 So I'm going to introduce our official wealth and work. I got some stuff to read here, but I'm going to have my own stuff later. What's different is the native South Dakota, born and raised on a grain livestock farm in eastern South Dakota, began its 36-year conservation career in Montana. As a student trainee for the soil conservation service in 1983 while attending the University of Montana. After graduating with a degree of range and management, he worked in three Montana field offices as a soil conservation and district conservationist. He transferred to Iowa in 1988, worked in two area offices and the Des Moines State Office. He served as an assistant state conservationist for field office operations in Southwest Iowa. He served several details in NRCS national headquarters in the South Dakota State Conservation since 2012. Jeff and his wife Kim have one son and twin daughters as well being blessed with four-graded grandchildren. In spare time, Jeff and Joey spend time outdoors, traveling his wife, and time with his family. You know, this organization of which we're quite proud doesn't happen unless somebody has an idea. It doesn't just go poof and happen. Somebody has to think of this. And Jeff was the guy that thought of it. And what we've been able to accomplish in our four-year, five-year history, four and a half, doesn't just happen. We have to have support. We have to have partners. We have to have finances. We have to have ideas. We have had all of that from Jeff Zimperich. So you've all heard this story saying, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. Jeff Zimperich is from the government and he has been of much help to us. So would you please welcome Jeff Zimperich, our state comrade. Thanks, Dennis. I got my own mic. I hope I'm coming through okay. Is it loud enough in the back? It should be. Good. I got thumbs up. Perfect. I'm going to stay off the stage. You heard 36 years. It's actually 37 now. I might fall off the stage. So I just better stay on the ground. It's a little safer down here. I can move around a little bit. But hey, it's great to be with you. I'm kind of like an opening act and that's great because my job is to maybe just tell you a little bit. But I think right out of the gate what I'm going to do is try to get some feedback from you. So I'm going to share just a few quick thoughts with you. And then we're going to put you to work, okay? But that work might pay off for you as well. So I want to walk through just a few things. What a year. Dennis brought up 2019, right? I almost feel guilty talking a little bit about 2019. But there's going to be some bright spots as I do. So it was a challenging year. Many of you know it well. It really started in 18. We had a wet fall. We had a heck of a spring. All kinds of messes going on. We had a hard time getting our crops in the ground, getting them planted. Then it came to harvest. We had another wet fall and some of that even didn't get harvested. Some of it's still in the field. I know in my travels across our great state I still see some corn, a few sunflowers still in the field. I think most of the beans are out. A year like no other. I mean, when you look at the records and everything, it told us that there was just a heck of a lot going on. So in a lot of ways you see a lot of producers talking about 2019, hoping that we never have a year like it. And I think that's true. But I also think that there's some things that we can learn from 2019. We know we had a day lose. We know we had a ton of water. Just exceptional amounts, many places, records that we've never seen before. But yet in all of that, South Dakota reached a milestone. And all the time that we've been tracking cropping systems and especially tillage systems and planting systems, this year for the first time South Dakota reached the milestone of planting 50% of our crop land using no-till methods. Amazing. Congratulations to all of you. I would share that more of these details are available in what we call our cropping systems inventory. And if you stop in at your local NRCS field office, you'll be able to pick up a copy of that. I would also tell you, ask them if they have the 2017 one available as well because it's going to be... I'm going to kind of paint a picture of the story of two tails really in some ways just about this whole thing that we've seen since 2017 and 18 and 19. But 50% amazing. When we look at that, this chart shows you just kind of that progression that's happened. I definitely want to tell you that this year, and I'll reference this a few more times, it was a challenging year to do a cropping systems inventory because you're actually out trying to look at fields that have been planted and determine how they were planted. We had a lot of fields in our state that were not planted. Four million acres roughly not planted in our state. So we have to put an asterisk a little bit on this 2019 data, but still a lot that we can learn. But you'll see we were doing this in the late 1990s, the 1980s, and then we stopped in 2004, we picked it up again in 13, so that's why you see a little bit of a gap. But you can see we progressed from 2004 to the 13, 14, 17. We bounced around. This year we jumped up. And the other ones you can see have stayed fairly constant, the other types of planting systems. And I talked about that prevent plant. I mean, look at those