Hi, thanks for coming out bright and early to the first session of DrupalCon 2022. My name is Greg Dunlap, and this session is called Structured Content and Flexible Layouts, a case study of the editorial tools for georgia.gov. We have three people speaking here today, we'll do some introductions. I'm Greg Dunlap. I'm the director of strategy at Lullabot, and yes. Hi, I'm Marissa Epstein. I am a senior user experience strategist and CPAC for accessibility also at Lullabot. Hi, I'm Rachel Hart. I am the UX UI designer with Digital Services Georgia. So we did this project a while back. So about 10 years ago, Digital Services Georgia, who is the agency that controls all of the web presence for the state of Georgia and its state government agencies, kind of recognized that maintaining a more consistent user experience for their constituents would be really helpful for getting people to find things and use their websites. And so to this end, they had created a Drupal 7 platform for managing the websites of all of their government agencies. And it provided the agencies with a common tool set for managing their content, which would in turn help increase consistency for constituents who are trying to find content and create a better user experience for them. Now Georgia has about 120 agencies, and despite there being no mandate to join the platform, about two thirds of them did end up migrating in. But what didn't change was the governance model for this content. So the authors at the agencies are subject matter experts, and they know their content and their constituent needs better than anybody else. And so it didn't make a lot of sense to have a ton of process getting in their way. They're sitting there creating the content that they know every day. But the wide variety in web and content skills across those agencies and the people who created the content within them made it really difficult to establish or hold any content guidelines or standards or guardrails or anything like that. And the ones that they did were kind of controversial. And it was tough because those agencies, since they weren't mandated to be on the platform, they could just jump ship and launch a WordPress site any time that they wanted. But that's not very good for their constituent experience because the platform helps to bring consistency, as I said, but also better accessibility, better mobile experience and things like that. So digital services knew that even if the constituent experience wasn't perfect in the system, if the agencies left, it would get even worse. This quote really sums it up from one of the stakeholders at Georgia when she was explaining this problem. We don't have any carrots. All we have, I mean, we don't have any sticks. All we have is carrots. Oh, I'm sorry, I had it backwards. All we have is carrots. We don't have any sticks. They can't establish any rules or negative effects to get the agencies to stay. All they can do is entice them in. So there were a lot of problems to solve here, but one of the biggest ones surrounded how to manage the content authoring in the new system. So the agency authors have a wide variety of content to meet their needs, and those needs are really, really varied across the different agencies. Now some strides had been made in that system on landing pages, which allowed them to assemble flexible groups of blocks and things like that. However, they were tightly controlled, and authors weren't empowered to change them directly. The updates had to be passed through the ticketing system back to digital services. At the same time, the main content pages had few options available other than basic formatting and imagery. So all of these content authors weren't particularly happy with the situation that they had. At the same time, digital services wanted to establish more consistency and predictability. There were too many ways to do the same thing across all of the agencies, even with a centralized system, and it was causing a lot of dissonance for constituents as they jumped from agency to agency finding different kinds of content. A new common design system was going to help this, but there also needed to be more common content patterns and common ways to create pages to serve more common use cases. And then finally, the constituents, they just want clear, findable content. They want to be able to get to the sites, figure out what they need, and get to it quickly and easily. And so we created a process for doing this, and I'm going to pass this off to Marissa to talk about that. All right. Thank you, Greg. And apologies. I've been having a little too much fun, so I'm losing my voice. So yeah, jumping into the process of what we did to actually tackle this problem and also how we uncovered some of the problems Greg's described. This is a process that follows roughly four months of research and content strategy, and I've gone ahead and broken that down into three phases. First is research. This is to understand the problem from all of the perspectives involved. We had different kinds of people experiencing the pains that Greg discussed in very different ways. And so we did conduct research with Georgia residents. However, I wanted to focus on the flexibility for authors here. So I'm going to talk through our process just with the authors of state agencies. Our first interactions were what we call contextual interviews, and the reason for this is to just drink from the fire hose and absorb so much information about the current editorial experience, how it's going, what could be better. We learned about authors' goals and what complicate those goals, and we also got a sense of their comfort levels with the CMS and technology in general. So why are they contextual interviews? Because we physically went to each person's office and often desk, which was lovingly coordinated by Georgia, so we ran around hot Atlanta for two days and got to see where the work actually gets done, which was very useful to bring back to our team. So I really like some takeaways from this first step, and they capture some of the lessons learned. Please enjoy. Some people know that the site is inconsistent. Some people know that it doesn't look great. Some people know they're doing things that are not encouraged. And so to this, I wanted to say why. It seems like there were some things to dig into deeper. The next step of research was a heuristic design audit, which sounds a lot fancier than it is. This is kind of an informal, usually solo process of reviewing the website, understanding how the content was structured, and also how design patterns were currently being used. There's what the system is and then how it's actually being taken upon by authors to get around some of the editorial restrictions. And this helped us see what patterns might be missing that we would build in the future. So I often suggest to take a breath before this one. So just some delightful examples that we captured from the georgia.gov umbrella. So real sites that were intended to share a design system, but as you can see, the authors were creating workarounds for those site restrictions. So this presents some issues in accessibility and compatibility with screen readers and all of that, but also essentially ends up in the situation that the restrictions were put in place to avoid. These workarounds end up with inconsistency in the design and can lead to some trust issues on the part of the constituents. So we got a lot of inspiration here on things that we could provide as far as buttons and layout options and other things that authors were making themselves. So to recap the research, we knew that we needed to make content creation more intuitive because if something wasn't comfortable for a user or familiar, it would just be ignored in favor of the tool they knew. And we needed to provide templates with much more customization to meet a huge pool of agency needs. And we knew that authors would find a way if we didn't. So the proverbial using any tool as a hammer when they saw a nail was what we wanted to prevent. And to this end, we believed that providing best practices and celebrating real examples could be one of the carrots in our tool belt. Okay, so now we're equipped for our second phase, sharing informed recommendations with the team and refining them together.  I'm missing some images in my slide deck. All right. I'm not sure if we can do one take a moment and see if we can. If we just shoot. And we haven't even come to the live demo. So I can actually see what I'm doing. My next couple are blank. I think I might have screwed that up this morning. Where the slide's ended in? I was just trying to make it available offline and I just kind of messed it all up. I like where you were going with it. I know right. Are you not on the wifi right now? I should be. It might be a bit spotty. I can try using my hotspot. Yeah, I should know nothing when it's still in. Maybe there's some level of local tech problem and some level of not being able to get on and not getting the wifi to load. Looks like we're connected, but nothing is coming up. I'll see you see. Try that one. I think that was because you switched wise-wise. Yeah. OK. I think you still need to select one. But if it works, great. You see what I mean? Scroll down. It's going to walk in. If you need to switch back to the other one. I'm going to my hotspot. That's what we were on. OK. Is this offline? This is the wrong talk. That's going great. I'm just going to tell everyone to picture it. It looks like these are trying to load. OK. It's going to be worth it. Do you want to try? Oh, because you're going. I see you're trying to go back. Yeah, we'll see. Do you want to try and get back on the Drupal Wi-Fi? So that the image is full? I just don't. I mean, I'll go to it. I was going to say that you'd like to get it from my phone, but I don't think that's the issue. Right, that's what I was saying. Is it like should we restore an old one or something? Well, if it's actually the same. That's what I'm wondering. This is from a week ago, and it's still not showing the images, because it's the offline mode. I don't know. I'll go back to that and change it. Well, can you make it? That's not what I want. I just switched back to the Drupal Con. We've been floating between of you. OK, let's get down to the OCC Wi-Fi for a second. Yeah, the OCC Wi-Fi isn't open. It was given us a login screen and sent by my result. And following the same OCC Wi-Fi script? Well, we have to have the login. So he's asking somebody for it, so that we can get on to it, because the. So we have our presentation on Google Slides, which is great when you have internet. And the internet, we're on the Drupal Con Wi-Fi, and nothing's loading. And so the tech is going to get us a login for the greater OCC Wi-Fi so that we can get back up. But for the moment, we're a little stuck. I'm sorry about