 Hi, my name is Emily Helms. I'm the state range management specialist from South Dakota NRCS. Today, we're going to demonstrate how to use the South Dakota grazing tool. This tool is used in conservation planning to help inventory and plan with producers. When we work our way through the tool, it provides the needed steps to implement prescribed grazing plan. Next, I would like to introduce Mitch, who is one of the presenters on this video. Thanks, Emily. I'm Mitch Faulkner. I'm an area range land management specialist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and I'm from Belfouche, South Dakota. I work with USDA staff, private landowners, and NRCS partners to utilize the South Dakota grazing tool. It is a comprehensive tool for planning grazing management activities. Next, I'd like to introduce Mark Washicheck, who is the primary developer of the South Dakota grazing tool. Yeah, thanks, Mitch. Yeah, I'm Mark Washicheck, and I'm a retired area resource conservationist from Brookings, South Dakota. I currently work as a consultant to USDA and NRCS. I'm in the agricultural conservation experience services program, it's called ASIS. I've been involved in programming the grazing tool since 2002. There have been many changes over the years, and with each new version comes improvements. The current version 4.3 allows users to enter their ranch data in one of three ways. They can enter it manually, making the tool a simple data entry record and planning tool. The second way to enter your ranch data is to enter it by drawing each field one at a time in web soil survey. It's free, and this method allows you to upload ecological site and forage suitability site data to help you estimate stocking rates for your ranch. The third method is also free and involves using Google Maps to create a shapefile of your ranch. Shapefiles can then be used in web soil survey to download all the data for all the fields into the grazing tool. This tutorial will show you all of this and more, so let's get started. Show you is when you open the grazing tool, which right now with the version is 4.3, it will take you through some terms that you must agree to, and we'll go in here, and it's basically gonna say that you accept the responsibilities in the program, agree to these terms, and each time you open it, you're gonna have to go through that same process. You can open it to web soils, actually you open it to a tab in the spreadsheet and it directs you how to get your data out of web soil survey, that's one way. You can open it without adding data, and that's if you've got a spreadsheet that has data in it, or you're gonna start a new one, you would click open without adding data. We used to have a link to Toolkit, an NRCS software program that would kick out a shapefile data for you. That link is not there anymore because NRCS doesn't use Toolkit, they use a conservation desktop. If we ever get that, I'll put that link in there if we get that figured out. So I'm gonna open it without adding data, and it always looks for existing data and tells you whether it found it or not, and here there's no field data in this spreadsheet. So that's basically the way you get it open. We do have a ability to have a button to save the spreadsheet, to print preview this page or multiple pages of this tab of the spreadsheet. There will be a link to this training video that we're doing right here, and we can go to the instructions, and I'm gonna flip over there quickly, and here we have PDFs of complete sets of instructions for various items that you may want to take a closer look at. So I'm gonna go back to where I was. Two tabs you will find very helpful are the range field guide and the pasture field guide. These can be printed and taken to the field to record the plant community that best describes the vegetation in the field. To use the sheet, click the MLRA filter button and uncheck any that are currently checked, and then select the MLRA where your land is located. Click okay, and your sites are sorted with their corresponding plant communities, and you can see their representative production values in pounds and AUMs. There's a tab for range fields that lists plant communities for ecological sites and one for pasture fields that lists ford suitability groups. These are very handy for collecting field information, and there are some brief planning step instructions and the getting started. This is kind of the guts of the spreadsheet, how to make it work right here in front of you, but I just wanted to point out those things to you, the normal growth and harvest efficiency. I pointed that out, and later we'll use these two buttons up here. Pre-populated, a couple spreadsheets, so I'm gonna close this one and actually have the example one open here where I don't have to type in all the data. Basically, I put in the information in the yellow boxes that we need, a couple of dropdowns I can select from here, and I've already done that. So we come down here to actually putting in our information. We're doing a present condition up here at the top, so I have that box checked. I've got listed the percent of normal growth and the harvest efficiency that it's currently calculating. Every time you see a little red triangle in a cell, you can get more information, you can get direction, you can get instruction. So I would hover over that to see what it says to help you out in completing the worksheet. So the first thing I'm looking at is the federal and off-site leases. In this example, I said we have a Fish and Wildlife Service lease, and I put the information in there. Basically, I need to put in how many AUMs, animal unit months, is available from that lease and what's the current growth curve of that 160 acres. So I've completed that and it actually calculates out how many animal unit months of grazeable forage I would have on that. It's based on the growth curve, which we grow grass based on growth curve one, two, three, and so on in the mixture of warm and cool season grass. So you're inputting that information and it calculates out when the grass is growing and when it's available to graze. Then we have purchased feeds and I just put an example purchased hay from Hayville and I put the factor in here. How did I know it was 2.5? Well, I hovered my mouse over the red triangle and it said all haze is 2.5. So then we get down to the actual data that we're gonna put in for the forage inventory and I put a track, you can put a name or a number. I've put a field number. I've typed in the range. All this is just data input. I made this up, upland and lowland and hilly. This is from my own recollection of my ranch. What it's like, I put the acres in and at one point this would be like if someone did a similarity index on my range land or a forage suitability score sheet. I can put that document that information here. I actually typed in the animal unit months in each field and then I entered the growth curve which was like I described above, mixture of the warm and cool season grasses. So I just wanted to show you, you can highlight and you can copy, you can drag, if you have a plus sign. I don't ever do it if you're looking at the symbol that has arrows like that on the end of it. That would move the cell and that would mess up the spreadsheet. But if you get on the corner and you have a plus like that, you can drag this down and it's gonna change that to one fifth and one sixth. What you wanna do there is click on the down arrow here and say copy cells. Then it puts exactly whatever you copied from above. Here I wanna have one field one, two and three and so I actually want the series of numbers to come in here. So I just showing you that so you know how that works. I want range in every one of these. You gotta have range or pasture in the land use for it to later on, I'm gonna show you how it will look up the animal unit months on its own. And if you're gonna use that feature, you have to use range or pasture as the land use here. We can add cropland and we can add our hayland hay that we grow on our ranch in here too, but that's not gonna give me AU, I'm not gonna put in AUMs for that. I'm gonna put in basically, I AU at cropland I might put in AUMs for aftermath grazing but hey, I would put in tons here, tons per acre. So having said all that, I want to, I'll just copy this down for purposes of explanation and I'll enter a couple of animal unit months figures in here and I suppose you're saying well, how do I know what that is? Well, you may not and if you don't, then I'll show you another alternative hybrid method that allows you to get this information from data in the spreadsheet. But here we have manually entered the information. It calculates out how many animal unit months when they're available and that's basically the manual entry process. I will go on and show you the animal inventory. So I'm gonna go over to the animal inventory and I've already pre-filled most of this out but I'm gonna add just to show you the dropdowns in here and I'm gonna add bulls and they're gonna be for them in this particular case. I'm gonna check the boxes whether I'm feeding them in this month or I'm grazing them in this month and if you have a month, let's say May, I'm going to feed half the month and graze half the month, then check both boxes. That's about as detailed as it gets. If you're doing feeding the whole month, closer to the whole month, three weeks or whatever, then check feed for the whole month. But a check box in both means half and half. All right, so you need to put a check mark in every month to tell the program what you're doing with this livestock type. And when you do that, it gives you a balance down here. Total grazing available and over here at this end, it's the grazing shortage or surplus. I'm short, 37 AUMs on my grazing. For as far as the feed goes for the winter time, I'm short 383 AUMs, why? Because I didn't put any purchased hay or grow any hay on the ranch and I'll show you what we can do there to resolve that issue. So it adds up to total shortages 420 AUMs. I have a grazing chart in here that really is helpful, I think, to explain that. But let me go through it real quick with you here. The green is grass that's growing. It's a grazeable forage produced. So you're producing a little bit of forage in April and then May and June, most of it, this is I think growth curve two, a little bit in July and less and less as summer goes on. So that's your grazeable forage that you're producing. Here's the animal demand. How many AUMs are the livestock eating or need? And it's pretty steady across here. I think I had bulls come into the pasture in June instead of May. So that's why the little tiny increase here. So that's steady. And then the pink is a shortage or surplus by month. So here's an example I'll use here. We grew a little bit of grass, grazed quite a bit of grass. And so we were actually that month, we had a shortage of the difference between here and here. And that is negative. So it shows it down here. But what's real handy is the cumulative shortage or surplus. And so you can see in this starts in April, it starts growing grass. And so then we end up with a surplus up here, more grass and we've graze. But as we graze month after month, that surplus declines until we actually have a shortage at the end of the season. So we're short on grass. That's what this is really telling us. And so we'll come back and take a look at that. Here's a handy chart about the feed. This is all about forage. Here's one about the feed. Matter of fact, the forage says I'm about 11% below what I need to be on forage. So it does a little calculation there on feed. This is the total AUMs that I'm short, 383. But it breaks it into whether if it was hay, it was 153 tons of hay. So I'm gonna show you then, if I pop back into the forage inventory and for example, if I buy 160 tons of hay, I was short 153. So this should show I'm now seven tons long on hay. So that's the way that calculation works. And it can tell you basically how many tons of hay are needed for that number of livestock that you got for that period of time that you're feeding them. So that's basically the nuts and bolts, you might say, of the forage and animal inventories if you enter all the data manually. So now what I'd like to do is show you the kind of a hybrid method. I'll say if we take our manual entries and they would remain the same up through here, the track field and land use. But at that point, what we could do, and we could actually put the acres in there at that time too, but at that point, I would not have entered the site or the anything in the column here where plant community choices exist. And what I can do now is I can check this box. It says site choices. And I'm gonna answer, yes, would you like site names available? So I'm gonna say yes. And then it's gonna ask me, where in South Dakota am I? Well, I'm gonna tell it I'm somewhere in MLRA, Major Land Resource Area 102A. And I happen to be in Brookings here today. So I'm gonna tell it 102A, tell it where the majority of the land is that you're planting here. And once I tell it that, it's gonna delete all this information I put in here if I've already put things in and give me a dropdown of actual ecological sites if this is a range field. And it's gonna give me Ford suitability groups from NRCS's system of classification if it's pasture. So I'm gonna fill in here what I had and I gotta peak at my sheet here because I had upland and then I had low land. I'm gonna call that low me overfall is what that site actually would be. This was if you had looked up on Websoil Survey to see what the majority of the field was as far as the ecological sites. And this one would be low me and I'll quickly try to put these in. I had a field that was called wet before but it's really a sub-irrigated field is the way NRCS classifies it. I had a dry one, well that was some sanding