- This is a production of SDPB.

Beyond its beauty.

South Dakota's vast prairieland has long played a key role in the state's economy.

Every year agriculture generates billions of dollars in economic value.

The beef industry in particular contributes over a billion dollars alone.

But today, South Dakota ranchers are facing a fast spreading threat.

A native evergreen tree called the Eastern Red Cedar.

The Eastern Red Cedar is rapidly transforming the state's grasslands, reshaping the landscape and challenging a way of life.

That's generations in the making.

That's tonight's South Dakota focus.

In South Dakota, ranching is more than just a livelihood.

For many families, it's a legacy passed down through generations.

That means how ranchers choose to care for the land today determines what they'll have to give their children in the future.

Healthy grasslands are integral to that legacy.

And one of the greatest emerging threats to the state's rangeland is the prolific spread of a juniper tree called the Eastern Red Cedar.

For decades, Eastern Red Cedars and other trees and shrubs have been advancing over the great plains grasslands.

This ecological shift is most severe in the southern and central plain states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

But it's steadily moving north, a phenomenon called the Green Glacier.

Today, it's estimated more than 22 million tons of rangeland forage across the Great Plains is lost annually to woody encroachment enough to feed nearly 5 million cattle in a year.

Hammerbeck is a fourth generation rancher in South Dakota.

Her family runs the forty Bar Ranch in Lyman County near the Missouri River.

For the past nine years, Hammerbeck has been battling the spread of thousands of Eastern Red Cedars on her pastures.

- In about 2018, I started actually thinking.

"okay, Heather, you need to do something about this."

And I was like, "okay."

Every day you go out, you've got a goal.

You need to cut 50 trees, and if you don't cut 50 trees, you need to make up for it the next day.

You know, so if that means you've got 150 trees to cut, you know, that's, anyway, I stuck with it.

So I figured in that summer I cut down 5,000 trees and I was like.

"That's gonna be, you know, that will have made a huge difference."

And at the end of the summer when it made no difference, that's when I was like.

"Okay, I'm in trouble."

- Between 1990 and 2022, tree cover increased more than 191,000 acres in South Dakota.

The state lost over five and a half million tons of cumulative rangeland production during that time.

- South Dakota lost over 200,000 tons of forage to woody encroachment in 2022, which would be the equivalent of 350,000 bales of hay, which is $29 million at 2024 prices, which would be enough to feed 38,000 cattle for a year.

So that's just how much we lost in 2022.

So just for that year.

- Whenever the pickup turns all the way to that, one way it honks the horn.

- Oh, - So that wasn't me.

The horn actually doesn't work if you try to press it normal.

So you gotta turn to the left all the way to get it to work.

My dad always told me when this was homesteaded, there wasn't hardly a tree on the place.

We homesteaded in 1912.

And so now we have this today, which you can see behind me is about 270, 280 acres.

We mapped out about 70 acres.

Of that 280 is solid trees.

So as far as production, you know, that's a quarter of the production, potential production or potential acres anyway of the whole pasture is, is gone to Cedars.

- John Egleston is a rancher in the White River area where Eastern Red Cedar encroachment is becoming increasingly prevalent.

He says one of the biggest issues with the trees is that they shade out native grass, significantly reducing forage production.

In fact, the ground beneath a mature cedar grove is often bare dirt and needles, and heavily encroached areas of a pasture can experience a total loss of grass production.

- Nobody really pays attention to to what we're, what we're losing here.

And it's fairly slow.

It creeps up on you.

It takes a while for trees to take over, but once they do take over, you've, you've lost that production and it's pretty expensive to get it back.

Really the only economical way to handle it is to keep, keep the small ones controlled and the production you've lost.

You've lost.

- This is one of our favorite warm season grasses.

This is - Hey, Faye, do you remember this grass?

What is this?

Big blue stem!

Good job!

So it turns, you know, it has this long stem, it's big.

I can go take out, you know, I could go clean up a draw and just put in the sweat and yes, I'll have some trees knocked down.

But then you come back and there's all these little ones and yeah, you can get some loppers out and cut 'em, but there, there could be literally hundreds of them.

