The Buzz on the Range: Promoting healthy soils and pollinators on Montana rangeland

The following details our education and outreach throughout the project. We have updated it by year while retaining intention details from the grant application.

Progress Reports

Learning Section of Buzz on the Range Website - for 2024, we published a large set of the learning on the Buzz on the Range project site. We also published much of the learning that was recorded on video on our YouTube channel (linked to from the website).

2023 Progress Report - an updated presentation about 2023 with visuals is presented here.

2022 Progress Report - a highlight presentation about 2022 with visuals is presented here.

Overall Objectives

Participating producers will learn how the soil health and pollinator activity of their ranges vary within their own ranches and how they compare to other ranges in their ecosystem and region. They will see how the management of rangeland can influence soil health and how improved soil health might impact the ecosystem and pollinator habitats. Participating partners and community members will learn many of the same things as they participate in various aspects of the work.

Methods

Our grant proposal includes education and outreach in 3 clear ways:

• Workshops each year touching on various aspects of the project and impacts
• Public/Rancher awareness campaigns such as “Soil Your Undies”
• Opportunity for producers and students to learn at research in action field days
• Documenting and sharing the outputs of the project widely

2022 Education and Outreach

Workshop 1 Details - April 29, 2022 - Soil Health and “Soil your Undies” Workshop - West Creek Ranch

Outreach

We invited producers and ranchers from across Southwest Montana to join our workshop. Partner workshop development and support: Stacey Barta (The Montana DNRC), Western Sustainability Exchange. Target audience:

• Project producers,
• producers in our region,
• partner organizations/programs, the
• Yellowstone Valley Ecosystem communities

We used our Project partner organizations email lists and event sites (it was held at West Creek Ranch), and word of mouth from participating producers. There are fantastic marketing tools from Oregon’s NRCS that we used to start our “Soil your undies” marketing in our area. The flyer for the event is here.

Event

Buzz on the Range project team and producer partners at West Creek Ranch workshop, April 2022

• See slides 9-10 of the update presentation for visuals of the day.
• We had 8 producer attendees, a DNRC representative, an NRCS soil health specialist, the Executive Director from Western Sustainability Exchange and the Conservation Director from AMB West in attendance.
• Participants learned or reviewed the five principles of soil health, ways to measure soil health, and how to improve the quality of their soil with tools they may already own. The workshop also covered microbiological activity, health, and seeds in mineral–planting seeds for bees/bovine.
• Marni Thompson, the NRCS Soil health Specialist in Montana did a wonderful lesson and demonstration on: Visual Soil Assessment and Discussion of Soil Health
• Chris Mehus from Western Sustainability Exchange and We Are For the Land representatives did a demonstration on how to bury undies on rangeland. This kicked off our “Soil Your Undies” campaign for 2022.

2022 Soil Your Undies Campaign

The Buzz on the Range project incorporated the “Soil Your Undies” experiment as an engaging way to demonstrate soil health across our partner ranches. This simple test reveals whether your soil’s microbiology is active and doing what it’s supposed to do.

What is Soil Your Undies?

Soil Your Undies citizen science experiment to test soil biological activity

Soil Your Undies is a citizen science initiative that originated in NRCS Oregon and has been used as a fun, educational tool to test soil health. The concept came to our project when Meagan Lannan learned about it from a colleague in New Zealand.

The experiment is brilliantly simple: bury cotton underwear in your soil and let the microbes do their work. The more the underwear decomposes, the healthier and more biologically active your soil is.

How to Conduct the Test:

1. Get a pair of 100% cotton underwear - They must be cotton because that’s what soil microbes can digest
2. Bury them to the waistline - About 3 inches deep in the soil
3. Mark the spot - So you can find them again!
4. Wait 90+ days - The exact time depends on your soil’s microbiology activity
5. Dig them up - And see what’s left!

Producer partners burying cotton underwear to test soil microbial activity

The Science Behind It:

Healthy soil contains billions of microbes - in fact, one teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microbes than there are people on the planet. These microorganisms:

• Break down organic matter like cotton
• Help soil resist erosion
• Cycle nutrients
• Store water
• Support overall ecosystem health

When your soil is biologically active, the microbes will literally eat the cotton underwear. The more decomposed the underwear, the more active your soil biology.

Our Results:

Across our partner ranches, we saw varying levels of decomposition that reflected the biological activity in different soils:

Partially decomposed underwear from Barney Creek Ranch showing degraded soil biology

• Barney Creek Ranch - Lara Birkes discovered partially decomposed underwear, indicating degraded soil biology. (This matched our findings from our ecological monitoring!)
• Anderson Ranch - Malou Anderson’s results showed healthy microbial activity
• Milk Maid Meats - Lily Andersen found good decomposition rates.
• Keewaydin Ranch - Alex Blake and his family found good decomposition rates.
• West Creek Ranch - Teo Abbruzzese found great decomposition rates, with the undies being almost completely gone in his irrigated fenceline soil.

