(serene music) - [Kyle] As soon as we put them in there they're the size that they're keeper size.

And we're looking for small basins and close proximities to towns that are gonna be able to get used.

- [Narrator] Virginia Homme is a dedicated environmental steward.

Her farm side showcases the best of soil and water protections and clean energy.

- [Eric] So the current vehicle we're calling it, Toro nicknamed it the Cowbot and it has just stuck.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by Safe Basements of Minnesota, your basement, waterproofing and foundation repair specialist since 1990.

Peace of mind is a safe basement.

Live Wide Open.

The more people know about West central Minnesota, the more reasons they have to live here.

More at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters.

Where peace, relaxation, and opportunities await.

And the members of Pioneer PBS.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] The DNRs Ortonville area fisheries manages 45 walleye rearing ponds in Western Minnesota The ponds are stocked with fry in the spring then netted in the fall and transported to area lakes and streams to sustain a healthy walleye population and increased fishing opportunities.

But nets can't capture all the young walleyes and those that escape grow large quickly, which is good news for kids living near ponds where big fish are stocked just for them.

(upbeat music) (guitar music) - So today we're coming out.

Water temperature is about 55 degrees.

It's an optimal time to be out there harvesting fish.

This pond, we've been using it for about four years.

We came in yesterday and set a bunch of trap nets.

The heaviest net I've ever lifted with walleyes has been 211 pounds.

I can still remember it and I've lifted too many zeros that it's hard to remember all the zeros.

But we're generally looking for that five to 10 of the pound.

10 pounds per net is productive.

We like to see fingerling production, meaning fish that are produced this year.

Stock this fry caught in the fall, smaller stuff.

They go to our lake stocking program.

We have ponds, several ponds that carry over meaning they don't win or kill.

And the fish survive year after year.

And we've had ponds at we've had fish over nine pounds coming out of our rearing ponds.

They just last so long in there.

So we're looking for ways to use those fish when we catch them.

And what better way we thought than to find some kids fishing ponds.

As soon as they put them in there they're the size that they're keeper size.

And we're looking for small basins and close proximities to towns that are gonna be able to get used by what we hope is a lot of kids out there fishing.

We try to put them in there in the spring and in the fall.

So they're there throughout the open water season and then again with the ice fishing.

We stock them quite heavily.

Way, way heavier than we would a manage lake.

So when we stock them, we do a lot of promoting of that stocking, get ahold of the local newspapers, let them know, hey, we put this amount of fish in there, this is the size, and really do a lot of PR work trying to encourage kids to get out there and go fishing.

- [Narrator] Sylvan Lake and Camby is one of the ponds that DNR stocks with large walleyes to lure young people into the sport of fishing.

- Totally convenient 'cause you can just come down here if you live in Camby and just fish.

- Just fun to catch them, just have a great time.

Don't get bothered.

It's just nice, peaceful out here.

- It's a small, about two acre basin, little reservoir right in the downtown, there's a fishing pier on it.

Pretty easy access all the way around that basin to provide fishing.

(upbeat music) The nice thing was Sylvan is that it does get some runoff from one of our management lakes.

So there'll be some perch in there sometimes, there'll be some bluegills in there.

But what happens is there's not the numbers that can provide a steady fishery, not for a whole season.

So that's where we come in there with the numbers trying to provide a more active fishery per se.

We're just losing a lot of the youth from fishing.

This is an instant gratification generation where they're used to, whether it's on the X-Box catching fish and it happens quickly.

So you got to capture them pretty aggressively.

So we're trying to maximize that bite.

(intense music) - [Narrator] Last fall, area fishery staff, Chris Domeyer and BJ Bauer headed out at night to capture large walleyes in a pond near Ortonville.

To move smaller fish, they would set nets one day then bring them up the next day.

But for large fish, the stun and capture method works best.

- Electric fishing can be a useful tool where you're going out there and you're actively or aggressively trying to catch a fish.

Electric fishing, we're going out into these shallow basins.

Sometimes when they're so shallow they don't net very well either, or there's full of vegetation and the fish aren't moving along shore.

So then we'll actively go out there and try to catch them with the electric fishing boat.

The one day on one of our ponds we had nine fish that we brought back to the truck and the nine fish weighed 72 pounds.

So some monstrous walleyes from ponds.

And we put into a little kids pond and talking with the kids the next year, this kid went on and on talking about the fight of his life and it actually broke his line right before he got to see it.

But that fight that he had, that time that he got to fight that fish was so memorable to that kid.