ground so it was sand. So now I have actual ecological sites or Ford suitability groups selected. And then here I'm gonna check plant community because I wanna actually put what plant community is. Would you like plant communities available? Yes. Do you want them sorted high to low? That's a click yes or low to high for productivity. I wanna go low to high. And so I click no and it's just telling me the lowest one will show up on the list here. And then I have a choice to change that. The lowest productivity, now see it stuck the productivity or 0.57 AUMs per acre. But if I change that to what's really out there in my field one, it changes it to 0.77. So it knows these two things here from the data that NRCS has collected and it inserts that in here for you. So I'm gonna put what my fields are predominantly made up of here quickly. And that's a wet, the subirrigated one and this one gets an alfalfa and intermediate in there. And it does the work for you here. So that's great. There is one thing that I wanted to show you about the columns that I forgot to and I'm going to demonstrate that here. So if you type something in that's a little too wide for the column, you actually can get up here and make an adjustment to the column width. Now, if you get them too wide the printout isn't gonna look very good but you can adjustment so that you can read things. So I just wanted to point that out as one additional method that you can use to make this look better for yourself. And so then the next thing I wanted to show was that there are two ways to change the basics of the calculations that this performs and that's when it comes to production values. So I've provided these two ways. Overall production you can change if you go up to the top and click on the production button. You can change the overall production to high or low or normal and what this does is it gets it within the range that's probable and NRCS has come up with these numbers. So if we change this to high then if we go down here and look our value here for AUM production was 0.77 before now it's 0.95 and it's changed to all of them. And so that's the way that works and it changes your header to high here so you know you're in the high category. So I'm gonna put that back. I don't think I'll use that too much. The one you might use more is, notice the adjusted is always the same as the AUM production column until you change normal production up here and I'm gonna change it to 80%. So this is looking at say you have a severe drought and you're looking at an 80% of normal production that would change your adjusted to 0.62 in this case from 0.77 and all the calculations are based on that then. And you can do this by field. You'll see that in a little bit how that works. So I just wanted to show you those two methods to change the basis for production. I'm gonna set that back to 100 so we don't, so we use the normal here from now on and then I'd like to also show you that once you have, you're using the sites lookups and the plant community lookups then these pink columns become formulas. So let's say that this 1.08 for pasture number two, I have better numbers for that production and it's more like 1.5. Okay, well you can actually type that in. But any changes you make to plant community or site name won't be reflected in the AUM calculation from that point on. It will always be 1.5 because you removed the formula and replaced it with the number 1.5. If you had to put that formula back in you can copy it from above, bring it down. Now the formula is back. So I just wanted to show you how that works and when you might use that. So let's jump over and take a look at our animal inventory I didn't change. So that's still 50 cows and four bulls. So what about our grazing chart? Well, I don't have as big a deficit now. I got my numbers a little more accurate you might say and now my deficit shows up as less, 3% off on my forage. So that's actually the way I would use this. If I was trying to do manual data entry I would use the hybrid method there. So then I wanna show you one more thing here quick and that's, well what I did was I opened up, let me pop up here, I opened up edit by row for the, this is showing me the harvest efficiency and the percent normal growth. And I can change that. It's all set to 100% normal production and harvest efficiency is 25%. That's pretty standard without any kind of grazing system. I'm gonna put a grazing system on these three pieces of range land and I'm gonna rotate through them and so what do I put in there? Well, excuse me, the harvest efficiency information 25% season long, I'm gonna use 30% grazing rotation once through three or more pastures. So I'm gonna use 30% for those three fields. So I've changed that and I've also added a field of crop land down here, 40 acres and I put it's 2.1 AUMs per acre that I'm gonna get off of those corn stocks. How did I figure that out? I popped over here in the crop tab and I put the data for the field in here, the acres, my yield and it told me that I have 2.1 AUMs estimated that I could harvest from those corn stocks. All right, so I put that field in and I'm gonna graze that in October because the growth curve, it isn't available till October and November and so that I changed. So I added a few acres, the animal inventory, I've bumped up five head and I think I went up one bull and I changed the grazing, I'm gonna graze in November for the cows, I was feeding, okay? So those are the things I changed and I wanna just take a look at the grazing chart now. Grazing chart has me coming out almost even as far as a shortage or surplus over the entire year. That's about what I wanted to try to figure out. Can I add those five cows if I add some grazing system and some corn stocks to graze in that system? I'm going to show you bringing in a land unit, by land unit, by drawing the area of interest. So what I have here is our web soil survey with me focused in on the land units I'm interested in. So I just kind of zoomed to that area. Got two land units here and we're gonna bring them in to the grazing tool. I'm gonna use these two buttons up here. You have two area of interest buttons. One is if you have a perfect rectangular square and the other is more of a free draw for sort of odd shaped land units, which is usually what we run into around here. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna click on the area of interest button and I'm gonna draw this area of interest out, clicking at every turn of the fence line and then when I'm done, just double clicking. So it's creating my area of interest. Gonna go to the blue identify button. I'm gonna click within that area of interest and I'm gonna look for that area of interest ID number. That's right here. So I'm gonna click on that, highlight it, right click and copy that number. Now I've got a brand new grazing tool opened here. I'm gonna bring that up. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and find my web soil survey data, South Dakota tab and I'm going to open that up and click run query. Okay, so as soon as that query box opens, I'm gonna right click in that box, click paste, submit my query. Brings up the data table with the soil map units and the ecological site IDs, clicking control A, highlights all that data, right click, copy. Gonna minimize that, go back to my grazing tool and just click the get ES data box. It brings in all of that soil survey data and it gives me a message that says a field number is required and that we need to enter in a field number for each of the cells under field. So I'll show you how that's done. I'm gonna click okay. I'm just gonna call this field one. If you have a track number, you can include a track number also. I don't have one, I'm just gonna go with field one but I need to take this and there's a little box in the corner of that cell, I'll hover over it until I get the little plus sign and I'm gonna drag that one down through the entire set of data and I'm gonna copy that field one into every line of data. Okay, so I've got my field one taken care of. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to my web soil survey and I'm gonna bring in another area of interest. So I'm gonna clear this area of interest and I happen to have another small field that's gonna be included in this grazing tool and it's a little rectangular field right here and since it is pretty much a perfect rectangle, I'm just gonna use this square area of interest and I'm just gonna drag it across and release and I'm gonna go through the exact same steps here again. So I'm gonna go to the blue, identify, click in the middle of it, look for my area of interest ID, copy that number, bring my grazing tool back, I'm gonna go through those steps again, I still have my data from the first polygon in there, click run query, click in the query box, right click paste, submit my query. Again, the data table opens, control A, copy it once it's highlighted to my grazing tool again and I'm gonna click on get ES data once again. It's gonna ask me because data exists from that first polygon, do I want to replace it or override it or append it? Well, I want to append it, so I want to add it to the existing data. I'm gonna click yes to append and it says a field number is required again, so I've got a number of these fields line by line once again, so I'm gonna just click okay and there's the start of my data, this is gonna be field two, I'm gonna do exactly as I did before and I'm gonna drag all the way down to the end of the data, field two. So there I've got two fields, you could do as many fields as you want this way, line by line, polygon by polygon, and I'm gonna stop here at two. So that's how we bring in polygons from web soil survey into the grazing tool by drawing them free hand in web soil survey. Going to demonstrate how to export shape files from conservation desktop. Conservation desktop is a planning software used by NRCS employees to plan for programs or any different technical assistance needed by a producer. So the first thing, once you open up conservation desktop, you want to navigate to the producer that you need to create a grazing plan for. And this is done by opening the case file using the SHROS function. I already have my producer open that I want to create a grazing plan for. The next step, you can either export these plan land units from the case PLU layer or you could go a step further and export them from the practice schedule that has just those specific land units already created. So I'm just gonna export on the case PLU layer. So all you have to do is using the select tool, draw a box around the land units that you want to export. And then in the select feature dialogue box, go ahead and make sure to highlight all of those land units. So click on the first one, hold the shift key down and click on the last one to select them all. And if there's one in this group that you don't want to include, all you have to do is hit the control key and then select the one that you don't want and then just hit okay. Or, but I'm going to include all of them. So I'll just hit control again, select that one and then hit okay. So now that I have them all selected, you open up the map contents tool bar by selecting this, it's got three lines with three dots. And then make sure that you have the layer that you want to export from highlighted. So it should be blue, otherwise it won't work correctly. And then just right click and hit export selected. Next name your shape file, something that you can easily remember. So we'll call this grazing tool and hit exports. Then it will go through a quick processing and then it will say shape file is ready to download and a download shape file link will appear in that dialog box. So just hit that. And depending on the browser you're using, either it will automatically ask you to save as like with Google Chrome or there will be a little pop-up like with internet explorer. So then make sure you navigate to the folder where you can find the shape file that you're saving and then go ahead and save it. And next Mitch will show you how to manipulate the grazing tool shape file in order to be used with web soil survey. So now that I've exported a shape file from conservation desktop, I can use that shape file in ArcGIS and add the part name field for use in web soil survey and I can also modify that shape file. If I wanna add fields or split fields or delete fields for use in the grazing tool. So all I've done so far is I've gotten into ArcGIS and I clicked the add data button and I've navigated to the shape file that I brought over from conservation desktop and I'm gonna click add and add that shape file. Click close there. So it should add my shape file. I'm gonna zoom to that shape file and there it is. So I wanna make some changes to this shape file and so I'm gonna make it a little easier to look at and take the fill out, change the outline. And so this field down here to the south, I wanna split that into three pastures. It's only one right now. So here's how I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna go up to editor. You gotta have the editing option and start editing. And then when I do that, it's gonna bring up the editing toolbar. Click on grazing tool and I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna click on create features. Click on grazing tool and it's gonna bring down my construction tools. But what I wanna do right now is split one. Using the polygon rectangle circle, that would let you add features or add parts to the shape file. But I just really wanna split a field. So I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna click my select button. I'm gonna select that field and then I'm just gonna come right over here to the cut polygon tool and I'm gonna split that polygon the way that I want it to represent our plan grazing pastures. North pasture kind of sits like that. Got one more