Educational Impact:

Working with Western SARE, we developed a comprehensive toolkit that allows anyone to conduct this experiment - whether it’s a 4-H Club, FFA chapter, or elementary school. The visual nature of the results makes it an excellent educational tool for all ages.

The experiment provides a “quick, fast, and dirty way” to assess whether your soil microbiology is sound, making soil health concepts accessible and engaging for the broader community.

We invited our producers in our region as well as interested community members to “Soil Their Undies.” Here is the flyer we created. We also created a landing page on our website for them to report their progress. This challenge encourages participants to “plant” cotton underwear and then dig them back up 60/90 days later to check on the microbial activity in the soil. While this is just an experiment just for fun, it gets people thinking about what their microbes are up to and how their management style influences how quickly they can eat their undies? We started a social media campaign on Instagram and Facebook encouraging others and workshop attendees to show us their “Soil your Undies” project. We checked back in 90 days on people who have joined the campaign and showed them the results of the buried underwear from the workshop site and encouraged them to share their photos.

2022 SUCCESS STORY: Even more Soil Your Undies - A BONUS WORKSHOP and serious awareness at the Livingston Farmers Market.

Community soil health demonstration at Livingston Farmers Market, July 2022

We were so inspired by the Soil Your Undies potential that, with fantastic in-kind support from Western Sustainability Exchange and Marni Thompson at NRCS, we did a soil health demonstration day at Miles Park in Livingston Montana that was well attended. We even put out a press release about it. We buried undies in Miles Park and dug them up on the soil health day on July 20th, 2022. See slides 12-13 on the project update presentation to get a sense of how well regarded, attended, and successful the day was.

2023 Education and Outreach

Expansion into 2 workshops

We had two main educational activities for our producers this year. Our original project proposal included only 1 workshop in 2023, but we had the distinct luck to have a fantastic partner in BGO as pollinator experts. We decided to include an ADDITIONAL workshop for our producers detailing just the pollinator aspect of their ranches. More details about that below.

Curriculum Shuffle

In addition to ADDING significant curriculum around pollinators from our expert partner. We also felt that a workshop centered around native grasses/plant surveys/water infiltration/bale grazing would be low-value-add for our producer partners since they also had been actively doing those activities with us in the field. Therefore, we had an opportunity to provide a different, more engaging workshop based on a sister event that we’ll share details about below.

Workshop: Montana Rangeland Tour - July 6th, 2023

The DNRC Montana Range Land tour took the place of our initially planned summer 2023 workshop which was intended for our producers with a wide invitation for other producers in the area to attend. However, with DNRC hosting a workshop already at one of our producer’s (Barney Creek Livestock) locations we decided that we would be able to reach more producers by presenting as part of their workshop.

Initial grant application workshop objectives (for reference, changed per “Curriculum Shuffle” above)

Content/Objectives:

• We’ll share project updates and any progress notes on the project with all attendees.
• The workshop will focus on native grasses that are good for grazing livestock and for pollinators, how to conduct plant surveys and examples of common plants that are found in Montana rangeland.
• The workshop will also cover how to impact Water Infiltration and the what the benefits of Bale Grazing are and how to use this technique effectively.

Target audience:

• Project producers,
• Producers in our region,
• MSU students from partner organizations/programs,
• the Yellowstone Valley Ecosystem communities

Partner workshop development and support: Ted Nelson (NRCS), Rachel Frost (MSU DSRP), Chris Mehus (WSE), Stacey Barta (DNRC)

Curriculum for Montana Rangeland Tour

The attached schedule for the Montana Rangeland Tour includes the details of the day. Note inclusion of Buzz on the Range. Major touchpoints:

• Soil health demonstration from world-renowned Nicole Masters, including a trench and microbiome discussion
• Pasture tours of Pete and Meagan (Barney Creek Livestock) locales including in-depths on electric fence and water management to support daily moves

Buzz on the Range Section of the Montana Range Tour Days

• Stacey Barta, our DNRC grant partner, enthusiastically included almost an hour for us to share the details of this project and objectives.
• Barney Creek Livestock producer, Meagan Lannan led the conversation about Buzz on the Range. Meagan shared overall about the project, the grazing protocol producers were using as well as the native seed mix involved.
• Lara Birkes, also shared about how the protocol has impacted her land which was previously heavily sprayed, un-grazed for a time, and lacked pollinator promoting plants.
• Buzz on the Range’s Fiscal Sponsor, Western Sustainability Exchange’s (WSE) then Program Director now Executive Director, Chris Mehus supported Meagan in talking about the project and connected how this work has inspired educational efforts in WSE’s programming. More on that in the impacts/outcome section.
• Michael DeChellis shared about how this work was supported by a Western SARE grant and encouraged attendees to come up with innovative producer partnerships for consideration by Western SARE for their grant goals.

Attendees

The workshop was WIDELY attended by all of those on the Rangeland Tour (estimated 40+ attendees!) Project producers Milk Maid Meats, Blake Ranch, and Malou Anderson were able to attend the workshop. Barney Creek Livestock has an additional project site and the landowner, Lara Birkes was in attendance to share her experience being part of the research protocol. Our 5th producer, West Creek Ranch, did not attend.