And so that means it's exciting when you're doing stuff and seeing it pay off with kids down the road whether they're actually catching the fish or experiencing the near miss.

It's all exciting to 'em.

(upbeat music) You get 'em out there and it's a boring day and I can speak from experience with my own kids.

If you're not out there when they're little and seeing a bite, it's hard to get them back off the next time.

They're looking for some action.

And so that's what we're trying to provide.

And we do a kids day, meaning we go up to the school and promote fisheries in the school that day.

It's a fifth grade group.

Every year I ask them how many of you guys have fished out on that kid's fishing pond.

And inevitably it's generally 80 to 90% of these kids have been out there.

And when I asked them to raise their hands with what they've caught, most of them raise their hands.

But my favorite fishing story, that was when we were doing ice fishing events and this little girl was out fishing and she caught a bought 11 inch perch.

And she said, I caught 11 inch perch and the guy fishing said, now tell them how many fish have you caught in your life?

She said, I caught an 11 inch perch.

It was her first fish he'd ever gotten.

It was a beautiful perch and she was just thrilled to death to have had caught that fish.

And when you get them early like that you get that enthusiasm going, they're more apt to keep going with it.

It doesn't do us any good if we have kids going out there fishing one time and never again.

If we get them going out there into these put and take situations and they can get a fish or two, and we encourage people to bring them home and eat them.

And they get that, they them bring home and they're able to eat them with their family that they've caught, that they've provided.

We're trying to create that fisherman or gal for the next generation.

(upbeat music) - And that's the thing that really surprises me.

That one person could do that much with that little.

- [Jack] There's always a thrill when you build something and it works the first time it's like a birth of a child almost.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Which was native to Minnesota and which is the invader?

The answer is coming up right after this.

(upbeat music) (serene music) - I was born during the depression.

And when you lived then, you learned to conserve everything.

As you're growing up, you know you don't have very much and what you've got, you better take good care of and see that it's gonna last you a long time.

- [Narrator] Virginia Homme is a dedicated environmental steward.

Her farm side showcases the best of soil and water protections and clean energy, a legacy she will leave to future generations.

(serene music) (upbeat music) Ginger's earth-friendly installations include a restored wetland, buffer strips, pollinator plots and geothermal, solar, and wind power systems.

The diminutive conservationist treads lightly on the earth and leaves little carbon in her footprint.

- Bought a hybrid car and that makes quite a difference.

The solar panels alone have saved 153,062 pounds of CO2.

I don't have a readout at all on the wind, but it's maybe 10 to 20 per cent of that more.

And that's the thing that really surprises me.

That one person in, it'll be 10 years in November, could do that much with that with that little.

(serene music) - [Narrator] After Ginger's husband, Paul retired from the air force in 1976, they moved to Yellow Medicine County with son, Erik and ran a cattle operation inherited from Paul's father.

In 2002, they purchased a 160 acre farm close to Granite Falls.

Two years later, Paul died unexpectedly.

- When my husband passed away, we lived in a big house on the bluff, about eight miles from town.

It was a long driveway and it took me a few years to figure out where I wanted to relocate to that would be easier to manage.

And after about two years I realized we owned this farm site and it had no buildings on it.

We had only had it a few years and we began.

I got Erik to help me start cleaning it up and making it something we could use.

- [Narrator] Ginger rented out most of her new farm, but she kept 17 acres where she built an energy efficient house and set out to restore natural habitat.

- She would show up to these meetings and just take in all the knowledge of local conservation practices projects going on.

And she inquired about the conservation reserve program, particularly about CRP pollinator plots.

She wanted us to assist her in installing a pollinator plot.

So I said, well, I can help you out there.

And when designed up a mix for her, ordered up and installed it for her.

It's been getting more popular especially the last maybe five years or so.

Programs are paying more for people to install more diverse mixes, hence the CP42-Pollinator practice.

They take more energy to maintain.

You can't manage those in ways that you would manage a clean grassland practice or restoration.

(serene music) The very next year, we installed another CRP practice across the stream that flows through her property.

- And the native seeds have extremely deep roots and do well to turn the soil into a sponge so that there isn't so much water runoff, erosion, wind erosion, rain run erosion and helps prevent some flooding too when it soaks up the water.

- Early spring, 2019, she has a stream flowing through her property.

Ginger had the perfect spot on this farm to create a wetland where we built an earthen diversion or a bank down in the bottom of her ravine where the stream runs through.

The stream drains roughly 711 acres of watershed.

It's a good source of sediment, total suspended solids and phosphorous to the Minnesota river.

This wetland creation will reduce 11.3 tons of sediment and phosphorus.

