(ambient music) - [Bret] This week on "Prairie Sportsman," join the Precision Rifle competition.

- That's a lot of movement, and at times to get that many rounds off accurately.

- And discover the latest in converting wind energy into green ammonia.

And we'll join Nicole Zempel for a fast forage.

I'm Brett Amundson and it's time for a brand new episode of "Prairie Sportsman."

(ambient music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yael Jolene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.

- [Bret] When people think about rifles in Minnesota, they usually think of the short gun deer hunting season, but there's a growing group of gun owners who are finding enjoyment and taking their rifles to the range in the off season for some good competitive fun.

(rifles banging) - We're out near rural area near New Holland, Minnesota, shooting a little precision rifle.

- [Bret] The precision Rifle series is considered a preeminent rifle organization and holds events all across the world.

Members participate in matches and then the top ranked shooters get to compete in the precision rifle finale.

But you don't have to be super competitive to participate.

Today's event is just a casual team match that doesn't count towards the standings.

- Both of your shooters are gonna shoot it individually, like just like a normal match.

And then you're gonna count your scores and your total time for the two of you.

- Teams take turns at different skills and challenges, shooting at different targets at varied distances.

They'll add up their scores based on how well they shot to determine a winner.

- I think they're a lot of fun.

The PRS series, we do shoot PRS series here at this range as well as New York Mills, Minnesota.

There's also one north of the cities as well and one of my Princeton too.

So there's a couple different ranges throughout the state that we shoot actual PRS series matches.

And there's a couple like outlaw, you'll call 'em other matches that are just for fun, they aren't necessarily in that league - Today was a team event, so we're able to help each other with getting on target to get those impacts.

And like I said, to build our score count.

So you have about 120 seconds to get your 10 rounds, which is pretty common, as low as eight, sometimes there are 12 round stages.

Some of the faster times when we get into like the pro level events, they're actually closer to a minute 45, so they cut the time a little bit, sometimes they're even 90 seconds.

It's a lot of movement at times to get that many rounds off accurately.

- [Member] Yeah.

- So with like today's event, we're counting the impacts, if you miss it is just no points at all.

So the key is to kind of take your time, get off a good hit, and there are times where we've done a bonus stage where if you have remaining rounds at the end, those were actually worth extra points.

(upbeat music) - This was our first team match.

- Yeah.

- Frustrating.

A lot of anxiety, today, I didn't really know what to expect.

Talked well.

- Yeah, it was good teamwork.

Good communication, which is not always easy when the timer's going and the stress is high, and you can't quite hear, and you're snappy a little bit.

(upbeat music) - The furthest end actually is one of the, like here with our 1300 yards is, I mean it's a stretch but on average the 600 to 800 is a pretty average number for the longer ranges.

And they kind of start about 300.

But yeah, that 500, 600, 800 kind of in there, that's what most of the ranges in Minnesota kind of run.

- It's great 'cause we have maybe a third of the people that come out to shoot to become a better hunter.

'Cause most people don't have access to shoot at a 400 yard target somewhere.

They live in the city or wherever.

And it's like, so now you can get the skills to make a 300, 400 yard shot and figure out exactly where your gun hits, and also figure out how challenging an 800 yard shot is and whether you shouldn't take it or not.

These are all center fire rifles.

Anything from, well I'm shooting a 308, just a plain jane 308 today.

Not the best gun for this sport, but I don't have to reload then.

'Cause you can be competitive without reloading.

A lot of us have fancy calibers that this sport really works a six dasher, that's my teammate was using today.

And it's just a very low recoiling efficient bullet that gets out there, and he just tag a 1200 yard target today twice.

- She shoots same pretty much build that I have, which is a masterpiece Arms, it's called the PMR Pro.

And it's like the entry level rifle that you can anyone buy off the shelf.

It's not custom or anything, you can just buy it.

I mean, a technically kind of is semi custom, but anyone can buy 'em.

And they're 6.5 creed mowers, which are very, very popular.

Yeah, got the kind of the basic upper tier stuff and then just, we've kind of been running with it.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] While they were shooting all center fire rifles today, PRS also has rim fire competitions.

- We're doing a lot of 22 matches now too.

Same thing, the targets are just moved way in, like 300 yards an end.

We have many of those throughout the state.

For rim fire aspect of it, we have a lot of experience, a lot of great shooters locally in Minnesota.

The world championships was in Italy this summer and we sent four or five people from the metro area or surrounding to the World Championships.

Center Fire, Oklahoma, they got it locked down, but we're newer to this than they aren't.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] Of course a big part of being a better shooter is knowing your firearm well, but having good optics can play a big role in these long range shots.

