The Rivers and Rangelands Podcast

Inciting Incidents - SDSU President Barry Dunn

• Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Hosts: Travis Entenman & Lori Walsh
Guest: Barry Dunn, President of South Dakota State University

Episode Summary

In the premiere of Rivers & Rangelands, hosts Travis and Lori sit down with Barry Dunn, President of SDSU, for a wide-ranging conversation about land, legacy, and the future of conservation in South Dakota. From his Lakota grandfather’s wisdom on stewardship to the responsibility of land-grant universities today, Barry shares powerful stories that connect personal history with ecological vision.

What You’ll Learn

  • 🌱 How Lakota traditions and family ranching shaped Barry Dunn’s land ethic.
  • 🦋 The importance of biodiversity — from fireflies and butterflies to bison herds.
  • 📚 The history and modern responsibility of America’s land-grant universities.
  • 🚜 How precision agriculture and conservation can work hand-in-hand: “farm the best, conserve the rest.”
  • 🔮 Why South Dakota needs a shared vision for its rivers, grasslands, and future generations.

About the Show

Rivers & Rangelands explores conservation, water, and community in the Northern Great Plains. Hosted by Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh, the podcast asks big questions about how we care for our land and water — today and for generations to come.

🎶 Special thanks to Jami Lynn for providing the music for this episode. You can explore more of her music here: jamilynnsd.com

👉 Follow Friends of the Big Sioux River for more episodes, updates, and ways to get involved.

👉👉  And to hear more from Lori, follow So Much Sunlight, a newsletter of essays, poetry, and audio ephemera on Substack!



SPEAKER_00:

I remember fireflies so abundant that we put them in a jar and then in our room at night they would provide light so my little brother Roger and I could read our books. I mean, I mean, I'm serious. Fireflies were everywhere and they aren't anymore.

SPEAKER_04:

to record and see

SPEAKER_02:

what happens. We'll fix it in post.

SPEAKER_04:

We'll fix everything in post, baby.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, welcome everyone to the first episode of the Rivers and Rangeland podcast. I'm Travis Entenman, and I am joined with the lovely Lori Walsh. I'm

SPEAKER_04:

Lori Walsh, a journalist and a conservationist, asking big questions. That's what we decided to do with this podcast, ask big questions about the health of our water, our watershed, grasslands, beyond.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, we want to highlight conservation, the environment of the Northern Great Plains, South Dakota. what people are doing, what are farmers doing, what are business leaders doing, lawmakers doing, what are everyday citizens doing to help our environment, have a sustainable community for the future of our future generations. So I had this idea that maybe Loie Walsh would like to help me with this random thought I had. It wasn't really a planned thing outside of like, ooh, a podcast. Everyone has a podcast.

SPEAKER_04:

And I had just come back from an environmental writing workshop in the Hudson River Valley through my book fellowship and had spent the whole week really thinking deeply and reading great reporting and great essays about the natural world and I wanted to do more of that and you just happened to come and say hey you want to do this with me at the exact right moment

SPEAKER_02:

timing so being a conservation professional you know one area in this part of the the country I felt there was a lack of public conversation around these type of topics watershed health like you mentioned grassland health conservation, regenerative ag practice. There was no outward public conversation. There's a lot of internal within the industry. We're all talking in the conservation field about best practices and what we can do as a state and as a country, but I wanted to try to bring that to a larger audience and everyday folks and highlight what folks are doing and get perspectives, the good and the bad, and have these honest conversations. I am incredibly happy and lucky and enthusiastic that Lori decided to help with this. I

SPEAKER_04:

come from a journalism background, journalism degree, print background, and public broadcasting, public radio background. And I was driving here. We're sitting at Falls Park. We decided to meet outside, close to the river. There's a lovely family nearby eating pizza next to us, wondering what the heck we're up to. You can hear cars. You can hear helicopters flying overhead. And you can hear a little bit of the wind in the trees and the river. But when I was driving down here, I went past the, uh, Jacobson Plaza where, you know, the kids and the families are out there playing and, you know, a splash park so close to the river where your kids can't certainly cannot splash in the river. So here it's, you know, stay away from the water, stay away from the foam, but here's a great safe place for you to get wet and have a good time.

SPEAKER_02:

Here's a manufactured place.