And then when you have to weigh that against all the other things that a person needs to do on a ranch, there's checking water and cattle and you know, there's some metaphorical fire somewhere else that you're not getting to because you're just dealing with the trees.

It's just not sustainable.

- You know, once you have 5% or more woody encroachment, then you can start feeling, you know, it is like, you know, 11% departure from normal grass 'cause 11 percents covered with trees, depending on the size of ranches is like not grazing anywhere from two to eight cows.

So if it was eight cows that you weren't grazing because of the amount of woody encroachment, at the price of calves, right now, you know, that's, that's significant.

That's like a 13 to $20,000 loss.

So somebody might say, well, for a 200 cow ranch, you know, only eight cows, but eight cows at today's calf prices is 20 grand.

You know, that's, that's a minimum wage job in town.

So it's significant.

Okay, if we can jump outta here.

- Lealand Shoon is a retired rangeland management specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Currently he owns a rangeland consulting business called Forever Grazing Land.

LLCI - First became concerned about, you know, woody encroachment in South Dakota as NRCS employee.

And then more so in 2006 we became landowners and livestock operators ourselves and therefore it was more meaningful.

Because as a range management specialist, I calculate stocking rates and I could see that with, especially shrubs like smooth sumac, which cows and sheep really don't eat.

And then the Eastern Red Cedar that it would, it would take away some of our livelihood.

This graph down here from the RAP report shows us the projection of this woody encroachment.

So there's a line underneath this arrow that shows that back here in about 1986, there wasn't much woody encroachment, maybe 1%, and over 30 years we've gained it 8%.

So the real impact is not only, you know, is it gonna take away grasslands from herbivores, not only cows and sheep, but also the wildlife.

But, but there's just the community.

Because whether you haul hay or whether you grow grass or whether you rodeo or drive a truck, moving livestock, those are all part of the livelihood within these communities.

Okay, start here.

But, so this is one of our woody draws I was telling you about.

You know, the, the trouble with seeing Eastern Red Cedar grow up underneath our deciduous riparian areas, we wanna preserve the water quality and the grasslands and everything.

If it becomes a monoculture of cedars, it's just taking away, you know, the diversity of our plants.

And so we had goats in here in January and part of February.

Methods that we're trying to use to combat woody encroachment or Eastern Red Cedar really needs to be an integrated approach.

Meaning you have, we have to use multiple tools in order to, to combat it.

I don't think it can be just one tool.

But the one that we hear overwhelmingly is to control Eastern Red Cedar with controlled burns.

And that's because a fire will kill a cedar tree.

Other tools that are really neat that you might hear more about is, you know, integrating, you know, our browsing species, which are our native browsing browsing species are probably the mule deer, the elk and moose and things like that.

Domestically, we're using goats and they don't necessarily eat the, the needles off the trees.

I think a lot of people will think that, but on, on the shrubs, they like to defoliate the leaves.

And on like Eastern Red Cedar, they pretty much eat the bark off the tree and then the tree can die from that.

- This one kind of shows the problem.

This is what I always show to people.

This is 1990 and this is the, you know, the woodlands.

So you see in 1990, basically in South Dakota you have only the Black Hills.

But then in 2020, you can see how this all increased through Kansas and Nebraska.

Nebraska really.

And now it's coming into South Dakota.

So that's that woody encroachment and some people call it the Green Glacier 'cause it's just moving north.

- Sheldon Fletcher is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and the 319 Non-Point Source Pollution and GIS coordinator for the Lower Brule Environmental Protection Office.

As part of his role with the Environmental Protection Office, Fletcher heads up Eastern Red Cedar Tree Management on the Lower Brule Teservation.

- I saw one estimate on just Lower Brule itself that we had lost, I think over 4,000 acres to cedar trees.

So if you put that in context, a lot of our range units are about 4,000 acres.

You know, basically that's a, you know, a range unit that disappeared.

Operators and ranchers, things are tight enough, you know, with the bottom line and prices on everything going up.

If you got cedar trees out there taking away your grass, so you're gonna be, you're gonna have to run less cows?

That's not, that's not a viable option for people.

So it's, we need to get on this.

So this is the Nebraska Sandhills, this is what the prairie's supposed to look like, you know, endless views, you get a horizon view with nothing in the way, but here is what's happening on the prairies.

