 My dad and I have been farming together since I got out of college and that was in 2013. We do corn, beans, wheat, cover crops. We have cattle and sheep, hogs, chickens. We try to integrate everything that we do, getting cattle out on cover crops, getting them out on all of our fields and trying to improve our soil health is kind of our number one priority around here. The first year the idea of cover crops was that we were going to get a little bit of grazing out of a wheat stubble field before corn stocks were available. And so the first year it worked wonderfully because the cover crop grew up darn near waste high and we put the cattle out there and they got a lot of feed value out of it. And then for about three years in a row it was dry after wheat harvest and we couldn't get a cover crop established and we couldn't get anything growing but we kept trying it. Our goal is to extend our grazing season so that we don't have to feed any stored forages. And last year I believe we had to feed for 45 days. We couldn't get anything out of the fields for the cattle to graze at that point. But this year we've got like six different things going on for the cover crops that we planted. We had some oats that we had this year and after harvest we planted that to a full season cover crop. At the same time that we planted the oats we put in four varieties of clover which got established so by the time the oats was harvested that was already growing. And so that's going to be our first forage to graze this fall. And then after wheat harvest we plant turnips and radishes and allow the volunteer wheat to come up. That isn't growing very well. We had kind of a cool September and October and didn't get a lot of growth out of that. We also had about a hundred acres of crop ground that was too wet to plant the corn. So about the 4th of July we got into that and seeded it all into a cocktail of cover crops. One of the new things we're kind of excited about for the future is going into standing corn when it's less than knee high and seeding some cover crop into that. That'll kind of go dormant over the summer but as soon as the corn starts to dry out in the fall it starts to grow again. So we're hoping that that'll give us a little protein boost in our corn stocks so that we can graze longer in corn stocks every winter. The land we're talking about here is the farm that I grew up on. My dad bought the farm in the late 50s and it was all crop ground and he struggled for 20 years to farm it and I tried to farm it for a few years and then he and I put most of it into CRP and it ended up staying in CRP for 20 years and we planted maybe four or five species and most of it for the CRP program. I believe this is the 10th year that it's been out of CRP and since then every year we see a little better diversity in the plants that are in the pastures and we get a little more forage out of it. By taking our CRP and putting it directly into pasture we were qualified for some programs through NRCS and gave vision parks and they cost shared putting in water lines. We have this one inch plastic pipe going right into all the paddocks and we've run them along the fence line between two areas so we can utilize that one water line better and we can use it on both sides of the fence. We don't have to have as many lines that way. There's just one centralized well that supplies all of our paddocks so our cattle are drinking out of portable water tanks that are on wheels and they just have a float and we have quick couplers and so they're drinking the cleanest water that they can drink. We try not to have the cattle on a given paddock for more than at most 48 hours and then they're moved and that paddock gets to rest for at least 30 days and we prefer 45 days and the fact that you're allowing every species to come back every time you graze it means that the cattle can't take out their favorite grasses and leave the weeds so the soil over the last thousand years has got a really heavy load of hard seed that's been there for a millennia and those seeds are being allowed to germinate now and come up and we're seeing a lot of native warm season grasses show up in pastures that have never been seeded to it and when I was a child those species weren't out there. It's kind of exciting. Every year we're finding new things. Somebody has come up with an innovation we didn't hear about before and it's like how can we use that on our farm and it keeps us going. The idea that when I'm gone there might be a legacy here and it might go on for a few more generations that's in the back of my mind.