kind of how we started this year. We had 84 that we were able to fund. We got just shy of 11 million dollars in funding for renewals and we were able to use just about all of that up through those 84 contracts. So you can see it was 10.8 million that we were able to fund in renewals. And then in classic, we break this out. You'll see that there's a CIS in there to Conservation Implementation Strategy. We had one proposal come in that included some CSP. So we had, initially we had just shy of 12 million dollars for CSP funding or classic. We do funds assessments throughout the year where if other states don't use all their funding, some of us states that are have higher signups that can steal some of their funding away if they're not going to use it. So at the end of the day, we did get some extra funding. You can see we got just a little over $4 million extra that we got throughout the year. So we were able to obligate $16.4 million in CSP classic, 115 contracts on 290,000 acres. And then our new category, which is the IRA. This is the first year we held an IRA signup. And we got four and a half million dollars to start. And just like I said, in the other one, we are able to steal money from other states. So we stole a little money from other states to the tune of about 2.3 million. And we were able to fund 53 applications through IRA for about 165,000 or 165,000 acres, excuse me. And then our last category in this, well, I'm assuming this will be the last year even with the extension of GCI. That was a new thing in the Farm Bill, the Grassland Conservation Initiative through CSP. This should have been our last year signups. There's no ranking, there's no competition if you apply and qualify, you're in. And it's only on certain acres that FSA tells us that it's eligible. So 35 contracts for $209,000. These always are typically pretty small contracts. So at the bottom, Val just kind of summed everything up for CSP. We got just shy of 700,000 acres enrolled this year, 287 contracts for $34.3 million. And that covers the entire five year lifespan for those contracts that $34 million does. As an estimation next year, we estimate we'll get about $12 million in classic again. And we're projected to get about $7 million in IRA next year to start. So you can see we ended the year close to $7 million in IRA and that's where we are going to start next year is at that $7 million mark. So CSP is gonna be, it was a huge program when we did it by the acres and then we made some changes in the 18 Farm Bill, 14 Farm Bill, 14 Farm Bill. Things go really fast these days. Anyways, we made some changes and the dollars that we got as a state kind of dropped for a while. Now I think we are back on the incline again with the amount of dollars that we're getting for CSP. So any questions on CSP? I'm gonna turn it over to Jen. I believe Jen's online. Do you mind if I stop sharing your room again? Jen, are you still online? Yeah, I am still online. I apologize that I don't have a handout in the stuff today, but I will send one out with the minutes. I am going to share my screen quick. All right, can you all see that now? There you go. Here is kind of where we're sitting and apologize, these are not accurate right at the moment. But for our initiatives that we had this year, I'll make this bigger too. We can see where we were kind of, we fell funding most everything. We did not end up having applications for the National Water Quality Initiative this year. Sage grass, we requested more money and then ended up with a little extra. So those two funds did go back to headquarters. Everything else is in the works to be funded here, if not already obligated into a contract. We did receive an additional $950,000 with IRA from our initial monies. And we do have a little bit left over that I am not able to use because our next applications in line are just slightly larger than what we need. In our general funding, we're on target to keep using all of the funds. I don't have everything obligated yet. Things are still working their way through the system. We did receive just over $10 million in additional funding for EQUIP, non IRA EQUIP. And that was used mostly through the resource unit fund pools here where you can see where we had the initial allocations very low, our additional allocations here increased quite a bit. So we were able to fund quite a few applications there in total. Egg waste too, we spent a lot of additional of that money in egg waste. Beginning farmer and socially disadvantaged as well. So we're sitting pretty good this year. Like I said, I will get you a better handout in the minutes that go out with this meeting that will detail everything on the CIS side. They are all working through final obligations on them. Some needed more money, some didn't use quite all their money so that money's being shuffled around quite a bit at this moment in time. So any questions for EQUIP and where we're ending up at this time for fiscal year 23? All right, Jeff, did you want to touch on anything more for going into fiscal year 24? I'll just say this, we started our initial allocation this year was about 17 million. We got some money we stole from other states and we're really good at that. And ended up somewhere in the neighborhood, I think it's 20 million in the year 21? Yeah, no. Okay, and so next year, rough projections, we will get about another 17 million to start the year for EQUIP as well. We're projected to get 14 million additional dollars in IRA. So we're looking at $31, $32 million of EQUIP funding to start the year next year versus the 17 we started with this year. And we got my number, we got about four billion in IRAs, right, Jen? As well. In total, yeah. Yes, we did, when it was all said and done, we got that much. So big increases, obviously in our dollars available to producers. So if you got folks that you visit with, your organizations, visit with any producers, obviously the big thing is get them in our door so we can bring that money to the table and help them out and get that conservation on the ground. So EQUIP's gonna be big too next year. Any questions on that? I'm guessing the printing press is at the trader just currently based for the bottom of the email where you got to come and sell them. All right. So the URCP, yep, that's where we're at. Select on the act now stuff. Yes. Is there gonna be an opportunity for like the partnership here at State Tech Media? We can see what all is being done with that now and providing the input on the practices. So could you utilize? Yeah, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is first and foremost act now for those that don't know is a piece of policy that exists that allows us to take applications on a first come, first serve basis. And if they need a certain threshold in our ranking system that they can just get funded right there. Normally what we do, we have a batching date, people come in, we do all the playing, we get all the rankings done for all those applications and then we make selections. Act now is more of a first come, first serve. You walk in the door, we do a quick assessment if you meet the threshold you're funded. So what I'm going to do, and we just started making some changes, I've been visiting with some of our staff here locally the last two weeks. So what I wanna do, I do wanna pull the partnership together to discuss how we kinda wanna handle act now, moving forward in FY 24. Same thing goes with CIS. We did, we took a pause with CIS here in 23 and I've covered maybe a little bit of a preview. I'm gonna discuss combining the act now and CIS into something where we can do a targeted approach on special projects. So a little preview of what we've been kinda discussing and what I kinda wanna bring to the table to the rest of the partners. But I like I said, the last two weeks is what we've been discussing internally. They've been for a kind of ballpark idea of what we wanna do. So yeah, I will be pulling you guys together and those that wanna be involved. So we're giving you comments right now on anything. Very good talk. No, I just wanted to, I think a lot of the stuff there's a lot of goes into it. So just curious that there'd be a separate meeting to talk more about specifics on that and if there's room to prioritize certain things. Yeah. Any other questions? That's a good question. All right. Oh, yeah, George. Are you gonna talk about CRP sometime during the meeting? We touched on it just briefly with the report from Brandon. Is there some additional things you'd like to talk about with CRP? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm kind of, George Mandel, I'm kind of CRPing. I've seen the graphic information when you compare large-scale, government, women's, social and economic impact because of the present populations. Now, when you see a rise in those social and economic and it's going to fall, the present population mirrors it. I'm talking about the presence because we have a good part of the present population to be at during those nine years. And I guess the concern I've got right now is that we've got like 2.1 million acres of CRP according to that. They sell, right, of the US media website. And the cost is about $130 million a year. The average is in the state, South Dakota, about 60 bucks a neighbor. Okay. Of that, almost 1.2 million acres is grassland reserve. And it's a great footprint, but it's annually paid for grains. And unless they're leaving 18 inches of grass and fire, it's not having the benefits of mileage. It's a great producer family, water quality, new name, but it's nested in the CRP. So when you cut out GRP, when it comes to the impacts of the drought, right? Because really it doesn't have any residual cover. It's annually in grains. It's a working lands program and respect them. But that means about a million acres of traditional CRP. And that CRP, it can be hand raised and for everything, a third of it every year. And those are the roles you would have, okay? So I'm not being critical of any of that. But that leaves them about 16% of that 2.2 million acres that's marginally available for a while. I guess that's what I'm trying to emphasize is that the CRP of today is not the CRP of 10, 15 years ago. And it's impact on South Dakota's resident wildlife. So the CRP of this peak was providing 2 million additional birds just out of CRP in the South Dakota in the fall of life. That's a significant number of backfield birds. Our first population peeped about 12 million birds. Right now, we're averaging about 4 million that's being produced by CRP because CRP takes three years to establish, okay? So when you mow once it did three years, none of it ever reaches its peak. And that's my concern, I'm pretty able about it. And sometimes I feel, I accuse my dogs of barking in the wind. Sometimes I feel like I'm barking in the wind. But I'm just trying to lay out the facts from the combination of the CRP of today. And the same fact in South Dakota's wildlife is not the CRP of 10 years ago. And I think that's something we all have to acknowledge and recognize. And really, I'm gonna stay on this horse in the homes, I'm gonna stay in this apple. Because people need to know for one, for 130 million dollars a year, just gonna stay in South Dakota. That goes 2.2 million acres. I estimate less than 16% is even marginally available for good, secure investment. And I think the public needs to know that. And I think our congressional leaders need to know that. That's not the program that it was. And once the changes are made, it will never be the same program we had in the CRP. Is Brandon still on? Oh, my man, my man is still on. But I guess I think, I'll come in and make a few comments for you. Oh, you're absolutely right, CRP now is not what CRP was then. I think we've realized a lot of things throughout the years when it comes to CRP. No management at all has led us to have a lot of stamps that are really not good and healthy native grass snakes. If we don't have any management. And we've learned that. I'm sorry, I don't really know what to mention. And I think the changes that that Farm Service Agency, again, it's Farm Service Agency's program, the changes that they've made nationally are because of some of the suggestions, that even this South Florida State Tech Committee made when it came to having really limited management, maybe once every five years. And the choices that we had for management were not great. I do think that NRCS has, this is a discussion we've been having since I've become an SRC is really to assist the producers because I understand what you're saying with grass and CRP, but we also have a lot of that grass and CRP that's being used for grazing and not hay. Now, we've got to stay outside in that state season and all those types of things when it comes to hay. But with grazing, we really are trying to work with our producers so that they can understand how it can be both a working management program and it can be valuable for our next day. And we have a lot of that belief, I think, throughout South Dakota. Now, I'm not gonna say we don't have a ways to go because we do, but I think the more that we can do, both NRCS and FSA to educate our producers on what a difference can be made saying how those wildlife acres that can also be used as a working lands is extremely important. Now, are there changes that need to be made on Farm Service Agency's side? I'm not gonna disagree with you and I can't really comment on that. That has to be in terms of all one question or statement. But I do understand where you're coming from. So there's give and take. I mean, I think there's some good things that don't have the changes that they've made with CRP throughout the last few years, but there's also some issues. So I would disagree with you. I just wanted to make that comment. And I hope you understand too why our game is not over yet. And we're all dealing with the courage and capability. That's the bottom line. But I'm just trying to get some evaluation that the impacts that CRP is having right now are not the same impacts that it had in two years and a half. Well, you can look at it at the federal level. So again, I don't want to be able on business, but I got the information. And who else had the information on the species? It was a deer factory. It was a modeling factory. I mean, there's a whole species that are not only flying as you see those CRP acres being used and being paid out and coming up through the basis. The changes that we suggested, I think they're good. I was part of that, and I agree with you. And in any given year throughout the history of CRP, about 30% of any given year was taken for grades, verbancies, droughts, CRP coming in, CRP coming out, many changes, all that resulted in the use of about 30%. We were dealing with the basis of about 1.8 million acres in CRPs, which meant that 1.2 million acres was available for wildlife. It was a great wildlife program. The data shows that. And that's how I'm trying to get people to understand is that unless some changes are made, and unless there's an acknowledging change, that it's not the program that it was, and it needs improvement. And I just saw a recent op-ed by dozens forever, National Wildlife Federation, Ducks Unlimited, and TRCP. They came out with an op-ed just yesterday. And one of the things they pointed out was that they have to get back to the grazing and caving analysis that were pre-2018. And that one change of all, you think a huge difference in the impact of CRP and that $139 a year will make them change so. That's the only point for them. Yeah. I want to talk as a producer. My family's a heavy user of CRP. And we're just right down here between the grasslands and the lower drill reservation. We use the grasslands CRP. It's one of the reasons my sisters have agreed not to break that land. And the next thing's gonna be an attitude to grasslands CRP right now, the ability, as part of the land doesn't have water. And that's a good thing to do. We can make those additions to it because of grasslands CRP raving in some kind of cigarettes on it. But it's making a difference in stopping someone that conversion is not a huge payment, but it's enough to pay our taxes to make sure that we get something. We don't pay. We crazy. We find there's a lot of producers like me out there. I also have same CRP by the end of the year. You name it. If I could put it on our prairie poppins, which people tell me we don't have West River and I argue that we use it on that. So the grasslands CRP used properly in a way I think it's raising it properly. We've got, we don't have a lot for thousands down there because we have used many of them, but we've got a ton of grass and prairie chickens. And all the other birds in the deer, we've got white tail and real deer spikes. But we're not hating it. We aren't raising it. So the program has improved in those ways. I guess Georgia agree with you. They're a professionalism, but there are some improvements to being made currently in residence in review and making more crazy and friendly. But if we don't have that water and fence, yeah, we're going to hate it. I'm not going to argue with you about the deer from the other ones, the red tail one. But again, it's not going to be the same with the wildlife, the traditions here, but it can't come out and look at it. But these types of things. That's right. Again, I don't argue it, but it's not new birds. It's existing grass. The Sierra people are keeping plants out of production. They're putting them in the wild. And that's why it makes such a big difference. What I can do is they are requiring to keep them out of the day. I can make sure that all of them have chances to hear what's been said today about Sierra people. And I'll leave you, if you want to share this with people, I got just one page to start raising. I kind of keep a running summary. It's something to do about every two months. I don't do it once a month because it doesn't change a lot. I like keeping track of the different regions. And there may be some errors up there, just me. Yeah, I'll be there in a minute, Justin. Thank you. So, before we move on to our CPP, and do we have any other questions on CRP? It's not going to be a conversation the other day with a neighbor. But he's telling me that next year he has to go burn his CRP again. I thought we could kind of defer that. It could very well be an old contract that still hasn't been termed management. And then, I mean, that'd be my guess. Is it still, and those contracts can be modified. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be burned. I told him that she needed to get a hold of somebody that though we kind of took care of that. And he was certainly not as easy to control it. And I said, well, we had been a number of years ago where we would, okay, go ahead and donate it or do something with it. There's options to do without burning it. But to me, it just, it just hit me wrong. And I said, I thought we had very much dealt with that deal and we're not out there starting grassland virus. Well, we, well, just to be clear, NRCS does support prescribed burning. Prescribed burning means that there is a prescription written, that there's a plan in place that we have all the people that we need to do a prescribed burn. And Sean is going to talk a little bit of all that today when it comes to what a species encroachment. Because we do have an issue on some of our CRP, on our CRP lands where we have what a species encroachment occurred. So it really depends on the situation. Now, are there situations where a producer should not be able to match to their CRP? Absolutely, I would agree with that because there are situations that it's just not feasible. But producers have the option, they can go in, they can talk to NRCS and FSA and they can do a modification of their plan to do a different type of management activities. And that would be my suggestion in that case. Thank you. Yeah. Any other questions on CRP before you go on? I'm here basically, in fact, by the end of the year. They're acquiring