SPEAKER_04:

If you're a family and it's wonderful, but it's also a testament to the, to what's happening in our city a little bit where we have created this really fun manufactured place very close to a natural body of water where people generations before us would have come and recreated and now that recreation is incredibly complicated and ill-advised to say the least as far as water quality so these are big questions that we can ask about how we decide these things

SPEAKER_02:

very big questions and i think it's important for us to have that conversation publicly honestly what what do we hope as a community not status quo if that's what we want that's what we want but is that what we want and we can't know that if we don't have these conversations with community members and people that are making these decisions and it's you know with population of south dakota growing um our economy is changing the demographics of the state is changing it's it's important for us to have these conversations now when we can and have access and ability to do it before we are told to do something so our hope with this my hope with this i can't I don't want to speak on behalf of Lori here, but my hope with this is to at least plant that seed to get people thinking about, you know, these different environmental and conservation topics, because it's not just, you know, you know, folks caring for nature for nature's sake. But it's also there is a lot of touch points in our lives that aren't just, you know, trying to protect trees and grass and water. It's like, how does, you know, clean drinking water impact my family's health? Right. So trying to get that out in the public as best as we can.

SPEAKER_04:

The first person we're going to hear in episode one is Barry Dunn. Yeah. President of South Dakota State University. And this is someone you really, well, you're a graduate of SDSU.

SPEAKER_02:

I am, yeah. My undergrad's at SDSU. As a journalism major, by the way. Nice. So this kind of flows, but not really. I don't know. I forgot everything I learned. But that's not because of SDSU. It's because of me.

SPEAKER_04:

So we headed up to Brookings. We did. To a conference room in the building named after the man who wrote the land grant legislation moral hall yeah right there yeah and we sat and had a nice long conversation with him and of note when public broadcasting aired his speech that he had given at the conference in Sioux Falls some local media outlets picked it up and wanted to send it out in print his words about his grandfather have already gone far and wide across the state and across the country yeah and that's where we started out talking with him

SPEAKER_00:

yeah it's it's I just got a tingle um it's it's really humbling and um really kind of gives me a very warm and, I don't know, contented feeling that it could reach a lot of people. And professionally, I have a voice now as president of South Dakota State, and so I have a little bit of a window to make an impact, and so I'm very pleased that it did and grateful for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. So to Travis's question, how do you explain your land ethic or the land ethic of your grant Well,

SPEAKER_00:

I certainly, my current adult age, have an opportunity to look back on that time with my grandparents as a very special and important part of my life, and not only about a land ethic, but also about some other aspects of my life. So I had a really unique experience basically following the death of my grandmother, to be with my grandfather during that period of grieving, but had many, many years before that with both of them on this large cattle ranch in western South Dakota on the Rosebud Reservation. So my grandfather was a member of the Secundra Lakota and had a very interesting life, fascinating life of growing up an American Indian in South Dakota and then Ended up putting together a very nice cattle ranch and managed it extremely well and got a lot of accolades for it during those last few years of his life. But the thing that struck me was that during the time that I got to manage the ranch, I was the beneficiary of his stewardship. It wasn't so much that he really didn't get to fully appreciate the positive impact that he made and his decisions made. And the ranch is in different hands now, but very successful. And again, those benefits, those ecological benefits from the decisions that he made are now 70 years old and still providing a very positive impact on the environment. It's fun to look back on, very rewarding.

SPEAKER_04:

He wouldn't have talked about it in these terms.

SPEAKER_00:

No. What would he have said?

SPEAKER_04:

If he was in this room with us, I don't know him. So how would he have expressed that to you? He

SPEAKER_00:

wouldn't have been in this room. He wouldn't be talking to us today. He was well-respected in the Valentine, Winter, Rosebud community, but he didn't talk a lot, and he would not have talked about it in terms of ecological responsibility. So I mentioned that he, on Antelope Creek, which actually is a very important waterway in Todd County and goes into Tripp County, and with Rock Creek forms a very important important water flow into the Kiapaha. So the Rock Creek and Antelope Creek form the Kiapaha River that flows into the Niobrara. But in those communities, those are really important waterways. And the Antelope Creek, really, the headwaters of it started on our ranch and his ranch. And when he moved back after World War II, found it very degraded but just abandoned because homesteaders had failed and nothing had been done through the World War II era no roads were built nothing happened in rural America and so he found a lot of opportunity but he found a very degraded resource so he planted native grass which is unbelievable to think about because it was hard to do worked very closely with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service which is the forefather of the NRCS now and he built dams along Antelope Creek which actually small dams which would have backed up small acreages of water but what it did was it slowed things down and then what just is an amazing story for me is that in this degraded landscape of the 1940s. By the 1960s, the willows had come back, the cottonwoods had come back, and the beaver came back, which is so cool to me because the beaver, it's my belief system and a lot of people's belief system that the first real degradation of the Great Plains was the removal of the beaver, which that dried out the environment and hence the Great American Desert. And And so removal of the beaver in the 1830s up through the 1860s was a tremendous negative impact of colonialism on the environment of South Dakota.

