A Question of Quality - Jay Gilbertson Part 1

Hosts: Travis Entenman & Lori Walsh
Guest: Jay Gilbertson, Manager of East Dakota Water Development District

Episode Summary

Rivers & Rangelands Episode 2 invites listeners into a lively conversation with Jay Gilbertson, manager of the East Dakota Water Development District. Hosts Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh unpack South Dakota’s complex water landscape, diving into the science behind aquifers, the evolution of local water protection ordinances, and what it takes to keep clean water flowing for communities and agriculture. Jay blends decades of expertise in geology and water management with stories of prairie policy, wellfield science, and the challenges facing both rural and urban development. Tune in for deep insights into how public agencies, landowners, and local governments cooperate to preserve water quality in the Big Sioux River Basin—and, with plenty of warmth and humor, learn why these prairies’ water stories matter for the future of South Dakota.

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!

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

The water in some of those deep bedrock units, the water is not wonderful. It's wet. Is about all you can say for it. The Flaming fountain, flaming fountain in pier, yeah, at Capitol Lake, yeah, water that burns naturally. Think about it. Naturally burns. Okay? If you had no other source of water, you figure out a way to make that work. If you have almost any other choice, we'll take option B, please not supporting water. It's not the best stuff. You Travis, welcome to rivers and rangelands podcast. I am Travis Entenman joined with I'm Lori Walsh. Nice to see you. Good to see you again. It's like we just saw each other not too long ago. We've done another one. We went through one, and people seem to like it. And so we're back, and instead of gathering at the river today, we are gathering because of a little rain, yes, at one of our favorite planning places in downtown Sioux Falls, where we meet for lunch between our two offices, and have been talking about this podcast for months, months. So we're downtown Sioux Falls at bread and circus, which they have a lovely patio. So you're gonna hear a lot of good traffic. Maybe a train. It's a big train day, big train day here in Sioux Falls. Maybe some rain, if it actually rains. So Jay Gilbertson is coming up here, and I think it's worthy to know that we headed to Egan. And the first time we went to Egan, you made it and I did not. We had to reschedule. This contest has been months in the making, multiple trips in the making. I took a wrong turn, and I ended up in the wrong place, but I was, in fact, on time. You were on time in the state, yes, just the wrong direction, just in the middle of nowhere. About half you can't trust technology. Google Maps stayed around second time we met with Jay. There was a wonderful interview. He gave us two, three hours of his time, yeah, yeah. And we just talked water, and we went up to the sea Wellhead Protection area, which I did not know existed. How long have you known Jay Gilbertson? I've known Jay, oh, geez, probably seven, eight years now, yeah, with my role through friends of Big Sioux River. So Jay Gilbertson, if you don't know, runs east Dakota Water Development District, it's kind of, I like to say the water czar on the Big Sioux River Watershed down to Minnehaha County. It's like a quasi governmental agency, and basically they help regulate manage our water resources. They do water testing. They know the legislation around the water in South Dakota, and then they make sure we are using it correctly in their territory. We're gonna break that conversation up into four parts, four parts because it is super interesting, yes, but we think four parts is gonna be easier for you to search through and find. After you listen to it, you say, I wanna go back and listen to this other part again. Also, we stretched my brain a little, I'm not gonna lie, there's a couple moments in there I was like, what? And I learned new things, and you learned a few things that you were wrong about. Oh, yeah, of course, I was. I'm usually wrong about things, and it was nice to have the expert. So Jay is the person you know in my role of friends. He's the person that I go to to get clarification on statute or the right way to do water testing or pollutant loads, and like kind of my go to person for that. So it was wonderful to sit down with him and have him correct some of the thoughts I had, too. And one of the reasons I like sitting here at bread and circus. We have not asked their permissions. We have to clarify whether they want to be mentioned in our podcast. One of the reasons I like sitting here at a busy downtown restaurant is because this conversation with Jake Gilbertson is also all about growth of a city like this, and you can't grow if you do not have water, you just can't I water is everything for a city, for a community, you know, for human health, it is one of the fundamental pieces of economic development, even though we often don't frame it as such. Will Sioux Falls be able to grow the way it is in 20 years without these conversations, probably not so we need to have them now, and I think this works to do that. You. Let's talk about the report, what that tells you, and why it's there. And, yeah, it's in the report. It's in the report. That's what you're gonna hear. It's in the report. And if you don't like what's in the report, that's where the conversation starts. Yeah, yeah. Where to go from here? I think that would be a good conversation. So, well, right? Somebody has to read it. I mean, it's, it's the, it's a