Workshop: Buzz on the Range Pollinator Surveys, Findings, and Pollinator Insights by Bee Girl Organization’s Sarah Red-Laird - December 11th, 2023

The second educational effort came from Sarah Red-Laird, Executive Director of the Bee Girl Organization. Last summer and this summer, she acted as our main pollinator research partner. She held a session with our producers to share with them all that she learned when surveying their fields. All 4 participating producers this year were able to attend this session. Sarah shared why there was a lack of complete bee data, shared preliminary findings, and demonstrated use of iNaturalist pages, where she was hosting her research. She also discussed methods for analyzing vegetation and bee populations. She also shared a powerful story about a bee death during her measurements on a producer’s land that really put the cost of spraying into focus from a pollinator perspective. Details of her presentation are in the update document here.

BONUS Education Activity: Soil Your Undies for ANOTHER YEAR!

We really wanted to highlight a successful continuation that came from our initial grant-funded Soil Your Undies campaign last year. At that time, we partnered with WSE to host a Soil Your Undies Campaign, which was met with great interest and success. While we weren’t able to continue this activity under this grant for this particular activity, WSE in 2023 did a social media campaign to encourage folks around Montana to Soil their Undies. They created some MT specific materials that they shared with their networks. In an email about this impact, Chris Mehus (project partner and ED of Western Sustainability Exchange) said: “Looks like our Western SARE Soil Your Undies activity continues to thrive and expand beyond our expectations! Last year, several groups, most notably Yellowstone County Extension and 4H used the concept for a large educational push that had tremendous reach through their youth program. From the forwarded email here, the MT Soil Health Week collaborative is using it this year as a major part of their outreach and programming!”

2024 Education and Outreach

Workshop Title: Buzz on Your Range: Discover the Benefits of Leasing Your Land for Grazing Date and Location: October 9, 2024 | MSU Extension Office, Livingston, MT Audience: Private landowners, leaseholders, small-acreage managers, conservation-minded land stewards

Links to videos from the workshop:

• Centering Visualization for Cows and Bees with Meagan Lannan
• Soil Your Undies Introduction from Meagan Lannan
• Grazing for Values with Jackie Pondolfino
• Montana Audubon Ranching Program with Christian Meny
• Adaptive Grazing and Leasing for Ecosystem Services Panel
• Platform for Grazers and Landowners to Connect - by Holly Stoltz with WSE

Educational Objectives Addressed:

• Increase awareness of the ecological and economic benefits of grazing on private lands

• Equip landowners with practical tools and considerations for leasing land for grazing

• Build bridges between regenerative ranchers and landowners through shared learning

Methods:

• In-person workshop (2.5 hours)

• Panel format featuring regenerative ranchers (Barney Creek Livestock, Indreland Ranch) discussing lived experiences with leasing and land management

• Expert presentations on grazing infrastructure, leasing logistics, and ecosystem benefits (e.g., Hayes Goosey on wildlife, Chris Mehus on the Mountain West Grazing Connection tool)

• Hands-on Q&A and guided discussion encouraging audience participation and peer learning

• Outreach tools included: community flyers, targeted email invitations, personal outreach to land trusts and landowner groups, and registration via Google Forms

Buzz on the Range Lessons

We created a k-12 lesson that can be used by agencies, educators, other producers based on our project. This has been shared with all participating producers and agencies and is available through the website to farm to school networks, 4H, and FFA. Lessons included opening focus question, learning objectives, lesson description, action steps, and a closing. Lesson Objectives:

1. Increased understanding about the relationship of soil health, pollinator habitats, and grazing animals.
2. Increased understanding about types of land management options available to support healthy ecosystems.
3. Improved knowledge of ranching careers and the scope of work and their decision- making process.
4. Improved awareness of current issues and challenges in agriculture.

Buzz on the Range Kids Book - Cows, Bees, and Blossoms

Lily the Cow and Biff the Bee, characters from the “Cows, Bees, and Blossoms” children’s book

We created a kids book to solicit contributions to the project from agencies, educators, and other producers.

Buzz on the Range Video series

We have completed and posted a visual story on YouTube showing what conducting this research actually looks like, with the goal of making it easy for others to replicate the process on their own. The video captures our workshops and demonstrates how we gather data at each producer site, including how we take measurements and record observations over time. This resource has been shared with our project producers and partners, who are encouraged to share it further. We will also link to it on the Western Sustainability Exchange website and invite organizations like NCAT and AERO to share the video within their own networks.

Project Report

Clear documentation of our project, process, and results presented in a way that is accessible and engaging for interested parties. Our completed project documentation is available online on our evergreen buzzontherange.info website. It includes a project summary, research introduction and goal, research methodology, results, learning, etc. The website contains links to the curriculum, video series, and recorded workshops for those who want to explore the project in greater depth.