(light music) (rousing music) - You guys are the cream of the crop.

- [Bret] On today's "Prairie Sportsman", we check out the Student Angler Tournament of Champions on Big Stone Lake.

- [Vincent] It's cool to know that we're building a program here.

- [Reagan] There's nothing to be nervous about.

You can whoop these boys' butt.

- [Bret] We learned the master plan for the Lac qui Parle WMA.

- [Walt] Prairie is one of the most threatened ecosystems in North America.

- [Bret] And Nicole Zempel introduces us to the benefits of burdock.

- [Nicole] There is so much more to this amazing plant.

- Welcome to "Prairie Sportsman".

I'm Bret Amundson.

We got a great show for you starting right now.

(rousing music continues) - [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, and by Mark and Margaret Yeakel 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.

(moderate music) - High school, where kids go to learn about things they like and a few things they don't, like math.

Sports have always been a big part of the high school experience, and in recent years, the sporting opportunities have expanded to include more of the outdoor world like archery, the Clay Target League, and now fishing.

(moderate music continues) The Student Angler Tournament Trail is a non-profit organization that offers competitive fishing events for students in Minnesota.

Each angler must be a member of the Student Angler Federation and fish for their local school team if it has one.

- I also coached the Brainerd Warrior Fishing Team, which our first year, we just kind of did some local stuff.

Our second year, we said, "Hey, let's have a trail."

So we started a trail, we gave away a brand new boat to the winners of our trail.

And it grew, we were getting, you know, 30 to 40 boats per event, which at that time was pretty big, pretty cool.

And then we all grew the Brainerd Warrior Fishing Trail and we started the Student Angler Tournament Trail.

In a nutshell, we do five qualifying events, and we take the top 10% from each event qualifies for our TOC.

- They were on Whitefish, La Homme Dieu.

We were supposed to have one on the Mississippi River, but unfortunately, we had to cancel and change that one to Mille Lacs.

And we had a regular open on Mille Lacs.

And then our TOC is tomorrow on Big Stone.

- So welcome to Big Stone Lake.

We have 95 boats that are gonna fish tomorrow, okay?

You guys are the cream of the crop.

Some of you guys and gals have been here for many, many years.

Some of you, this is your first TOC.

- It's really grown, especially in the northern region of the country, I guess.

I know South was always big fishing, and we've been here for a little bit, and it's cool to see all the younger kids like we were.

Cool to see that and how good they're doing.

- Our program started from about four people last year, and now we have about 14, 15 this year.

- Oh, really?

- It's been a massive growth.

We have three teams at the TOC.

If you told me that before this year, I wouldn't believe you.

We have guys who just finished eighth grade year.

They're at the TOC this year.

I mean, that's something me and my buddy Noah weren't able to do.

So it's cool to know that we're building a program here.

(moderate music continues) - Minimum countable length of a bass is 12 inches.

It's gotta hit 12 inches on your bump board, then you're gonna round it up a quarter inch.

So your smallest bass in the app is gonna be 12.25 inches.

Absolutely no fish at all period ever in your livewell.

- I think it'll be a tough bite, and if we can get seven of 'em, I think we'll sit pretty good if we get seven, but... - I'm sure all you guys got out there and practiced a little bit.

I've heard multiple different things as far as how the bite was, but I guarantee one thing.

Somebody is gonna figure it out.

- This is my first-ever day fishing Big Stone in my entire life.

So I have about 7 1/2 hours of time on the water out here.

(Tommy chuckles) - How did it go?

- It didn't go very well.

(laughs) I've heard that there's some big fish in here.

We didn't catch any, but I've heard that you gotta keep moving, and we did not do that today.

So hopefully, we're gonna try that tomorrow, and hopefully, we'll bump into a few big ones tomorrow.

(rousing music) ("The Star-Spangled Banner") (wind susurrating) - Let's get going.

- Woo!

- [Chris] Good luck out there.

Live check, thank you.

(stirring music) - Well, that's what it's all about right there.

Almost a hundred boats lined up and taken off for the Tournament of Champions here on Big Stone.

Normally, they don't do a lineup takeoff.

Normally, they can just start from anywhere on the lake.

At seven o'clock, the app opens up and they can start fishing and entering fish.

Now they have to use a timestamp.

That way, you know that the fish was caught after seven o'clock.

So right away, after a couple of minutes when the fishing started today, there were a couple of really nice bass that were entered into the app.

So they're all out there now.

They gotta be back in by two o'clock.

They'll have the award ceremony.

We'll find out who wins this tournament.

It's a big deal.

There's some scholarship money up for grabs.

There's some bragging rights.

And how great is it for these kids who are in high school to be in a moment like this?

- So Lund donates us a boat each year, as well as Scheels donates some prizes, and then each school in Minnesota is able to check out tickets and they sell those tickets for $20.