So we're getting this, and that's the woody encroachment, the Eastern Red Cedars.

This is actually a picture on Lower Brule, and we, we just burned this area in April.

There's a couple ways to deal with the Eastern Red Cedar.

One of 'em is mechanical control, where you go out and you just physically cut 'em down and then sometimes you pile 'em up and burn 'em.

Sometimes you just cut 'em and leave them.

The mechanical control.

Almost every time you use that, within, within five years, you need to do a burn anyway, because when you go out and you harvest the mature seeders and you're moving, your equipments moving around and, and tearing up the ground, you're just replanting seeds and they come back with a vengeance.

Within four years, you're gonna have, you know, just hundreds and maybe thousands, a little, you know, three footers.

So you have to follow up with fire eventually.

So fire, a prescribed burn, is probably the most economical way to deal with these Eastern Red Cedars.

When, when done properly.

- To understand why fire is such an effective management tool for Eastern Red Cedars, it's useful to look at the historical context of how the trees became an issue.

Eastern Red Cedars are a native species in the state, and there are numerous documented cultural and medicinal uses of Eastern Red Cedars by regional tribes.

They're also an important food, nesting, and shelter source for wildlife.

But historically, the trees stayed confined to deep ravines, rocky hillsides and other areas sheltered from prairie fires.

Prior to European settlement, wildfires were a regular occurrence on South Dakota's grasslands, either occurring naturally from lightning or set by Indigenous tribes.

- Fire has evolved with tribes for thousands of years.

Tribes know it, it's in, in their stories, in our ceremonies, in our songs.

Science can go back and prove it on fire scarred trees and it was all across the nation in different areas for different things.

Out here on the plains, a lot of times the tribes would burn to, they would try to burn the grass to like refresh it, to try to attract the buffalo in for hunting or they would burn to kind of refresh the grass for their horses and their animals.

So the prairies have evolved with fire.

The tribes have evolved with it and using it.

So it's just, you can't have one without the other.

And when you don't have fire anymore, this is what happens.

You get a species that takes over.

- In addition to decades of fire suppression, in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the Prairie States Forestry Project in response to the Dust Bowl.

This new deal program resulted in the planting of 220 million trees in shelterbelts across the Great Plains.

The Eastern Red Cedar was among the most commonly planted shelterbelt tree.

And if left unmanaged shelter belts can be a seed source for the encroachment issue happening today.

- There's a reason that they've been utilized and they've been planted.

They've been put into shelterbelts because they're effective and they can grow here and they can outcompete the native grass.

They have shallow root systems, so they need a significant amount of water every day in a place like this that on average gets 21 inches of precipitation a year.

So they really, really abused the water table.

- This was our smaller burn that we did.

The River Breaks Prescribed Burn Association did.

The other one that we did was about 450 acres, but the hills have definitely benefited from, from getting rid of these cedars.

There'll be a lot more grass.

You know, ideally it'd be nice if we were burning 3,000-4,000 acres a spring.

You know, that's what we're gonna need to do to kind of catch up on this deal.

We need a lot more people to, to get interested and want to help out.

- One way Fletcher recommends people get involved is by joining a prescribed burn association, or PBA.

A Prescribed burn Association is an organization made up of local landowners and community members who work together to conduct burns and promote fire as a grassland management tool.

In Brookings, South Dakota State University Extension has partnered with federal and state agencies as well as non-government organizations across South Dakota to host prescribed burn and live fire trainings for landowners.

- A couple little nuances of the fire torches, they've got a breather valve on the top here and that goes back to where Cody was talking about the dribble.

- Over the years, several prescribed burn associations have formed in South Dakota to combat Eastern Red Cedar encroachment.

One of the most established PBAs in the state is the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association.

So like - When we were doing a prescribed burn, you saw in the pictures, this is where we do our main briefing, this is where we figure out our assignments.

This is the actual one from St.

Michaels Burn.

- The Mid-Missouri River.

PBA runs out of Gregory County, which is one of the hardest hit regions when it comes to Eastern Red Cedar encroachment.

In fact, recent research shows the trees are spreading nearly exponentially in some areas of the county.