SPEAKER_04:

Mass removal.

SPEAKER_02:

It's kind of funny now

SPEAKER_04:

that

SPEAKER_02:

you can get federal funds to put in things called beaver dam analogs. So we are now learning what your grandfather just... instinctively knew was to return these kind of natural functions back to the landscape that was there before we came in and trapped everything.

SPEAKER_04:

Did he instinctively know it? How did he know to put what basically is what we would call an analog beaver dam back?

SPEAKER_00:

How did he know those things? Yeah, I don't know. How did he understand? So his word for ecological succession was go back. So his go back was the land was trying to go back to its native but he found in the 1940s was that homesteaders had plowed up about every flat acre in Todd County to meet their homestead requirement and then when 90% of the homesteaders failed they left that land abandoned and the land then started its successional journey and was covered with weeds and annual grasses and so grandpa said that weeds were mother nature's way of covering her nakedness and and so um how did he know or how did he he had a few courses in business uh at some point in his life and worked in a bank but he did not have a formal education certainly not on on ecology but he had he had been born on that in that country born um and raised he he'd ridden in the last great roundups of the reservations in 1908, 1909, 1910 to remove the Texas cattle from the reservations across South Dakota to open it up, to open them up for homesteading. So he had ridden this country, born in the country, ridden in the country, and he knew it like the back of his hand. So somehow he understood it better than probably anyone I've ever known. He saw it.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, he knew the land.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, he knew the land. And he knew how it had

SPEAKER_04:

been changed.

SPEAKER_00:

He knew how it had been degraded, and he knew somehow he captured. By then, you know, he was well into his 50s and his 60s, and he was putting in practices to help the land recover. And it was intuitive. It was part of his Lakota culture. I have no idea. You know, I was the annoying little grandson following him around. and uh asking a ton of questions and and he um put up with me um and um to learn about native plants from him um with with common names not scientific names but he he understood indian grass big blue stem the the red grasses he called them because in the fall you know they have that little blue stem big blue stem have that red tint to him so he called them the red grasses that they were they were the ecological pinnacle of the prairie he knew that and without having a you know a course in ecology in eighth grade so that was a really great experience to be around him especially as I you know got to be in my teens and then but he he died when I was you know 19 years old or so 20 years old so then it took me a long long time to kind put all this together,

SPEAKER_03:

Lori. Yeah. Red fox, red fox Running through the forest Making me cross You run so free And you never stay When

SPEAKER_04:

did some of those pieces start clicking into you where you would be doing something that you were doing in your own career and it would just click and it would be like, I know what that means because I saw it with my grandfather?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, even in college, taking a course in ecology here at South Dakota State, you know, it was, oh, well, sure, you know, that's what Grandpa did. It was just, you know, you didn't learn about lead plant as a legume or western snowberry as a tremendous plant for grouse and bird species, but he knew knew all that and taught me all that in, not as Western Snowberry, but as Buck Brush. And so he had his, there were their own names for those species. So I had to relearn that part of it.

SPEAKER_04:

Did you have that when I would, you know, I sort of first learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book where she went to college and had to figure out how to weave her indigenous knowledge with the thing she was trying to study, the botany she was, and there was some conflict for her in that. Did you have a moment of conflict or did you just learn and layer it? Like, was there a moment where you were like, well, wait a minute, why is it this and not this thing that I already know?

SPEAKER_00:

For me, it all just kind of made sense as I learned ecology and then, you know, studied range management and range. For me, it just kind of all fit together and it was an aha that this, you know, character in my life was generations ahead of his time. It was really... I found it very affirming and helpful.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you think, and I know you made mention of this, but do you think your grandfather knew he was setting up the next generation to steward that land by putting in these practices? Or was it just purely, I think this is the best way to go forward now?