that. Thank you for your patience. For some reason, on the laptop that we were using, every image in the entire deck disappeared for no reason, despite the fact, even when we were loading on the internet. It was very strange. So here we go. We're back in business. And I'll hand it back to you. Yeah, thanks again. OK, let me give you my hypothesis pitch now. And we'll see if it cuts out, make lots of noise. OK, so each content type in Drupal can be displayed in a variety of ways. And these are called our display modes. So example, a full page versus a teaser are default display modes within Drupal for content. And we started talking about this and how we could leverage additional custom display modes to create pages that are essentially assemblies of different pieces of content displayed this way. This eventually made its way into two broad concepts. So on the left, you can see topic pages, which are standard long form text pages, except content can be embedded into the text in different ways. On the right are landing pages, which are only an aggregation of that content throughout the site. So just pulling those different blocks that you can see there. There we go. And key to both of these solutions is a third, which is what we've been calling microcontent. So these are small pieces of structured content. And I have a ton of examples up for you here on this flickering slide. And the main way that it differs from normal site content, the microcontent, is that it does not live at its own URL. It's only meant to be featured on another page and not linked to and visited separately. So for example, we have link collections, calls to action, and icon lists. So one of the things that we like about microcontent is that it's structured to be easily reusable. You can see here we've labeled some of the fields that specifically define how it will be rendered in terms for the user. So this is a small tile set microcontent type. You can see the title, the series of links and icons and images, and the URL at the bottom in the button that can take people to information. So a nice feature of that is once we have that structure, you can see we can easily go from one column to two to three. And another great feature of microcontent is that it's reusable. So this promo that you can see here was made once and then used in multiple places throughout the site. So if you need to update that link, you can do it one time on the microcontent directly, and then that updates everywhere. And so this is a really big help for maintaining pages over time. But I'll save the cons for Rachel. Now, we have this great idea. We thought this was solid, but we needed the author buy-in. As we saw, it doesn't matter if they have a good tool, if it's not comfortable because it won't be used. So when I say testing in this third phase, I don't mean the comprehensive usability testing. I'm talking about testing our hypothesis with authors. So specifically, I'm gonna go through a few examples that brought the highest impact for providing more flexible layouts. So I'm really excited about this first step of testing. This was paper prototyping. It's a great way to engage participation and it's a low-fidelity workshop. So it doesn't require a lot of coding and setup. The goals here, we wanted to validate the page builder in that landing page sketch that you saw before and see if agency authors would be happier with the drag and drop, or if this was not cohesive with their workflow. And we also wanted to test it against real content. So if we went to an agency website, are they able to recreate all of their content there and also make content that they want in the future, essentially with the framework flourish or flounder? So here's an example of that paper prototyping that I described and this was a workshop that we did with I believe the Environmental Protections Division. So you can see in the image here, we're kind of working together and they're calling out some components that they like to build into their landing page. So the components are sketched on flashcards on the right and you can see just some very basic components from the design system we were using. In the center, we have just a laminated piece of 11 by 17 piece of paper. So we could stack the flashcards on it and we could also do some sketching if we needed with dry erase markers. And from there, we just kind of selected the cards and ordered them on the long sheet and then drew in any custom details. So this process allowed us to start with the proposed components that we came in with but then see things like which of the components were important to different agencies, which ones weren't quite working for everyone because they might need an additional presentation or if anything was just flat out missing and that we needed to create additional components. So you can see an example of that with this finished homepage and we got pretty close. We had to write in some titles of lists and change our icons from four to eight but they were pretty happy with the system. The second testing step that I wanted to discuss here focused on actually naming the content types. So the landing page was just one of the many content types that we were working on and there was a variety of ways that we approached this. Some of them we felt were working as is, some were added, some were consolidated that were very similar and now we just wanted to make sure that the authors understood them. We thought this is a pretty important barrier to entry right up front and so we were able to essentially start with a survey just asking if you were creating this which one of these would you use and then we were able to dig in a lot deeper with interviews that we paired with that paper prototyping to look at specific content or understand why they wouldn't use a content type for example. So the task here firstly was to correctly identify the best content type for a particular piece of content. Then we reviewed the create new content page itself and made sure that that was clear in the way it was laid out and then again we asked them to map a couple of their content pages so if there's a page that you wish you had which of these types do you think you could use? So I think this quote sums up nicely our findings that we saw a positive response to the content model and the layout builder functionality. Nothing was broken, everything's a step in the right direction, a lot of options, a lot of flexibilities what we wanted to hear and then that second thing there everything could be reproduced was one of our successes that we wanted to measure as well. So finally, one more testing visual for you. This is the area where you do create that new content. This is what Georgia calls their type tray and this is where I was talking about we just printed this out and asked them to imagine that they were using the site and it was nice to get some UI feedback and some features like pinning content types that authors would use most frequently per user and things like that but one of the findings I wanted to share for example is that we had created an amalgamation and aggregate of different news posts and we had called it update as in you're sharing an update with the constituents and the first couple authors that we shared that with asked us update what and heard that as a verb so we quickly changed that to news for the rest of our tests and saw that that was successful so it was really great to just iterate right off of this on paper and finally I'll note that the Lullabot developers have contributed this type tray back to the Drupal ecosystem as a module. Yeah, I'm very excited to hand things off to Rachel now. We are gonna dive into a real demo at the end hence all the tech setup but she's going to give us an overview of our changes and what's happened since. All right, so real work with tech issues, right? If it's not turn it off and turn it back on then what is the solution when you can't get things loading properly in your browser? Clear the cache. Clear the cache. Got it working. Oh no! And how do I get... I want this over there. Can. Can you just double click, no? On the top? No, cause we need to get the presenter stuff. Oh, fun. They should be back over there. Where's the presenter now? Oh, because I don't think you did presenter but you just did. Right, it's just next to me. We're so close. Okay, I'm happy with that. Yeah. All right, so sorry. All right, so I'm gonna talk about the results and what we've seen. So for example, on the left you see what landing page looked like on the old version of the site and then on the right is on the new version of the site. So of course there are some stylistic changes here. We have a new design system that we implemented along with the update but the new system also with this using layout builder gives us the flexibility to really make the page whatever it needs to be. We have different block types and then just all these different layout options that you really can build and put together however you need it to be. And then we also see a benefit with our more text heavy pages. So again on the left side is what it used to be and really it's just a vertical column of text. You can add in some images and maybe a block quote but for the most part it's just one big wissy wig. And then on the right side we are making use of that reusable micro content. So rather than just all being fully unique content on the page we can have these blocks that we can reuse elsewhere and then also embed within the wissy wig on this page specifically. So we launched our first sites in Gov Hub in this system in 2019. So we've had a few years now to see how editors are actually using it and see what has gone well and what not so much. So first off we do have more editor control. So like Greg said in the previous system the ability to edit landing pages was pretty locked down. They could swap out content in the blocks but they didn't have access to add new blocks or to move them around or really change the layout in any way and so we really just loosened the reins on that when we updated into the new system. Part of that was because we felt pretty confident that the system was intuitive enough that they could edit it with some training of course and with some pre-knowledge and with us still being available to help them we wanted to loosen that up and that's something that our editors have really responded well to. And then this also is really important for making quick and timely updates. So for example throughout the past couple of years of course every website has COVID-19 information and with the ability for editors to fully create and edit landing pages on their own without needing to go through us that means that they can make all of this information on their website available immediately and of course looking at these there are things that I would change. It's not perfect, it's