acres that are brown in the deep brown. Those are 100,000 plus acres of prevent plant acres across our state. The lighter brown, 50 to 100,000. Extreme conditions led to a lot of prevent plants. Like I said, caused us some extra problems putting this together. But the amazing thing of it is as we did the research, as we drove around the countryside, we gathered this data, we learned one thing that more of the fields got planted that were on the no-till side of things. So roughly what I feel very confident in telling you today was is that producers that were using soil health systems, and I'll talk about what those systems look like in just a second, they got their fields planted. Their fields were ready to handle as best as they could what mother nature threw at them. That's not to say we're ever going to be able to totally outguess her. In fact, I feel pretty sheepish ever saying that. I think that's almost like setting her up. That's a challenge. That's the way it was raising my kids, right? If I challenged them, they found a way to make me wrong. And I don't want to do that with mother nature, but I think that people were set up and we learned a lot from that. So why did that happen? I'd ask you that. And we did. We asked producers that. One week, he was mentioned earlier as a board member. He says, I can't control the rain, right? You can read his quote. But what I can do is do the right things on my field so whenever the rain comes and whatever amount it is, maybe some years it's going to be too much, some years it's going to be too little, my soil is as ready as it can be. We heard the same thing from many high county, Carl Eliason. You know, his land was fit to plant before the rest of his neighbors. He was out planting when others couldn't. So there's something positive going on here. Jesse Hall Arlington, Kingsbury, same thing. He says he planted 91% of his acres, okay? I'll show you a map. If you look at Kingsbury, Kingsbury is a county where 31% to 40% of the acres didn't get planted. Jesse was at 91. There's something going on there, right? These systems are helping producers be more resilient and helping get things done in years that are not the most favorable. So what was that? What are we hearing producers talk about? One of the things that I don't know that we've talked so much about, but it's soil structure. And soil structure is important. It's important to the plants that you have growing in the field, right? Soil structure allows water to get to the roots. It allows the roots to move. Soil structure allows air to be in that soil profile. So it leads to a healthy plant production, all of that. But it's also really important when you want to be in the field, whether that's at planting time, whether that's at spraying time, whether that's at harvest time. We learned a lot about that this year and I think we've got more to learn. Share with you a few pictures. A combine going through a soybean field. I see some water between the rows. That's what you focus on. When I see this picture, what I immediately want to look to is I want to see what happened on the stuff that had already been harvested, so I look just to the right. I see a harvested soybean field with no roots. We got a few things off Twitter. Anthony Fisher, a North Dakota producer. He says, hey, I'm so glad 2019's over. But what he's roughly saying is all the practices they did for soil health paid off. And so, great things. He showed some pictures of their harvest operations and the lack of roots. A friend jumped on, grabbed onto his Twitter and said, it's amazing how the guys who chiselplowed got stuck all the time in our strip till system, we were able to harvest and not very many roots. That's two North Dakota producers. We heard the same thing in South Dakota. The Johnsons, not far from here in Spring County, they give a lot of credit to the fact that they were able to harvest, not get stuck, not have a lot of roots in their fields to their soil health system. So, 2019, crazy year. Lots of us want to forget about it, but I don't think we should forget everything. I think we should remember some of the things that we observed and some of the ways different systems across our state acted and treated us. I'll use that word, treated us. How did our soil health systems treat us? So, question is, is every crop you're going to be like 2019? You're all going, sure, hope not. I would agree. I am confident in telling you, and I'm not a weatherman, that we will probably never have a year quite like 2019. It might be worse. It might be better. It could be dry. There's going to be some differences. We don't know. But I think it's easy to say that we know how weather is everywhere. So, with that in mind, let's think about 17. Not too long ago. We did the cropping systems inventory in 17 as well. We had drought over big parts of our state. Some severe drought just west of here, in the Aberdeen area, right? So, just two years ago, and all we're focused on now is too much water, many of you would have taken many of the rains that you dreaded this year if you could have had them two years ago. When we did the cropping systems inventory, again, we asked producers, tell us about this year. Scott tells us, you know, thought we would add a complete crop failure. But because of our soil health systems, we retained moisture and we raised a crop. Trevor told us, we've been fighting nature too much. Now we're learning that with what we're doing with our cropping systems, we're being able to build soil organic matter. It's doing positive things. It's letting rain infiltrate when we get it. It's being able to hold onto it a little bit better. And from there, it's helping us later in the year. Dan Forge, many of you know him. He's in the room today. We'll hear him speak more throughout the conference and he'll share information with you. But same thing, slightly above average yields in 2017 when many producers couldn't say that. So, two extremes. 