into a crap book. And basically looking at wanting to see an implementation with maybe an old practice, but under a new name, whatever. With outland water retention, well, holy facilities, it doesn't necessarily have to be outland either. In the past, the soil conservation service, for example, CES did have those dam type programs. And their big concern, of course, water quality to be number one, you know, but also with the basically heavily increased upland drainage, there's numerous miles of new drainage that's gone into the Grand River. We've seen the problems in over the last couple of years, but previous 20 years, we've seen more flooding activity than we had in all the reported time before that. And a lot of it is because, you know, all this increased drainage. And right now, when you get these heavy rains, everything goes there. And what they're looking at is it also creates other problems, like debris pile up, all those other things that downstream landowners are forced to deal with. You know, and should they have to pay the cost to remove all of these debris, the obstructions, things, just a whole list of concerns that come up along the river basin. But having these holy facilities that would be able to do control release basically would help dramatically and maybe under the prep program, the Syracuse Townsend Program, you know, that we can encourage producers to enroll and then, yeah, give them a plenty of basin on their drainage basin to also, you know, get that going in there. I'm kind of here to hear what's all available through the NRCF side and through the FSA side and, you know, I guess, for clarity, I was a 40-year employee for Farm Service and ASCS, Farm Service Agency. So, you know, I have a little bit of dangers, you know. So, I know a few of these things, but, you know, with the NRCF side, you know, I know that with the EPA program, CSP program, these were all issues that I dealt with, but I mean, they've dramatically increased over time now. And I'm willing to, you know, hear what we have available and stuff, but primarily, you know, to implement that practice. And it's my understanding that in any new practice, this is where it has to be, kiddo. And like many of our practices, we just need to get somebody out to take a look at what we're talking about. Sure. And get a chance to get out to the ground. Let's get a soil conservationist or a planner out there to see what the situation is. And then we can start looking to see if we have some options already in, because we may already have some things that we can help out with before we start talking about implementing and covering in a new practice. And there may be something we can already do. There is a, well, thanks to a real friend that's very made in place. No ideals you can offer. It's not specific, but there may be some ability where producers do want to create a weapon to obtain. It's incredible to be able to do that. There's an existing program right now to marry into a traditional CRP, where there's an access agreement. But it's fairly financially advantageous. Last but not least, program offers incentives, conditions on the setting that, you know, that's the whole key to the CRP program. It's the whole key to the annual program. It has to be financially viable for the individual to go into. You mentioned, you know, about the, you know, those reduction and stuff like that. The CRP program was initially an acreage reduction. That's why it came into being. It was to take land out of production and, you know, just by environmental involvement with just the scientific. Well, it's gotten legs and it's going more to that direction because we have an attitude, but you still have to have incentives available and the resources available just like cost years like I mentioned, to re-remove all the stuff like that. Okay, well, we've had emergency programs, conservation program, ECP, things on that order. I'm sure there's, you know, something on the NRCSI too, but it also involves a producer having to burn a lot of that cost. And that's why under CRP program, they get a partnership with different organizations, things like that. It wouldn't be so burdensome that one individual should get care of all the debris that everybody else is sending down to is it should it be his responsibility or her responsibility to do that. So that's why, you know, we're looking at the CRP side of it because that probably is the most advantageous, you know, to preserve. Okay, I appreciate bringing it up. I want to make sure that in the next meeting, we actually have some more representation at the city too. I'm getting the sense that it's a big topic that we need to talk about. Just to make sure that we have some decision makers for what I say to be part of this conversation too. You know, Bob is educated enough to even ask the right question, you know, backfinding two or nine, so I don't keep that conversation. And then that's a big part of this meeting that's supposed to be about. It's about having these conversations about what are the issues and let's come and listen to each other. I'll work to make sure the next time we're done. So I'm going to say representation here too so we can have some more less conversation about this too. So that's been talked about our CBP. Switch gears here a little bit. Last Friday, we closed this year, this year 23 is National Planning Opportunity for our CBP. He and talking to partners or cohorts around the country sounds like South Dakota is on average. What we saw for interest this year in our CBP. With this NFO, there was about a half a billion dollars available between IRA funding and traditional farm bill funding. So it was a big pot of money. But we, for South Dakota specifically, we had seven South Dakota as the lead partner space. We had seven proposals come in, one of which is a classic our CBP application. We had six alternative funding applications as well. Then we're also a partner state with one more application with Nebraska leading that one. So we had a total of eight proposals come in this year for a total of 115 million worth of proposals coming in. Of that, approximately 90 million in financial assistance that can go to state producers if they're successful. I say approximately because half those came in and said they're requesting a waiver. So we'll see that membership a little bit and take away some technical assistance dollars if they're successful. They had more money available to state producers. We also within that application period we had, it was a pretty good number. We had 60 million in contributions coming through it. So between the contributions, the proposal dollar amounts, there's 175 million worth of proposals that came in. Timeline looking at it is that we as a state have to have our recommendations up to an HQ by the middle of September. We're hoping to hear back. Yeah, probably a better day than I do, but I'd say mid-December, we're gonna hear back as far as who's successful and who's not. Sounds like interest is pretty high around the state or around the country, but we were above average with eight of them coming in in the South Dakota. So I'm gonna take most, so many partners in the room that put in proposals and others I want you guys to think about next year. We're gonna have a lot bigger pot with money next year nationwide. So that may be an opportunity to talk with you. Our CPP might be in a few of you guys to take your needs to a lot of money available next year. So that was a quick rundown of what we had this year. I'm in for proposals. Happy to take another question you have out there, but go ahead. I think you're making the announcements on might or might not be getting awards there, but can you give maybe just some basic examples of what kind of things we're funding in terms of our regional transportation? Yeah, currently we have a lot of this crazy focus, crazy infrastructure increasing in soil health practices that we haven't acted right now. We have 11 projects active around the state. And we're seeing a lot of that again here in these proposals, mirroring those kind of traditional equit type things, which is more targeted in geographical areas. A lot of it, the nice thing about the alternative funding arrangements is that the partners are spending those dollars. So we can do a little bit quicker turnaround over that as well. Very tertiary equipped. We also have two easements coming in. There are two easements coming in this year, which is nice to see an increased interest in easements again. It's another way to get more of those easements on the ground. We're hearing a lot of talk about these are dealing strictly with urbanization. So keeping farmland intact, keeping the range line intact, keeping the easements from looking at. So it's nice to see an uptick in those again coming in. It could be significant funding for the freeze with this program. So it's pretty wide open where you can put forth a proposal. So I think it might be a good opportunity for you when we should get together after this and talk a little bit about what you want to do. It might be a chance to put in next year for that. Question. What is the cost share amount of that program that you're giving out? I guess, what's the unit? Typically it's about 75%. 75%. Yeah. So they've seen some of the stuff. 