not the most beautiful page layout that I've seen but it does get the information out there and that's the most crucial part for this is just making it available and then we can always go back later and make any tweaks that we need to improve the page. And this also opens up our ability to have real-time collaboration with editors. So for example last year we were working with the Georgia Department of Driver Services on updating their homepage and the editor, the primary content manager at this agency is very aware of what her editors or what her users need. She's always looking at the data and she's very in touch with her stakeholders so she comes into this knowing really what needs to happen with the homepage so she was able to within her site build this page in draft mode and she shared it with us so then we could provide some feedback and right again within the system send her back another draft and say well here are some changes like great ideas but this might be a better way to display it. She then gives us her final feedback and finally we land on the finished page. And so with her being able to directly edit the site we can have this back and forth and just working directly on the same page in draft mode right within the system. So Greg and Rosa have given a really great intro into the concept of content sharing so I wanna take a look at how that has gone so far. Now the ability to use one piece of content in multiple places has allowed authors to update and remove content in bulk and overall this has been a really big win. So for example every site has a primary contact so this is phone number, email address can have the role, whatever. So this information shows up on the contact detail page and with it being the primary contact for the site down there in the footer you can see you also have the option to add that information down there. You can also again if it's the primary it'll show on the main about us page. You can embed it within a wissy wig. You can place it on a landing page. And then it will also share to georgia.gov so all of our agencies have their own website but this information is very specific there's not really anything that is super editorial with the contact it's just phone number, email address. So we share that directly to georgia.gov and that shows up on their organization page as well as on any services that are associated with that organization. And all of this information, it's all over the place all these different placements of the contact are handled with this one edit form. So if a phone number changes they can go in there and change it in one place and that information updates everywhere that it's located. And we are continuing to update content types to encourage editors to reuse their content. So this is new for a lot of people who are working on the site so it's not always necessarily intuitive for them. So for example, editors will often add contact information directly into the wissy wig for a page that they're working on. And like we just saw, contacts are one of those types of content that can be really beneficial if they're reused throughout the site so that if anything changes you can take care of that all in one go. And from speaking with editors we learned that it's just an extra step for them in the moment when they're trying to put this information on a page to take a step back and think, okay, what contacts do I need? Now I need to create those contacts and then I need to give them certain taxonomy to organize into a contact directory so then I can show that contact directory on this page. It's just a little bit more abstract and a little more cumbersome for them to go and create that when they just want a couple of phone numbers on this page. And so this is one place where we're taking another look at the UX of building contact directories. And we really just want to make it easier for them to just grab the contacts that they need, stick them all into a table, put that on the page and it's still using all of that connected content. And this also introduces problems. So like I said, it's not super intuitive for someone who is used to just working on individual pages. They don't necessarily think of their website in terms of chunks. They think of it in terms of I'm on this page now and I'm on a different page another time. So they might forget or not totally understand that editing micro content will update it everywhere that it exists. And so for example, an editor might have a landing page and they created this for one program on their website and they really like the layout of it so they clone that page. So now they have these two separate landing pages. On the new page, they want to update the content there so they swap out the information in the blocks on that new page, not realizing that it also updated that content on the old version of the page, on the original program page that they had cloned. So really when you, with the way that it's currently built, when you clone a landing page it clones the layout for the page. It does not clone the blocks that are within it. That's all still fully connected which of course has its own benefits but if you're not aware of that then it can create these problems. And so that brings me to my final point which is that this is definitely a learning curve. So it is a different process than editing a typical page. Just it can be technically confusing. So for most content types, our editors are used to everything existing within the edit form. You just, you have these specific fields that you fill out and that creates the page and everything on that edit form is what is going to show up on the final page. And you're gonna see this in a little bit when Greg is doing the demo, but with something like a landing page it's really split into two sections. So we have the title and the summary on the edit form and other than that it's really just metadata. There's not really much of what you're doing there that's gonna affect what it looks like in the end. And most of the actual content is controlled on the layout tab. And so you're placing the blocks and moving them around and setting up what the page is gonna look like. And so that's just, it's two places for editors to go to and that's just not something that they're typically used to. And so this is, this gets back to the type tray that Marissa mentioned. Another point that can be confusing is understanding what content is versus microcontent. Understanding what a promo is versus a CTA. We have lots of things that are very similar but just different enough that we made them separate content types. And so we're continuing to look at how we are making these content types available to editors and providing them with visuals and descriptions to help them make the best choices. This also can be strategically confusing. So like I said, most editors are used to working with just a vertical column of text. They just have their wissy wig and they fill it out and that makes the page. And now they have an entire page to fully customize and build its own layout. And that can be confusing and overwhelming if you're not used to it. So again, you're gonna see this in the demo but so you create the landing page and it starts off pretty empty. You go into the Layout tab, you add a new section. Okay, now you have to decide what is the layout for this section. So you pick that. And now you have some more choices to make. Do you wanna give that section a title? Do you give it a background color, a background image? Okay, so you've got your section put together and now you have to put blocks into it. So what block are you gonna choose? You have all these options.  Are you gonna put it into a card display or are you gonna give it an icon? So it's just one decision after another and this gives them the ability to make a wide variety of page layouts and make it look exactly how they want it to. It's just, but it does of course add that complexity. And we are still, right. We are still of course building out our guidance and supporting editors to put these pages together. So we have fully built out information on the technical piece of how do you do this? And then over time we are still building some more open-ended sort of like strategic pieces of how do you put together the best sort of landing page? And so one way that we're doing that is with these hands-on workshops. So we've done this a couple of times. And it's really just the idea of stepping away from the layout. So all of those options that I was showing you, save those until the end and start just with the content. Figure out what is it that this page is trying to accomplish? What do users need to get from it? And what content is going to make those goals happen? And so then if you start there, then you have a pretty good idea by the time that you're actually getting into the system and choosing the blocks that you're using, finalizing it with colors and icons and all those sorts of things. So we really encourage our editors to just start from the content level and work from there and not get too far ahead of it. And this is also a learning curve for us. So this screenshot is from a study that we did last year where we were just trying to get kind of a baseline of our customer experience and how they're liking things and so this gave us a good idea of what is going well for editors and what we need to dig more into. So now we're diving deeper into specific areas like web forms and document management and location lists and we are also continuing to think about what we can do with layout builder pages and trying to think about how we can give them all the flexibility that they need because of course, even though we have so much flexibility, it's still not enough. There's still more that they want this page, they have a specific idea in mind of what they want this page to look like and we can get so far, but it's that balance of trying to give enough options without making it confusing and overwhelming and so that's something that we're still continuing to work on doing more research. Of course, research always leads to more and just making these updates over time. So I'm gonna pass to Greg to get into a demo. And can I, yes. Oh, you wanted to just mirror. Oh no, okay. Actually, we only have five minutes left before we're supposed to cut and so I'm, and given our technical issues, I kind of don't wanna push my luck with a live demo and so, but if any, and I wanted to have time to take questions too, so if anybody has any questions, we'd love to get them. You mentioned that Lullabon contributed to the TypeTray module back. What's the name of that module? TypeTray. TypeTray. Okay. Like there. So the question was basically what are we using to do the landing pages and the micro content on the standard article pages, right? So for the landing pages, we used LayoutBuilder and that has worked out really