pasture. I wanna put into this. Do that again right here. Just kind of split it right through the middle and there I've split my polygon. So I can attribute these two. So I'm gonna click this attributes button. It's gonna bring up the attribute table. So right now they're all attributed with the PLU name and the PLU number of the original polygon. So I'm gonna leave this one South Range one and I'm mostly gonna focus on the PLU name. I come over here, I'm gonna change this to South Range two and I'm gonna change this to South Range three. So I've got that polygon edited the way I want it to be edited and I've got the PLU names as I want them. So I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna save edits and stop editing. And that's a quick tutorial on how to use your shapefile that you exported from Conservation Desktop and bring it into ArcGIS. If you have questions on this, I would suggest that you talk to your area GIS specialist for more and you can also refer to some of the handy how-tos that South Dakota NRCS has developed. So I've just modified the shapefile that we exported from Conservation Desktop and in order to make the shapefile work the way we need it to for the grazing tool and web soil survey, I have to add the part name column into the attribute table for our shapefile. So I wanna make sure I can bring up the table of contents and got my grazing tool layer right here that I've modified the way that I want it and I'm just gonna right click on it and I'm gonna open the attribute table. Slide that attribute table and then we're gonna work with it. Okay, so what we changed when we were working with that shapefile is the PLU name layer and that's the way we want those named. You have a PLU number in here and you might have some other attributes in there as well but we want that shapefile to have the part name attribute. So I'm just gonna go over here and I'm gonna click on this little, it looks like a piece of paper up above and I can add field here and just one sort of suggestion or hint, you do not wanna be editing the shapefile when you do this, you wanna be done editing. So it won't work unless you're not editing. So I'm just gonna add it and it needs to be exactly as I type it, part with a capital P and name with the capital N. And then we're going to change this to text in the type and just go ahead and set the properties link to 20. I'm gonna click okay. Okay, so what I wanna do here is I wanna make the part name the PLU name and we can do that two different ways. You can go back in and start editing the shapefile again and you can type in each line by line for that polygon what you want the part name to be. If you've already got it named in your attribute table and I do, I've got the PLU name, that's what I want for part name. You can come over here and you can right click that part name header and click field calculator. And when you do that, all you have to do is come down, find your PLU name right here, double click it and click okay and it'll carry over that name from the PLU name column. Like I said before, you can manually type these in once you add that part name column, but you have to be editing the polygon in order to do it. So now that we've got that the way we want it, I'm gonna close out of here and I'm going to open up web soil survey and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna find my shapefile and I'm gonna go ahead and zip that and I'm gonna add it into web soil survey. So that'll just take a couple of clicks to do that. Add my AOI from a zip shapefile because in my opinion, it's a lot easier to add those in as a zip shapefile instead of one by one. So there it is, my zip shapefile, click set AOI. There are my polygons that we split up into pastures as we wanted them to work through the grazing tool and with the part name that we added in the attribute table to the shapefile in our GIS. I'm going to show you how to create a map of your land units using Google Maps and this will be the product that we eventually put into web soil survey to get data for the grazing tool. So I'm logged into my Google account and I'm gonna click on Google Maps. Right away, it's gonna take me to the area where I'm located but I'm gonna click on the menu function here and I'm gonna go to your places. I'm gonna come over here to maps and I'm gonna click maps and what I wanna do there is create a new map. So I'm gonna click create maps and it's gonna zoom me way out you can either search for your location here to zoom in but I know roughly where we're gonna be working so I'm gonna kind of zoom in on that area near Rapid City, South Dakota. Since I know where we're working I'm gonna go ahead and hit the base map layer and I'm gonna turn on the satellite imagery. So that's gonna help me navigate to where I'm going. So when you're navigating here either using your mouse to scroll or you can double click, right? You can either use the mouse to scroll or you can zoom in using the zoom button down here. So I'm gonna find my location that I'm interested in I'm gonna zoom into that area. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna retitle the map and then I can rename the layer here and save that. So I'm just gonna start drawing and I can see the outlines of my land units pretty easily and I'm gonna use this button here that's got the two lines with the three dots says draw a line. So I'm just gonna start drawing my land units. So when I click left, click it, it says add liner shape and that's what I wanna do. So I'm just gonna start clicking and you get a vertices click again and I'm just gonna outline the square with clicks at each corner finish up there. I can name this, I'm not gonna worry about it right now because I'm going to create a new name once we complete this and I'm gonna show you how to do that but I'm just gonna go save for that. Click that button again and I'm gonna add a new line. So I'm just gonna go down here to the south draw rectangle. This is my other land unit. I'm just gonna hit save again. I'm just gonna keep doing that until I have all my land units drawn. I feel like one of the perks of using Google Maps is it has really good imagery. It does, I can see all of the fence lines easily. Okay, so I have all of my polygons drawn the way I want them. If you want to, you can click on these vertices and you can move them or adjust the boundaries but I think I've got what I need. So the next thing I need to do is in my layer name, I'm gonna click on these three dots. I'm gonna click open data table and in order for web soil survey to identify the names of these pastures, I'm going to need to add a part name column. Part name is what web soil survey will recognize. So let's go ahead and do that. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit this dropdown button and I'm gonna say let's insert a column after the description. Call it part name, this little add new column window pops up. I'm not gonna put a space in, but the P and the N are going to be capitalized. So I'm gonna leave that as text and I'm gonna add. So I'm gonna come up here, this North field, the first one is polygon one. I'm gonna click in part name and polygon one, I'm gonna call that field the North pasture. Polygon two is a hay field that's called North hay. Polygon three is a piece of range land that's called the dam pasture, has a big dam in it. This is South range unit one, this is South range unit two, range unit three. I think that's how I want it. Can edit these any way you want, and I'm pretty happy with that. Now I can do whatever I want within this project, I can add more fields and in fact, I wanna add this crop field in, because that might be a field that we put into the grazing tool. Zoom in on that thing, I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add a line, outline our crop field. Just gonna click save, open the data table again. Let's call that the rest, the West crop field. We've got all of our polygons, our field units drawn, and we've got them attributed the way that we want. What we wanna do is we wanna get this Google Maps project into a shape file. So the next thing that we're gonna do is we're going to take this layer and we're going to export it into a KML. And the way we do that is here's the map name. This is the, go to the map name, and I'm gonna click on those three dots and I'm gonna click export to KML slash KMZ. I want the entire map and I'm gonna click export as KML instead of KMZ. I'm gonna click download. It's gonna ask me, where do I wanna save that? Let's go to the C drive. Put it in my C drive, you can put it wherever you want to. I've made a folder for this project. We'll call this South Dakota. Okay, so I've saved that as a KML. The next thing that I wanna do is I wanna convert that KML layer to a shape file. Within the grazing tool instructions, there is a link along with instructions how to do all of this, but I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna go to a website, GISconvert.com, and here is that site. First thing I wanna do is I wanna come up here to the left and there is a AutoCAD shape file, Google Earth option. I'm gonna click that thing. It's gonna ask me for an input file. That's the KML file that we just created, Google Earth. I'm gonna navigate to that thing. There it is, South Dakota land, I'm gonna open it. Then there's a dropdown here. And we want it to say, as a reshape file, just polyline. I'm gonna convert that file. There's a little window that opens in the lower left and I wanna collect save as. And this is a pretty handy feature. So it wants to put that in a zip file, which will work well, the web soil survey called South Dakota land again and save. That's how we convert our Google Maps land units to a shape file. All right, so the next step that we're going to do is we're going to take the map units that we made in Google Maps and we're going to run them through web soil survey to get soils data to put into the South Dakota grazing tool. I'm currently in the South Dakota grazing tool and I am in a tab, Web Soil Survey Data, South Dakota. So if my land units are in South Dakota, this is the tab that we're gonna use to bring in the data to populate our foraging before. So there is a link right here to Web Soil Survey. So I'm just gonna click on that, hold my function button down and left click to open Web Soil Survey and I'm gonna click Start Web Soil Survey. So it'll bring me to the main menu. Well, what I wanna do is I want to import an area of interest. And if you remember when we built our Google Maps layer, when we converted the KML to a shape file, the converter automatically zipped that shape file. So that's pretty handy. So we're going to bring it in from a shape file. You could also file by file, bring in that shape file, but it's much easier to do it this way. And this is my way to do it. So I'm gonna click Choose File from the zip shape file option. I'm gonna go find that zip shape file and I put it in my C drive. Here it is, it was called South Dakota land. I'm gonna open it, set my AOI and there are our land units and that part name column that we added and named. These are the labels, so the map labels are there. So it looks like that worked rather well. Right, the next step is I'm gonna click this blue Identify button. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go down here into the map and we're gonna click anywhere in those land units. And what I'm looking for is this AOI ID. And it's right here, so I'm going to highlight it, right click it and I'm going to copy those numbers. I go back in to our grazing tool and step two, there's a Run Query button. I'm gonna click that. It's gonna bring up a box where it says please enter your SQL query. I'm gonna right click in that box and I'm gonna paste that query into the box. And I'm gonna click Submit Query. Brings up a rather large table. And so I need to select this data. And for me, it usually works better to hit my control key and A to select that data. And I'm going to right click in that data and select copy. Go back to the grazing tool and the click get ES data. And there it is. All of the soil survey data from our shape file that we created using Google Maps is loaded into the grazing tool. Okay, so there's one other thing that I wanna do before I finish this process up with our soft code of land. We had one land unit when we were mapping it called the North pasture. This left-hand side of the web soil survey data tab is for rangeland. I have one in there that's actually true pasture and it's tame and probably seated back to alfalfa and intermediate wheatgrass or something like that. So I can account for the productivity of that pasture in a different way. And I'm gonna do that right now. I'm gonna show you how I would handle that. So I'm just gonna go into this North pasture, came in on the range side. I'm just gonna delete that because we're gonna bring it in on the other side, which is where we link to ford suitability group data. So I still have my web soil survey open and here is that North pasture. That's the pasture I'm interested in. So I'm gonna go into this suitabilities and limitations for use tab and ecological site ID is an option along the left side. And then you see down here, there's a little dropdown. If we're interested in ford suitability groups, we select ford suitability groups. If we're interested in rangeland, we would select NRCS rangeland or ecological sites options. So I'm gonna click ford suitability groups. I'm gonna click view rating. So it's gonna map ford suitability groups and it's going to give me a soils table down below. And this is for all of those land units. So it's for everything, including all of the rangeland as well. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna copy that data and I'm gonna paste it back in here. It tells you how to do that in the instructions. So what we're going to do is we're going to do as it says in step six, highlight the data in the table by selecting the first soil symbol all the way through the 100% FEM. Let me show you how that looks. So here's the map unit symbol, select everything until I see 100% here at the bottom. I'm gonna right click, copy that data. I'm gonna come in here and where it says map unit symbol and in 20, left click that I'm gonna right click and this is important. You wanna match destination formatting in your paste options. I'm gonna left click that icon. It's gonna bring all of that data into the right side of the Web Soil Survey Data tab. Now you'll notice with that option, it doesn't automatically populate the field name. And in this case, that's okay because I'm only interested in one of those land units being identified as pasture. So if I only go in and I find my north pasture, which is right here, and I'm gonna point out to you where to find this, just kind of a good rule is to, when you're looking at this data, you can find the names here within all of the information, but I see north pasture here and then I see north pasture at the close of the data and here are the two soil map units that it brought in for north pasture. But I wanna be sure that I'm in this all of collared cell right here. That's where north pasture is and you wanna be paying close attention that you're in the right cell, but I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna label this north pasture. And so I'll know that's what that is. And so when I type that field name in, that will identify the north pasture as being something that needs forage suitability group data in the forage inventory. I'm just gonna leave all the other fields blank on this right side of the tab for forage suitability group information or pastures. And it's only gonna bring in the north pasture. So at this point, I would be ready to come up here and click finished on the blue button up on top. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do that now. Next, there's a question. Would I like to have all the tools available for the forage suitability groups and the ecological sites? I do, I want that. You don't have to go this route, but we're going to use ecological site and forage suitability group data to determine productivity and stocking rates. Next, it's going to ask me how I want that data arranged within the tab. I usually go with low to high productivity. If you wanted high to low, you could click yes, I'm gonna click no because I want that data arranged from low to high. Click okay here. And all of our data has shown up in the forage inventory tab based on the field and the ecological site by acres. Let me go ahead and expand column C so I can see those field names. There they are. So it'll also show you what the land use is. All range, here's our North pasture. Since it was in the forage suitability group side, it identifies it as pasture and gives it a forage suitability group name along with forage suitability group plant options. Moving down, I'm going to make sure all of my land units showed up in this thing and they all appear to be there with one small detail, our crop field shows up as range, which is fine, but we're gonna go ahead and we're just gonna get rid of that and we're gonna work with that in a little different way. I'm gonna leave the acres in there and I'm just gonna leave that in as West crop. So now we would be ready to work with this forage inventory tab using either information that we have from a inventory or visiting with the producer as to what sort of forage is out there, but this is where we would start changing some of the information within this tab to match what's out there, match our inventory data and come up with carrying capacity and recommended stock rates within the grazing tool. So the next step that we're gonna go through is we've already showed you how to incorporate web soil survey data from within the state of South Dakota. We're gonna look at the operations to bring in web soil survey data outside South Dakota. So there's a tab, web soil survey data other. Click on that tab. This is where we're gonna bring that data in, but I'm gonna go back into web soil survey and we're gonna look at the process to make that happen. Okay, so in many cases, we're gonna have land units that aren't gonna be within state. And in this case, we're gonna bring in some land units across the border in Wyoming over in Crick County. And the best way to do this is to make sure you've got separate shape files. So this shape file could have been done using Google Maps. It could have been done using ArcGIS and can bring a shape file in. But I've got one that's in here for a few land units. We're gonna go get that shape file and bring it in. It's a zip shape file. I'm gonna open that. And I'm gonna set my area of interest. So it just brought in three land units over in Crick County. And we're gonna go through this operation a little bit differently. So within South Dakota, we're set up to operate off of an ecological site ID, which allows us to bring data from our ecological site descriptions directly into the grazing tool. In other words, we can select different plant community phases for different ecological sites. And then we can look at productivity levels based on those plant communities and assign it with a stocking rate. We don't have that ability for land units that are out of state. So we're gonna go up here to the top and we're gonna hit soil data explorer tab. And then we're gonna come down to vegetative productivity. And we have a range production value for a normal year. And that's what I wanna choose is a normal year for those soils. We're planning on a normal year and I'm going to click view rating. And for the soils that are out there, it's going to bring in a productivity level. So I wanna bring that data into our grazing tool. And we're gonna do this process just like we did for the Forge Suitability Group information that we brought in. And I'm gonna start with that first map unit symbol and I'm gonna highlight all this data in the table. Till I get clear down to that 100% when I find it. There it is. So I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna copy. So I'm gonna go back to our grazing tool. Okay, so I'm gonna come in under map unit symbol, click in that cell and right click. Again, very important that when you paste, you match destination formatting, click that and the data should load in our WebSol survey data other tab. There it is. So you'll notice that the field number wasn't populated when we did the copy and paste. But I can see that field number right here. It's track 123 R1. So I'm just gonna type those in where it allows me to do that. One down here, this is track 123 R2. See that from the subtotals. The last one, track 123 R3. Okay, when you're finished with that process, we're gonna click finished. Now, there's a question that's asked since there's already data that's existing within the South Dakota grazing tool in our WebSol survey data, South Dakota tab. It wants to know whether we want to append this new data, that is to add it with the existing data or to override the existing data and just include this new data. We want to append that data because we're gonna look at all these land units together. So I'm gonna say yes to append and brings me back to the Forge tab. And here's our formerly named pastures that we developed together in Google Maps. As I go down, here are our Wyoming range units, R1, 2, and 3. So they're all here and you'll notice that they all have stocking rates assigned to them based on the productivity of the soils. All right, so now that I have all of the data I need from WebSol survey and the WebSol survey data tab, of course, click on finished. And after it goes through that process that we've looked at brings all that data into the Forge inventory tab. And now we can start working with this data that's been brought in from soil survey. So I'm just gonna start at the top and I'm going to enter in a client name and address if I have one. And if you wanna put your name here, you can. There's a lot of data in here. We'll kind of come back and look at some of it. We're gonna have to enter growth curves into our Forge inventory data. And there's an explanation for all of those growth curves. Really, it's one through five depending on range land. If you've got a cool season dominated a mix or a warm season dominated stand out there for those ecological sites. And then it'll give us a summary of our total acres. And this is just going to be adding and updating as we enter data into this tool. But there's a few different places to get some summaries of the data as you talk about it. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna add in some feeds here. This is where we can put in if we have some federal leases that aren't included here maybe a Forest Service lease that's not included with the deeded that we're not planning on. Just kind of gives a placeholder for some of those grazing resources. But I'm gonna go down here to feeds. I'm gonna go hay, maybe all Hayes. And this is purchased feeds. And I'm just gonna say, all right, we're gonna go with 100 tons that we've purchased or that we're planning to purchase most years. And it's gonna say AUM conversion factor for those feeds. And so there's a number that we can select from. So 2.5 for all Hayes, one and a half for silage or if it's grains, 3.7 is the conversion factor to convert it to some AUMs. So 2.5 for Hayes. So I'm gonna put that in there and it's gonna tell me how many animal unit months I have from 100 tons of feed that I bought for this hay. So I'm gonna keep moving down. If you wanna make comments, there's a place to do that. But I'm more interested in just getting this forage in the pool. Okay, so here is all of that data by either tract or field number or field name gives us our land use type. And we had one pasture in there that came in from our land units that we brought in using a shape file and we do have in here our crop land. So that's gonna be crop. It's not gonna be range land. So I'm just gonna clean that up a little bit and I'm just gonna get rid of the range specific data which would be the land use, the ecological site ID and the ecological site name. Gonna delete that right now but I'm gonna keep the acres in there. And I'm gonna go back up to the top and you can sort within this forage inventory tab. So I can sort the data by tract and field which is usually how we sort this because we wanna see all the fields together by land use by the site ID or the site name or the acres. But I'm gonna sort this by the site acres first because there's something that we can do to kind of speed this up. And so it's gonna sort from high to low and something that happens sometimes especially when we're working with maybe some smaller land units is we get these what we call slivers and they're really, really small pieces of ground that might be mapped to a certain probably a minor part of the map unit. And so we wind up with all these almost insignificant type of acres. And so we can get rid of that here if we want now because it's just in especially in larger range units they're just not gonna matter much and we don't really wanna spend a lot of time going through. So I'm just gonna have my cutoff be maybe a half an acre. You can have an acre be your cutoff if it really doesn't matter. But I'm just gonna go ahead and say those are just little slivers. I'm gonna go right up. So I'm just gonna highlight them and I'm gonna going to delete those so we don't have to deal with them later. And then I'm gonna go back to the top and what I usually do is if I've got good inventory data I probably know which pastures might be in a little bit better condition might have a little higher stocking rate. But everything is sorted here based on ecological site ID or ecological site name. And so I'm gonna sort by ecological site ID right now. And it is going to bring me all of those similar ecological sites and it's gonna group them together. So it's not my field anymore. It's by ecological site ID. So we should have a corresponding ecological site name. That's the same. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to look at the plant community phases because it's bringing in stocking rates based on plant community phase. And when I brought this data in from the web soil survey data tab I told the tool that I wanted to sort it from low to high. So I want it to automatically populate the low value. Now from this ecological site I have four different ecological site plant community phases to choose from with Kentucky bluegrass sedge being the lowest productive and blue stem wheatgrass, needlegrass being the highest. So I'm gonna say, well, I think that the productivity in here is probably somewhere in the middle. So you can see that change to a 0.78. Let's go to the next one, 0.78. So it is actually bringing in those productivity values as a stocking rate here and it's automatically populating a growth curve. We talked about those up above. And so that growth curve must be populated before this AUM data will be added to our forage balance. The next you can see non-site. So in Western South Dakota, we have a lot of slick spots, clay pans and the like and some of those slick spots are mapped as a non-site, badlands, things like rock outcrop might be. It's good to know what you're dealing with there. And usually here we're dealing with slick spots. So I can either give that a zero. I don't think there's any productivity on there but I'm gonna give it a really low value. So I'm gonna give all those non-sites 0.07. And then usually those slick spots only grow vegetation really early in the year. I'm gonna give them a one because they kind of dry out and burn up. All right, so I'm just gonna keep doing this process. Got all my loamy 16 to 18s, my clay 16 to 18s here. And if I wanna make them all the same, this is a really easy way to do it. I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna click the first two. I want them to be the Western wheatgrass, bluegrass annuals plant community phase. Got two of them the same. I can take that. Once I have two populated the way I want them, you can drag it down and make them all the same. Or if my inventory data says that these pastures are different, I can do them pasture by pasture too. But this is a quick way to do it. So I'm gonna show you this way. Same with the clay 16 to 18s. I want that to be a Western wheatgrass, bluegroma plant community phase. Kind of something that's somewhat productive, but not as productive as it probably could be. I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna click and drag. You can see how all of the growth curves are automatically updated. Got a shallow dense clay here. It's only two plant community phases for that. I'm gonna make it just the wheatgrass plant community phase. A shallow dense clay, just gonna click them all. Shallow loamy, pick a plant community phase for that ecological site. Got a few clay overflows in there from our 60A. We make those the same. Just keep going down the list until I'm done. And then lastly, here's our pasture field. It won't be plant community phases from the ecological site descriptions. Instead, it will be forage types from our forage suitability groups. So I can pick which it's the best and we will get a corresponding stocking rate. Sure, I have all of that in there. And then for the crop field. So there's a crop tab that you can click on to help calculate crop aftermath or cover crop values for productivity and convert them to an AUM. So we're just gonna do a simple sort of example of how that might work. So this is not linked to the forage inventory. It's just a calculating tool. So I'm gonna say that I have some oats and it asks to enter a yield if the stubble is gray. So we're just gonna say we're gonna turn out there in a little bit where we're gonna try to get some grazing off of these oats. I'm gonna say that the yield is about 50 bushels per acre. So it's gonna estimate about a 0.35 AUM per acre stocking rate, which is about a 26 AUMs. And so this is the number we're looking for. We're gonna get about 26 or 0.4 AUMs per acre of grazing off of that. So we're gonna go back into the forage inventory tab. And I don't really worry too much about all the different soil types that are out there on the crop because it's usually they're pretty uniform and they are in this case, there's 62 acres. So 0.4 is going to be my stocking rate. Now you have to enter in a value for the growth curve. So I'm gonna come up here, crop aftermath is a seven. And so what it's saying is it's probably gonna be at the end of the season when you harvest that, you can change that if you want to. These yellow cells are editable. So really we're gonna have that aftermath available probably sometime even in July after those oats are harvested. But I'm just gonna go ahead. And I'm gonna say, you know, we might not get into this till later. So I'm gonna go ahead and make that growth curve for crop aftermath, which is a seven. Once again, you highlight two of those cells, you can drag them down, you can go quicker. So I've kind of got the forage inventory, how I want it. The other thing that we can do is if you wanna tinker with these a little bit, you can always change this data or leave it the same. It doesn't matter. And you can resort these anytime you want. So I'm gonna sort them back to track and field and field number. So there it is, I've completed this. It's pretty fast and easy. One thing that is pretty handy is that you can one thing that is pretty handy that I would show you is you can here go ahead and see the AUMs by field. So it'll actually calculate that for you. The AUM per acre for each field and the total AUMs. So I've just pretty quickly and really pretty automatically. I didn't add any of my own inventory data in there. I just made some assumptions and some of my best professional guesses based on the plant community phases completed the forage inventory. So since I finished the forage inventory and I have all of the hay and grassland productivity that I want in that tab, I'm gonna come over to the animal inventory tab. So this is usually the next step in the process of creating the grazing tool. So the way to look at this is this is kind of the big picture analysis or evaluation of what we're planning to do within this grazing tool or on this ranch. And comparing it to forage in the feed that we've got to what kinds and amounts of animals we're gonna plan to get through for the year. So this is a whole year process. Usually it doesn't have to be, but that's how we're gonna kind of look at it. And so I'm just gonna start filling this out. And the first thing it asks for is the animal kind. So I'm just gonna say I got some 1,200 pound cows out there. So I'm gonna start with about 125 had 1,200 pound cows. And so there are a lot of different animal types that you can choose from in here. And most of it are things that we're gonna see throughout the Western United States. So we've kind of got all that taken care of, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can create our own animal kind. And the thing that matters is the animal unit equivalence. Do we have the animal unit equivalent that we want? And we can do whatever we want. So there's an edit livestock types and animals, animal units tab. And this is how that's done. So I'm gonna click that button and it's gonna list all of our animal unit equivalence for the different livestock types that are automatically incorporated into the tool. Now let's say that I have, let's call it a self-decoder range cow. I think that's my really easy doing, take care of our self-efficient self-decoder range cow. So I'm gonna say, well, I want that to be 1.05. So I've just made my own livestock type. You can make multiple livestock types if you want, or edit these numbers, the yellow while you to edit. But I'm just gonna go ahead and just go with that and click here to complete my edits. And once I've done that, I'm not gonna use this new animal kind that I created, but there's my self-decoder range cow right there. So, and her animal unit that I developed. So I'm not gonna use that though. I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna stick with these canned animal kinds. And then we're gonna throw some yearlings in there. It's a 0.8 animal unit equivalent. We're gonna go with about 80 that there. And then I'm gonna put some bowls in here too. And find my matured bowl. And let's just say we're gonna put six out there. Okay, so the next thing is I wanna come over here and I wanna start clicking these boxes. So we've got by month, either we're gonna graze or we're gonna feed. So this is where the Eden Forge balance comes into play. So I'm showing how this works. So for this cow herd, I'm gonna say, you know what, most of their requirements are gonna probably be out doing some winter grazing, but we're just planning on pretty much putting them on full feed for a few months, at least in the winter time. And so in January, they're gonna be on feed. So it's gonna start calculating their feed demand. And this is gonna be fed, hey. So I'm just gonna say now march the feed, April will be fed. In May, we're starting to get our grass grown here in South Dakota. We're gonna go graze there. June, they're gonna be out on pasture, graze. And then we're gonna graze pretty much clear through October. Maybe they're gonna graze some in November, but I'm gonna say, you know what, I'm gonna kind of plan to mostly provide feed to them for what their intake requirements are. So yearlings, we're not gonna bring those things in until May, so these are gonna come in in May. And we're gonna have yearlings out there. So let's say we're gonna keep them out there all summer. And usually they're gone by some time in September. We'll go ahead and we'll just say, hey, we need to allocate for September on these yearlings too. And then the bulls. So we're gonna throw the bulls a little bit of hay, but for the most part, they're gonna be grazing and being fed hay, they're gonna need to go out there and get some forage in the winter time too. So we're gonna say clear through April, we're gonna be expecting to throw them some hay and then really the grass is gonna start growing and then they're gonna be out with the cows in the summertime or back in the bull pasture. And mostly being grazed at that time. And then I'll start throwing them a little bit of hay in November. And they're gonna be winter grazing and being fed. So as you saw, as I clicked all these boxes, we started to see a lot of numbers populate down below. And I'm not gonna go through these numbers. These are kind of a lot of the computations. It'll give you some ideas by month, but really the important thing here is the forage balance summary. So it's gonna tell us for those numbers do we have a feed and forage balance? And it's showing here that we're a little bit short on feed. It tells us here, this is the forage balance summary, total grazing available, this is the demand. So we're pretty close on the grazing. This is the total feed, or what we say we're gonna need the feed out there. And that's where we're short. We're about 637 AUM short. And this is both feed and forage combined. So we're looking like we're a little bit slim there. So we can go up here and we can start playing with these numbers a little bit and say, holy cow, how many tons of hay would I have to buy? You know, I did produce a little bit of hay down here. So we didn't put that into the tool. We just left that hay as range. So this should actually be hay ground that we are producing. So let's go ahead and let's change this because we just put that in as forage. So I'm gonna delete that data. I'm gonna delete this data. And this is how we would handle hay ground is we would need to tell the tool how many tons per acre do we have? And so I'm gonna take a look at this and say, you know what? I'm thinking maybe we could count on two tons per acre on this hay ground. And right here, harvested feeds. This is gonna come right off of our tool. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put that in as, hey, we're not gonna graze any of that. And once again, the AUM conversion factor, I hover over the little red triangle in that cell and it reminds me 2.5 for all haze. And then as always, even with haze, I need a growth curve. So I'm just gonna say it's a one, all of our haze here are mostly cool season, almost always. And whether or not we get a second cutting here or not, you know, as usually we can count on one, but I'm gonna go back in and see how that changed things. So now that's allocated to feed, that looks a lot better. So wow, we've got almost a balance there. We've got a little overage here, 204 AUM's over on the grazing. That's about within that 20% range, but we might be a little bit over on the grazing side, but we've got nearly a perfect balance, only a 28 AUM deficit or both feed and forage. So that helps you analyze, at least from a planning standpoint, how you might be doing with what you've got planned to do on the operation and what you've got for resources. Now that I've finished the forage inventory and the animal inventory tabs in the grazing tool, I'm ready to move on. And generally the next step is developing a grazing schedule or what we call the grazing plan often. And I'm gonna go in here and I'm just gonna go through each one of these grazing schedule options. There's basically four different options within the grazing tool for a grazing schedule. And I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna start with the South Dakota CPA 15 grazing plan design tab. It's just a couple of tabs over to the right from the forage inventory and I'm gonna open that up. All right, so this is what the blank grazing plan design worksheet looks like. It used to be called the grazing time control worksheet but essentially what this worksheet is designed to do is to evaluate pastures that are going to be in a rotation together based on desired rest periods with a minimum and maximum rest period. And as you remember in the grazing tool, most always the editable or those cells that require entry of data are yellow. And so this is asking us desired rest period with a minimum and maximum. So we're gonna set that. One of the other things that you should know about this tab is that it's designed mostly for pastures that are even sized or of an even carrying capacity. And it seems to work best when you have numerous pastures in rotations. Probably more of a management intensive type system that you're looking at. And this grazing plan is more of a guide for minimum grazing periods and maximum grazing periods. And I'm just gonna go through this as I populate it and explain some of these cells and columns. So as usual, there is an instructions box that shows up when you hover over the cell with the red triangle in the corner. And it'll give you some hints on how to use this tab. But first things first, you wanna hit the make list button when it's an option on the grazing schedules. And so I'm just gonna hit make list. And it's gonna bring in all of the pastures that we have in this grazing tool, the Forage Inventory tab so far. And so it brings them in kind of a random order, but we're gonna play with it a little bit. So it brought in tract one, two, three, R1, two, and three. And those are our Wyoming fields. Well, we're just gonna work with the South Dakota side right now. So I'm going to delete those pastures out of here. I'm just gonna hover over them and I'm gonna click the delete key. And so that gets rid of them. If I wanted to add them back in, I can just go back to this dropdown and there they are. I could add them back in, but I don't wanna do that. So for this tab, it doesn't really matter