75% of the cost. I assume there's a holdout of that. Well, on our end there is, but the partners can come in and give additional funding too. The stuff that the partners bring that cash that they didn't want to go above or what we traditionally do. And this does a question like, Dave, I'll give another time for this. I'm going to give a lot of utilizing federal dollars for to cross over to help with another program to get basically up to 100% cost share. I know that activity is going on, but is there any thing to maybe hopeful I'll come out of that in the paper? I mean, in general, we can't, we can't pay our federal funding and federal funding. Right. And we just can't, we have to make sure we're not the, and having money coming from a private organization or an NGO, we can't, we just need to find the partners that are going to, or with us, or with the producer to help offset the government. So if there's a party can assist with this. Yes. We just need to find the partners and we have to make sure that that partner is not using because they're not able to do to use a matching. Thank you. Any other questions out there for me? George? Can you talk a little bit about the PAP program? I just read a news release for the other days. The server is going to be implementing a proper program with the state blockchain program. I'll let Matt go. I'll take that one. All right. So I don't work here anymore. I don't want to speak for them. So I have to say, I'm going to cover that today. I think probably each part of it. It's been 20 years, but yeah, they finally got rid of me. And we found somebody suffer enough to take me in. So. Now he's got to do the stuff with me. Matt, do you want to go ahead and cover that question? Yep. I will cover the PAP program briefly later on. Oh, I see that you're on there later. Okay. Thank you, Matt. Perfect, thank you. My problem is they replaced Matt with Matt. They put Matt with Matt. I hear you're all slowly available. Please tell me where we're going. Hey, so I'm going to come back and do my actual job now since I've covered for a lot already. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of our technical updates, at least from the ecological sciences side of the house. I don't know if Brett has anything to add from engineering, I'll let you think about what he does. But just wanted to cover a few things that I haven't covered recently. You may have heard some of this information in the past, but I just wanted to make sure I covered it again. And one of those things is interim conservation practice standards. So interim conservation practice standards are practice standards that the state chooses to adopt and kind of test out, right? And we have to provide data back to national headquarters about the conservation practices that we're using. And they really give us a great opportunity to find out if something works in our state. And so a few things I wanted to touch on, urban conservation is really a goal of USDA at Y, the whole department. This past spring, we've released interim practice standards for low tunnels and raised beds. We will have payments, that would be in our payment schedule for fiscal year 24. So those are two interim practice standards. Another one that we adopted, and we really adopted this kind of because of a push from the national office with the organic transition initiative that is the A23 organic management practice standard. So that's another one that we adopted. Emily and the range management specialist just recently adopted an interim practice standard called strategic harvested forage management, which is really bale grazing, which we tried to get them to call it bale grazing and they didn't want to call it that. So they came up with a different name. So that's what we're going to have to live with, but it's really bale grazing. So it's really placing bales out on either cropland, hayland, to really increase that soil organic matter throughout the wintertime especially. 10 interim practice standard, that's one that's been adopted by a lot of other states. It's annual forages for grazing systems, it's cover crops for grazing systems is what it is. So we're looking at adopting that one. Some of the other practice standards that will be in the hopper for this fall, 420 wildlife habitat planting, that is something that's already a national practice standard, that's not an interim, that's a national practice standard. The reason we're looking at adopting that is kind of again, it's because of a push from the plan quarters to really be able to provide wildlife friendly conservation practices. It'll be similar to the 327 conservation cover practice standard. And then Brandon Walter, who's been on the call, our state biologist and also our CRP program manager for NRCS, he is on the team to work on those 644 and 645, which are upland wildlife habitat management and wetland wildlife habitat management. So those will be coming out shortly as well. I just wanted to touch on those practice standards from the ecological sciences side of the house. If you have questions about any of them, if you wanna be a reviewer for when we send out the draft practice standards to the state tech committee, just let us know. We keep you on the list. We do, we release practice standards in October and April. So just two times a year. The reason we do that is to not make sure our planters have time to digest things and not be continually releasing them. Brett, did you have anything on the engineering side that you wanted to mention, or are you good? Sure. I guess I can go through the engineering practices that will be releasing this fall and it suggests that if anybody is any interested in these, feel free to get ahold of us and you can comment on them. And I'll just put the list really quick. Quick composting facility, farm, secondary, containment facility, emergency, animal mortality management, combustion system improvement, grade water management, storm water runoff control, screen processing, that graded buffer, denfrag bioreactor, subsurface drain, subsurface drain field dish, saline and sodic soil management, water harvest catchment, water-spreading, destructive wetland, but hydration and floodland enhancement. And also, Jess mentioned a little bit about engineering practice standards. We also have one that's out to what it was lead on nationally, it's called water treatment facility. That is, I think nearing, actually, it's unlike when they're in each room to actually become a practice standard in that one. I think it's become a national practice standard so much already. So, again, if you have any interesting commenting on those ones I read through, feel free to get a hold of me. Thanks, Brett. Okay, so that is my technical update. Are there any questions for Brother Ag? Okay, hearing none, we're gonna move into some partnership reports and we're gonna start, Sandy Smart wasn't able to join us today, but Sean Kelly will be presenting on behalf of SDSU on the update on the Woody Plant Control Summit strategic plan. Thanks, Sean, for being here. We'll share this, switch it with this. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. I'm sorry, I have no idea how to guess this. Okay, maybe, let's change it up there at all. Just like Sean, there we go. Okay, okay, well, it's a big one. It doesn't change on the computer, but it changes up there. So I'll go, I'm pinching for Sandy to say give you an update. He wanted me to talk a little bit more than just the strategic summit, but I'll cover it. He wanted me to talk about the, I'm gonna have to get up here so I can see what I'm looking at. The SDSU Burn Association CCGA grant that we had from 2019 to 2021. We finally finished this year. We had two one-year no-cost extensions on that. Cover the Woody Plant Summit quick, and then our current SDSU and RCS Burn Association contribution agreement. And then what's next on the horizon for SDSU Burn Association and RCSP in the future. And then that'll all lead into the future of Grasslands Roadmap while we're gonna be talking about. So to start with on our CCG, like I mentioned, 2019, 2021, the big purpose of that grant was so our Burn Association could build capacity. We had a goal of writing 30 prescribed burn plans in those three years and another goal of burning 2,000 acres per year for three years. And as well as some funding assistance for education and outreach, as well as funding for two graduate students to do some research projects in our Burn Association area. So kind of the results from that as we finally finished it up this spring was able to complete 28 prescribed burn plans which resulted in about 42,000 going to the Burn Association for us to build capacity. Below that kind of lays out how we did on burning acres in 2019. We didn't burn anything because of flooding in our four-county area. 2020 was COVID, we were able to see one burn in before we got shut down. Then 2021, we finally got rolling again and got a couple of burns done. And then in 2022 was the drought year that 290 acres was the first ball prescribed burn that we'd ever done because we were shut down in the spring because of dry weather. So up to those four years I was really starting to get some gray hairs after we got this grant because we weren't getting anything done. And then finally this spring I was even getting nervous again because we still had snow on the ground up until the middle of April. And then on April 24th, we finally started getting rolling. We went hard and fast for three weeks and got over 5,000 acres burn up and down the Missouri River. For those that don't know our Burn Association who covers Lyman, Brule, Charles Mix and Greger counties I'd say probably 90 to 95% of our prescribed burns are in the river break country right along the river. And the purpose of those burns is to combat secret training coachmen. So that's kind of what we do. So we had a total of a little over 6,500 acres burn which resulted in about 82,000 to the Burn Association to help build more capacity. We did have the two graduate students they completed two research projects on actually it was yeah, four different branches within the Burn Association area on both sides of the river in Gregory County and in Charles Mix and Brule County. As far as other education and outreach we were able to get a burn association website built that's the web address. If anybody wants to check it out we've been able to do by annual newsletters covering what we get done as well as outreach with the burn association. They completed 10 educational videos documenting woody plant control by the burn association. Those are available on our website or Facebook page and on YouTube and I believe they're under NRSS's YouTube channel as well. Also two podcast episodes on woody plant encroachment