well. We do have, actually most of the pages are more typical content types with a body field and different fields and stuff like that and for those, we used Entity Embed to bring the micro content into the WYSIWYG so that, and it's really great because you can use the same micro content types in both places and you can share content really easily and it works really well. If anybody is interested in seeing that demo, we also did this talk at Drupal GovCon and that demo is a part of that so if you wanna go check that out, you can. Of course. I'm wondering how some of that kind of work has changed. And we're all here now, it's the first time of the year, so I'm sort of wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that changed in your time. Yeah, our initial work was done well before the pandemic. I think we did this project three or four years ago, initially, but I'll ask Rachel about how things have changed in working with the agency since that started. Yeah, so of course everything has gone online. We don't have the hands-on with the post-its and everything. We are building out all of our training in an LMS so we have video tutorials, showing just some of the basics on how to edit it and then I guess the example that I showed for the Department of Driver Services homepage, that's really sort of the direction that it's gone. So I don't think that we've actually done any large group workshops since going remote but we will have projects where we're working directly with one agency and we have that back and forth and that's where opening up the permissions for editing these pages really comes in handy because we can have the back and forth with them and we can both be working on it at the same time. And so I think that's probably the primary way that we've gotten into this sort of thing. Does that answer your question? Yeah. I'll just add a PS that for non-Georgia workshops, we've been primarily using Miro and so we're using that for the stickies and you can insert images to use those components, sort of reusable. So it's not quite the same hands-on but we can see mice and draw and move things around in there so it does mimic some of that collaboration well. Miro, M-I-R-O dot com. I wanna, I'll take one last question and then I wanna make sure everybody has time to before they go to the keynote. I'm sorry, I can't hear you very well. If we were to do this project right now, which part do we think we'd like to change? I'll ask Rachel because she's had the most, I mean, we built and launched the project but she's the one who works around day-to-day. So it's tough to say. I would say the part that I would at least wanna spend some more time with is the concept of the reusable microcontents because yeah, like I said, it's on the one hand fantastic. On the other hand, it can be confusing and really just looking at what is the information with that microcontent that is fully shared from one instance to the next and what is controlled on a page by page basis. So there are times where we have a promo that we wanna show on multiple pages but maybe here we want the image to show and over here we don't just because of the way that it comes together on the page and so with the way that it's currently put together we have to create two separate promos and so that sort of thing, it gets a little tricky and I would wanna probably spend a little more time thinking about that as well as I think we have about 17 types of microcontent and some of them are very similar to each other. So if we were to do it again, I think that might be another place to spend some more time thinking about does this really need to be a totally separate type of block or is it something that can all be one? Can there be the promo and the CTA and text block all as one type of block and then maybe there's just some display options within there so that if you wanna change this link to a button display, that's a simple switch rather than having to now recreate that into a new block type. Thanks everybody, if you have any more questions, we'll be around throughout the conference. I will be at the Lullabot booth for a few hours following this and later in this afternoon or you can reach out on Twitter. I am Greg D. Dunlap on Twitter, Mars Toy Ship and Rachel H. Underscore Design. All right, got it. Thanks a lot everybody and thanks for your patience.


Yeah, whoever I guess I'm, I'm fine by whoever starting it. It started very good. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. So welcome everybody. I want to take a couple of minutes here at the start of this meeting to introduce you to our new state conservationists. Tony Sonseri. Tony is joining us today for California and I'll let him introduce himself and kind of give you an update on what his plans are. So Tony, I'll turn it over to you. All right. Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, folks. Just a quick introduction. I'm Tony Sonseri. I'm the new state conservationist for South Dakota. I've been working in the natural resources conservation field for right around 20 years and I'm excited to be a part of South Dakota agriculture and to be carrying on the mission of NRCS here. I am still working on getting up to speed on South Dakota and will be focusing on just listening and taking notes today. I would be remiss though if I didn't take the opportunity to mention that this week is Soil Health Awareness Week and that Governor Christie Nolan will be making a proclamation to that effect tomorrow at the Capitol. With agriculture being South Dakota's most important industry, we rely on healthy soils to remain economically viable. The goal of this week is to spread awareness of the importance of Soil Health, build community support for the adoption of Soil Health practices by producers, landowners and homeowners. I encourage everybody to visit the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition website if you want more information on Soil Health Awareness Week. Ultimately, I appreciate everyone being here this morning. I look forward to today's discussion and with that, Jeff, I'm going to hand it back to you. All right. Thank you, Tony. Next on the agenda, we like to give our congressional representatives an opportunity to share any updates that they might have. And I haven't scrolled through the list, so there we go. Mr. Donnelly popped on the screen right away. I'll let you give an update quick. Hey, good morning, everyone. I don't have much to note today, but we are kicking off efforts on the next Farm Bill and conservation is always a high priority for Senator Thune, so we'll be thinking of things in the CRP space, areas for improvement there, especially related to hanging, grazing, flexibility and grazing infrastructure. So I would just welcome any ideas that anyone may have. CRP or conservation more generally, as we gear up for the Farm Bill, and I look forward to working with you all. Thanks. All right. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate the update. I do believe I saw Jim on from Senator Rowan's office. Jim, do you have any updates to give us as well? You know, I think Ryan kind of hit it best, you know, and you're right. Ag is number one in this state and, you know, we do support conservation efforts, so, you know, those are always the things that we're working on here in South Dakota, so welcome aboard, by the way. Looking forward to seeing you in person whenever you get here, so, but unless there's any questions of me. Anybody have any questions for either one of our Senator representatives? I just want to say I appreciate you both being on today. I'm looking forward to the discussion and Jim, I'm hoping to be there within the next couple of weeks too. We're working on getting the relocation thing taken care of, so I'm looking forward to meeting people in person here soon, so thank you. Well, just let us know when you get here and we'll set something up. Sounds perfect, thank you. All right, do we have anybody from Congressman Johnson's office? Well, I'm going to take that as a no. All right, so we will move over to an update from FSA. I don't know, Owen or Joe, I'm not sure which one of you is covering that. If you guys want to give us your update, we'd appreciate that. Hi, good morning. I'm Joe Schulz, acting SED for South Dakota FSA. We're hoping to get an actual SED appointment here within the next month. I don't know who it is, and as far as the conservation updates, I will let Owen update you on what we got going on with CRP's items. All right, thanks, Joe. Morning, everyone. Just a few updates on the conservation reserve side of things. January 26th, there was a press release issued by the secretary that announced the general CRP signup that'll be running from January 31st through March 11th. In addition, our grassland CRP signup will start April 4th and run through May 13th, so county offices are currently busy accepting the general CRP offers along with new land offers for CREP, for continuous CRP signup. Any re-enrollments on expiring contracts for continuous cannot be looked at until April 1, which would be six months prior to expiration, so we will be targeting that along with grassland signup at about the same time. This year alone, we've got around 139,000 acres expiring in South Dakota, so of course, we want to recapture those, get those re-enrolled along with new offers to continue our success with CRP in South Dakota. I guess I'd field any questions if there are any. If not, I'll turn it back to Jeff. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Owen, for that update. Next, we have a soil health update from Tants. Tants, I'll turn it over to you, sir. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. I have just a couple of slides to share with you. I believe it's this one. Can you all see that? Yes, sir. All right. So welcome. Back in May of 2021, I switched my career path a little bit from that of a district conservationist in the Sturgis Field Office and was happy to accept the role of our state's grazing land soil health specialist. So I joined Kent Vleager in having that be my daily focus and just a little bit of background. South Dakota born and bred, graduated high school from Chamberlain, was active in FFA and 4-H at that level, served as the state FFA president during my sophomore year of college and have my degree in egg education from South Dakota State. I started my career with the South Dakota Association of Conservation Districts in 2003 in Belfouche. April of 2005, I moved over to NRCS as a soil conservationist in the Sturgis Field Office. And after four years of being a soil con, it became the DC for 12 and now joined as a soil health specialist. The last few years of being a district conservationist, I caught the soil health bug. I'll point to Jeff Zimperich and members of the soil health and grassland coalitions as credited with giving me the bug and the passion for soil health and really getting into the outreach side of things, both for our internal staff as well as our private landowner producers and even some collaborating agency staff as well. There's three main functions that I see this position really, really having. Of course, the soil health, education, training and outreach is paramount among those three. With the various focus points, the landowner operator side of things is clearly critical because we can talk about the science all we want, but if we can't translate that into implementation on the ground, then what is all of that effort for? We can certainly do that through programs and are having success at doing so, but really it's the technical assistance where Kent and I find our focus. And even though grazing lands specifically is in my position title, in practice, it doesn't matter what the land use is. With me being located at Rapid City in Kent and Huron, we've really been able to grow our reach, if you will, just logistically to include more of the activities related to soil health in the western South Dakota area. So some of the things that I've been doing since May include obviously some of the public tours and things such as the Leopold Tour out at New Harsh this summer. We didn't have any in western South Dakota, but excellence in range management, property tours from the Society for Range Management, conservation district tours and et cetera, pasture walks posted by the South Dakota Grassland Coalition at various locations. Dave Ola and I from the Soil Health Coalition presented at FFA Day down at the Black Hills Stock Show, been in a couple of classrooms, did the rainfall simulator and slag test and things like that. And you can see one of those photos there at County Fair's Youth and Agriculture is outside of school, outside of 4-H, just kind of a parent-led organization in Butte County, which is growing to include some of the surrounding counties. And we look for some activities with them again in 2022, kind of based, unless they change in that Butte Lawrence County Fairgrounds there. I'm a part of the Society for Range Management as a member and one of the things that organization is doing is we put together a natural resources professionals range camp. This is a modified version, if you will, of the historic range camp that used to focus on youth, but due to declining attendance of our youth participants, we found that if we targeted natural resource professionals and maybe moved our focus point a little bit, that we could partner with our colleagues from the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, some of our tribal natural resource agencies and things. And we found success there, so I'm active with that. And then also presenting soil health principles to those grazing land managers help with dynamic soil properties in the field. I think that you're probably, you have been made aware of that project where we're capturing the differences in management across the fence line or across the road, where we have verified that the soils are exactly the same, but our history and management has changed and then quantifying what those properties really undergo as far as change under what we would consider better management versus more of the conventional management and telling that story through these public events. Some of the, maybe the last FaceTime type things got to be on Dakota Farm Talk with Pam Geppert a couple of times earlier this summer with respect to grazing land management during drought conditions. And if you're a subscriber or maybe saw an email, the growing resilience campaign did the six part series on soil health for grazing lands in the tri-state livestock news with Buzz Clute and that was pretty good. And soon to be released a podcast with Buzz where we talk all things soil health on the internal side, changing our focus a little bit to the staff rather than that public facing side of things, one of the focal points in the South Dakota soil health strategy is really engaging out all of our staff and equipping them and even holding them accountable for soil health measures in their performance and in their planning. And so that's going to obviously be a large part of this position already is in my involvement with the soil health and sustainability course from our employee development section, as well as the conservation planning on grazing lands. One of the neat things that I'm really enjoying about this position is that while I'm technically on the soil staff under Nathan Jones, in day-to-day function, I'm just as much tied to the grazing land staff or the range team with Emily as our state range conservationist and all of the area RMS folks. Another big point is to support and grow the partnership effort in our state. I went online and found all these logos and I know that I'm missing piles of them. I just ran out of space. And with Colette serving in her role as Assistant State Con for partnerships and her staff, we're looking for those opportunities and many members of the State Technical Committee might be represented here or should be. And I apologize if I've left you off. It was not on purpose, I promise. And so there's a lot to do there. I think that we've got many untapped resources. I'm serving on the state subcommittee for urban and innovative agriculture. And I suspect that if this were in list format, rather than all of these logos on one slide, that that list would be quite lengthy and will indeed continue to grow through that. And then finally, range land or the grazing land national resources inventory. It's part of my performance plan that I will help or I have and will continue to coordinate our private land access requests for this national inventory of trends, plant communities, soil properties and things of that nature. Really a statistical analysis. This may indeed be one of the best statistically backed resource inventories in the world as far as private lands are concerned. So I'm proud to be a part of it. It can be a heavy lift at times, but we still are accessing private land and need to have permission. So that's a large part of it so that our contractor teams can get on site. I have a role in going to the field. You can see Emily is the closest person in that photo there. That was a trip out to join one of the data collection teams. Make sure that they're essentially following the protocols. And then once the season is completed, I'm charged with reviewing that data accuracy. A lot of that stuff gets used then in ecological site descriptions. The South Dakota drought tool pulls data from this related to production. Kind of gets us maybe not real time, but an always current measure on what production was at a given point with known temperature and precip data from that geographic region. That's a very kind of a quick synopsis of what I do as the state grazing land soil health specialist. It changes. I'm still learning the role. I've always felt like and been told by folks a lot longer in the tooth or been in their careers for longer than me that oftentimes it takes a year, maybe three, to truly find what your niche is and what those roles as the seasons move forward really are. And so I'm still learning. I've been absorbing information just as rapidly as I can related to soil health and landscape management type things. But I'm always looking for other opportunities, particularly on that partnership front. So like the heading on this slide says, let's do something together. I would love to collaborate and visit with folks regardless of their background about soil health. If there's a focus on grazing lands, wonderful, but it doesn't have to be. And I have an email group that I send event flyers to, often included some comments for thought and pondering related to management and soil health. If anyone would like to be included on that, feel free to send me an email. Otherwise, I'm always available for questions. That's all I've got, Jeff. All right. Thank you, sir. Anybody have any questions, sir? By the way, this is my very first state technical committee meeting in almost 18 years. So I'm looking to learn and take it in for the rest of the agenda. Well, welcome. Glad you could join us. I can't say it's my first. All right. Thank you, sir. Next on the agenda, we've got Collette. Collette's got the next two topics about some grant opportunities. So I'll turn it over to Collette. Great. Thanks, Jeff. I just want to drive ready his attention to the handout that came with the state technical committee meeting notice that Kathy sent out. So some of the things that TANTS referenced are in there under a publication called the 3Rs, and it's a growing resilience on the grasslands. So please take time to look through that. The Range Line Management Specialists and the coalitions have been really great about developing and messaging for that effort, and it's being coordinated by Buzz Cluton and his crew. So anyways, I want to draw your attention to that as something to look in our notes. So on the national scale news, we have an announcement that was done by Secretary Vilsack of Climate Smart Partnerships. And in your packet, there is a fact sheet about it, and I've included some links in there regarding that national agreement opportunity. It's really exciting, and there's a very large amount of money, a billion dollars with a B. And it would be really awesome to have some South Dakota proposals go up and be accepted for that. So please do take a look. The first deadline is April 8th for proposals from 5 million to 100 million. And the second deadline is May 27th for smaller from 250,000 to 4.9 million. So that's still a lot of money, and it's still really exciting. But just put your thinking caps on, and just know that any of the staff, if you've got ideas, we'll be happy to brainstorm a little bit with you as far as how to make a good proposal. So it'd really be awesome to have some South Dakota in there. So, okay, let's see. In the, for South Dakota, we have the conservation innovation grants, and it was determined with the leadership team that we will be pausing that announcement or proposals opportunity for one year. There's some things we need to attend to and work on within our state. So we'll be easily pausing that. We'll look for it next year in the winter, probably. Okay, so for the conservation collaboration agreements, we will be having a fiscal year 2022 notice of funding opportunity, and it will be posted on grants.gov. So the grants and agreements team has our information now, and as soon as it's posted on grants.gov, I'll be sure to push it out and we'll have a news release with public affairs and that sort of thing too. But just be aware that it will be posted and the opportunity is going to be coming for some cooperative agreements with us. And when it is posted, it'll be open for 60 days. So those are the things I have. Let's