what order you have those pastures. And you can put them in the order that you wanna graze them if you want, might feel a little bit more organized. But if I'm gonna have these pastures all sort of in a rotation, especially this is where you're gonna be potentially doing multiple times through rotation, you know, intense management. Two or three, maybe more times through. But I can change the order of these. I wanna order them from North to South just so I can have that in my mind of how that works. I can do that and I'm just gonna go ahead and put those in there. And that pretty much solves that problem. So it'll bring in those field acres and the total number of AUMs available as computed by the Forge Inventory tab. And then it automatically assigns each one of those pastures a paddock grazing factor. And so this is kind of a relative factor that compares the AUMs in each pasture to the average of all the pastures that we're working with. So those with a small number of AUMs available are gonna have a small paddock grazing factor. And those with a larger carrying capacity such as this one here, field two is gonna have a larger paddock cycle. So it's just relative. For this form, you know, usually those are gonna be pretty close to each other. They're mostly gonna hover around one. So the first thing it asks me for is what kind of animals are we grazing? And so I'm just gonna go ahead here and I'm gonna say, well, we're gonna graze 1200 pound cows and it's gonna ask for a number of animals here and we're gonna need to include that. And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna put in what you've grazed about, oh, let's say 125 cows. And then you can add another type of animal if you'd like. So if you were grazing different classes of livestock, if you wanted to add some sheep in there, you can throw some sheep in there too. Maybe I had a sheep in there. And it'll calculate both of those livestock grazing demands. Now, here's the important part. It's gonna ask us to enter a minimum number of days. Each pasture will be rested between grazing events. It's gonna suggest usually around 30 days during fast plant growth. So let's go ahead and just put the days there. Click on that cell. And then what is our maximum rest period in 90 days during slow plant growth? Well, this is pretty intensive and we're gonna go 50 days is the maximum we want. So as I populate those, it's going to suggest a minimum grazing period and a maximum grazing period for each of those pastures to achieve the minimum rest period of 30 days or the maximum rest period of 50 days during slow growth. So this is just a guide of how many days you might be in each of those pastures in rotation with each other to achieve those rest days. So there's some other information here that's kind of important. So it gives us some averages and the minimum grazing period on average, the maximum grazing period on average, the stocking rate, but then here is the total number of months that we can graze that pasture most likely given the animal demand that we put in here for the number and kind of livestock and the AUM's calculated from the Forage Inventory tab. So as usual, there's a place to add notes. If you wanna add some notes in there, maybe something to consider or important guidelines for the prescribed grazing plan, you can do that here, it's totally editable. And then also just to wrap up, this is just a guideline for more management intensive grazing systems, usually where we have numerous pastures of fairly even size or even carrying capacity and it serves as a guideline. All right, I'm gonna move on to the next tab in the grazing tool and that's what we call the weekly scheduler. And it looks like there's a lot going on in this tab, but once I go through it, I think you'll find that it's relatively simple to use. And this is probably the most widely used grazing schedule tab in the grazing tool here in South Dakota. It schedules grazing use by week. So this is probably a little bit better for those larger range units, deferred rotation type grazing management schedules work really well in this. And it's gonna allocate forage by the week. So it's a little coarser look at the carrying capacity and the forage and feed balance for these pastures. But I'm just gonna go through it and I'm just gonna show you again, you can hover over the instructions button or sell here and it'll give you some hints for completing this tab. But I'm gonna do like I always do and make a list right away. So you need to bring those fields in so you have to push the make list button first. And when I do, it's gonna bring in those pastures. And one of the things you can do here is you can kind of change the width of those cells. So if they're a little bit tight, you can go ahead and pull those a little bit by just getting this line next to the column and go ahead and expand it. So now I can see those a little bit better. Well, in this schedule, I want the pastures to be in the sequence that I want them. And once again, I'm not gonna work with those Wyoming fields. I'm gonna get rid of those. This is just what we're doing here in the South Dakota side. And I'll go ahead and I'll show you that map again. This was the map that we made when we were working in ArcGIS and Google Maps or pastures. So we kind of started with that North pasture North Hay Dam pasture. We have a crop aftermath field over here. And then we have our three range units down here and three range pastures that we're gonna be including in this plan. So that's kind of the layout of this thing. North pasture, I believe, we said that was a tame, cool season pasture. Probably graze that thing in the spring first every year. So keep that in mind. So we're gonna start with a 2021 schedule. So I'm gonna put 21 in each of these. Some folks will just put year one, two or three, but I'm gonna go with the actual year, 2021. And I think we're gonna be working with these six pastures. And then I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna click in this cell and you get the dropdown button. And you can put those pastures in there in the order that you want them because this is gonna be a time sequence thing. You'll see that as we work through it. So I'm gonna start with that North pasture because that's what we're going to graze first. And I'm gonna move down to the dam pasture. It's gonna get grazed next. Then we're gonna go range one, two and three. They're there in order and there's our crop aftermath. We're gonna graze that at the very end of the season. We've decided. Okay, so I've got my pastures in there, brings in the acres and the available AUMs from the Forage Inventory. It's gonna ask me here. I can either build a herd or I can enter in an animal type. So if I've got just cows or say I have yearlings in here, I can just enter those things in. But actually what I've got here is sort of a combination. I'm gonna have some bulls in there too. If I had a whole combination of animals, say I had some sheep in there too or I had some replacements in there, I could do whatever I want as far as that herd is concerned and really make a composite of different animals, different classes of livestock and it's going to consider their demand on Forage. So I'm gonna click this build a herd button and do that just like this. And so it's gonna bring me into build a herd. So I've got herd one, herd two, herd three, herd four. I can have multiple herds in here. And I'm just gonna have one herd for simplicity's sake. And when I click in this blue cell, it's gonna give me the dropdown box again. So then I can go in and I can actually choose from all of those livestock classes and I can make whatever herd I want. So 1,200 pound cow, say I have about 120 of them. And I'm gonna have bulls in there for some of the year. They might not be in there for the entire season obviously, but I wanna account for them. And I'm just gonna go ahead and add some bulls into this thing. And so there's my herd. And so it's gonna give me a number right here. I have 128 animals. And the bulls have a higher animal unit equivalent than the 1,200 pound cows do because they consume more forage. So what it calculates in this grazing tool is sort of a composite or a weighted average animal unit equivalent of 1.16. Based on the number of each of those class of livestock. So I'm gonna show you why that's important. So what I wanna focus on right now is it's gonna be 128 for herd one. That's our number. So I'm gonna hit the return button. Gonna take me back into that grazing tool and their herd one shows up. I still have the option to use all of the customized animals, but I'm gonna put herd one in there. And I'm gonna put 128 because that's the total number of animals. And it's gonna going to calculate demand based on that 1.16 animal unit equivalent. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna look herd one again. And then when I do that twice, it's gonna let me just drag from the corner down through the cells for herd one. 128, I can just do that like that. And there I have my herd one in there. So this build a herd option is really pretty handy and you can use that in a whole bunch of different ways. Okay, so the next thing I'm gonna do here, there's a chart year cell. It's gonna have a dropdown button. And if I've got a number over here in the year column, it's gonna allow me to choose that chart year. So I'm gonna choose that chart year. And you're gonna notice that you're gonna see these green bars show up. And there's a text here that says North pasture. So you see 100% of the AUMs are available. And I'm gonna show you how to use this and how to kind of watch this thing move through time. Okay, so you can see the months across the top of the spreadsheet here. It's a full year of grazing you can plan on this thing. So it starts with April, which is when our growing season begins. And it goes through March, which is the last month of what we consider to be mostly the dormant period here in South Dakota. So let's say that I want to start grazing in the middle of May. See, now people tend to start grazing about then in some cases. And so what you can do here is you're gonna need to enter in the numbers one through six most often. And you can see here there is one through six with different color blocks below them. So you can have different herds in this grazing schedule that can be represented by different numbers. So if I enter a one on the first day about the middle of May that I'm gonna start grazing, it's gonna turn that cell yellow. If I were to enter a two, it's gonna make it blue. That herd one is gonna be represented by yellow. So each time I put a one into one of those cells next to the North pasture, it's going to calculate the AUM's used for that 128 head of livestock. And I know we're probably not gonna have the bulls out there at that time, but I'm just gonna for simplicity's sake, just keep herd one together. It's only eight head of bulls. Usually you can sort those out if you want to, but I'm not going to do that today. So I'm just gonna keep putting ones in. And as you can see, the green bar over here starts to drop down. And we can see the AUM's that are available and the AUM's that are used. So I've got 120 AUM's available. I've already used in those three weeks 103 AUM's. And there I go. I went over by about 18 AUM's and it turned the cell red. And so it says, hey, you kind of overdid it here. You've got more AUM's used than what you have available. So I'm just gonna back that off a little bit and especially because it's early in the growing season. It is probably cool season forage, but I probably haven't grown all my AUM's yet anyway. I'm gonna say, well, maybe around three weeks is what you might be able to do in there. If you wanna be conservative, you could back it off to two weeks. If you don't think you're gonna have the growth by the first part of June. So in the next thing I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna keep kind of going through here and the dam pasture is gonna be our next pasture. And it looks like you'd really be going overboard. I think if you did three, turns it dark red and show you a feature here in a minute, it's gonna explain that. So I'm gonna come down. It's like towards the end of June, middle of June, I can be in that pasture one. And usually by the first of July, we consider that we've sort of grown all our AUM's. So I probably got peak production out there. So I went over on this pasture, but I barely went over. And so you can see these cells up here, 10% and 5%. So when we're within 5% of our recommended initial stocking rates, it'll just kind of show up this nice light peach color and it says, you know, you're kind of getting over, but when you go over that 5%, it turns to the dark red in the more salmon colored cell. So that says, hey, you need to be careful here. You've really gone over and as a rule of thumb, we never want to go over probably 20% of our initial recommended stocking rates. And once we've gone over 10, then we know we've probably got something we should be aware of. So I'm gonna back that off. So it's just kind of an early warning. So I'm gonna bring this down and I'm gonna see how many AUM's are available. I can see I've got a few more here. And almost right on. So within 5% for sure. And it looks like we might be able to get a week out of that crop residue down there. So there's the year one schedule, the third rotation with those past years. And so one thing you can do is you're building grazing schedules. Here we like to build a grazing schedule for at least three years. And so you can go ahead and you can put all these grazing schedules on the same page. So I can create a 2022 schedule here. Got six pastures. And then you can put those pastures in the same sequence that you want. I'm just gonna say north pasture is a special early cool season pasture. And then we work here at least in South