Salinity often triggers a simple response: draw a line around the affected area, take it out of production, and manage it separately. While this can address visible symptoms—like white crusts and poor crop performance—it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. As NRCS Resource Conservationist Shane Jordan says, “You can box it out if you want—but it just keeps moving.” That’s because salinity isn’t the beginning of the problem; it’s where the system finally shows stress. When wat

Most soil loss doesn’t happen in storms—it happens on ordinary spring days. In dry conditions across South Dakota, steady winds are quietly moving soil, nutrients, and long-term productivity off exposed fields.

Soil salinity is re-emerging across South Dakota fields. After a wet year followed by dry conditions, salts are rising to the surface. Here’s why—and what it means for producers.

In January 2021, Joe Dickey visited Reid Suelflow near White Lake, South Dakota, to document how winter corn grazing and bale grazing reduce feeding costs while improving soil health. We are going to listen.

After years of winter calving and rising feed costs, the Kammerer family of western South Dakota shifted their system to align calving with green grass. The result? Lower weather risk, reduced hay bills, and a renewed focus on land, labor, and family.We are not going to extract content. We are going to listen.

The ranch is divided now. Fence lines mark more than property, they mark change. What fragments with land is not just acreage, but memory. Knowledge. Belonging. Standing where cattle once grazed, it becomes clear that regenerative agriculture is not a technique. It is attention. Presence. Intimacy with place. You cannot love what you do not know and knowing takes time. We are not going to extract content. We are going to listen.

On a seventh-generation ranch near Piedmont, South Dakota, Jimmie and Riley Kammerer manage grass, cattle, and family together—building resilience through thoughtful grazing, husbandry, and shared work.

This open winter can be a unique opportunity to experiment with bale grazing without making a complete system change commitment. Winter management can be made easier than you might think by starting small, lowering daily feeding pressure, and letting the land do the work.

Two people can look at the same weed and see entirely different things—problem, signal, or resource. What we see shapes how we manage and whether our systems hold up over time.

“Nothing surprised me,” he said. “We simplified the system—and nature filled the gaps.”

“I saw cattle bring the desert back,” Ray says, “and transform it back into native rangeland. It changed the local climate. He’s getting more rain now.”

Drought resilience isn’t something you buy in a jug or fix in one season. Long-term work from Dakota Lakes and other dryland regions shows that rotating warm- and cool-season row crops builds stronger roots and more reliable soils, helping corn handle dry years better than no-till alone ever could.

“We were told you can’t increase organic matter in the South… I couldn’t promote something I didn’t know anything about. I just needed questions answered.”

“Standing in Jesse Hall’s field, Joe and I exchanged that familiar look — the one we’ve shared with several South Dakota producers — because once again someone was demonstrating a truth that runs against the old playbook: you don’t fix water problems with tillage; you fix them with biology.”

Step behind the lens to explore South Dakota’s grasslands and the ranch families restoring them, one sunrise, one pasture, and one story at a time.

we still have much more to share on the tillage conversation — and this piece offers a timely refresher before we dive deeper into the economics of rotation and soil resilience.

Can you really graze cattle year-round? South Dakota ranchers Pat Guptill and Bart Carmichael say yes — not through miracle, but through mindset. By calving on grass, managing for plant diversity, and timing their moves with nature, they’ve cut feed costs, restored their soils, and rediscovered joy in ranching. Watch the Year-Round Grazing video .

How collaboration among farmers, ranchers, and scientists like Dr. Ray Weil turned soil health from a niche idea into a growing agricultural movement.

At Wedge Tent Ranch near Faith, SD, Bart Carmichael shows how adaptive grazing, humor, and humility can turn harsh prairie country into a thriving, resilient landscape.

Cover Crop Mix In early September 2013, just before the Atlas storm swept across the Dakotas, I met Dr. Mark Liebig at the USDA-ARS laboratory in Mandan, North Dakota. He handed me a single laminated sheet — the now-famous Cover Crop Chart — a visual guide to plant diversity that still feels timeless, like a periodic table for living systems. Each square on that chart represented not just a species but a function in the soil ecosystem. I’d first encountered the idea of crop