- You know we can feel the wind here, but we don't know what the wind is going out, not out there.

Thankfully there's some wind flags on this particular range, but usually you can see the mirage going through the air.

If you have good quality optics that are like little waves in the line or in the sky, and you can kind of guesstimate the wind based upon the mirage sometimes.

And also hopefully when you hit the target or you miss the target, the bullet hits and then the dust either flows away or sometimes, like today that's a 10 mile an hour wind.

You can kind of get an idea of how much wind you're supposed to hold before you get there by spotting.

And then also this is a competition, so there are people spotting to, did you hit or miss?

And this one's not unlike others, it's not how close you hit to the center, it's did you hit or miss.

- When we get into like the pro level, there usually is a designated range officer for each stage and a designated spotter.

With these we're usually having our, we're self Ro-ing, so everybody is kind of an RO, so everybody takes a turn watching and running the tablets and running a timer.

Some of the rifles you can see the vapor trail as the bullet's going through the air as it's actually cutting through the air.

You'll actually see some of them actually go out into the wind and then come back in.

It's kinda like bowling.

(upbeat music) - Beings is I'm an avid hunter, and I kind of went down the road of shooting deer at longer distances and I was like, man, is there like a way to have fun without having to go hunting to do this?

So then I just found the Minnesota Precision Rifle group and then they had a match coming up.

So I had a rifle ready and then I shot my first match and then she came to that and then she didn't come to my second match.

But then three months later, middle of winter, it was December, nd I, of course I'm training all the time and she had asked me one time, she's like, "Well, can I come out with your training?"

And I was like, well, of course.

'cause I mean now we both get to do what we love to do.

(upbeat music) - My hobby was woodworking and it was too loud when we had an infant son.

So I started hobby was reloading and then I started shooting.

I wanted to shoot longer range, I wanted to hit a five bucket at a thousand yards.

And I started off shooting like F class, which is like a more of a prone type thing.

And then I found one of these matches, and this is way more fun.

- This is probably one of those sports that everybody's willing to help everybody else out.

I mean, you could come with grandpa's gun and some ammo, and the shooters will be more than arms open, and hand you gear to use, give you pointers.

It's crazy on how in a competitive sport, everybody's willing to help you out even though it's competitive.

- When I started, one of the coolest things about it was when I went my first nationwide two day matches is I was squatted with the Dale Earnhardt or the Tiger Woods.

I mean, I was squatted with the top shooters, they were in my squad, they were giving me a helping hand.

We shot with them all the time.

So shooting with number one or number two in the nation, it's kind of cool, it is kind of a cool feeling.

It's not like everything else where you're way down there, so it's neat.

(upbeat music) If you have a rifle, come out, bring it and don't feel like you have to be prepared for this.

We even have, throughout Minnesota, we have at least one or two like new shooter events to try to get people into it more.

Like, I'll probably try to talk you and shoot my gun yet today.

(upbeat music) If you don't even have a gun, don't feel like you have to go buy one.

And actually that's probably more important, don't go buy something that you think you need for this if you don't have a friend that's already doing it.

Because a lot of us have had to rebuy and rebuy and rebuy because this is what we were told or we heard on the internet.

But you get a mentor, a local person that you can talk to and help you out, and that's really how we improve our skills.

- I just think everybody's just so awesome.

There's so many good people and all the events we've been to is great hospitality and well run.

- Yeah.

- And they just keep it moving and keep you having fun.

- It's not the cheapest thing in the world, but like I tell everybody, just whatever you have, if your grandpa's got an old hunting rifle, just bring with, get you shooting to know if you actually do like it or not.

But I have a feeling you'll like it.

(upbeat music) - [Eric] We also finished a project a year and a half ago, maybe now, where we replaced up to 50% of the diesel fuel in a tractor in a John Deere tractor with ammonia.

- If you have this in your yard or around a garden, it will deter the deer and the rabbits.

- Minnesota spends upwards of a billion dollars a year on anhydrous ammonia fertilizer as as a whole state.

None of it is made in Minnesota except the small amount that we're making here at this pilot plant.

We've been doing renewable energy research here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center since 2005, when that first wind turbine went up.

Some of that idea was what could we do to provide jobs and income for people in rural areas?

And one thing we have is a lot of energy.

We have wind energy out here in West central Minnesota.

And then it was like, well, could we do something with it?

Could we make some product that would be useful locally?

As far as we know, this was actually the first site of a wind to hydrogen to ammonia plant.

Whenever the wind is blowing and we don't need that electricity, we could electrolyze water and make hydrogen, and then later on we could take that hydrogen and burn it in a generator and make electricity again.