SPEAKER_00:

No, he, yeah, that's a great question, Travis. But he used words like, you know, he's telling his grandson, you need to leave things better than and the way you found them but that was his message to me was it was about land but it was also about relationships it was about my whole life he felt and if as I understand Lakota culture and that's talk about an ethos that is not he applied it to land but he was trying to get me to apply it to much deeper than that so whatever I found a relationship, a piece of land, a business, whatever, I was to leave that situation better. A university. A state, yeah. Leave it better

SPEAKER_02:

than the way I found it. It's not just unique to landscapes, but you can apply those lessons learned through multiple stages of life and relationships.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and he wasn't... He didn't throw shade on the past. He wasn't overly critical. He understood... he had come to grips with I mean, that decision to open the Rosebud for homesteading was devastating to the Lakota, Sugunju Lakota people, if you think about it. They had a reservation that ran from the Missouri River to what's now western Todd County, the western border of Todd County from the White River to the Nebraska border. It was an incredible, beautiful resource. And they weren't, I mean, the population might have been 2,000 or 3,000 American Indians And so it would have appeared underutilized and underappreciated to white policymakers. And so that flow of European immigrants kept coming, and they opened that up then for homesteading. But that, you know, the breakup of the Great Sioux Reservation was bad enough, and then on top of that, then you open up for homesteading. And I have a lot of friends who are very proud of the fact that there family started in Tripp County or Todd County or Gregory County in 1909 1911 but that you know there was another side of that story that that was somebody else's land and so I think but he didn't he wasn't bitter about it he just was moving forward in his moving forward I think so but you know as a teenager riding in big roundups in a chuck wagon lifestyle That was, so this is the cowboy Indian that I just, you know, just, just. worshiped. Yeah. Because a boy in the 1950s and the 1960s that was full of Roy Rogers and all those cowboy images and gun smoke on TV. And so it was, I didn't have to look very far to see that image for me.

SPEAKER_04:

So how did the land come back into the family then? It was homesteaded and then abandoned. How does...

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So the land was pot marked with some that was homesteaded and some that was still in trust. So he, after World War II, land in Todd County was dollars per acre, the abandoned land. So he got a loan from the Federal Land Bank, what is now Farm Credit Services, and he put together a plan and bought a contiguous part of it that had been owned by C.J. Grossenberg out of bankruptcy that C.J. Grossenberg had bought. And then Grandpa added on additional lands and and put together 12,500 acres.

SPEAKER_04:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. And his grief when grandma died. What ways did you see him express grief?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so the grandpa that really didn't talk to me very much, all of a sudden I was his– we were calving cows, we were really busy, but we went– I drove him to church, I drove him to town because his health was failing and he was brokenhearted. And so this grandfather that didn't talk to me very much all of a sudden was talking to me because I was the only family member around. My parents lived– And my uncle and aunt didn't live in the area. So I was kind of a driving Miss Daisy type character, for those of you who remember that movie. So I got to drive him around and to go visit his, as he grieved, go visit his brothers, go visit my great aunt, his sister-in-law, and just frequently go visit those people to try to help him through that very lonely period of his life. So it was really... He told me, you know, he really opened up during those four or five months. And, you know, we took back roads and showed me where he and my grandma had first gotten married and lived out on the prairie trying to start a ranch. And he showed me the—so it was really poignant. It was really unforgettable.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

have all gone on to great things and then good

SPEAKER_04:

We talk about being here in this conference room when we first started, and let's broaden that lens a little bit to be here on the campus of a land-grant university. Help people who don't know what that means understand what that means, and then we'll get into a little bit about how you've taken that mantle and said, well, this is what it can mean. This is what perhaps it should mean.