For each ticket, $5 goes back to the school who sold it as a fundraiser, $5 is kept by the SATT just for administration costs, and then $10 goes straight to college scholarships.

So this year, we sold 6,027, I believe is the number.

So we're able to give away $60,000.

The $60,000 is split between 1st and 15th place, and then we also draw four random spots.

So it might be 25th place and 38th place, and they'll get $1,000 scholarship and those are split between the two anglers.

And they don't have to go to a specific school.

You can go to a tech school, a four-year school in-state, out-of-state.

You can even do an apprenticeship and we will pay for that as well.

(steady music) - Fishing with SATT, you meet so many great people.

You get great opportunities with them as well, winning a bunch of scholarship money.

I mean, last season, I won two big bass, checks back to back, one on Leach Lake, one on the Mississippi River with a 5/8 largemouth.

There's so many great opportunities with the fishing.

- I've talked to many girls, and they're like, "Oh, I'm too nervous, I don't want to."

It's like there's nothing to be nervous about.

You can whoop these boys' butts.

- Being a female is awesome in the fishing community.

So many people are supportive of you.

You get so many opportunities.

I mean there's separate checks just for you, just for the females.

So if you're female, you should really join fishing, and it's great.

(steady music continues) - When we do our informational meetings, you know, we tell 'em whatever level you're at, you know, if you want to come on and you just wanna learn how to fish, if you wanna learn a Palomar knot, we're gonna teach you how to tie a Palomar knot.

- We have a lot of people who join the team, and they've almost never fished before in their life.

So it's a great way to teach people how to fish.

I'm a captain.

Every week in a derby, I got two other kids in my boat who tend to be pretty fresh.

So it's a good way to kind of help other people learn too.

- I've been doing this since the summer after my eighth grade year.

Me and my buddy Noah, we kind of just found out about it and we both like fishing.

I don't own a boat or anything, but he does.

And I mean I didn't know that much about fishing before this, but then I joined in the league and I've learned a lot from it.

(steady music continues) - [Jason] If you want to come in and you want to travel down to Florida and fish competitively, we'll provide that platform too.

- Yeah, the dream is to go on and college fish somewhere.

- But we've had several kids that went off and fished to college, and our best success story, we had a kid that started on the SATT who fished Bass Master Classic this year, and just a few weeks ago qualified for a second Bass Master Classic and likely is gonna be an elite BASS angler starting next season.

And high school fishing and college fishing gave them that platform to do that.

(steady music continues) I think there's a lot of kids out there everywhere that just really like to fish.

But I think when you add that competition to it, that competitiveness to it, it completely changes the game.

Then just going out is obviously very important to go out with grandpa and go fishing.

But when you're competing against your peers, and then you add elements like scholarships and things like that, it completely changes these games.

And some of these guys are just built for that.

They want to compete.

- I've always liked just competitive stuff 'cause it's just, it's a way to make things just like, it elevates the adrenaline rush for me.

I'm just naturally a competitive person, and I think that fishing was just another way to keep that going throughout the year.

- It's a great community.

I mean there's some rivalry that goes on and it's fun beating people.

(Bret laughs) (steady music continues) - There's days when football are very hard, baseball is very hard, but when you come out here, it's calm, it's peaceful, you're out here.

And even when the fish aren't biting, you're just out there.

I mean you're fishing and then you get, there's that competitive aspect on Sundays, but before that, it's just fun to come out here and fish.

And that's probably my favorite part about it.

Throughout an entire summer, I might have pre-fished for tournaments more than I've had football practice, and I want to change that.

(steady music continues) - I think it's only gonna get bigger.

Kids are gonna get better, stakes are gonna get higher.

- I don't see us slowing down anytime soon.

We've been, you know, steadily growing, just, I mean it's obviously not as much as we grew from say 2017 to 2019, but we are coming back up to numbers pre-COVID right now.

So I think we'll at least stay here or probably grow a little bit more too.

(bright music) - Pretty awesome derby.

Some of you guys caught 'em, some of 'em, some of you guys, it was a pretty tough bite.

The fish definitely changed, as you guys know.

We had a pretty big shift in temperature.

Our winners, I can say dominated.

Anytime you win a derby with 98 boats, 97 boats by two pounds, you can say that's a pretty dominating derby for them.

They made $12,500 today.

They're from Cambridge-Isanti.

We have Zach Piescher and Cole Semler with 27.77 pounds.

- Yeah, it did not go like practice at all.

We just showed up to our first spot and we just pulled a couple five-pounders out and we're like, "Oh my gosh, what's going on?"

Went to the next spot, same thing happened, and we just went back and forth two miles apart about the size of our boat each spot, and just went back and forth all day.

- Well, awesome job.

Mom and Dad are gonna be a little happy.

Their college tab just went down.