So it was a way to store energy.

We decided we could use that hydrogen to make ammonia.

And anhydrous ammonia is a primary fertilizer that goes on the corn fields all around Minnesota.

- This here is our serial number one, our ammonia production unit.

We have this built for us specifically for this project.

So we'll bring that stored hydrogen, anhydrogen, pass it through some regulators, then pass it through a compressor.

And this compressor is just basically a pump pushing the airflow.

Flows through four exchangers, one, two, three, four.

As it passes, leaves four, then it goes through that horizontal unit right there, that's just electric heater.

Heats us up this hydrogen nitrogen up to about 820 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where then it passes into this device right here, this vessel, this is our ammonia production vessel.

It goes at 820 degrees, comes out at 975 degrees, roughly 15 to 20% of that ammonia or hydrogen and nitrogen become ammonia.

- This is looks like a very complicated piece of equipment, but it's really like when you are a kid and you have the chemistry set, as a possible Christmas present, this is kind of a giant version of that.

Probably half the people in the world wouldn't have food if it wasn't for synthetic ammonia.

Haber and Bosch, German scientists won the Nobel Prize for this development.

And usually when people kind of think about things that humans have done, this is in the top five.

And most anhydrous ammonia fertilizer is made at these what are called world scale plants.

Super large plants make thousands of tons a day.

This by comparison, makes about 25 tons a years, is what it was designed for.

Just enough ammonia for our farm field, which is under a thousand acres.

(country music) The idea, the model on this was sort of an idea that maybe a farmer co-op would be formed.

They could have some wind turbines and generate electricity.

They could have a small plant making ammonia fertilizer that they would then use on their farm fields and kind of have that circular economy going for themselves.

The new inflation reduction act has a incentive to produce green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen means that the hydrogen is made from renewable energy, as opposed to normally it's made from methane or natural gas.

So a lot of the ammonia plants are near the Gulf coast or in places where they have natural gas in abundance, and then it comes up in a pipeline or in a truck, or by ship or barge up into the Midwest.

Current price of ammonia is 600 to $800 a ton.

With this IRA incentive of $3 a kilogram, we're almost, the incentive is almost equal to the cost of production.

That IRA incentive is for 10 years.

If you start five years from now, you can still get that incentive for 10 years.

There's no question that there are going to be hubs of folks making ammonia in the Midwest using renewable energy to get the hydrogen and then nitrogen from the air and making the ammonia.

So just a question about who's gonna do it.

(country music) Another aspect of the research we're doing here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center is looking at the carbon footprint of agriculture.

It turns out that a little over a third of the carbon footprint of growing corn is due to the ammonia fertilizer because of that natural gas used to make the hydrogen.

Another third to 40% of it is in drying the grain.

Another LCCMR project that we just completed was actually using ammonia in a grain dryer.

We converted a grain dryer from natural gas to run on ammonia and demonstrated that as a possibility.

We also finished a project a year and a half ago, maybe now, where we replaced up to 50% of the diesel fuel in a tractor, in a John Deere tractor with ammonia.

Hydrogen is an important element in steel making.

And so that's something that in Northern Minnesota we could possibly be looking at that.

There's a lot of possibilities that kind of stem from this green hydrogen, then going to ammonia, and then going to other fuels, other chemicals, other products.

In 2010, when we first started turning wind energy into hydrogen, and then this ammonia plant went live in 2013, and we're now operating almost a $20 million federal grant to replace this facility with one that will make 15 times more ammonia.

- That's about the size of a co-op or a county wide.

And I mean, and that's kind of the size we're shooting for.

- A model of a plant like this size will be an incentive for maybe farmer co-ops or that kind of level of scale to come around and see if they can't get a piece of that action.

There are some new technologies that some of these larger companies have come up with where they can now ramp the production of ammonia from a hundred percent down to 10% in an hour and back up again to a hundred percent.

That's what's gonna be tested here.

You can follow wind as we like to say, or follow the sun, make it during the day and and not at night.

That has a potential to really lower the cost of production for ammonia fertilizer.

(lively music) Minnesota has great wind resource, especially in Western and southwestern Minnesota.

We have excellent solar resources, but what we do not have is any fossil fuels.

So we don't have any coal in Minnesota.

There's no natural gas.

And so those precursor items to make to get to hydrogen don't exist in Minnesota.

By using renewable energy in a site like this, everything is right here, and we're making the product that goes right on that cornfield.

The idea of making a product like ammonia fertilizer is very attractive in places where you have excess renewable resources, especially wind.

We've had a group from New Zealand out here that's very interested in doing some research here, or perhaps even purchasing this original reactor when we put the new one in.