see. There's another sheet in the agenda in your handouts that has some news from partners. And of course, Tony already addressed the Soil Health Awareness Week, which the coalition has been promoting, which is awesome. I wanted to also just have a couple of other quick announcements that I know partners are working on. There's the South Dakota Leopold Conservation Award nominations that are being called for now. So it's a fabulous opportunity to recognize our stewards of the land. And if you need a little help with a nomination or getting it finessed, don't hesitate to ask around and we can maybe help polish it up a little bit because it really is a prestigious award and we fully support it within the agency. And also the Grassland Planners. I know the Grassland Coalition has been working on that for the current year and hard copies of those are available from either Judge Jessup or from Tammy Burmeister at our State Office. We've got soil planners. That's not on this list, but they're really cool this year. They have just each calendar month talks about some of the benefits and the reasons why soil is important to water, to health, to nutrition, all these different things for us. I mean, there's some really cool facts in there. So you may want to be, may want to copy of that as well. The last part is through that Grand Resilience project, Tantz had mentioned the podcast that are coming out. But what's really cool is that we've been working with farmers and ranchers across the state with interviews. And those interviews will be aired through public service announcement on the Grand Resilience project. And they'll be all on South Dakota radio stations. So you can hear voices of your peers on those stations. Okay, well, unless anyone has any questions, I will turn it back to Jeff Indewelt.  All right, any questions for Collette? All right, about that. Always got to have some kind of technical difficulty. Otherwise, it's no fun. All right. Thank you, Collette. Looks like I'm next on the agenda with a couple of items. First, we'll start with the conservation implementation strategy. Just a quick reminder to everybody out there. March 4th is the deadline for the pre-proposals. We changed the process up a little bit this year to do a pre-proposal process, which is just a short two-page write-up of the project, a quick synopsis to give us an idea of what your project would be. And then we will invite a portion of those pre-proposals back to submit full proposals. So March 4th, which is coming up here in just a couple of weeks, is the deadline. And you can email those proposals into myself and to Jennifer Wirtz, and we will collect those up and get those reviewed and make those invites back out shortly thereafter so that you have plenty of time to work on those full proposals. So that's CIS. I also want to talk about woody encroachment strategy that we've been working on a little bit and give you guys kind of a little bit of an update on that as well. I think for those of you that were on the November State Technical Committee, you would have heard Dorak Tweedwell from University of Nebraska-Lincoln discuss what he's been working on and the impact that woody species encroachment has had on on our range lands. It's a pretty, it's a very interesting set of data that he has and what he's able to show about how woody species encroachment is truly invading a lot of our range lands. And so what we hear in South Dakota have been working on specifically Jessica Maholsky and I have been spending a lot of time trying to develop a strategic plan for South Dakota NRCS and we're not doing it by ourselves, but we want to make sure that we're incorporating the best research, the best information that we have on how to go about reducing woody species encroachment. We definitely want to develop an education and outreach component to that so that we can help producers understand some of those best practices that they can install to help help control woody species encroachment on their on their range lands and we want to work with them to create as many high quality conservation plans as we can to to help them with that process. So and then of course we always want to see that through and help them actually implement those conservation plans and and we're working on developing some some program funding that might be able to be available to those folks to help them implement those conservation plans as well. We did meet with some folks from SDSU Extension to talk about maybe some areas within the state to focus on and I would tell you at this point and these are just tentative I don't want to make this sound like this is set in stone but we kind of picked out seven areas in the state that we thought might be good areas to focus on and and how we came about those seven areas was some of it was based on what we know for local interest in dealing with woody species encroachment and some of it was based on on Dirac's research showing where we might have the the best chance of actually dealing with woody and species encroachment before it actually even gets to be a serious situation for that for that particular area. So we kind of have a combination of both types of areas where where woody species encroachments already an issue and then also a couple areas where we have the opportunity to maybe stop that encroachment before it really even starts. So those and these are just general areas just so that you know that these we're still working on some of this. So one of those is is the White River area where we had a lot of interest down there recently had a a rancher's workshop really had a lot of folks interested in in looking at woody species encroachment down in that area. Also the Mid-Missouri area down in the Lake Andes Charles Mix Gregory County area those folks have been doing some burning for a while down there and of course we want to continue to support them in that. And then we've got a couple spots in the Jim River Valley with Yankton and the Mitchell area where where we were starting to see a lot of encroachment along the Jim River obviously. We're also looking up into the northeast corner of the state up around the Katoa area as another opportunity. And then also these two areas just south appear the Lower Brule Fort Peer Grasslands area and then north appear up to the Cheyenne River as a couple of areas where maybe we can stop some of that woody species encroachment for moving up the river. So those at this point are kind of the seven areas that we've been thinking about trying to start doing a lot of education outreach getting connected with some folks there on the ground that are doing some work and seeing if we can build some build some local interest in in in dealing with woody species encroachment. And then lastly I'll kind of give you guys a heads up part of what we're trying to do and with this strategic plan and these areas is to develop a grassland summit for this fall fall or winter time where we would like to bring a whole lot of partners and producers in to talk about woody species encroachment and kind of help us finalize that strategic plan and finalize a plan on how we can deal with woody species encroachment in South Dakota. So that's that's what this overall effort is kind of leading up to and then hopefully then in 23 we'll also be able to roll out some programs and and start offering some support to our producers who are looking to deal with woody species encroachment. So lastly I guess I would just say that you know we've got kind of a three tier approach that we've been taking first and foremost is you know where are we having success now and working with those folks to help us build build interest and also help make sure that we got the education out there that we need to and then we want to network and partner with as many people as we can. We kind of think this is a whole an issue for the entire state for the most part. As you can see a lot of woody species encroaching all over the state and if you look to our south Nebraska, Kansas you'll you'll see a lot of that encroachment and it's all just moving north and we're kind of considering ourselves the front lines of maybe being able to beat that back a little bit. And then lastly you know we're trying to build up our technical guidance build up our technical adequacy here in South Dakota as well educating our staff so that we can assist producers in a in a good way and help with dealing with that woody species encroachment. So that's what we've been working on and I kind of just want to keep this this topic in front of you keep talking about it and like I said we're working toward putting a summit together for this fall where we can all get together and really hash some of these things out and really maybe put an effort towards beating that green glacier like they like to call it back a little bit and see if we can halt that spread and increase our production on our rangelands that way at the same time so that's kind of the overall goal and I just wanted to give you guys a quick update on that. So anybody have any questions on the woody species topic at all that they'd like to ask on what we're working on? Jeff this is Mark Norton with South Dakota Game Fishing Parks. I was trying to keep track of your seven areas as you were talking about them and I got six so maybe maybe one of them was combined. Is the area north of pier one area and then the Cheyenne River another or is it or did I miss something there? No so we've got the lower brool four pier grasslands which is south of pier obviously and then we're looking also to go from north of pier up to the Cheyenne River that area in general and then we got the Cato, the Mitchell area, the Yankton area and what we call the Mid-Missouri which is Charles-Mex Gregory, Wyman County that area and then the White River area those should be the seven if I counted right. All right thank you. You are welcome. Like I said that's just like we we sat down with a few folks and kind of talked about some areas and those were kind of the seven we picked out. If other folks have some ideas or interests that they think might be out there let us know but we sat down looked at some of that research with Dirac also looked at where we we have existing interest and those were kind of the seven general areas that we picked out. And I was just going to add Jeff that if anybody on this call is interested in a link to recording on YouTube with that data about a 45-minute presentation that Dirac gave to some of our South Dakota NRCS staff it's definitely worth a listen if you are interested in that just reach out to me and I will get you that recording. Okay we'll keep moving on. Next we'll have Jen Wertz join us to give us a quick update on Equip. As she joins us I'll just kind of make a quick comment that in general we're kind of in that time of year with our programs that there isn't a