compendium of of the quality water in South Dakota, the lakes and streams. And it's published every two years by the state. That's one of our Clean Water Act requirements. And every year, two people read it, maybe that aren't named Jay Gilbertson and EPA. Yeah. So what's it called? What's the title? It's the integrated South Dakota integrated report for surface water quality assessment, and it's actually tied to a couple of sections of the federal Clean Water Act, 303 D, 305 B, which are integrated in this report. These are our standards. These are the waters that have been assigned a particular beneficial use, like swimming, and based on the available data that we have, this is a statement as to whether or not that water body supports the designated uses the statement, yeah, it doesn't get into how, how well it supports it, yeah, if bad is bad, it's a binary sort of decision, you know? Or, yeah, oh my god, right over right. And that's a lot of what we're dealing with in the Big Sioux River Basin is the initial non support status was the OH MY GOD level sort of stuff. And the various watershed projects, activities or groups like the Big Sioux River Project, or friends of the Big Sioux River have improved the water quality, lowered the number of violations, but it's still technically not supporting. It's still impaired. It's still impaired, but that percentage so yeah, let's talk about the integrated report. So it's federally mandated through the EPA Clean Water Act. It's a Clean Water Act requirement. So did the current iteration of the the IR start in the early 2000s Well, the reports compiled in a single document, okay, the integrate, the integrated report started probably about 20 years ago, but there was testing. Part of that. The testing has been taking place. And the important part of that requirement was what was called the 303 D list. Section 303 of the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act is a listing of the impaired or non support waters. And so we had a 303 D list. And then what was called a 305 B list, which was all of it three or 3d is a subset, sure. And they put two of those out. And somebody finally got smart and said, Hey, let's combine these two documents. Might be easier for folks looking for the five people who read it, a little less work, right for them, and it comes out every two years. Obviously, a bunch of explanatory material about, you know, what it's about, and what the standard testing, mythology tested, yeah, the methodologies, the requirements for data you need to have for a river segment like the Big Sioux River running, yeah, past Eagan here, segment seven, I think it is data that's used has to be collected using accepted protocols, processed in a laboratory that is meets certain standards. If there are multiple data points in a given day, only one gets used, and it's typically the worst sample. Well, not typically it is. It is a bad sample. And so if you take five samples on a segment, five of them, or four of them are good and one is bad for that day, the segment has a bad rating, right? And so what we've done over the years with the water development district. Sampling is adjusted when we go to certain places, because we know where the segment boundaries are. We want to get a good we want to get a representative picture of the river in that segment. The case of the moody county area where we are right now, we've got two sites where we'd like to get data. They tell us something important. Well, if we take both samples on the same day, one of them doesn't count, and so our standard circuit picks up one of those on the Monday run and one of them on the Wednesday run. We sample both locations, and both samples count. So. For that activity. And so yeah, there's you need a certain number of samples. Support status is a function of how many of those samples, what percentage violate. And in some instances, like dissolved oxygen, you know, usually too much is a bad thing. In the case of dissolved oxygen, too little is a bad thing. And so if the standard is not met, that's a black check. And if more than 10% of the samples over the period of record are black checks, then it's considered non supporting, right? Red Fox. Red Fox, running the back up a little bit, because we dive right into the report, but I want to set the scene, because the report sitting on a table in a conference room, and you mentioned Egan, there's a lawn mower outside. It's a cloudless day in South Dakota summer. Why are we here when we when we said we wanted to talk to you, and we end up at this place? Where are we and what's happening here in this part of South Dakota? I guess we're here in part because it's part way between Brookings and Sioux Falls. It's early in the morning and my grandkids aren't available, so there's no reason for me to drive down to Sioux Falls right away in the morning. But no, we're here at the Office of the Big Sioux community water system, one of the what are called our regional or rural water systems. They've got a nice facility the boardroom, the young kids outside mowing the grass, and that's the lawn mower you hear in the background. You unlock the door for me and unlock the door. That's very good. That's very good. What happens in this place? What happens in this building? What happens in this place is outside are up to a dozen different wells in the ground, drilled down into and then established in what's called the Big Sioux aquifer, Big Sioux community water, pulls water out of those wells, brings it here into the treatment plant. It is manipulated so that it meets the appropriate standards, softened or things removed, or things added, and then from here it is distributed to most of