So every year this wetland remains on the property it will reduce that much pollutants into the Minnesota river.

- The bacteria in the bottom of the wetland it's the same bacteria that industry use in an anaerobic digester to clean up the most polluted water you could think of.

And they do a tremendous, tremendous job of cleaning up the water.

- 'Cause that sustains our lives, ground water and water in the streams and lakes, if we can keep those clean for future generations, that's important to me.

- It's when they did the work down here, they were surprised at the depth of the black dirt before they wanted to get down to clay to use that for the berm.

And they had to dig more than two feet down.

It was a big surprise.

So I feel like I'm sitting on a gold mine.

(chuckles) We need to keep it where it is and not have it blow away or go downstream because we have some of the best farmland around ever anywhere.

We can't afford to lose it.

(guitar music) - In 2019, we nominated, we as in Chippewa SWCD, nominated Ginger Homme as our Conservationist of the Year.

We noticed just all the things that we've done for her or helped her with, accompanied with the things she's done on her own and felt she was very deserving of the award.

- Well, that was quite a surprise that they give awards to little old ladies, and it was a beautiful, I got a beautiful picture by Terry Redland called "The Conservationist" and it looks beautiful in my living room.

Climate change is something that's definitely here and we all need to do all we can to be ready to handle the heavy rains and the heavy winds and to avoid the erosions and the flooding.

And that's, I mean, we can't deny it.

- Long after we're gone, the land will still be here and it's worth investing in it.

Where there's clean water and healthy soils, life will flourish.

Here on Ginger's farm life is flourishing and she's done a great job.

(guitar music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Which was native to Minnesota and which is the invader?

The invader is Asian clam.

How do we tell invasive Asian clams from native freshwater mussels?

The invasive clams are symmetrical in shape.

Native mussels are asymmetrical.

Asian clam shells have rigid concentric rings and grow up to two inches.

Native mussels are larger.

Why are invasive Asian clams a problem?

They can filter out nutrients that native aquatic species need and the invasive clams may block drainage or water systems.

Where are Asian clams found?

Currently they are found in regions of Eastern Minnesota.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] We can stop these invaders from infesting more lakes and streams by cleaning up everything we pull out of the water.

It's a simple drill.

Clean in, clean out.

Before leaving a water access, clean your boat and water equipment.

Remove and dispose of all plants and aquatic species in the trash.

Remove drain plugs from your boat, drain bilge, live well and bait containers and keep them out when transporting your watercraft.

Dispose of unwanted bait in the trash.

If you have been in infested waters, also spray your boat with high pressure water, rinse with very hot water, dry for at least five days.

Stop the spread of AIS.

Funding for this segment was provided by the Aquatic Invasive Species task forces of Wright, Meeker, Yellow Medicine, Lac Qui Parle, and Big Stone counties.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Robots have always been a curiosity among humans.

They're often portrayed in science fiction as superior adversaries, or sophisticated assistants attending to our every need.

In truth today's robot technology is not yet at science-fiction levels, but we do have robotic vacuum cleaners and assembly line machines and we're developing self-driving cars.

Soon, we may also have autonomy weed mowers.

They're being developed by University of Minnesota researchers who are testing the mower in cow pastures.

(upbeat music) (serene music) The West Central Research and Outreach Centers Morris' Office, the Toro Company, and University of Minnesota's computer programmers are collaborating on the mowers design.

- So it really started with a problem here on the farm.

So as the cows are grazing in their pastures, they will eat the grass but they'll leave thistles and Burdoch and other weeds.

And so those don't get controlled, they go to seed, they spread and eventually they can kind of take over a pasture.

So every now and then a person would actually have to get on a tractor and pull a mower out into a pasture and mow it to control the weeds.

And it's a job that nobody wants to do 'cause the pastures are really rough.

There's a lot of gopher mounds, et cetera.

- [Narrator] The face of the project is a modified Toro Groundmaster mower.

- [Eric] So the current vehicle we're calling, Toro nicknamed it the Cowbot and it has just kind of stuck.

It's a mower that would have been used on a golf course.

Toro converted it from a diesel mower to electricity.

We've also changed the mowing apparatus itself from a normal deck mower to a flail mower.

- So we have lithium batteries on here and we've converted the mower to do an efficiency study.

There's a couple of ways to make an electric vehicle.

One is to start from scratch and make it drives all the power systems electric powered.

What we did on this mower was simply remove the diesel engine and replace it with an electric motor.

So the rest of the tractor is essentially staying the same.