whole lot to report on but we do want to still provide you a quick update so Jen I'll turn it over to you. Thanks Jeff. Good morning everyone like Jeff said I don't have a lot for you today no handout this month so next time I will have a handout with some funding breakdowns of where the applications were at and what ones we funded how many we funded but just to let you know we're starting to move forward with pre-approvals we had a cover crop initiative that came out in 11 states South Dakota was one of them so that is moving forward. We do have a little bit of a hang up in our software system right now that hopefully will be fixed by Friday so we can continue moving forward with obligations on those contracts. We had about a hundred and three cover crops out of over 200 applications that had come in and then a few of our CIS projects some new some from last year are moving forward and we've pre-approved you know about four projects right now five projects excuse me right now and more are getting ranked our general Equip ranking deadline is March 4th as well and we will be moving towards pre-approvals on all of them the following week after that so like I said next time we'll definitely have more information for you but if you guys have any questions at all let me know I can take them now or you can certainly reach out to me after the meeting. Any questions for Jen? Thanks Jen. Like she said we're just in the middle of ranking and just starting some pre-approval stuff so definitely more information to come on that as well. One thing I will mention it was kind of brought to my attention yesterday and this kind of goes along with Equip the potential for for some some I forget the name of the disease off the top of my head but there is there is a chance of it affecting some of our poultry operations here in South Dakota and we're kind of keeping an eye on that been in contact with the state vet veterinarian as well trying to keep an eye on if it's if it's coming to the south of South Dakota area and if it does we'll certainly try to be ahead of it a little bit and offer those producers some assistance with that emergency should it make its way here so just wanted to let you guys know we're at least watching it nothing nothing really to report yet but just letting you know we're trying to be prepared in the off chance that that does come this way and we're trying to take proper precautions from a biosecurity standpoint as well when we visit these operations as well so just have to wait and see how this all actually plays out over the next few weeks and months we also have the mycoplasm bovis that is affecting at least a couple of bison herds here in South Dakota as well and also looking to provide them some assistance depending on how much or how how bad that disease spreads throughout South Dakota here as well so a couple of those things are on our radar nothing nothing real major yet as far as kind of a statewide concern but just think we are keeping our eye on to let you know and then I want to give you a quick update on our cpp we are we've got nine funded projects here in South Dakota they're all in kind of different stages of of process as far as getting those agreements in place and and those kinds of things but to let you know that two of them are are or have held signups for for producers to enroll and we're going to start that contracting process here shortly for those and then we've also got a couple that will be holding signups here in the very near future as we as we get those agreements in place and get those on board so very excited about rcpp and what it's going to bring to South Dakota like I said we've got nine projects that got funded last year so that is very exciting news for us also know that the rcpp proposal process is open right now for folks to submit uh proposals to the national level uh you can you can google rcpp announcement and and find that or it's also on uh grants.gov I believe it's what it's called uh that you can log in there and also search for it and find that announcement of available funding so they did the classic and afa funding announcement together this year I think you guys mostly have heard me speak about that in the past typically those are two separate announcements but this year they are running concurrently so you can apply for the classic and the afa both at the same time you would have to submit two different proposals if you want to put in for both or you can pick one or the other and submit a proposal that way if anybody is interested or has questions about rcpp or or a proposal and you want some some input or guidance on that proposal certainly let me know be glad to help you out and provide you some input on on your proposal and and help you try to at least put your best foot forward and see if we can get some more funding uh for conservation here in South Dakota through that program as well so any questions on rcpp I'll probably try to put a little more of a handout together as we actually are are now starting to to have some announcements and and contracting take place with rcpp finally we'll we'll start giving you an actual report now that we will be starting to get some money on the ground okay with that I will turn this over to Joyce Trevithic to give you an update on csp good morning I'll share my screen briefly with the handout that's with the report that's in your handout just give you a brief update on what's happened with csp in the last couple months since we've met um are you seeing my screen Jeff yes we are oh good okay so for the csp 22 renewals which um um or actually the application deadline on those was last April those were obligated in this past December and uh we had an allocation of 6.628 million and we had 307 357 applications so quite a few applications for that amount of money we were able to contract 44 of those applications that covered 131,834 acres and for a total cost of 6 million 540,206 dollars and 80 cents so that just finished in the South Dakota obligation deadline with December 17th on those then we had the csp gci sign up the 2022 sign up and those letters had been sent out in August to the eligible owners and operators and they were sent out from fsa the farm service agency that obligation deadline was December 31st 2021 and we were able to contract 17 applications which covered 1,838 acres for a total of 165,461 dollars and then our classic csp for 2022 is just in the process those that application deadline was January 21st and at that point we had 523 applications so our initial allocation on that is 8,640,000 dollars there's an additional allocation of 200,000 for organic and that ranking deadline is coming up quickly it's on March 18th and the obligation deadline we've set earlier this year it's April 29th so that pretty much wraps up what's happening with csp right now the following page does have the allocation amounts for each resource unit that is for csp classic that is just now in the assessing process so any questions I'll take them otherwise we'll move forward back to you Jeff all right thank you Joyce you're welcome I'll I'll just add to what Joyce said we moved that obligation deadline up to April 29th with the intent of hopefully allowing our producers an opportunity to get some practices on the ground this spring yet I think a lot of you know typically we'll we'll do obligations into June July and August and that makes it rather difficult for producers to get some of their practices on the ground that you know need to be implemented in the spring or early summer so hopefully with this earlier deadline we'll be able to allow some of that to happen a lot of a lot of the reason why we're able to do that is our funding and those kinds of things came to us earlier this year and so that's allowed us to to hopefully make some of this happen for for our producers so very thankful for that and and we're very hopeful that that'll work out well for our producers here in the long run as well so next on the list we've got Brandon Kotke Brandon's going to give us an update on the ASAP program so I'll turn it to you Brandon all right thanks Jeff morning everybody I'm going to give you a little bit of an update where we sit on ASAP for this year we're about three months I guess I had to schedule over the last three or four years I guess which has been official to our staff and our applicants out there so overall this year we're down a little bit in the application numbers total of 68 for WRE user we're kind of right around that 100 number but we're down a little bit this year as we went through things we're currently at the phase of making our tentative offers to our applicants so so far for this year we are looking at selecting two permanent easements with reserve grazing rights and eight permanent easements as well so we're right around 612 acres for the 10 application so since we're a little bit ahead of schedule our hope is as we go through things and as other states may have some slippage in ASAP funds we're kind of hoping that we can move down our list and maybe select another three to five easements in the coming months as far as ALE we did see some increase in application numbers there as well for this year which is great to see we're currently going through all those offers at this time we have not made any tentative offers and I am hopeful by our next state tech meeting that we'll be able to give you some more details on there and let you know how many of those that we plan to select for this year so again things are moving along pretty good this year so we're excited about that and we're hoping to get a little bit more money so we can get a little bit more easements in South Dakota we still have quite a bit of interest I guess if there's no questions for me I'll turn it back over Jeff all right any questions for Brandon on on the two easement programs all right thank you sir one last topic to bring up with our easement programs and I don't have the official guidance yet it's coming out here in the next couple of weeks but I did ask since we were having state technical committee meeting today they kind of gave me a heads up on what that that new policy is going to be and I wanted to share that with you so that we could have a conversation at some point so before I get too far into what this is I just want to let you know I'm we're not going to spend a lot of time today debating it but what I will ask anybody on here that's interested in in talking about this new policy that's coming out that you get a hold of me and we will schedule a meeting to to talk about this change in policy so what is well let me give you the history last year in 2021 with the drought that hit South Dakota there was a lot of interest in our primary nesting season dates and when we were allowing hang to occur on our easements versus when hang was being allowed on our CRP fields and there was a discrepancy