control and prescribed burning from myself and Rod Boss. We also were able to do RFD TV at Cattleman and Cattleman television. That episode was done on Justin Bailey branch north of bold steel that we've done to prescribe burns on his ranch since our burn association was founded in 2016. We continue to hold monthly board meetings for strategic outreach, burn planning, miscellaneous business as well as we do an annual meeting usually in January of every year as an education outreach we usually have a speaker come in. This last year we had direct twidwell from University of Nebraska come up. And also recently we've started partnering with local FFA chapters in Gregor County, Winner, Wagner and Boyd County, Nebraska just to help bring the youth on board with this woody encroachment problem in our area as well as introducing them to prescribed burning. And then one of the final things I'm proud of we assisted Mathea Gordon in 2020 with her FFA Agro Science Project focusing on woody encroachment down in our four county area and the fear of implementing prescribed burning and she was able to win first place at National SRM meeting in Denver a few years ago. So good for her, excellent for her. So with that money that we've been able to get through our getting burns done through our prescribed burn plans we've been able to build some inventory get some equipment, some manpower Sandy wanted me to kind of share what we've been able to purchase with some of this grant money when we first started this burn association we had absolutely nothing other than what our local VFPs were providing with help with and as well as about other local ranchers and farmers had. So since then we've been able to buy a couple of side-by-sides, a burn trailer, a couple of thousand gallon water tenders we built, there's four on there now and we have five slide in fire units for side-by-sides, a grass rig fire unit and then miscellaneous drip torches, hand tools and we continue to add to this inventory. There's just a couple of pictures of some of the stuff we've been able to purchase and it's really been a constant as I mean from 2016 to 2018 we really been able to kind of hone in what really works well in the river break country doing prescribed burns in river breaks is completely different than burning a flat CRP field so we've really just figured out that six-by-six side-by-sides with 60 to 100 gallon fire units are what works best. There's a picture as we were getting ready to do our briefing before one of our prescribed burns of our burn trailer and burn truck in the background that was donated to us by the Nature Conservancy that we used to carry our slide in fire units around. We're able to lift the ramp up, we can slide fire units right off the back of the truck right into various side-by-sides. We always carry a couple extra slide in fire units any farmer ranger shows up to the burn and they don't have a fire unit or a good sprayer for their side-by-side so we can help provide that. There's just an example of another six-by-six ranger that we bought. We have three as well as the fire units that we build. We built our own side-by-side fire units for the burn association. I've seen every one that's mass produced by manufacturers and I've seen a lot of homemade ones and like I said, we've kind of honed in on what really works well for us. There's a picture as well as of our grass wig fire unit they're nothing fancy, but it works extremely well. So moving past, we got that CC, completed that CCGA grant. We're moving into the Woody Plant Control Summit that was in December 1st in Oklahoma. We had over a hundred in attendance there representing 40 different state, federal NGOs, as well as private landowners. The keynote speaker of that summit was again, Dr. Dr. Woodwell from the University of Nebraska. And we also heard from landowners from Ball Steel, White River, Chamberlain and the Lord Burl-Sue tribe discussing their experiences with Woody encroachment. Management, including prescribed fire, mechanical control and really the take-home message from Dirac's address was how South Dakota's in the unique position to actually stop this Woody encroachment of spread as it comes up from Nebraska. I mean, it started in Texas, it's moved to Oklahoma, it's gone to Kansas, it's gone to Nebraska. No state as again has been able to stop this spread of Woody encroachment coming up through the great plants and real opportunity to halt it in its tracks. As well as we did do some strategic planning at this summit, stakeholders were asked to offer their thoughts in four key areas. Awareness, actions, concerns and opportunities and I'll just give you the top comment from each one of those. On the awareness, it was more awareness on the economic impact of cedar encroachment for Woody plant encroachment throughout the state and the ripple effects and especially in some of the local areas where the encroachment is pretty severe. Actions were more clear messages from all the agencies involved, everything from state, federal, NGOs just having that clear message where everybody's on board. Some of the concerns, obviously the fear of fire that's still a huge concern throughout the state and continue to work through that with education outreach as well as it's not a problem. I don't have a tree problem on my ranch yet. Well, you might not yet, but you might someday. I'm just working on that education as well. And then some of the opportunities were obviously starting other PBAs around the state. There are some other areas of South Dakota that we started focusing on to try to get some PBAs started as well as increasing awareness outside of, like our four county impact area, like I mentioned. So beyond that, some of the results of that summit, we started holding bi-weekly meetings with SDSU, NRCS, our burn association, Laura Burrell and Cro Creek Sioux tribes. Laura Burrell and Cro Creek are working to try to get burn associations going on those two reservations and start getting burning going up there. They're really on the leading edge of the Cedar encroachment. It's not nearly as bad up there as it is down in our four county area. Did have some representatives from Laura Burrell come to a couple of our prescribed burns this spring. And after they attended, I think one of our burns towards the end of April on the Graham Ranch, then Laura Burrell conducted their first strike burn. Right on the river, they burned about 40 acres and couldn't have been happier for me. It's such a hurdle to get over, get that first burn under your belt is such a huge thing. I can't even tell you how important that is and they're ready and ready to go now. So we're continuing to work with them. They're working on forming kind of a joint grazing slash prescribed burn association up there. And we're going to continue to assist them in any way we can to keep that rolling. From other things from that summit, it led into a current SDSU NRCS and burn association contribution agreement that we're in right now. And this was mainly for outreach education and support really to help a lot of some of our burn association board members help to free some of their expenses to assist with burn schools, trainings, outreach. They have a seven member board and outside of myself and one other person, the other five members are full-time farmers and ranchers. It's a land owner by organization. So anything we could do to help them to free some of the expenses as we asked them to travel around the state and other areas with even our four county area to help with education and outreach. Anything we can do to help helps them a lot. Some of the things we've done, also this contribution agreement will help with continuing our biannual newsletters, our website, burn tours. We're hosting three burn tours this spring. Two have already been done. We got one left at the end of the month. We assist people, his burn schools that he's conducted around the state as well. We helped assist Nebraska pheasants forever with putting on a burn school in Cape Haute County, Nebraska, which is just south of winter. We got a lot of landowners from Southern Tripp County and Southern Gregory County and Southern Cod County to come to that burn school. So that was a big help. And like I mentioned, helped to free costs for some of the board members doing burns. We have a four county area, which is a large area and asking full-time farmers and ranchers to drop everything at the drop of a hat really to go and do a prescribed burn. It can get a little rough and definitely rough on them. And every prescribed burn we do is an education event. It is, I keep expressing this to everybody. Our burn association is not a custom burn outfit. I mean, we're in the business to teach people how to do prescribed burns so they can eventually get a group going and get able to do them on their own in the future. So like I mentioned, the three burn tours as well. Is there an adjustment? Yeah. Is there a custom burn outfit and salt code? You know, do you know that it does it? I think I'm aware. As far as other parts of this contribution agreement, we also have two contract positions. Two of our board members were put on contract to Tom Housman. He's based out of E-8 and he's gonna help travel the James River area and help build awareness on Cedar encroachment and try to recruit people to start getting a PBA going in that area. And then Brad Trishinson, who's our training officer, he's also the Gregory County Emergency Manager and the board member. He's gonna be assisting me with some burn plan writing in our four county area as well as in the James River area. So that's all part of the new contribution agreement. Next on the horizon for the burn association, SDSU, NRCS, we're hoping some sort of RCPP. I don't know if it'll be sponsored by the burn association, but something along those lines to get going in the future really to get for landowner support to get fire on the ground. I mean, maybe, you know, the purpose of it maybe is to just kind of cut through some of the red tape