SPEAKER_00:

The land-grant system, there's 52 major land-grants, one in each state, and then there's some historically black colleges that have been in it. and some tribal colleges, but that in 1862, Lincoln and others, but President Lincoln and Justin Morrill, who was the author of the Land-Grant Act, who was a representative from Vermont, they saw with great anticipation that they felt that they would win the Civil War, and then they saw a great expansion of the Industrial Revolution coming after the Civil War. To do that, they needed engineers literally to design railroads, bridges, streets. So with great prescient thinking, they started a series of public universities, one in each state, and basically built around the industrial sciences of engineering and agriculture. And the agriculture part of it was that they knew during that industrial revolution that as people migrated to the cities, whether that be that freed slave or whomever, that they needed to be fed. And so agriculture had to come along with engineering and this great industrial revolution that they foresaw, which happened. And so agricultural research was a big part of the land grant system. So up until then, universities in America were privately owned, usually associated with a Christian church and only for men. And so the land grant system in the language itself says for all, A-L-L. And so that's revolutionary in the history of the world. Nobody had ever thought of that or done that before. They were pragmatic enough to say, look, we can't just educate a few rich engineers. We need lots of engineers. We need lots of agriculturalists. So they built this system of what's called land grant... universities. And it's been an enormous success. The land grants responded to that early challenge and built roads and built highways. And in 1862, Lincoln also signed what has become the Transcontinental Railroad Act. So he saw this expansion coming. And they've also revolutionized food production. And so varieties of all the major crops were studied and tried to, were using pretty simple genetics, alien genetics to improve them so they would be more productive the kind of the ironic um twist to that was he they didn't have any money they were fighting the civil war so he paid for that with land and that was he gave grants to each state 30,000 acres per senator and per house of representative member to pay for the land grant system and that land of course was mostly western land that had been taken from the western tribes with broken treaties and that's the kind of the poignant story behind the land grant system that wasn't acknowledged or talked about for many many years but has become talked about now and addressed

SPEAKER_04:

So

SPEAKER_00:

for all. whom the land was taken. So that's our Wakini initiative. So we're serving, we're trying to serve all of South Dakotans, just like the original act challenged us to do. Could you expand on that initiative a little bit? Our goal is to have the population of the student body to reflect that of South Dakota in terms of demographics and race. And so We know that 9% to 10% of the population of South Dakota is American Indian, and our goal is to have the student body reflect that. And so we've used private dollars as scholarships to enrolled members of tribes to help them achieve a college education. We're in our eighth year. It's hard, but we've got some really exciting success stories, too.

SPEAKER_04:

And conceptually, this is also a first- its kind initiative and has gotten national and international attention.

SPEAKER_00:

I think we're doing it the right way. We haven't talked about land back. That's not going to be considered. We're not trying to be controversial. We're trying to solve problems and provide opportunities for young people. We're taking the relatively small flow of resources that we get from our land grant land and we use that to help build student success on campus for American Indians we built with private dollars with donated dollars we built an American Indian Student Center and we do provide we have over 20 million dollars in an endowment for scholarships so so we're gradually increasing the number of American Indian students on campus and pretty dramatically increasing the success of those students on campus So this was first in the state or first in the nation type of program? It's first in the nation. Nobody has ever, nobody has, no other state or no other land grant university has done it either. The other land-grant

SPEAKER_04:

university has said that it should be a philosophy.

SPEAKER_00:

Or a commitment. Yeah, or a commitment. Some states have provided. Montana's done a nice job. I think Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin have provided free tuition for American Indian students in their public higher ed. That's probably not going to happen in South Dakota, so we found another way.

SPEAKER_02:

That's incredible. I went to SSU and I did not know that, and I apologize. Sorry.

SPEAKER_04:

It's only been eight years. It's only been eight years. broadly about how that education happens because there's a lot of tension between different ways of doing business and there needs to be an ethic behind it as well. So from your position as president, what kind of leadership can you offer for thinking about this more deeply?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, when I became, I was the dean of agriculture here for six years before I became president. During that time, we really pushed the practices related to precision agriculture. Most of South Dakota agriculture is at a very, very large scale. But whether it's large-scale agriculture or small-scale agriculture, precision agriculture is what I stressed and we partnered with Raven Industries and South Dakota Corn, South Dakota Soybeans, South Dakota Wheat, and built a beautiful facility to help teach the model principles of precision agriculture which using satellite technology but also really good economic and really fundamental basic business ideas that you you know it's reduced down to its maybe its simplest words is you farm the best and conserve the rest because on a quarter section of land or a section of land there's a great the tagline for South Dakota used to be the land of infinite variety well that variety existed on every exists on every acre every quarter section every section and so precision agriculture allows a farmer to precisely apply the practices of tillage or hopefully no tillage but then also seeding and crop rotations and herbicides and and pesticides at an economic optimum rather than just kind of a blanket application because that variation in those soils on that quarter section of land, for example, not every acre will produce 200 bushel corn. Some will produce 250 bushel corn, some will produce 150 bushel corn. So if you can vary the rate of seeding, vary the rate of application of inputs then you optimize the production from the land and you don't over fertilize and you don't over you actually you try to the best word is optimize but you try to actually you're trying to minimize the use of external inputs into it into those lands so it's very exciting we've partnered with Raven but many other companies we were part of that revolution to pursue use the right amount of seed on each acre or each it can be sort of smaller than that each square meter of land can have a different seeding rate because it you know if it's if it's on top of the hill and and and kind of drouthy then you don't need 30,000 seeds per acre you might the optimum might be 15,000 but in the in the lower where there's some water compensation deeper soil you might be able to plant 32,000 seeds per acre. So variable rate seeding, variable rate application of everything is precision agriculture, and that's what we've been promoting.