of about two weeks between those dates and so what has happened that that issue got raised well I think it was more than just South Dakota but that issue did get raised at a national level and so so policy is being adjusted to deal with that discrepancy and dates and so what is going to happen is that we're being asked to make our dates align between CRP and our easement programs as to when we will allow hang to occur on on these pieces of of land so what will happen then essentially is that the easement program will adjust its dates to match the CRP hang dates as well so instead of July 15th being the first day that we can start hang easements we will move that to August 1st to match CRP and so those that would like to discuss this more there is there is wiggle room in the new policy that says that if we can justify having two different dates that we can update our wetland criteria our wetland restoration criteria to to justify why we would have an earlier hang date with our easements than we do with CRP so what I would like to do in order to have a you know very productive discussion about those dates is that if there is anybody on here that is interested in in talking about keeping the July 15th date for our easements versus the August 1st for CRP that you get ahold of me send me an email you can drop your name in the chat here today either way will work and I will schedule a meeting now I will tell you that meeting is probably not going to happen until probably mid-March as I don't anticipate that policy actually being issued until about the 1st of March so I don't want to get too far out ahead of when that policy actually comes out and what the wording will specifically say but I have been going to given a preliminary draft of that wording and so I wanted to bring that to your guys' attention that I think this will have a lot of effect especially on our easement holders as far as them being delayed another two weeks before they can do their hang that's going to be kind of a major change for those folks and will obviously cause some some complaining and and and those kinds of things to happen over the next couple of months as we as we roll that out so so anybody on here that would want to be included on that conversation like I said either drop your name in the chat and I'll copy those down or send me an email and I will make sure that you get invited to that to that meeting so we can have a conversation on those dates and decide how South Dakota should move forward with this new policy and when that policy comes out I will share that policy with I'll share with everybody on this call or with the entire state tech mailing list I should say and we can have that conversation and get that meeting lined up at that point so wanted to give you a heads up that that was coming and like I said I I didn't want to wait till the May State Tech I know that the policy will be out before that but May's getting too close to to when we'll we'll be writing our compatible use agreements for easements and those kinds of things and I would like to at least do some kind of outreach to our easement holders before that so we can kind of get this out in front of them before hang really gets really gets going this summer slash fall so wanted to give you a heads up on that and like I said drop your name in the chat or or send me an email and I will I'll make sure you get invited to that meeting so any quick questions on that or comments I didn't want to waste everybody's time spent a lot of time talking about that today but did want to at least get it to your your guys's attention and Jim and Pete I see both your names in there I'll make sure you guys are on it okay um the next topic is the wetland and he'll compliance team update uh Deeks not able to be here with us today so I am going to touch very briefly on his handouts and if you got specific questions about anything certainly reach out to Deekhavik and he would be glad to to answer those questions for you but just wanted to share real quick where we're sitting currently and just kind of continue to keep you guys apprised of of any any requests that we're getting and how old our requests are I think you'll you'll see that we're still doing a good job of trying to keep up with the requests our oldest requests on here are six months or less which is really good as far as that goes and as you can see on here you know a majority of them well a little over half of them actually are two months or less old um so the compliance team is doing a good job of keeping up with those uh requests here in South Dakota so 569 and 1026 is you can see the request age here and how many we've completed and received and uh how the team's keeping up with that on the HEL side you can see the same thing a lot of requests have come in you know they've completed 759 requests since October and they've they've still have just 19 outstanding requests to work on you can see we're still having a lot of new breakings 383 for us grass guys you know that's a lot of new breakings and hopefully we can continue to show the value of rangeland as well so and then he's got a couple of maps in his handouts as well and i'll rotate the view here so it's right here are our 1026 only uh determination requests uh mini ha ha you can see has has between 11 and 21 is the highest number on there excuse me everybody else is at 10 or less and you can kind of see where that workload is and how it's how it's spread out throughout the state on the certified wetland determination requests received you can also see there we've got 229 total requests out there and you can see where all those requests are at as well and then lastly he's got a map in here about where all the requests have been completed so far this year um well since October I believe and you can see there's 350 requests that have been completed as well so I don't have a lot to add to deke slides he wasn't able to join us today as he's working on some appeal training but he did want to make sure that his information was shared with you guys and you had the opportunity to see it and like I said if anybody has any questions or comments about any of that just reach out to deke uh and he'll be glad to to help you out with that um as I I don't know all the ins and outs of his uh slides there but did want to share them and make sure that you guys got a chance to see them any questions on that I could maybe try but I'm I'm going to tell you not too likely not my cup of tea okay lastly we've got an update um from the northern Great Plains Joint Venture I know I saw Steve on here I don't know if Catherine joined as well or who's going to do that update I see Steve's coming on so we'll turn it over to Steve yeah Catherine had a conflict today so I'll uh you'll have to look at my face but uh just uh wanted to take the opportunity to uh uh share a little news we uh just recently entered into an agreement with South Dakota NRCS through the conservation collaboration agreement process to embark on a three-year project to try to integrate science at the field level and particularly we're interested in grassland science related to uh healthy range conditions as well as uh you know the connection to grassland burrs so as a kind of a a key part of that process we uh recently hired a young lady named Krista Erdman and I'll introduce you to Krista she is in Rapid City uh grew up there went to Augustana and then uh followed up with graduate work at Duke uh and most recently she's been working for the division of forestry as a service forester and has been involved with NRCS through that process and I'll ask that Krista join us on the camera and give you a little bit of an elevator speech as to what she's going to be doing uh with the the broad partnership over the next three years Krista yeah thank you Steve hi everyone I'm happy to be here so in this position my goal is to accelerate and amplify conservation action across South Dakota and we identified four main objectives that I'll be focusing on including increasing access by partners to conservation science tools data and research to inform conservation decisions identifying and reducing barriers to conservation programs co-producing science to address locally relevant information needs and then finally bridging the gap in science and evaluations with the outcomes and measures that are needed to inform partner programs uh so this was alluded to earlier in the meeting but there is a lot of science out there and more is being published every day and even though the science is meant to help folks on the ground um sometimes it's just not making it there whether it be too complex or just not relevant at the local scale so essentially my job will be in collaboration with you all to figure out how to bridge that gap um and make the science work for practitioners and our producers across South Dakota so um please feel free to reach out with any questions or to chat about ideas I can put my contact info in the chat box and I look forward to speaking more and working with all of you in the future so thank you thanks Krista so I you know I think you can tell that we're really excited about this partnership and I think it's kind of a cutting-edge opportunity for us to work together to try to just get more relevant tools to the local level so that folks can weave those tools into their decision-making process and hopefully advance conservation as we go along so really want to thank South Dakota NRCS for working with us on this and enabling this to happen and want to just ask all of you to uh where it's appropriate be engaged I would mention that one of the other partners in this group of partners is the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture and we'll be collaborating with them since East River is part of the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture and West River is all within the Northern Great Plains Joint Venture will be working together to try to make sure that we cover the whole state of South Dakota with whatever processes we develop any questions well thanks for the opportunity to introduce Krista and we'll turn it back over to Jeff. All right thanks Steve and welcome Krista. Glad to be joining us today. Okay so that brings us to the end of the official agenda um any of our other partners on here want to give uh any kind of an update or have any comments that they'd like to make okay not seeing any um we will wrap this up uh I'll do that by saying thanks everybody for joining us today. I'm glad this could go fairly quick today we had some just real quick updates to give you uh as we're kind of in that time of year where we're not quite to spring we're thinking we'll really start happening so thanks for joining us today I hope you guys all have a good rest of the week and uh we'll talk to you all again soon thanks everybody Kathy do you need to stop the recording?