so we can get some direct money and payments too. Some of the areas that we're really focusing on like from up and down the Missouri River where we can get money for fire breaks, for deferred grazing, for shearing, for brush management, all that stuff where maybe we won't get bogged down quite as much in the Equip ranking and stuff like that. Maybe we could get some more. Just a quicker way of maybe getting the money to the producer so we can get fire on the ground quicker as well as involving other agencies like Pheasants Forever, Lord Barul and Pro Creek Sioux Tribes, Audubon, just a real all-encompassing effort. And that all kind of leads into grassland and road map that Laura looked at us about. So that was kind of hard and fast. So what we've done in the last five or six years. Any questions? Yeah. What you mentioned, what are you charged? Tipped for a burn? Yeah. So if you're in our four-counting area, we only do prescribed burns in our four-counting area. If you're in our four-counting area, it's about at first thought that it's about if you're going to try and assess the plan of the prescribed burn. They do require you to be a member of our Earned Association, which that's a more big unhelp during our shift. And then the other big requirement is we require you to attend a burn on somebody else's branch before we do a burn on your branch. So you're aware of it. And then one other thing you've done in the past, I don't know if we're going to continue this or not, it's just we visit in the past because we're already short on funds at this up. Doesn't matter if it's a 10-acre burn or a 10-thousand-acre burn, it was a $500 to the Burned Association just to help maintain your equipment. But we're going to be looking at it. We really need to continue that with the grant when he hasn't been able to see the beard. So for sure, it's $25 membership to the Burned Association. And the big one that I stress is coming to, you have to come to somebody else's burn. So you kind of get an idea of what a burn is going to be like on your own branch. So this is moving into the Hutchison area. Yeah, so Tom Hasman, he's one of our board members, but he's been contracted through NRCS. And he's working on building a community and just the awareness of getting some of the movers, shaker, landowners in areas to start trying to form a PVA in those areas. Obviously, so I need to bring in a TLC group for the Burned Association. Let's be kind of an issue. Yeah, definitely. The cedar in front of me. Now, is this a particular variety of herders like salt cedars done on the branch? We do have salt cedars, but salt cedars are a whole different animal. That's a restrouder, and it's a senior tree. You burn them and they're done. Salt cedars are kind of a different animal, but it's, and it can be invasive as well. That it's a, yeah, completely different species. All right, thanks, Sean. Hey, Sean, can we go to that flash drive? You can flash drive. I've got it. I forgot if I came in for my presentation, I don't feel like a visual, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. So I guess I'll start off. My name is Laura Taylor. I'm here wearing two hats today. I've been working with South Dakota specialty producers association, and they've been working with NRCS since last fall. So I'm here to kind of represent part of the project that I'm helping with there. And then most recently, I just started with the South Dakota grassland coalition a couple of weeks ago. So they'll pull in the new car a little bit, but we're starting to develop a plan that we want to share with you as well. So once we get the technology going, I'll go through this. Yeah, so for those who aren't familiar with South Dakota specialty producers, it's a nonprofit organization that focuses on education and promotion of specialty crops, which are things like fruits and vegetables, even things like tree farms, basically the non-smoddy crops in South Dakota. They're working and promoting and educating on those topics, as well as helping kind of more of those niche producers, like small dairies that might be selling directly to the customer, grass-fed beef, those type of products. So that is South Dakota specialty producers. So last fall, they entered into a cooperative agreement with NRCS. The focus on the agreement is kind of expanding that education for both NRCS employees and the general public. As you've probably heard, NRCS is really having this new push for urban egg and specialty crop support. And so kind of going with how do we train that employees so that when somebody new comes in to the office and a employer that's maybe used to working in more of the traditional crops and cattle side of things, knows how to answer a question about tomatoes. So specialty producers are helping to train the NRCS staff, as well as new individuals who are interested in exploring that field. And then of course, focusing on using methods that are sustainable for environment and producers. So the two goals of this project are to have partnership development and education for resource development and education. One piece of this was having a conference that we call UMARI, just another abbreviation out there. So it's the Upper Midwest, Urban and Rural Egg Innovation Conference. We actually held it in this space. We had 50 people this first year and we had 18 different speakers talking on a wide array of topics. The big focus for this conference is making it a little bit more technical. So not just, and certainly anyone is welcome, but not just your person that's growing five tomatoes for their family, but somebody that's growing on a little bit more commercial scale, maybe selling at the farmer's market, maybe at the grocery store. It is available or it's recorded and it's available online. I believe it's on the NRCS YouTube channel. So if you wanna check out any of those, you can. Just a few photos from that conference. We do have a trivia night. So if you're thinking of attending next spring, start studying up on your trivia. Some other projects that we've done are supporting local foods through the South Dakota Local Foods Coalition, serving as a representative there. And one subcommittee of that local foods coalition is the Farm to School Project. That's a piece that I've been a little bit more involved in. So if anyone has questions, I'd love to visit about it. But how do we get schools purchasing directly from local producers and kind of closing that gap? Recognizing that a school doesn't have to buy all of its food from a local producer. They could just buy 20 pounds of carrots a year from somebody local who's growing it. And then a big piece that we also have going is Educational Opportunities. So far into this project, we have eight producer webinars also available on South Dakota Specialty Producers YouTube channel to watch the recordings. Two webinars that are a little more geared towards the NRCS employees and then two in-person events which were open to both NRCS employees and the public who want to see what a large scale or at least moderate scale specialty crop farm looks like in South Dakota. And here's some photos from that. Moving forward, continuing to do things related to urban agriculture, such as growing in high tunnels, soil management for specialty crops and producing to sell to local market. Any questions on what they've been doing? Okay. I also have to say it's so the SDSPA had somebody that's really good at graphics on the team for that grant. So pardon my little bit more white looking grassland coalition update, but hopefully the information will make up for it. So here's my contact information. I'll also have it on the last slide. So I really encourage you if you'd like, you can snap a photo of it and send me an email or give me a call with any questions or discussion. So the cooperative agreement that grassland coalitions has entered into is titled the South Dakota Grassland Task Force, two key goals, development of the South Dakota Grassland Task Force and developing additional capacity for technical assistance. A couple of points on the task force thing. They're going to be referring to it as task force. The name might be changing as we move forward. We're trying to make sure that we are reflective in giving the correct first impression of what our team's all about. So that name you might see shifted. If you hear talk about something that's very similar to what we described today, but it's got a different name. It's going to be the same thing. But the goal is improving the lifestyle of all South Dakota residents with grasslands as a catalyst for that. I was almost hesitant to put photos on here because I don't want it to be limited to just cab or just pollinators. But we're really thinking big, big scope of what the grasslands entails. And with that, it kind of goes hand in hand with the roadmap that Shauna Lee alluded to. Who here has heard of the Central Grasslands Roadmap? A few of you, great. So this is a project that you can see is going from Canada down through Mexico. Of course, the migrating birds, plants, nothing is stopping at those boundaries that we call the states and the countries. So this project is looking at the grasslands from Canada down to Mexico. They've spent about two years developing the roadmap. It has a vision strategy and metrics. It's a really good thorough document you can look through. If you go to that website link, there's a really nice like two-page document that gives a nice summary, or you can delve into the documents and see kind of what they've looked into. And there's also a better graphic that you can find too, but it's one of the key things that they're talking eight sectors. So if you look at there, they're saying like indigenous communities, province and state led agencies, industry, private land managers, academia, NGOs, volunteers and the government. So those are all the components that we need to be thinking of when we're making decisions related to grasslands. And not just thinking about them, but hearing from them. So those