moody County and a good chunk of Eastern Lake County, the lake Madison area in particular. And this is the public water supply for those folks. It's really probably the only public water supply in moody County. So if you live in moody County, this is where your water's coming from. Live in moody County, unless you have your own well, okay, this is where your water comes from. They deliver water to Flandreau, they deliver water to Trent, to Egan, to Coleman. Ward, I think technically, has its own well, but there's only, like, eight people, so they can have their own. They can have their own well, but yeah, if you are, if you are hooked up, if you are not generating your own water, odds are pretty good your water is coming from here, which is a good thing. You know, we have economies of scale. They can treat a bunch of water and do it very efficiently. The bad side is that if something were something bad were to happen, you know, looking at the window, I can see part of the well field. If a truck came down Highway 34 and tipped over and dumped bad things on the ground that could quickly contaminate one or more of the of the wells, and a lot of people in people are going to be in big trouble, right with that, and but it also makes it easy to protect if you've just got that one spot, right, bad things are going to happen, or Somebody wants to do a development that might generate contaminants, you can say, well, that's great. There are 127 different locations in moody County where that would probably be okay. You need to be safe. But there's a couple of them right here where, like, no, that's not something we're going to allow because, for for that reason, the contamination issue, if something goes wrong, right here, a whole bunch of people are in big trouble. Yeah, I noticed on the way in. So we turned off onto this gravel road, and you see signs throughout as you're driving saying, well, head protection area. Oh, exactly. So these big fields of native prairie, or at least grasslands, that are actively helping to protect the well fit, yeah, they're called well hit protection areas. Not terribly original. I need to work on real creative name, real creative naming. That was something that was initiated, actually by the well. Water Development District, working with initially, Brookings County back in the late 80s, as EPA was starting to recognize that protecting the groundwater was a good idea, sure. And so what were developed were maps of the counties with the shallow aquifers, sand and gravel right at the surface, like we have here the Big Sioux aquifer and so forth. And then individual public water supplies that were using those shallow aquifers were identified. Information about how much water and which way the groundwater was moving was gathered, and portions of the aquifer that were contributing water to that well or well field were mapped, and then zoning ordinances were adopted that protected the shallow aquifer in general, but for areas like here at Egan, where You're right by the well, then there were additional protections put in place. The things that are allowed are relatively few pre existing activities. Obviously, were left alone. But if you want to come into a Wellhead Protection area or zone, a the list of things you can do is pretty short the list of things that are not allowed is a lot of like, No no and oh hell no. That works. So there's ag around here, though, yes, there's ag around here, yeah. And what people can farm? Yeah, there people can farm what has happened, and here at Big Sue is a great example. And I'm trying to think reaching for a map, but the flu, the this area on the map is the well protection area. And so what the rural water system has done over the years is work with landowners within that area. They can't make them behave, if you will. They can't dictate what happens, but they can work with the landowner and say, look, the federal government has programs for landowners, conservation, CRP, sure. You know, if you would like to enroll some of your ground into CRP, that would be fantastic, and maybe we could offer you an additional incentive on top of what the Feds would do to get you into that program, because variety of benefits that come from that. From a water quality standpoint, if you're not trying to grow something, it probably means you're not adding amendments to the ground like fertilizers or something else that could get into the water and cause problems or and they've done that here, work with the landowners and take additional soil samples so that they know exactly how much fertilizer is needed in a given field, sure. And so rather than saying, Well, you know, we'll put 20 pounds or whatever the number is across the field, just to make sure we've got it. If you know that, well, we're we've really got a bunch of leftover fertilizer, or we don't need to add that much. You can, you know, cut your fertilizer bill in half, maybe, which is a plus for the landowner. And that testing was done by the system, whatever it the activities are all going to be voluntary. And so unless the system wants to buy the land, they have to work. They will work with the landowner to get them to adopt practices that are both beneficial for the system by improving or protecting water quality, but also have an economic advantage for the owner. How hard of a sell is that it can be a pretty hard sell sometimes. I mean, people like to, you know, I've always done it this way, and, you know, I'm comfortable doing it that way. And because there it's a voluntary program. Everybody kind of understands that, you know, although we like to talk about the black helicopters coming and all that sort of stuff at the end of the day, if