Dakota NRCS. We wanna change the season of use as much as we can every year. And so usually we can do that if we have the right size pastures by kind of taking that first pasture from the year before and making it last. So I'm gonna make that first pasture last. We're gonna change season of use on this thing. So that damn pasture comes the last pasture. And let's just say we're not gonna have any crop residues, add in third one again. And then 128 head is what we're planning for once more. And then I can just go through that same process again of assigning AUMs. And kind of looking at this, you gotta use a little bit of user judgment. And by the end of May, we're probably gonna be through maybe at least half of our growth curve. But I'm gonna back it off a little bit just saying we're not gonna have those AUMs available yet. Go ahead and just go through the same process again. So there I have two years of a grazing schedule in the weekly grazing schedule tab. And so I would probably add a third one. These tabs really work well. If you print them on legal or 11 by 17 size paper, you could really get a lot of years or a lot of fields into those grazing schedules you print them that way. So there is a reset print area button. You kind of get wonky on the size of the data that you put in there or if you really start expanding cells. And then I would also advise you that this tab is really better for just kind of getting a general idea of how long you can be in each of those pastures. You know, the manager on the ground is probably gonna be making decisions, hopefully when to move those livestock kind of based on grazing use and conditions. But you know, larger pastures, larger range units. This is a really good option and it just kind of helps create a plan from which to work with. But you know, of course, using management judgment along the way. You can clear the weekly schedule too. There's a clear button. So there it is, it's gone. I could start over again. And then of course, there are notes as always. You can make certain notes about this grazing schedule or things that might be important according to the producer or the planner. And that's the weekly grazing scheduler. What I'm going to go through in the South Dakota grazing tool is what we call our daily scheduler. And that resides just in the tab to the right of the weekly scheduler. So I'm gonna open that up. And this scheduler works pretty much exactly the same way as the weekly scheduler does. The big difference is that instead of allocating grazing use on a weekly basis, we can allocate grazing use on a daily basis. So this allows us to really fine tune our planned grazing use and allows us to develop a pretty detailed grazing schedule. And so in a lot of cases, when we would use this form would be on probably smaller pastures that have relatively large numbers of livestock in them. Maybe even more management intensive type grazing situations where we've got maybe daily moves or moves that are definitely less than a week in time. So this allows us to get pretty detailed. So I'm just gonna go through and kind of show you how this form works. Much like the weekly schedule and the other grazing schedules there is a place to put notes. If you feel like you need to put notes to make something specifically known about this grazing schedule. As always, you hover over the instruction cell and there'll be some handy tips for completing this form. And again, we are needing to make list. And so this is commonly the button that we would push first in our grazing schedules. So I'm just gonna go ahead and push that and bring in those fields from our four-agent and Tory sheet. So I'm gonna expand that cell out a little bit so we can see that better. And so there are pastures. And so once again, I have these Wyoming fields down here at the bottom. I'm gonna get rid of those. We're only working on the South Dakota land units. And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to organize these pastures in the sequence that we plan to graze them this year. Start with that north pasture and go to the dam pasture. And one range, two range, three and our crop field there is last. And then I put in the year here, 2021. And then if I wanna evaluate our grazing use as we develop this with the green bars here similarly to the weekly scheduler, I just need to populate this chart year, 2021. Again, we have the six colors that correspond to different herds if we have them. And once again, I can build a herd here if I'd like. And I'm not gonna do that though. I'm gonna do this in a little different way but I could build my own herd like I did in the weekly scheduler in 2021. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put in, we're mostly gonna be grazing 1200 pound cows here. And I think we had about 120 head of those 1200 pound cows. And so I want to start grazing about the middle of the day. So this scheduler is much like the weekly in that it allows us to schedule the entire year of grazing on one sheet. So moving over there, April through March again. But one thing that we have is each of these cells and I've got April, May. If I look in this cell here, that is day 15. So this cell here will represent the 15th of May. So I'm going to enter a one there because that's gonna turn yellow and it's gonna represent third one. So every time I put a one in each of those cells that is representing one day of grazing by 120 head of 1200 pound cows. So my AUM's used will increase correspondingly as I populate each one of those cells. Looks like I have about 120 AUM's available. So it's a lot faster just to go ahead and hover over those cells or select those cells until you can bring up this little square in the lower right-hand corner, get that plus symbol. And I'm just gonna drag this thing out until let me see maybe about the middle of June. That's just a guess. Oh, I went over a little bit there. I'm gonna move that back. And there's about 117 AUM's that I've used. I've got 120 available. Gets me to about the ninth, but it's like I'm gonna go ahead and just leave it right there. That's our early cool season pasture. And I'm gonna say that's probably about close enough. So I'm gonna go ahead and we're gonna move next to the dam pasture. Again, 120 head of cows, 1200 pounds. And I'm gonna enter ones there. And I'm gonna say, well, that's not a very big pasture. So I'm gonna just drag those cells out. Getting pretty close, 63 AUM's. Kind of still early in the grazing season, have 77 available, use 63. I might just add one more, see where that gets me. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and just stop there. We're just shy of the first part of July. So drop down, bring in those 1200 pound cows again. Get 120 head. And allocate that forage day by day. And if I want, I can drag that or I can just go ahead and enter ones into each cell until I have the AUM's used that I'm looking for. Again, just like the weekly scheduler, I'm watching this green bar up here on the top go down. So I can kind of see where I'm at. Still have quite a few AUM's left. Maybe I'll go ahead and do the trick of dragging that cell with the one in it a little bit to the middle of July, about the 10th there. Still got some AUM's left, but I'm gonna do something a little different here than I did in the weekly scheduler. I'm gonna say that about that time of year, that's when I plan to bring my bulls into the situation. So I'm gonna go ahead and put bull mature there. So I have field one range, field one range, because they're both gonna be in the same pasture together. And I think I had about eight head of bulls. And so I'm gonna start with a two here to show that those bulls are using it. But same as at the top, I've got cows using it alongside the bulls. So bring this in, it's taken kind of a long time to do that. I'm gonna go and use my trick of just dragging those cells out and copying them. Bring it out to here and see where that gets me. Got some more AUM's left there. And that gets me just a little bit over. I think I'll just hover over those. Hit the delete key, get back to something closer, do a little tighter feed and forge balance. Again, the colors show up like in the weekly scheduler. If I'm a little over 5%, it's sort of that soft peach color. But when I get over 10% use of my estimated stocking rates, it turns that over salmon color with the attacks. So I might just push it a little bit, go an extra day there. And there I've got my cow use again, drop down. We're gonna move to pasture three here, those 1200 pound cows, 120 head. Sure I've got pasture three again, because those bulls are still gonna be in there for a while. Eight head of bulls. I won for the cows, two for the bulls gonna show up blue. And I'm just gonna kind of drag this out. It's like I've got quite a few AUM's in there. It's gonna be about the same carrying capacity as field two. Just a little bit over, get a few of those off. Yep, there it is. Looks like I about got my feed and forge balance there. And that's looking pretty close there. So that's another way of bringing in animals into the grazing schedule. And kind of the best way to use the daily South Dakota grazing tool grazing schedule. Once again, I can reset the print range here. Of course, I can clear the schedule if I wanna start all over again, just a word of warning. If you do clear the schedule, you can't get the data back. And then I'm not gonna do it here, but once again, if I wanted to create a 2022 schedule, I could do that here too. But that is how you use the daily grazing scheduler in the South Dakota. All right, so next we're gonna move on to the last grazing schedule type in the South Dakota grazing tool. It's called the in and out scheduler. And so this one has some different features than the weekly and the daily scheduler. And I'm gonna show you how this works. And basically it's set up to be a pretty easy date in date out type of format. And I'm just gonna stop, start from the top and work to the bottom. And again, there are cells here that have sort of handy tips as you hover over them for each of the cells. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna build that same herd I did before, but there's a place to put your herds in here so you can kind of describe what they are. So we had 120 cows and pink bulls in that herd. And it'll ask you for the grazing management type if you have one. On this one, I'm gonna show you how to do a twice-through rotation. I'm gonna show you how that will... This tool will actually help you design that rotation based on desired recovery periods. One of the things in the South Dakota prescribed grazing standard that's important are periods of recovery between grazing years. So you can put notes in here again, as always. And then I wanna show you something. There's a cell over here that says important points to understand about this prescribed grazing plan. And the way this thing comes standard is these are sort of the general tenants of prescribed grazing in South Dakota. So generally when we will write a prescribed grazing plan in most cases, unless we've got some other consideration, we will write them to be in line with a prescribed grazing standard. So that's what this language is. It talks about recovery periods and utilization levels and changing season to use. So let's just tear into this thing. The first thing you wanna do is click the make list button as always to bring in your pastures. And it will bring in those pastures. I don't want those Wyoming pastures. I'm just gonna delete those right off the top. And we're gonna go ahead and we're just gonna put in here the C sequence as always. So the same sequence. So I'm gonna start in the north pasture. We're gonna go to the dam pasture in year one, range one, two, and three. And we'll end up in that crop field. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna build a herd here. And I've got that same herd, but I can change this if I want to, but I've got those same numbers from the weekly scheduler where we built the herd. It saved that. And so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm just gonna find herd one. We're gonna just roll with herd one as we got it. The number again was 128. And here is where this is a little different. So I want you to notice two things. The first thing is this is only for one year. And that's why I put the 2020 grazing season in there. So this is just one year of grazing use. If you wanna do multiple years, the best way to use this tab is to do multiple grazing plans for every, just do one per year. You're not gonna get two years of grazing or three years of grazing plan on one form like this. So the first thing I need to know is what is my date in? And that's an easy number, 515. Okay, so I can go ahead and I can play with the date out if I wanted to. I wonder if this thing will last me till 6.20. I don't know. Nope, that's way too long. So it's 11 days over. So it's gonna tell me how many days of grazing are available. And it'll tell me as I enter in numbers here, how much am I under or how much am I over? So I'm gonna go, okay, well, let's go 6.50. That's gonna tell me I have at least four days left. So I can go, okay, 6.50. So there it is, that's perfect. Well, I don't wanna deal with that. There is a really handy feature in this tab where I can click on schedule and it's gonna add a new column to this. So it's gonna say use what percent of available days. So let's say I have a twice-through rotation. If I have a once-through rotation, all I have to do is say I wanna use 100% of the available days and it's gonna add that date in automatically and perfectly balance me out. Now early on in the grazing season, I'm probably not gonna do that because I'm gonna have to consider my growth curve and how much I actually have. But in this, we're gonna go through and we're gonna use about 40% the first time through and we're gonna go through a