We've also had farmer groups from the Dakotas out.

So every where place where we're burning something, if we could use electricity instead, that is the shortest path to really reducing our carbon footprint because we can put in wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal dams, hydropower, all of these kind of things, we can make the electric grid less carbon intensive faster than we can do anything else.

And that's the beauty of this green ammonia, it's a drop in replacement.

It doesn't change anything the farmer is doing, they're just using a green ammonia instead of an ammonia made from natural gas.

Almost a billion dollars a year that Minnesotan spend on ammonia fertilizer could potentially someday stay in the state.

- One of the first ethanol plants in the world are actually right here at this facility at the West Central Research and Outreach Center.

So now you look at it today, how you have ethanol plants over the Midwest.

Well that started in the early late '70s, early '80s.

Well, we started this in 200s, 2010s, what's gonna happen 20 or 30 years from now?

Are we gonna have ammonia facilities all over the site and say, Hey, we started that right here at the West Central Research and Outreach Center as well.

So I think that's really neat.

These small towns are dying, all the kids are going to the cities and they're staying there.

And these towns out here getting smaller and smaller.

Well, if we can bring jobs out here, we can bring a vibrant economy back to the rural areas.

(lively music) - I am standing in what looks like a sea of wild bergamot, beautiful wild bergamot, AKA horse mint, AKA beebalm, and we'll talk about that.

But first I wanna point out, it looks like this beautiful native plant is growing in great abundance.

And here in this fragmented little hidden gem of an area it is, but elsewhere, it's a native threatened plant due to habitat loss.

So that's very important because that also impacts the way I choose to harvest not only the bergamot plant, but all of our wild native plant species.

So today, like I said, wild bergamot, it is a member of the mint family, and interestingly, any member of the Mint family will have a square stem, so not round, square.

And you can notice it by just looking at it, but also when you feel it.

So when I harvest the wild bergamot plant, I take only the top third and only if necessary.

Typically I'll just go for the leaf shoots that are coming up when they're young and tender.

I like to leave the plant as much intact as possible.

So again, today for the purposes of science, I have clipped the top third of a bergamot plant.

So again, the stem is square.

So a telltale IDing characteristic also is that the leaves are opposite each other.

So it's almost like they're shaking hands and the stem is in between them, so they're just straight across from each other.

And then the flowering part consists of kind of a pinkish purple long lobed petals, which brings me to something interesting.

While I'm talking we might be visited by several bees, different types of bees, all kinds of insects, different pollinators, hummingbirds, hummingbird moths love this plant.

So this is a very beneficial plant to have in general.

Interestingly with the bee, oh, and we have a bee right back there.

So I'm gonna guess because that bee is on the petals, it's a long tongued bee and nature blessed it with that long tongue because it's able to get down the long lobes of the flowering petals and get that nectar.

Other types of bees that don't have that gift will actually literally just tear into the bottom of the flowering part of the plant to get at that nectar.

If I'm looking at it for edible and medicinal purposes, this plant is one of my favorite things to utilize and harvest.

A multitude of nutritional benefits and medicinal.

When I harvest the plant, as I mentioned, I take only the top third if I am needing to, but I like to leave it as intact as possible.

So again, utilizing the young leaves shooting up, they can be used in salads, they can be ground into kind of a spice.

They are similar sort of in smell and taste to oregano, which is surprising to me because you would think it would smell a little bit more minty being from the mint family.

But all else, it smells like oregano.

If you have this in your yard or around a garden, it will deter the deer and the rabbits because they don't like that smell of oregano.

So the young leaves can be used in salads.

But today we're gonna talk about tea.

And really I am swimming in a sea of tea.

That's what I see when I see this beautiful plant.

As I mentioned, it's ingested as a tea for those medicinal purposes.

It aids in relieving symptoms of cold and flu, minor headaches associated with that.

And it's wonderful on the throat as well.

So to make the tea, you simply harvest the leaves and you harvest the flowers and you're gonna dry those.

And I just air dry them naturally in a dark space.

I put them usually in a brown paper bag or a box, and then I just cover it with like some paper towels so that they can still get some air circulation through there.

When they're totally dry, I'm gonna take them and grind them up to however I prefer to have my tea.

Some people love powder, some people like the dried leaves and the petals whole.

I plop those in a reusable teabag and I boil one cup of water.

And then I'm gonna drop in about two teaspoons of my dried bergamot.

And there you go, you have a medicinally beneficial healthy tea.

And also this is a mosquito repellent, so people do make balms out of this.

They also make tinctures and use that as a spray.

(lively music) (ambient music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, Mark and Margaret Yael Jolene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.