eight sectors have all been well represented in developing the roadmap and are the theme that we want to continue through as we work in our own state. The scorecard, like I said, it's broad. It's not just saying, we want so many acres of grassland. It's saying, what do we see as socioeconomic improvement? Are these rural communities stronger because of the grasslands? Ecological, looking at landscape conservation, species, water quality and soil health and then also industry and private partnership contribution. So looking at those local food supplies and things being done in the low-impact production methods. This map here is also the roadmap. Purple is representing converging ground. Green is intact. Yellow is the high-risk. Our management is probably looking directly towards where South Dakota is. Do you have the black circle there? That's the black hills? Of course, we don't want, we want to forest it out there. So that's kind of why it's black. But if you look to the side, I don't know what you, but one thing that's pretty exciting is how much green we still have in South Dakota. So a big piece of this project is looking at, what is it looking at? Hearing from all the partners, bringing everybody in the state together to say, what are we wanting this map to look like in 10 years? How much change will it be comfortable with? So that brings me to the next point. Is what is South Dakota's response? A really exciting piece. We are the first state that is having a formal discussion on what are we going to do in South Dakota in response to the roadmap? It's not going to exact replica of what the international plan, we need to decide what are the priorities here and how are we going to kind of align that concept? So phase one has been the development of the Grasslands Collaborative Group. The staff was submitted for their collaborative agreement and we'll be managing it. The Harriory Director, which is myself. And then we have a steering committee of 11 individuals from different agencies and organizations that are kind of helping guide this initial launch. Right now we're working on developing a vision and a mission statement. And it's kind of figuring out what are our values? So that way we can explain our plan to you guys. We are going to be meeting the roadmap to find the diverse value grasslands and having diverse perspectives brought in. But the main thing is that we need to be connecting with the South Dakota and saying, how do we take South Dakota and put it next to the Grasslands? So you'll be seeing that kind of get pulled together in the next few months. And then that's where you come in. So any individual in this room, if you or your group cares about South Dakota, that's the qualifier that says we want you and I in this conversation. Even if you're not grassland specific, you are part of South Dakota, which isn't part of Grasslands, our part of South Dakota. So you should be in this conversation. We're going to be looking at how do we preserve rural communities, the pro-ecosystem and the social significance of grasslands in South Dakota. So specifically what I'd like to see you guys doing, we're going to be studying four of the meetings. Our first one is October 24th at 1 p.m. central. You'll be getting some information in the next few weeks if you're on our party list. If you want to be sure that you get on, make sure to next slide and grab my email or my phone number and let me know as to if you're included. We'd love to know your liaison from your group or 20 members from your group, whichever group you're about to be. We also advise you to bring your group into the conversation. We want to share our plan and our thought with everyone. This is not just about having those 10 partners leading this project. They're going to help secure the launch, but then it's about getting everybody in the room discussing things. We'd love to come and give them a board meeting, annual conference or event. We'd love to be the speaker there, share a little bit about what we're thinking and then if there's time, we'd love to be able to just sit and visit with your members in here. What are their thoughts on the grasslands in South Florida? What are some gaps? What are some areas that may be looking so much focus here? We're missing this area over here. I mean, the border swap. Both from our landowner and producer side, but also the general public, who still doesn't know the grasslands, but might not have been controlled at the land or event. And the third way to have enough support is attending the South Florida Grassland Summer. We'll be having that next summer, date to be determined, but that's going to be to continue that time of station and have the education on the broad-topped undergrass lands. So, with that, any questions on this plan? How many angles do you have anything to add? Very part of this. Well, I'm just writing. You didn't read anything. Okay. All right, so I'll put my name up here. Like I said, please jot it down, send me an email. We haven't met yet. We're about to chat. Thank you, Laura. Thank you for having me. Thank you. All right. So next on the agenda, we have Matt with Pesence Forever. All right. Thanks, Tony. I'm going to get my screen shared here. Is that coming through? Yes. All right. Very good. I apologize. I'm not able to join in person. I had every intention to, but woke up with apparently it was just a head cold. Got tested for COVID and clinically had all the symptoms. And Doc said to avoid crowds for a week. So sorry I can't be there, but appreciate the opportunity to provide updates to everyone. So again, this is my contact info here. Having, yeah, that bar is blocking out my cell, but that'll be my contact info beyond the last slide as well. So this picture here is our most recent team meeting back in January. Four of these staff members have moved on to different positions. And yeah, just wanted to give a quick shout out to our team here. So here is the habitat advisor map that is available through the South Dakota Habitat Pays website. Mark Norton in the room there. Mark Norton is the one that maintains that. So I appreciate him keeping this up to date, especially over the last, well, since I've been on about four months, we've had four or five changes to this. So this is our network of farm bill biologists, as well as our monarch and pollinator, coordinating wildlife biologists, as well as our precision egg and conservation specialists here that serve our producers across the state. In addition to those 19 positions, we also have an R3 and veterans outreach coordinator here in South Dakota. And also not listed on this map are our eight habitat specialists that work in partnership positions as well with game fishing parks, putting habitat on the ground as well as an additional habitat easement specialist that works on signing and maintaining our easements across the state as well. So again, a big shout out to our team. As Tony mentioned with a lot of his staff, we have a very dynamic group. Just they burn and bleed conservation. So there are the boots on the ground out there working directly with our farmers and ranchers across the state to meet their habitat and conservation needs. So diving into a little bit of their impact over our fiscal year 2023, which would have been July 1st, 2022 up until June 30th of this year. So just under 4200 contracts. And again, this is just based on our 17 farm bill biologists positions. And a couple of those were open a strong majority of that timeframe with people coming and going. And again, huge shout out to our staff there. So kicked out over 1500 conservation plans. Did a ton of practice designs. Just under 700 status reviews. Over 950 there as well as doing some easement monitoring. A lot of education and outreach events. They hosted 29 workshops and also attended 42 themselves across our group. So the biggest thing is they impacted 1.2 million acres just in South Dakota over that 12 month timeframe. So again, I want to give a huge shout out and pat on the back to our staff that is actually absolutely doing an incredible job and leading the country every year and the number of acres impacted. So one other thing I wanted to mention that was recent here back in July. A few folks in the room attended the working lands for wildlife workshop down in. Manhattan, Kansas, highlighting the woody encroachment that Sean and others have touched on today. So just wanted to touch briefly on that was in on the national planning committee for that. So over 300 people were in attendance. Strong. So we had to turn out farmers and ranchers from across the country as well as agency staff from wildlife agencies, NRCS BLM forest service. Basically anybody that works in the conservation world in. Again, this was focused in the grasslands of Kansas, looking at that effort and also had some local representation. So that was a great experience. And Sean was there. And Bill was there on a panel presenting on the woody encroachment work that they have been working on. So again, wanted to give out some recognition there. Recognizing our leaders, not only in that room, but also throughout the state on that woody encroachment topic. So. Also wanted to put on everybody's radar that South in March of this coming year. So it will be in Sioux Falls at the Premier Center and we'll actually take up the Premier Center, Event Center and the arena as well. So I wanted to make everyone aware of that and I will be sending this information along shortly to pretty much everyone in the room and across the state as far as our conservation partner saved the date. So we will have an NRCS partnership meeting that Friday morning. I know some of the room have been involved in the planning of this, but I guess I'm kind of letting the cat out of the bag a little bit. But again, there'll be more info coming on that. So there'll be a variety of workshops looking at all sorts of things for landowners as far as conservation partners as well as non-operating landowners and then all sorts of other workshops more aligned