SPEAKER_02:

Have you seen large-scale adoption of these practices for the students that are in the programs but also taking those back to the farm? Have you seen that transition happening? Is it slow progress? Is it happening quickly? What's your perspective on that?

SPEAKER_00:

I think the application South Dakota's farmers have been early adopters for a long, long time. They were really early adopters of hybrid seed corn. They were, going back 70 years, they were early adopters of genetically modified seeds. And so they've adopted this technology quite dramatically, which is good. I think there's a second side of that, though, is that those acres that don't produce very well because they're either too wet or they're too dry getting them planted back to grass mix which we with Governor Noem and a group of us started a program called Every Acre Counts and so that's a conservation program to put the acres out of that quarter section that don't produce an economic return to you plant them back to grasses and get an economic return from the wildlife that's produced or just get a get a you know not everything needs a dollar on it and so not using that 15 acres over in that one corner that doesn't produce very much because it's marginal land has some benefits to the greater society if it's not farmed every year so I think every acre counts Travis the adoption's been slow But there's some pretty dramatic anecdotal stories about how powerful it is, and hopefully those will pick up.

SPEAKER_02:

So for that program, you're using precision egg technology while coupling that with hoping to get conservation back on the ground by bringing those to maybe... folks might think are counteractive principles coming together to make one landscape productive on a large scale.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly, right. So farm the best, conserve the rest.

SPEAKER_04:

Do you find that students are coming to you now with a sense of, you know, is that attention to them or is that natural? Of course we would farm the best and conserve the rest. Of course, as farmers and ag producers, we're interested in public good. for the lands that we steward. You

SPEAKER_00:

know, Laurie, I think having been in that farmer's chair at the kitchen table, I think the pressure, the short-term pressures of the economics of farming kind of overwhelm some of these discussions. You know, extremely high capital investment. These are big, big businesses now, and So I think the pragmatic part of it to try to reduce total cost of inputs is the bigger story right now. And so I think that makes intuitive sense to farmers and their sons and daughters who come to us. I think the conservation aspect of it is a positive story, but secondary to most South Dakotans.

SPEAKER_04:

Could it even be one more pressure? Yeah. You know, if you increase this and say, well, this is for the, this is a good, I think someone said like the good of society. Well, if I'm the kid who's trying to, you know, keep the business operational that has been passed down to me from, you know, three or four generations, not only am I struggling to get the bottom line, but now I'm struggling to be part of the good of public society. There's a lot of pressure on me if I'm 21. Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And you know that, um, you see, I think we see, I'm not sure what the future holds, But in the past 20 years with the farm service programs around conservation have certainly pushed some really good conservation practices onto the land and rewarded farmers, kind of whether they had that ethic or not. The NRCS and the farm service agencies have tried really, really hard to push a reward system representing society, Lori, right? And I think it's been pretty successful. I mean, there's EQIP programs and the more years I'm in this role as president, the further I get away from some of those, what's happening on the land. Cause I don't, I'm not down at the farm service agency, but very often, but I think they've done a good job. Tried some NGOs, non-government agencies like, or organizations like Pheasants Forever And Ducks Unlimited have done a really good job partnering with NRCS to promote conservation and the adoption of those practices. And they've had projects along our rivers to help get some of it, especially the Jim River, as I understand it. With CREP. Yeah, with the Conservation Enhancement Program. And literally thousands and thousands of acres along the Jim

SPEAKER_02:

River have been done. Up to a point, I think 100,000 was the goal. I think they got very close to

SPEAKER_01:

that.