I can't convince you to change, that's it. It is what it is, right? There isn't going to be anybody coming up with with a stick to get you to adopt a new practice, but there are some things that you can't do because you're in the zone. Yeah? I mean, there's certain things right, that you just hard no, yeah. There's some hard No, but most of that is for something new. To happen. So if there's a pre existing activity, you've got a pre existing activity. We've got a corn field that's part of an area that was identified as the Wellhead Protection area for a given public water supply. I can't make that land owner change out and grow something else. Late 1980s for some of these programs, doesn't seem that long ago to me. Maybe I'm showing my age, but that's certainly not ancient history. The Groundwater Protection is something that you know we makes all kinds of sense today, but back in the late 80s, people were just starting to figure out that, oh, hey, you know, our water's going bad. I wonder what's happening. And two and two was put together in many places up and down the valley, and it was like, oh, maybe we should stop doing this. And bad things were happening. Bad things were happening. Yeah, small communities would have, you know, the public well in the little town would go bad. And around here, that was typically the result of nitrates, elevated nitrates in the water. And it was not uncommon, you know, for the town. Well, in a town that's only six or seven blocks across, local fertilizer dealer has got his bins up in places and or whatever else was going on. And it was like, oh, you know, the connections made. And so in the in the late 80s, again, when the EPA started to have more of a press and we had information about where the aquifers were, it was actually easy. Might be a bit of a stretch, but there was recognition at the local level that these water groundwater quality protection measures were necessary because many of the small towns were starting to have problems. It was that like a local officials, elected officials, or was that just the community at large recognizing this? I get combination. You needed to get the local officials involved so that, I mean county commissioners were the big ones in Brookings County, it was a woman named Barbara telkamp who was a big supporter of this activity, the water development district. We're based in Brookings. We have connections with EPA out of Denver, and the groundwater program on some other activities that were taking place. And so it all kind of came together. And, you know, maps were drawn, areas where delineated meetings held to talk about what's going on. And once the Brookings county ordinance was written, that became the model, and then as a district, we then took that model to every other county in the basin. So then if a development wanted to come in, or somebody wanted to come in and do something that the Brookings county groundwater ordinance would not allow, they wouldn't just move across the county line and build it in moody county or build it in Hamlin County. Sure, even though really nothing's changed, the conditions were the same. The worries were there. And so now we have Groundwater Protection ordinances starting at Summit and going all the way to North Sioux City. But it began in Brookings County, in the Big Sioux River Basin, River Basin in Brookings County. So those Wellhead Protection programs, I mean, so that is that a state law now to have those, or is it county by county throughout the state? It is a local decision, local decision. Yeah, and does, do you know South Dakota with large is that, do we have 100% buy in on Wellhead Protection? Is there counties that do not have. There are 1415, counties that have it that only have, only have, oh, okay, yeah. And out of 65 out of 6666 66 Yeah. And now the ordinance that that was developed, I should say, we I, I was not with the water development district. When this work was done. I worked for the state Geological Survey, but one of my responsibilities at that time for the survey was drawing the maps that were to be used by the Groundwater Protection ordinances. And they are, yeah, designed to protect shallow aquifers like the one we're sitting on here in Eagan and in the big SiO River Basin, in parts of the Vermillion River Basin, particularly the lower vermilion River Basin. Those are. The aquifers are the ones that are used as the public water supply in other parts of the state. You know they are buried aquifers, okay? Or, you know what we call intermediate or basal glacial aquifers, or even some of the bedrock units, and there, you know what you do here in Egan at one of the wells around the plant here, if you dump something on the ground, it's going to get into the water right away. Sure, even if the well itself is a good one, it's not the pathway, but the ground is just very porous, and it'll soak right in. You take and dump that same substance, whatever it is, on the ground, out at wall, it's going to do different things. It's yeah, there. There's no pathway for it to get into the ground. You know, if you got a buried aquifer, if you've got a layer of material separating it, the surface from your aquifer buried at some depth, unless there's a pathway for that material to get there, like a bad Well, it's safe, and the ordinances here in the basin reflect that as well. If you're building here over the shallow aquifer. There's a whole bunch of no's. If you are building a half mile to the east of us here, a mile to the east, up off of the shallow aquifer, then you know, if something spills at that location, it's not it. I mean, it'll soak into the ground, but it's not going anywhere. You wouldn't want a