So congratulations, and congratulations on a fantastic couple seasons.

(bright music continues) - A bunch of friendships that changes your life.

I mean, I know people from Little Falls, I know people from Owatonna that have graduated, and I still hang out with them, or meeting people from Louisiana that we travel down there once a year and see them.

So friendships, that really changes everything.

- I've thought about joining the DNR because of this.

I love fishing that much that I've thought maybe I could do something.

I kind of want to go to community college for wildlife and fishery management because of this, you know.

So yeah, again, it's definitely, it's impacted my life for sure.

- Definitely do it.

It's life changing.

And I know that sounds like a big thing, but it truly is.

(bright music continues) - [Walt] How many places can you go where you can walk across a prairie for three miles and never been broken?

- We see this plant as maybe a nuisance, but the magic in this plant lies in the root.

(steady music) - [Bret] Encompassing over 33,000 acres of habitat in western Minnesota, the Lac qui Parle Wildlife Management Area, or WMA, is home to an abundance of wildlife and some of Minnesota's remaining prairie.

And now there's a new plan to keep this place special.

(steady music continues) - Lac qui Parle is the only prairie-dominated major unit in the state.

We have about 13,000 acres of prairie and grasslands on the WMA.

That's a big chunk.

So you don't see that in one area.

It's a mix of restored and also remnant prairie that was never tilled.

So that makes it really, really special.

And they had management in the past that haying and grazing, but they were never turned over by the plow.

But we have a number of areas that we manage with agriculture to provide winter food for deer, pheasants, and migrating waterfowl, and there's roughly 2,000 acres of that.

So some of that, we manage ourselves.

Some of that, we manage in cooperation with local farmers.

- [Bret] In 2023, the DNR started the process for a new master plan on how to maintain and improve the WMA to benefit both wildlife and users.

- It's to guide management activities on a major unit to inform other management and planning processes.

And it's required by state statute.

The first management plan for Lac qui Parle was prepared in 1977 and there was another one done in 1997, and they're supposed to be done every 10 years.

But obviously, we weren't keeping up.

We had our initial meeting, trying to do some scoping, decide what we felt we needed to look at, what needed to be done.

And then we had a pretty extensive public input process.

I think we received a lot of public comments, we put a lot of effort into reaching out to people.

In our case, we went out on opening days of deer, pheasant, waterfowl season, and put information on hunter's cars, let 'em know we were looking for their insights and input on this management plan.

There was, I mean a variety of comments, but I think we had a lot of positive comments, you know, some concerns about our tree removal work we do.

People commented about how we're farming on WMA, for example.

People were interested in that we continue to manage the prairies on the WMA.

Tree removal is always, seems to be controversial, but if you wanna maintain a prairie, you can't have trees in it.

And it's an ongoing process for succession.

There's always a battle between trees and prairie.

It's been going on forever.

And if you want to increase prairie and maintain prairie, I mean, you have to do it.

Prairie is one of the most most threatened ecosystems in North America.

We only have 1% left in the state from what was here originally.

So it's really important resource to maintain.

And then you throw in some of our invasive tree species, Siberian elm, European buckthorn, black locusts.

I mean, you add that to the mix, it's like forest succession on steroids.

It just, it goes nuts.

So we gotta work really hard to address that.

And it's an ongoing battle that we're gonna continue into the future.

You have to do something, or we will lose what prairies we have.

As trees become established within grassland, it starts to pull out predators into the grassland.

They'll go out into an area of prairie or grassland that has trees starting to show up.

You'll start to see little trails going to each tree.

And I think that's ground-based predators start to follow those trees out there.

And by keeping it open, not only it improves pheasant nest success and other species, waterfowl, non-game grassland nesting birds as well.

There was a number of different comments from people, comments about Marsh Lake, good and bad.

The lake has transitioned so much from where it was.

It was a wide open basin with very turbid water.

Now we have a lot more vegetation in the lake, the water's more clear, the submergent vegetation has increased.

There's a lot more aquatic life in that lake now.

So it's changed, and in some cases, it's reduced the amount of available areas that hunters can get to.

So, I mean people commented about that, and we're gonna take steps to try to open things up so people have some better access in other areas and create some more open water areas out on Marsh Lake by doing some aerial herbicide treatments on some of the cattails.

So we had issues with crowding because the amount of open water wasn't as much as it used to be, so people had to go into a small area, so it made it harder.

We have, you know, some WMA roads, a lot of parking lots.

So I think we're looking at make it easier for people who have special needs to get onto a lake, get onto a dock, those sort of things.

If there's ways we can improve access to other areas that we can't do now or we don't have the ability to, you know, for example, some of our docks have a gravel approach in the middle.

Someone who's either in a wheelchair or perhaps crutches, it's hard for them to navigate that.

Just by simply putting in a cement approach would improve that.