The other thing we did was we added on the drive-by wire items so that it could become a robot.

We aren't doing the navigation.

We are making a machine that will listen to navigation commands and execute them.

So the traction control and the steering control are electronically controlled devices.

- I mainly work on the navigation of the robot.

We take varying information and define which direction you move for the robot.

Like if I'm controlling commands your find.

Previously, I work on like flat ground, but in the pasture the ground is much more rough.

So not all my previous codes can work.

So I have to specifically deal with those, like the robot jockey like rotate a lot.

- There's a lot of integration.

You got to have a lot of handshakes between the navigation and the machine to say, I'm ready to be a robot, are you ready to navigate?

Yes, I am.

Okay, go ahead.

And some safety protocols for that transition.

And the navigation has to understand capabilities of the robot.

It can ask for 60 miles an hour, but it can't get it.

And the robot has to understand if the navigation tells it to do something to say here's the method I'm going to do it.

I'm gonna proceed smoothly.

I'm gonna turn at this rate, things like that.

- We have quite an array of sensors.

So we use very precise GPS location we have in use, putting lidar and camera.

So they're a bunch of sensors that work together.

All of these interact with our system, we interact then with the robot system, the Cowbots internal systems.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] The Cowbot has been tested on the university's research pastures in Morris.

- So the Cowbot is using GPS for navigation.

And so it's connecting to satellites just like you would in your car, but also it's a differential GPS.

So there's also a unit mounted in the pasture which vastly increases the accuracy.

So it gets it down to centimeter type accuracy.

Originally a driver drove a perimeter to establish the area that we wanted to mow.

The Cowbot then calculated, programming on the Cowbot calculated a path to fill that area and now it's following the path and it's using the GPS signals to make sure it stays online.

Ideally, it's trying to manage the amount of overlap that we get all the weeds, but we don't overlap too much.

And so you'll it go.

And if it hits a gopher mound and gets sort of diverted from the path, it will correct and come back.

- [Narrator] The Cowbots battery life is two to three hours.

Eventually it'll be able to return itself to the custom fitted solar charger trailer.

- We have 10 solar panels on the roof of this cargo trailer which is about 3.3 kilowatts of energy.

And the first piece of equipment is a charge controller.

And any solar PV array that's hooked up to batteries needs a charge controller, and that is controlling the charging of the battery bank.

So we're taking the energy from the solar panels.

This is making sure that the voltage and current are correct for the truck and depending on how charged the batteries are it a varies of voltage to charge the batteries.

This is a power inverter.

So, so far everything from the solar panels and stored in the batteries is DC electricity.

But normally if you want to use that electricity you need it to be inverted into AC electricity that same kind you have in your house.

And that comes into a circuit panel just like you'd have in your basement.

And then the last thing we have on here is a level two electric vehicle charger.

So this is the same kind of thing that would have in your garage if you had an electric vehicle and you're charging at home.

- [Narrator] There's more in store for the Cowbot than just mowing pasture weeds.

- We're also looking at using the same vehicle for autonomously weeding early row crop.

So something like soybeans or corn.

When that plant is still very small.

And then a phase two of this project is to actually weed late term row crop.

So going in a cornfield perhaps after the corn is tall enough that you couldn't go through with a tractor and a cultivator anymore, we're developing a different vehicle.

This would be a different vehicle, not the Cowbot but a new robot that would actually go down a single row in that cornfield and hunt and kill weeds, that will find, determine what is a weed relative to a corn plant, find it and kill it.

(serene music) - There's always a thrill when you build something and it works the first time.

It's like a birth of a child almost.

So those are fun.

Seeing it make progress, on a scale of, comparing to an adult, the Cowbot's probably a seven-year-old.

But last year it was a toddler.

So it's growing in its capabilities.

It's got a long ways to go to be a full functioning adult though.

- It's been a really fun project to work on.

It's an interesting application.

I think that we're at the very cusp of robotics in agriculture.

You're already seeing tractors that are steering themselves in the fields and things.

So I think farmers are becoming more accustomed to this type of technology.

And I really don't think it will be that long, five to 10 years before you'll be seeing commercial products where you're gonna see a lot more robotic activity on farms.

(guitar music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by; Safe Basements of Minnesota.

Your basement, waterproofing and foundation repair specialist since 1990.

Peace of mind is a safe basement.

Live Wide Open.

The more people know about West Central Minnesota, the more reasons they have to live here.

More at livewideopen.com.

Western Minnesota Prairie Waters.

Where peace, relaxation, and opportunities await.

And the members of Pioneer PBS.

(serene music)