SPEAKER_00:

So I think society as a whole has expressed itself through the farm program, which included conservation as a requirement.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, I see.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

to kind of note on that too, the one thing I've found working with farmers and ranchers is I've never met one that doesn't have a land ethic and they want to do the right thing, but that economic driver is the main driver, the economic impact of all that. So it's a challenge.

SPEAKER_04:

Can the economic... thing be the right thing?

SPEAKER_02:

It can. I think that's kind of the hurdle is making conservation the most economic practice for that farmer or rancher. So, you know, having these voluntary programs through Natural Resources Conservation Service or, you know, CRP is very familiar to a lot of folks. Getting that economic driver out there so if they have to choose between row crop or putting it back to grass, they'll choose grass because there is enough going on there economically for them to make a positive return on it. I see.

SPEAKER_04:

In your remarks about your grandfather, you told a story about wildflowers just like blooming and sort of seeing this land ethic blossom before you. And then you mentioned, you know, wildlife, you know, an acre that's not perhaps tilled or planted. And I've been reading about shifting baseline syndrome and this idea that like we look at something and we think, oh, look at all this wildlife because this is so much more than I knew growing up but then you go back to your grandfather's time and he would have his expectation would be even bigger because he saw a bigger landscape of wildflowers how do you deal with this idea that our perception of what is normal might change over time as things are reduced buffalo herds reduce we see a small herd and we think that's amazing we have no concept of millions of buffalo running across the landscape of this place how do you think about changing perspective especially as you are in your position longer and the people who keep coming in are a little bit younger each year it feels like I bet

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's what I have remarked for quite a few years I've been talking about butterflies and so I'm really intrigued with butterflies and I had a 8th grade class where I had a butterfly collection or insect collection. And what struck me at some point as an adult was that I noticed that, and I don't remember the year, but it was when I, it's 20, 30 years ago. I came to the kind of the aha that if I was given that same task by my eighth grade teacher, I would not be able to complete it because the insect population around me has been so reduced. I remember fireflies so abundant that we put them in a jar and then in our room at night they would provide light so my little brother Roger and I could read our books. I mean, I'm serious. The fireflies were everywhere and they aren't anymore.

UNKNOWN:

music

SPEAKER_00:

I had that kind of aha, like the flowers on my grandfather's land. So I've been talking lots about butterflies. So one day on a Saturday afternoon here on campus, Jane and I live in the president's home, and Jane loves flowers, so we've got flowers all over. We had helped students move in, and I was pretty well tired and put on some shorts and kind of an old T-shirt, and I was sitting down and I looked out the window and the swallowtail butterfly was in Jane's flowers and so I rushed out with my camera and my phone and was taking pictures of this beautiful swallowtail butterfly which is you don't see a lot actually sadly and the police the campus police drove up and came across the lawn and they said oh it's you and I said what do you mean and Well, we got a report that there was a strange old man peeking in the president's windows. So that was me, that strange old man. So that's me, Laurie. That's a strange old man who loves butterflies, trying to protect them. And I've sent pictures of my butterflies, pictures to friends all over. I talk about them frequently as that key species. And I might not, I'm not a PhD ecologist, but I understand key species. And I'm going to offer them up as a key species. that we should be concerned about because as we watch their decline then other really important insects also are in decline we know that with honeybees and we know that with all kinds of species so that concerns me a lot and so I've been kind of using that butterfly story that it's really going to be a sad day if the only place a grandpa and his grandchild can see a butterfly is in the butterfly house in Sioux Falls or in a museum of natural history. And I don't think we're far from that, sadly. I would challenge people to count the number of swallowtails they've seen so far. I haven't seen one this summer yet, and I've seen some monarchs. So I'm very, very concerned about the overall trend of the ecology of the world around us.

SPEAKER_04:

Thank you for that. I will never forget fireflies in a jar in your reading book. by them

SPEAKER_00:

that's exactly that's a definition wasn't great wasn't great life of shifting baseline syndrome you know of like what you yeah exactly yeah where you where you had something was so abundant so to your point about bison yeah something was so abundant that that we could have this novel little nine-year-old approach to how we could sneak some more reading in at the end of the day

SPEAKER_04:

yeah yeah

SPEAKER_00:

that there's also some great stories though um you know i i i I do think that the Scotty Phillips story should be heralded as one of the great conservation stories. I mean, who else saves a species? Who saved the trumpeter swan? It's a great story for all of us to know how Scotty Phillips and his wife saved, along with Fred Dupree captured and rounded up some 80 head of bison or buffalo in 1890 or whatever it was. And most of the bison in Custer State Park and in the national parks in South Dakota could trace back to Scotty's herd. And so we've got that example right here in South Dakota, one of the great ecologists in history. He and four or five other families are credited with saving the bison. So we've got that story right here in our state. He's a fantastic character to learn about. And so why did my grandfather practice the conservation practices that he did or implement the conservation practice he did? Why did Scotty Phillip and his wife save 80 head of bison? I mean, it's a fantastic story.