We're looking at one spot near Marsh Lake, we might be able to put in a handicap-accessible barn.

There's been increased population, human pressure, human use of the WMA.

We have people drive out from the Twin Cities to fish, you know, every day in the weekend and they'll drive back.

And that's kind of a new thing.

New demographics of people that we haven't had out here historically.

We're seeing people from Hispanic groups among, they all enjoy the area.

So it's a new group of people and they use it a little differently.

So we're trying to improve our signage and how we communicate with people that don't have English as their primary language.

If we stay on top of our invasive issues, that'll certainly keep the prairie in good shape.

We continue with our active prescribed burn, that's gonna help.

But if we're not able to stay on top of invasives, on top of tree encroachment, we're gonna see less prairie out here, less open landscapes.

And some people might like that, but I would disagree.

So how many places can you go where you can walk across a prairie for three miles and never been broken?

I mean, that's really, really special.

And to go out on a prairie today is one thing, and then you go a week from now, it will have changed.

I mean, prairies are so dynamic and from season to month and from year.

I mean, this year is so different from last year.

We have an abundance of porcupine grass seed production this year that we haven't seen in years.

And this year, it seems with all the rain, it just exploded.

And you know, when people just come here in the fall to hunt, they're missing a lot.

So I think it'd be important for people to come here 12 months of the year.

I think they'll gain a new appreciation for the area.

The prairie habitat is just so rare.

I mean, it's become so uncommon in Minnesota and in the Midwest.

It's just, there's been a steady reduction in this type of habitat and the species that it supports.

I mean that's really what it comes down to.

(catchy music) (light music) - So you might be asking yourself, "Why on earth is Nicole sitting next to the burdock plant?"

There is so much more to this amazing plant than meets the eye.

But like I've always said in my own learnings, you don't know what you don't know until you actually know.

This plant showed up in my yard and it was my dad who informed me, "That's burdock, get rid of it."

But I foster native plants, I incorporate them, and then I learn about those plants and I am so glad this plant showed up.

So first off, yes, we see this plant as maybe a nuisance, or you know, the burrs, you go walking, you have 'em sticking to your shoes, your pants, your clothes.

But the magic in this plant, even though the whole thing is edible, the magic lies in the root.

The leaves are a bit bitter, but I find that with most wild greens anyway.

And there's ways to tame bitterness or embrace it and incorporate it.

I use a lot of bitter greens in my salsas.

The stem, also edible, and it kind of resembles rhubarb.

And you can eat this raw or cooked, same with the leafy greens.

If I was gonna eat the stem, I would take it home and then just give it a rinse.

But then just take like a potato peeler or just a knife and gently peel away just the outer layer.

And once you get in there, you can see it's moist, it's green.

Treat it like you would asparagus or a vegetable if you're gonna prepare it.

What I go for is the root.

You never know what size root you're gonna get.

And you wanna dig about three to five inches away from the base of the plant, and you don't wanna break the stem, or at least you wanna try not to break the stem.

Turns out I did break the stem, but that happens.

I don't like to waste, and so usually I will give away the stems and the leaves to folks that would like to utilize those.

But the root, it's considered a super food and it actually contains 102 different minerals.

This root is incredibly, incredibly healthy.

I'm just gonna again, take a potato peeler or a knife, and you can see the nice white, fleshy interior of the root.

And I'm actually gonna treat it like I would a carrot or a parsnip.

Some people say it tastes earthy or kind of sort of like soil.

I don't know that I necessarily can detect a distinct taste coming out of it.

I know I like them.

I know they're good for me.

Sometimes, I will use it as like a textural component.

It reminds me of like a bean sprout or a water chestnut.

And it does take on the flavor of whatever you're using it in.

So it's good in stir fries, it's great in soups.

It is considered a vegetable.

In Japan, they have been harvesting this plant for millennia, and they understand that it is of great medicinal and nutritional value and it is commercially sold as gobo.

Behold, the root of the burdock plant.

Also very important, they have a lifespan of about three years.

I'm gonna guess this beauty is probably in its second year.

Next year will double or triple in size, and it gets really pretty flowers on it too, which then become the burrs.

But this is no longer harvestable.

What I look for is the first-year plant, or if it is in its second year, it has a flower stalk but it is not flowering yet.

It looks like rhubarb, it's low to the ground, and there is not the flowering parts yet there.

So people always say harvest burdock in the fall of its first year or the spring of its second year.

I've never really followed that rule, but I break a lot of rules in foraging anyway.

Maybe I don't love rules.

So many of the plants that I harvest, they have so many different benefits, nutritional value, medicinal value.

But really what I'm gonna say is with any plant, dig deeper and read because every plant holds so much value, and you'll be surprised.

The burdock plant.

(steady 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, and by Mark and Margaret Yeakel 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.

(light music)