statewide ordinance. You want it to be based on the water shade that you have, right? The ordinances reflect sort of the local geology, okay? And as I said, the preponderance of public water supply wells that are out there, and even private wells are pulling from these same units, and so we're protecting those so free, and he never stays, and he only moves faster when the gray wolf comes to play. So wolf comes to play. When the gray wolf comes to play. And the ordinances, I mean, they there are delineated, delineated areas we call zone A's for each of the major public water supplies, and those have the very strict restrictions on them. The rest of the shallow aquifer, there are limits on what can be done. But for most of those, you know, if you want to do activity x, there might be what we call a performance standard. You can, you can put up a building if you want to store chemicals, that's okay, as long as you have secondary containment, you know, put up a berm around it, or have an extra tank around it, or certain things that the list of things you cannot do on zone B the Rest of the shallow aquifer is pretty short. Okay, so you mentioned your time with the US Geological service, the South Dakota. Sorry, South Dakota geological service. Give us your background, a little bit about how you came to this work that you're doing today. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I've been in South Dakota now for little over 41 and a half years, something like that. Yeah, I came out South Dakota. I was in graduate school up the University of Minnesota, the Twin Cities campus, there was a position open with the South Dakota Geological Survey down in Vermillion for someone to come out and do mapping of the glacier of the counties in this part of the world, which were eastern South Dakota was glaciated during the last ice age. And that was kind of what I was doing or going to grad school for. And so in January, yeah, of 1984 came out and spent little over 10 years with the state, out of the out of the survey, working on glacial mapping in eastern South Dakota, particularly the Upper Big Sioux River Basin and so. And part of that work was actually supported by the East Dakota Water Development District, who I work for now. And so I got to know the number of the board members and my predecessor on that and and then in the mid 1994 I guess, the my predecessor, the former mayor. Manager decided it was time to try something else, and I lucked out, and that was right about the time. And what was that? 94 was when the we had a little kerfuffle with state funding having to do with lottery proceeds, where the lottery wasn't really a lottery, and the Supreme Court, having apparently made it clear to the state on numerous occasions that, no, you really shouldn't be doing that, finally said, Oh, to heck with it. And so somebody sued, saying it wasn't what it was. The court said, Yeah, you're right. And so though we were looking at $100 million shortfall in the general fund and the Geological Survey is a state agency that does not get a lot of federal funding, and so a big general fund cut was going to be painful. That wasn't why I left. It just happened to fall at about kind of worked out. It worked out really well, yeah, and my departure saved the state and FTE, yeah, sure. And so that was helpful. You know, if I had worked for one of the regulatory offices within DNR at the time, a lot of the support for an individual may come from federal funding. So cutting a regulator doesn't save the state any money. Cutting a geologist, save the state geology, pay some money. So So are we still using the mapping that you did then? Yes, yeah, the geology doesn't change. And you were doing it before you had the modern technology that we have now. You were how good were you? Excellent. We talked about best of it, or professional judgment and best available information. And in the context of the maps for the Groundwater Protection Areas and stuff, that is a subject that will come up very from time to time, if somebody comes in and wants to do something and a county ordinance says no, or we have to check and so I'll get a call to come up and and talk about that. And in the case of the line work that is done, where is the edge of the aquifer? Yeah, yeah, I can pull out the original maps. We have those at the office. I can bring them to the meeting, and I can show them down in the lower right hand corner where my initials are penciled. You know the how do you well? How do you know that's where the line is? I said, Well, for starters, I drew the line so I know, so I know and but it, you know, we're drawing a line that's supposedly telling us what is below the ground surface. And I'd be the first person to admit, I mean, if I have, you know, I'm sitting here, and I would say, Yeah, we're sitting over sand and gravel, and I can see the boundary is somewhere over there, to the east of us, at about where the hill starts, and I can draw that line in a map pretty accurately, but if you're in an area where, say, the topography or the physical clues aren't there, what you need is a hole drilled into the ground. What's underneath me? I don't know. Let's drill a hole and find out. Well, there's never going to be a hole drilled every place. Were up to me, we'd have holes every 20 feet from here the Minnesota border all the way to the Missouri but that's not how it works. And so the the because then you would know, then we would know, but then somebody would come in, and there they'd be in between the 220 foot, right? They'd say, what's what's here? Yeah. And in some of the glacial materials, I've drilled holes back when I was with the state, where we literally, you