SPEAKER_04:

Sometimes you just do the thing that you're supposed to do. Sometimes you just do the right thing

SPEAKER_00:

yeah yeah and people did so it was it's great and it it wasn't just Scotty because um as I understand the story Fred Dupree and his wife had had nurtured some baby calves um and uh so it's a goes it's a terrific South Dakota conservation story

SPEAKER_04:

yeah yeah thank you

SPEAKER_02:

why is it important for us as a community to have conversations like this around conservation the environment what we had what we have now what can we do for the future why is that important for Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

I think that what I find lacking, and it's because we're so overwhelmed now. Seriously, my childhood was very simple. It seems very, very simple in the 1950s and 60s versus a child growing up today. Strong nuclear family, very simple, very low middle class. class, but certainly a very wonderful childhood. I just worry that those that were missing out, we don't have a vision. So maybe it was my grandfather's vision that he had seen in 1905 or as he was born in 1890. Maybe he had that vision, Lori and Travis, that we're missing right now about what the big Sioux River could look like, what the prairie could look like, what our lives, how many butterflies are the appropriate number for children to watch and to marvel at. So I think what we're missing is a cohesive vision about what we could do as society in terms of living in this very complex world now, lots and lots of pressures, but in terms of water quality or soil erosion, wind erosion, what what's acceptable, what isn't, and what's our societal responsibility, what's landowner responsibility. We don't have a vision for that. We're so, everything is so temporal and so forced and kind of, there's so many kind of immediate pressures that we've lost that ability maybe to create a longer term vision of how we'd like to live and what we'd like, and the environment we'd like to live in.

SPEAKER_03:

I don't care in my house with me I stay rooted in this hell Now all my curves have each got corners Like I've outgrown some old shell I know someday the Lord will break me And I can stretch out every limb Embrace these bones against the comings No, I think, was that

SPEAKER_02:

kind of what you were thinking? Yeah, I think so. I felt good about that. I did too. I don't know, did we do a good enough job explaining what the podcast was?

SPEAKER_04:

I mean... So

SPEAKER_03:

a

SPEAKER_04:

little bit there with Barry Dunn. Where are we going next? We're going to see Jay Gilbertson. We're going to head up to Eagan,

SPEAKER_02:

South Dakota next. We're going to Eagan to the Big Sioux Rural Water Treatment Facility to talk with Jay Gilbertson about water quality, water quantity. Water rights. Water rights. Water law. Just get deep in.

SPEAKER_04:

We're going deep in the well.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes,

SPEAKER_04:

deep in the well. Deep in the well with Jay Gilbertson. Rivers and Rangelands podcast by Travis Entenman, Lori Walsh. We are producing this ourselves and our friends. And Jamie Lynn is providing the music for this episode and episodes in the future. You can follow us, like us, rate us on your podcast platforms. That helps us be found in the acoustic landscape of South Dakota right now.

SPEAKER_02:

The Rivers and Rangelands podcast is being hosted by Friends of the Big Sioux River. And you can find more information about the podcast on the Friends of the Big Sioux River website. social media. And as we grow, we will expand our reach and access and provide the content that you would like to hear. I hate the word content. Ah, no content. The stories and conversations you would like to hear. Yeah,

SPEAKER_04:

I don't do content.

SPEAKER_02:

That's

SPEAKER_04:

good to know. Make

SPEAKER_02:

a note. Make a note. Content bad. Now we're just two crazy people at a park bench with families around us and we're talking to a microphone

SPEAKER_04:

and the thing is nobody's even looking at us like no one cares no one cares there's nothing interesting to see here because everybody has a podcast everyone has a podcast

SPEAKER_03:

embrace these bones against the So.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Lori Walsh

Host
Head Shot

Travis Entenman

Host