Sara Grim and Tom Hausmann are both members of the Mid-Missouri River.

PBA Grim operates a ranch near the Missouri River with her husband Richard, while Hausmann has land outside Bonesteel that he leases for ranch.

Both Grim and Hausmann have conducted successful prescribed burns on their rangeland to mitigate cedar trees.

- What it got to be for us, for my husband and I, was that we did not have enough grass and we were taking cows out on pasture, was costing us to send cows different parts of the state to pasture 'em for the summer because we just didn't have enough grass.

And he and I both looked at each other and said, what are we doing?

We've got the land, we need to reclaim it.

- When we see these cedar trees essentially taking over ground and you know, there's nothing growing underneath them, there's just no grass.

And a cow, a mature cow, depending on her size, maybe eats 22 to 24 pounds of grass a day.

That grass is converted into milk, obviously.

Well, if she can't, if she can't get that grass as much grass as she needs, her milk production goes down.

It takes about eight to 10 pounds of milk to produce a pound of calf.

The cal is less and that's what ranchers have to sell.

So grass is their primary forage that they use to, to grow beef and it's, it really is a matter of economics.

When I sheared in my pasture, the easy areas up on the ridges cost me $62 an acre with government help.

They paid about two thirds of the cost.

I paid one third.

By the time I got to the, to those places that were more difficult to get to and the trees were taller, my cost went to $438 an acre.

So it's a simple matter of economics.

The longer you wait, the less pasture you have, the less beef you're gonna raise and it's gonna cost you more.

- We're looking from our river ridge down towards our, what we call our river pasture.

Years ago we couldn't run very many cows, maybe where we used to run 10 head of cows, we could only run three.

So we've been trying to reclaim our grasses in this country and bring back the natural grasslands.

And doing that, we we're going, we're working through the shearing of the trees, the deferred grazing, and then the burning, the prescribed burning in these river hills.

- Since its inception in 2016, the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association has successfully conducted 25 prescribed burns over nearly 9,000 acres without incident.

While they've built a strong reputation over the years, there's still stigma around fire in many South Dakota communities.

Over in White River, John Egleston has used the Mid-Missouri River PBA as a resource for dealing with Eastern Red Cedars, including attending several workshops the organization has hosted.

While he's not against using controlled burns to manage the trees, he's pragmatic about the risk involved.

- If we were to light this whole hillside and ridge up, it would make a pretty big fire for quite a few days, I would imagine.

And there's been a fair amount of risk lately.

You know, last fall we had the 15,000 acre fire come through and it was windy and just in Nebraska a month ago or so, they had one get away that burned 14,000 acres.

And fire is a four letter word here, which I understand.

I don't want, you know, somebody start a prescribed burn and it burns up 10,000 acres.

That's my whole place, you know, insurance doesn't, insurance isn't gonna make make it right and so it's, it's gotta be done carefully.

- There are risks associated with controlled burns, but Eastern Red Cedars themselves pose a wildfire risk if left unmanaged - That wildfire last year in September 2024 was an example of that.

And it didn't start in the trees, but it got to the trees and it got hotter and more dangerous.

- Despite the concerns around prescribed fires.

Sara Grim says, the Mid-Missouri River PBA is shifting perspectives with every successful burn.

- Now we have a tool and we're reclaiming some of our grassland and it's looking good, you know, and we're proving to our neighbors and friends that yes, we can safely do this and it's good for the area, it's good for the land and it's bringing back our grasslands.

- We're fighting 25 and 30 foot trees where people north of us along the river are, are noticing three and four foot trees.

What I think we need, what the state needs too is, is more people that are willing to take on the responsibility of saying we need to form a prescribed burn association so we can do that on our own.

- The Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association has gained momentum in building a fire culture and more awareness of Eastern Red Cedar encroachment.

But another roadblock has created a serious threat to the PBAs progress in fighting the green glacier in South Dakota.

Some of the heaviest Eastern Red Cedar encroachment travels up the Missouri River through Gregory and Lyman counties toward I-90.

A unique feature of this landscape is the title VI state land that borders the Missouri.

- South Dakota is one of the only states that has Title VI ground.

In some places it's just tiny slivers in some places along the rivers, it's really wide.