with outdoorsmen and women from across the country. So as was brought up earlier, yesterday we had the announcement of the public access to habitat here in South Dakota, which is a really exciting access program that we've been working on behind the scenes with South Dakota Game Fishing Parks for a really long time. It goes back well before I came on as the state coordinator, excuse me, back in May. So through South Dakota Department of Tourism, as well as ONIX, we've got our entire first year amount of funding in order to provide these habitat incentives on top of South Dakota Game Fishing Parks walk-in area contracts to open. We're gonna aim for 10,000 or more acres of new public access this year. We're hoping with fundraising, we'll be able to do that annually, but our initial year, we are gonna target that 10,000 acres across the state. So payment rates will range across the state depending on habitat types, but we will have some aimed at the kind of CRP type access within the pheasant core range, but it will also be applicable statewide on well-managed range and grazing lands. And in those instances, we'll mirror more closely the South Dakota Game Fishing Parks current walk-in area incentive payments for producers on those acres. So I know we're getting up against the planned time here, so didn't wanna dive into that too deep, but did wanna mention something on it because I know it's been announced far and wide throughout the media and really exciting. I'm not only for South Dakota, but for sportsmen across the country that do come here to the capital of the world. So with that, here's my contact information and feel free to reach out outside of the call as well if you have any thoughts or questions and concerns and otherwise I will take some at this time. Anybody have any questions in the room for Matt? I've not seen any questions, I'm not seeing anybody come off a mute on the meeting. So I think you're off to a go. All right, thanks for the opportunity to share. Thank you so much Matt. All right, so we have a couple more partners with the range I wanted to give you just an opportunity if you did wanna say anything you don't have to, but I just wanted to give you all the opportunity. Bruce, we'll let him start with you. Do you have any updates or anything that you'd like to bring up to the group? Yeah, I guess nothing real works out if we're continuing to work on our CPP project which is coming on real well. We had three agreements signed last year and they'll probably be for the next year and they're on the ground and all of this will be pressed. The plan is as best as going in and cover tracks going in. So that's excited. Our last sign up this past spring, it does be cooperators working on the agreements right now on our teams, working on the planning and the environmental compliance and all that to get those hopefully for this fall so we can get some performance seeding and the grass seeding moving forward from there. We also have our grazing lands conservation initiative grants with the NRCS coming together real soon to help the team with the outreach, providing opportunities for grazers, to ranchers that give you advantage to some of the new farm go programs that are available in your program. I'm a smart practice is that that help of their branching program here. So that gets together and reaching out to partners and hopefully have some more outreach events and just kind of help reach those, those partnerships at least before that aren't aware of the opportunities and help just make some of those connections. Thank you. I guess other news too, if you didn't see the breeding population and also came off a lot of the gold, not continentally long ball populations are now on about 7%. We used to have some good snow this past winter, but this is very quickly, but things get a lot, didn't have quite the condition that we hope could put past the very bottom of the region, but I did see them go ahead and announce that the root index is up, but almost 80% of their solar arts and good pockets of production this year as well. Thank you here. Thank you, Bruce. Yeah. No? Yeah, real briefly, I guess what's most normal for this group will be the current RCPP project that we have and that's been a great help with getting some of our procedural steps, administrative steps in place. I think we're close again to actually get down to the need to be ready to talk to those landlords. We do have two specific branches that were targeted in the proposal. So there won't necessarily be an open call for landlords participating in that program or put those easements on the ground. And those two landlords are really excited to move forward. And I can tell you there's gonna be two really good stories to tell about the value of easements in South Dakota when we get those projects done. And they're really gonna provide a lot more stimulus for future projects and a lot more motivation and broad-based support for easements in the stake. And just wanna make sure Maddox, how much we appreciate his assistance. And Tony, you know how good he is with the state in touch and keeping things rolling on our side. One other real brief thing earlier this week, Maddox, how many of you are subscribers to South Dakota Magazine? It's probably got one of the widest distributions in South Dakota, but there was a story in there of our first easement in Oak Hills Ranch. If any of you are subscribers, yeah, check it out. If you're not, maybe see Gene Barrow copy from someone that is doing a really well done story in there about the Oak Hills Ranch and how valuable that is gonna be to that local community in keeping that area in the branch. That's it. I guess if anybody has any questions, I can let them answer them otherwise, yeah. Thank you, Tony. Mark? Hey, good morning, Mark Norton, South Dakota Game and Fish and Parks. A couple of quick things. We've got a couple of our friends doing the James River Watershed and the Big Sea River on the head. Right now, it's about 80,000 acres of the James River Watershed enrolled and about 700 in the Big Sea River, which is brand new for us started just late last fall. And it looks like we're in the middle of pretty much grabbing up a re-enrollment of about 6,000 acres that were expiring this year on the James River Prep. Looking like we're gonna have around a 90% re-enrollment rate there, which is probably our best re-enrollment year yet since 2020 when prep contracts started inspiring. And then I mentioned 700 acres of the Big Sea where are currently enrolled and active. And it looks like we'll have another 7,800 acres. So it'll probably be starting this fall up and down the James River. You know, the Big Sea River Watershed, that's a prep partnership between the state and USDA and the farm service agency through the Conservation Reserve program. Those are pro-plant acres being enrolled in the CRP and also open to public and kind of dishing access. Thank you Mark. Angela. One quick item that through and out learned by thanks for all contribution of the River Lake and the Denver CS. We are now releasing a healthy soils at home publication, which is not meant for producers. It's meant for homeowners in the urban areas and the places that are not our normal producers. We're going to do a rollout at State Fair at the value of an A conference next week. And we are also now going to be at the Municipal League Convention in October. And then all the soils making that working through the cities are going to be even broader distribution of the information. We also have a convention coming up too. Oh yeah, two. Oh yeah. September 17th through the 19th will be an opening for our convention. I think that's interesting topics. All right. And then just looking at who we have online, I know at least a minute ago, I saw the judge was on there. Judge, do you have any updates for us? He may know something about us. All right. Well, yes, sorry. Those are farming bag and natural resources. Just let people know of what we do, I guess. We're kind of the unknown people in the room as well. But we give about $2 million a year for the EPA Clean Water Act to push through to the tools. We have six active projects throughout the state. One in the James River, two in the Big Sioux, one in the Belfouche, and then we have the Morgan Soil Health Coalition to do the statewide project. And then the Discovery Center and Peers are doing non-point source information education project. But our projects work pretty hand-in-hand with NRCS. Quite a few of those have RCPPs as well. And then we also have one other thing. We got some funding through the legislature a couple of years ago who had gotten a repairage buffer. We call it the Repairing Bluffery Initiative. We have one through an opera grant that is statewide. And then we have that legislation money, which is kind of earmarked in the Big Sioux. So I want to throw those out there. Kind of working with Mark down on some CREP stuff, maybe adding on top of that the RBI Repairing Bluffery Initiative on top of that. So just want people to know that. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our meeting here. I'll just open it up for if there are any questions or any other items that we need to bring up before I close our meeting up today. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for calling in today. Really do appreciate the attendance and the conversation. I'm hoping that as we move forward and as we start working on putting together our strategic plan for NRCS, that we're going to have more of this discussion and more of this collaboration built into these meetings so that we can try to continue building what we do in South Dakota. Thank you all for attending. Thank you for your continued efforts supporting what we do with conservation. This is really important. This is important for the future of South Dakota, and I just appreciate it. So with that, everyone, have a great rest of your week. Have a great weekend, and we'll chat again soon. Thank you so much. What's that? Go ahead. Yeah. Go ahead.