know, drill a hole in the ditch, find something. We'd go all the way to the bottom, our target, down to bedrock, having found something in the middle and said, well, let's come back. Pull up, plug the hole. Pull ahead, drill another hole and stop at that marker unit, put a well in an aquifer. Well. You know, we usually would have to move the rig about 40 feet to get away from all the stuff we've messed up. Drill a hole 40 feet away, and the target we were after was gone. So it changes that it can, it can change very quickly. And if you think about it and again, here we are. We can look over there and see the hill, and that's the edge of the valley. Okay, all right. Now this, this, the valley here is two or three miles wide. But you know, if you're trying to figure out what is going on at depth in an area where glaciers have come through a lot of the water, and the sands and gravels are in these relatively narrow valleys, okay, and so if I have a hole at a. One location. And, you know, I can drill another hole two miles away, and whatever I found at the first one may not be there. Okay, yes, whereas, as opposed to out on the western side of the state, or at great depth here in eastern South Dakota, the geology is in layers, okay, like a cake. And so if you know, and those layers extend in all directions here, and this part is the depth underneath, yeah, okay, there's some of the underneath. And quartzite kind of messes it up in this immediate area. But if you go out to Huron or Aberdeen or other places, if you drill down far enough, you can get into this sort of layer cake geology. And once you're into that, if you know well, the top of the Madison formation at this in this area is about so many feet above sea level, our elevation is 1000 feet higher than that. If I drill a hole 1000 feet deep, I'll hit the Madison. It's very predictable, and you can go to different places. And that's more relative to the western side of the state too, right? Because you Is it a little bit more? Well, yeah, that's it's the western side. But those, a lot of those same units are over here on the eastern side. The glacial deposits have covered buried them. And from a water standpoint, and the water in some of those deep bedrock units, things like the Madison or the Dakota formation, out away from the Black Hills, the water is not wonderful. It's wet. Is about all you can say for it. The Flaming fountain, flaming fountain in pier, yeah, at Capitol Lake, yeah. Okay, water that burns naturally. Think about it. Naturally burns. Okay, that water was wet. If you had no other source of water. That's a wonderful that that works. You figure out a way to make that work. If you have almost any other choice, we'll take plan option B, please. Burning water. It's not the best stuff, so. But over in the East, in the glaciated part of the state, the East East River, the glacial aquifers that date to glacial times generally have much better water than the bedrock units, okay, and so they were preferred targets. I do not know any of this here in the valleys, the surface units, like the Big Sioux aquifer that Sioux Falls and Brookings and Watertown all use that's really very, very good water, but it's also very vulnerable, vulnerable to contamination, and so that's the reason we have the ordinances protecting it. It's good, clean water. We need to it's a lot easier to keep it that way than it is to clean it up later, fix it in this hell now my curves have each got corners Like a little gruesome old shell I know someday the and shell I know someday the Lord will break me and I can stretch out every limb, embrace these bones against the coming. Well, that was Jay Gilbertson with East Dakota Water Development District, part one of four. Part one of four. We really appreciate Jay's time and taking us through, you know, the integrated report water regulation in the state of South Dakota, how we know how much water we have in our aquifer and where you know our water comes from so we really appreciate that. But stay tuned for parts three or 234, and oh no. 23423, and four. Oh my gosh. The train got me confused. You might hear a train in the background. So people have been asking us how they can help out with the podcast. The best way to do that is really to like it. Give it those stars on your podcast platform. Make a comment, send us an email, tell us a little bit about what you want in the future. Who do you think we should be talking to? All those things kind of help us figure out the road ahead for a podcast like this, yep, like everything, like and subscribe. Follow the Friends of the big Sue, social and email channels for new episode updates. We really appreciate all the support we've been getting from our first episode. The outpouring has been wonderful. I want to thank President Dunn again for his generosity of sitting down with us and being our first episode and kind of being the guinea pig of how this will all work out, and everyone that's listened thus far. Thank you and. We hope to continue to bring you information and points of view that will help you know, enlighten what's happening in South Dakota on the northern prairies. And a big thanks to South Dakota musician Jamie Lynn, who offered to let us use this song for season one of rivers and range lands. If you wait till the end of the podcast, you get to hear a lot of Jamie Lynn, it's a good way to to end your days. Listen to the end of the podcast. It's really important to watch the credits, dang it. You never know what teasers at the end. We learned anything from Marvel watch until the end, an after credit scene, an after credit scene. Now I'm gonna fight to find an after credit scene. Post production. You I can me.