It used to be the Army Corps of Engineers that owned that land and they deeded it to the State of South Dakota who gave it to Game, Fish, and Parks.

- The landowners that adjoin that ground lease it back from game fish and parks at a very discounted rate.

So the state owns the Title VI ground, the ranch owns the private ground and we manage the Title VI ground the exact same way that we manage our own ground.

We try to take as good a care of it as we do of our own.

Back in 2019, we had an agreement between South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks and our Mid-Missouri River prescribed Burn Association to burn to the river, which only makes sense because it's such a narrow spot and why wouldn't you burn to the water?

It's totally safe and you might burn a few cedar trees, which would do Game, Fish, and Parks a lot of good.

It only makes sense to use that as one of our borders and make our burns U-shaped.

We go up one side over the top and down the other and we burn to the water.

- Any fire related activities on Game, Fish, and parks, land falls under the jurisdiction of South Dakota Wildland Fire and the Department of Public Safety or DPS.

In an email, a DPS spokesperson said the Memorandum of Agreement was revoked because it was not compliant with state statute.

The department declined to comment further.

- The issue that we're talking about is just on state ground.

It just so happens that it is really important, strategic ground, because it's what separates the private ground from one of the biggest fire breaks in North America - Since its Memorandum of Agreement with Game, Fish and Parks was revoked, the Mid-Missouri River PBA has paused most of the burns along the Missouri River it had scheduled.

All future burn planning along the river is now on hold.

The PBA says the ability to burn on Title VI land is required because it's both impractical and dangerous to build a firebreak between the state and private land - Almost everywhere.

It's so rough that you can't, I mean, you can hardly even walk along it much less fence effectively.

There's really no physical way, at least on this ranch, to be able to differentiate what is the title six ground and what is the private ground.

So then if you can't fence it or walk along it, how could you possibly build a fire break?

You know, it's just, it would be so unsafe to try to hold a fire from crossing the state ground when it could just go across the state ground to the water.

- The Mid-Missouri River, PBA says they're working with the state to find a solution.

- Game, Fish, and Parks and Public Safety heads have been very genuine and they want to work out a solution, and we hope to see one coming soon.

- Meanwhile, time is ticking as Eastern Red Cedar trees continue to transform thousands of acres of rangeland in South Dakota and beyond.

- People have waited too long to tackle this problem.

I think South Dakota has a moral obligation, if nothing else, we know it's a problem.

We know it has a, a really a, a huge economic impact on, on ranchers and anyone trying to raise grass, but we have the ability to stop it because we're ahead of it.

If those people where those trees are just getting started, will take action, we can literally stop it.

- Grasslands are the most imperiled and least protected biomes in existence.

Only 55% of North America's Great Plains grasslands are left intact.

The two primary threats to this ecosystem are land-use conversion and woody encroachment.

Recent research shows they are now happening at nearly the same rate.

- It's a problem that's just gonna get worse and worse, and generally problems don't get better by ignoring them.

And so they'll come a point where it'll just be a forest.

And a forest doesn't really feed very many cows.

And so it's probably, it's gonna be somewhat painful economically to take care of it now, but if you don't take care of it now, you know, my kids are gonna have to light this whole country on fire to get rid of the trees or clear cut it or, or whatever that's gonna be probably not worth the expense.

- The Eastern Red Cedar encroachment isn't a rancher problem.

And this just isn't a reservation problem.

It isn't a state problem, it's not a federal agency problem.

It's, it's everybody's problem and we all have to work together to address this.

- There's still a component of society that sees grasslands as kind of a wasteland.

They're just open prairies that nothing really lives there.

And the public outside of agriculture has to understand the value of native grasslands.

People that aren't really surrounded by these communities that really survive on the open grasslands is just to understand how valuable, important grasslands are and how important it's to, to keep them and for them to understand that fire can be used as a tool.

Trees have a place, grasslands have integrity for so many other reasons, like water quality, people's livelihoods, other wildlife species that we appreciate.

- If we don't do anything, we're gonna lose the grasslands and we can't afford to do that.

There's just too much diversity, too much life in these grasslands that it's just not an option to lose our grasslands and our prairies.