second time. So I'm gonna show you how I usually do that. So I'm just gonna drop this thing down and I'm gonna get rid of this crop field because that thing is gonna be grazed last. And like I said, we're gonna do this twice-through. So I'm just gonna pull this down 40% in every pasture the first time through, okay? So there's our first time through it gets us to about the second of July. Okay, so I wanna do basically that same thing. I'm gonna try to copy this down. And I'm gonna copy numbers and it's gonna start me out July 2nd. I'm coming in the second time. So this is those pastures in sequence over again. But I wanna use all of the AUMs that are left. So I'm gonna put a hundred in there because I wanna use 100% of the AUMs available that second time through. And as I do that, it's gonna fill in the date in and the date out for each of those pastures. And one thing that's kind of cool is it's gonna give me the recovery period in days for each of those pastures. So you can see how many days of recovery we actually got since the time we grazed it before. So that's pretty cool and pretty handy. And then down here, I had that crop field and I'm just gonna say I wanna use 100% of that. It's gonna say, hey, you can graze that thing for six days, you're probably gonna be out of there by the 18th of September. Obviously there's no recovery days because we've only grazed it once. And that is a really handy, easy way to use the scheduler in and out. One of the reasons this form was designed is some of our clients liked looking at something that actually had dates in there. They found it easier to use in some cases than spreadsheets that have the colored cells which create bars across the grazing use. So this is just kind of an alternative way to design a grazing plan. And then there's another handy feature here. You can actually print this out and you can put your applied actual grazing use records into this sheet and kind of compare what you planned to what you actually did. So it's kind of a nice evaluation side by side of how your grazing plan worked that year and if you were able to either kind of follow the plan or if you had to deviate from it for whatever reason. So that's a quick and easy way to use the in and out scheduler and the South Dakota Grazing Tool. All right, so the last tab that I'm gonna show you in the South Dakota Grazing Tool is the CPA 16. Actual Grazing Use Records tab. So what this allows you to do is enter in your actual use grazing records and compare them to the, your use to the AUM's available. And also this form is basically what South Dakota NRCS uses to certify prescribed grazing. So once again, I'm gonna click the make list button and I wanna make sure I have the right grazing year in. So I'm gonna enter 2021 there. Put whatever you want in there, it could be 2020s records. And so it's gonna bring in all your past years. I don't want anything to do with those Wyoming fields again. So I'm just gonna go ahead and it's better to put them in in the actual sequence that's been grazed. So I'm gonna change that using the drop down button once again on two and three and then that crop field. And then it's gonna ask me for the animal kind. If I just wanna throw herd one in there, I can. Cause it's still available to me or you can just put in 1200 pound cows, 1300 pound cows, whatever I got in my animal inventory. Just gonna do that for all of them. And then we had 128 was roughly where we were on those. Actually, let's just say, hey, we were ended up with a more like 133. Okay. So I've got that side in there, the actual use for the animals. Then I'm gonna come over here and it allows you to drop down on this side, all those fields. And what I'd like to do is I like those to be in the same order up above on the horizontal side of this as I do the vertical side. So I'm gonna go north pasture, put the dam pasture in here next. I want them to be in the same order. It's just, it really makes a lot more sense when you do that range, range two, self range three. And you can see some of those are cut off, but you can actually see the names up here in the formula bar. And then here I'm gonna put that crop field in here. It left in those Wyoming fields cause those are in our forage inventory. Just gonna delete those out of there for simple use. Then I'm gonna come down here and it gives me the option to put in a date in and a date out. So I'm gonna say, yep, we started on 5.15, but we were in there until about 6.15. And it's gonna calculate the AUMs used and the days grazed and it looks like we went over on that field. So we were a little bit high there. So it gives us that same sort of salmon color, dark salmon color in this case because we went over then over 10% of our estimated recommended stocking rate in that past year. So we kind of went overboard on that. And you're gonna see here it's gonna have an option for a degree of use. So you can put in a percent utilization there at the end of the season or remaining leaf length at the end of the grazing period or season. So I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna say, oh man, we kind of hope we didn't end up with over 50% utilization there. Then let's just keep going. Then I wanna show you that you just, you start with the day that you ended. So it's gonna cut those days in half for use. So you don't have to put 6.16 in there. You put 6.15 in there again. And I'm gonna say we were in there until about 6.30. That was almost right on the money. So here it says we had 77 AUM suggested from our forage inventory. We used about 75.1. So let's say that one is 45% utilization. Just keep going through the range. We're out of there by 7.28. Went over a little bit on that one. Went under a little bit on that next field, range two. Went over and then let's take a look at that crop field. Went over a little bit on that one too, but pretty close. Then fill the rest of this in. If you wanna go with inches of grass left behind, that's an option to utilization. So it just kind of gives you a comparison of the animal, the AUMs used to the AUMs that were suggested to be available from the forage inventory tab. And so this is a handy way to go ahead and enter those records and kind of do an evaluation. Now one of the things that's kind of nice, if you have one grazing tool that's set up for your ranch or for a plant that you're working with, you can just click this Save Current Years Data button. This will clear the 16 and make it ready for next year, but it will go ahead and it will archive that data. And so we'll be able to access 2021's grazing schedule. So I'm gonna show you how that works. That's gonna archive the data. It's taken a few minutes for it to do this on my laptop and there it goes. It came back to me. Then I'm just gonna go to this archive tab directly to the right. It's gonna give me the option to bring in the 2021 grazing season. And there it is. So you can archive multiple years of grazing records within the South Dakota Grazing Tool. South Dakota Grazing Record tab is ready to take on 2020's grazing records. So that's a quick overview of the actual use, raising records tab in the South Dakota Grazing Tool. Version 4.4 has some updates that I'd like to go over with you. The first change shows all acres in the ranch. So in the past, only the acres that had eco sites were brought over to the forage inventory. Now all the acres, including the ones without site names and the ones that include water, they're all brought over to the forage inventory so that if you have a 5,000 acre ranch that includes these areas with acres in them that don't have ecological site names, that those acres will be brought over. They'll either be called non-site or they'll be called water. So that's the first change. I believe what I'll do is I will bring that data over to the forage inventory by clicking finish. I'm going to have plant communities available. So I'm gonna click yes. I'll just have it sorted from highest to lowest as far as the production values go. And so I'm gonna agree with that. And it brings all the data over that came from WebStoil Survey originally. And so the data here has, like I said, non-site acres in it. They don't have AUM values. It has all the other sites and acres that were in that field one. It includes water. And if you notice several different non-sites show up here. Some I've named with the soil name Slickspots. Some have come over with an ecological site ID 999 and some have come over again with a different site name based on the soils. So it brings all of these sites over for field one. There's a considerable number of them for that field one. So the second change that's made with version 4.4 is I've added a lump sites button. This macro will allow you to take a whole bunch of fields sites in a field and some of them come in with as little as 0.15 acres, that kind of thing. It'll allow you to lump these down to the primary sites that you wanna deal with. And so this is a 37,139 acre ranch. And I point that out to show you that when we do lump our sites, that total acreage should not ever change and it won't. So I'm going to lump some sites and I'm gonna show you how that works. So let's get started. Let's click lump sites. And if you kept an eye on all these acres, there are a variety of acres in there anywhere from 435 in one site, excuse me, to a 0.15 acres in another site. So I'm gonna choose the first one just to show you how this works. Set the maximum number of sites. I'm gonna use that option one. And this is per field now. Enter the maximum number of eco sites per field. I'm going to have only three sites per field. And say, okay, I could have any number. And when I click okay, what it's gonna do is lump these small sites. It's gonna add up all the acres of the small sites and lump them into the top three sites that had the largest acreage. So the largest acreage in field one again. Let's just look at 1647 field one. The largest three were clay, shallow clay, and dense clay. They had the largest acreage to start with. So it took all the other sites, added up all those acres and prorated them back into these three sites based on their original acres. You'll notice it didn't do anything with non-site acres, including the water. It left those just like they were because they don't have AUMs, dumping those back into sites that have AUMs would not be a reasonable thing to do. And I think it would not give you accurate values here. But so let me go on to show you that using the lump sites button a second time, I can lump my non-sites all together with the exception of water. Water always stays water. So let me just show you how that works. If I lump the sites again, and I pick number three, combine sites with the same name. Many cases we end up with sites like clay from one MLRA and another clay from the adjacent MLRA. That's only because that's the ecological sites they assigned when they did the soil survey to those soils. And so we end up with sites with the same name but different ecological site IDs. We can combine those if I pick number three. And if I say, okay, now it's asking me, it says data in the forage inventory tab is not the original data. No, it's not, we just changed it. We just boiled it down to three sites per field. So it's asking me choose yes to use the data currently in the forage inventory or no to start with the original data. I've saved the original data that was in here in the forage inventory. And the first time I ran the lump sites, it saved it. So I can always go back to it. Well, here I wanna use the data that's currently in the forage inventory because I wanna take this data and boil it down. Again, lump it down where the non-sites get lumped together. So I'm gonna say yes, use the data currently in the forage inventory. So what it should do is take the Badlands non-site, the Slick Spots non-site and combine those and the 999 non-site and combine those into one non-site entry and add up all the acres there. And then we'll have a non-site for water and we'll have our three ecological sites, the predominant ones. And after doing a lot, you'll notice the total acres in the ranch is still 37,139. So that hasn't changed. You don't lose any acres by doing this. It does change the AUMs that are in the ranch because now I've lumped some sites into clay, shallow clay and dense clay. But after doing an evaluation, I'm fairly confident that if you're in the range of three to five sites per field, you're only changing the overall for the whole ranch, less than 1% as far as the AUM values. It might change them a little bit more per field, but I still think it's a reasonable thing to do. If you go down to one site per field, that changes it more. And so the AUM value changes considerably more. And I've seen it in the 3%, maybe 4% range. So I don't think I would go down to one site ever, but three, five, that's a reasonable number. You can always click, run lump sites and go back to number four, reset to the original. So I'm gonna show you how that is. Like I said, the first time I ran lump sites, I saved that original data down here in the Forge Inventory. And so I can put it back if I don't like what happened and now I'm back to that original data with all of those sites for field one. So having said that, I also wanna point out that when you run any of these options under lump sites, it resets the plant community, the AUMs and the growth curve back to their defaults. It's a lookup based on this eco site. So the point is, don't make any changes to your plant communities, to your AUMs or to your growth curves until you have lumped your sites and have them the way you want them. Then when that is done, then come in and you can make changes if needed to the plant communities, the AUMs and the growth curves. So I believe I've covered what I need to with the changes in 4.4. Thanks for watching our video. 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