1917, not the movie. That's out now. 2017, 2019. Two completely different years. But soil health systems paid off. That's what we have to take away from this year and almost every year. Cover crops played a big part of that. We heard that. Our cover crop use in South Dakota grew a lot this year. Part of that was because of Prevent Plant. We put a lot of acres of cover crops out through the Natural Resources Conservation Service through some of our programs. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program won't be one stewardship. Conservation Stewardship Program would be another. But it's growing. Interest is growing in this. Almost a doubling based on what we did with programs. But the key is, the question I want to ask you is, is your soil ready? I can't stand here today and tell you what 2020 is going to be like. I don't know. I don't think any of you do. But I think we do know that we're learning. We can do things with our soil and have it be ready to pay us off. Okay? I want to tell you, I just want to wrap up with this and get you to work now. So here's the deal. You need to know that you have a whole lot of partners in this state and in a lot of the states around us that are all in on soil health. The chief of our agency, Matt Lohr, is all in on soil health. He made soil health one of his top priorities for NRCS nationally this year. South Dakota soil health has been our number one priority since 2012. It's not going to change. It's at the top of our list. Okay? The Soil Health Coalition is here. Our friends at South Dakota State University, the Grassland Coalition, so many other groups. South Dakota Corn, the list just goes on and on and I know I'm missing many groups and I don't mean to do that. Just let me make the point that there's a partnership in this state where soil is healthy. It's important to us to do that. So what we want to do now is listen to you. We want to get some information from you. So on your table, there's a pink card. The front tables, we figured that not very many people would sit in the front. Okay? So I ran out and I stopped at the front row but we'll get them to all of you. This pink card, two questions on it. We would like you to answer them. First one. And think about this and be diligent in it and just what you're thinking. So if there was one issue that's keeping you from applying more soil health practices on your farm, on your operation, on your ranch, what's that issue? Write it down for us. On the back of it or front of it, depending on which way it popped up, what are the soil health management practices that you'd like to see demoed in your area? If you want us to be a partner for you and you want to learn more, I think seeing it with our eyes, listening to another producer that's doing it through demonstrations is so powerful. So what things would you want to have demonstrated in your area? And if you could put down your county there, that'd be great because we, I think we'll see that in some parts of our state we need different things demoed than we do in other parts of our state. So take the time to do this. We're going to come around and everyone who completes one of these is going to get a ticket with a number on it and then we're going to get those numbers drawn out of a bucket and we've got about 40 or plus books that we're going to give away to producers that fill out these cards. Books that you can learn more about on soil health, we have some variety, but the key of it is just to say thank you so get these cards filled out. We can do this really throughout the conference. It'll be fine, but if you really want to be involved in the drawing, try to get them wrapped up if you could and we'll get by and pick them up. So with that, I just thought I'd quickly touch on those five principles and then I'm going to shut up just so as you think about filling out that card you've got them. One, we've got to armor the soil. We've got to keep it covered, right? There's so many reasons. We've got to minimize our soil disturbance. We want to have diversity, not only in our cash crop rotations but also what we do with cover crops and the use of perennials fits in there as well. Live plants, every second we can have a live root in the system. We're benefiting the soil. And lastly, we know that if we can integrate livestock on to our cropland acres, and I just say all acres but it kind of goes without saying on grazing acres, we will have benefit, okay? So with that, thank you for a few minutes of your time to just kind of get you started today. Got great people that are going to speak to us over the next two days. Thank you to the Soil Health Coalition for all the work they do and all the partners that are with them. I hope you have a great conference and I look forward to talking to you. Take care.