 I'm Denise Rackley. I live in Switzerland County, Indiana, which is the southeast corner of the state. I use stock dogs to help me manage my sheep. Stock dogs allow one person to work stock by themselves and do it safely. You can do it longer because the dogs are there to help you move the stock. The dogs are there to help you move the livestock away from you so you can open gates so you're not in immediate danger. A lot of older folks feel like they can't handle stock anymore. The dog takes care of most of that for me. They also, like I said, are invaluable with rotational grazing so I'm able to graze every place on the farm without fences. They just lend hand wherever I need it so I as a single person and a woman can take care of everything with the sheep that needs to be done. I lived out in South Dakota for a while and I got bottle lambs and 40 bottle lambs and 50 bottle lambs and the lambs kind of started my flock and I got about to maybe 50 head of use and it's hard to manage 50 head by yourself. You know you carry a bucket of grain and there's 50 use in front of you stick their head in a bucket grain. They don't care if you're there or not. You know they want the grain. So I thought well I'll get a dog and I did and it was a puppy and I went oh heck I don't know what I'm doing so despite being a vet tech helping people with their own dogs doing obedience classes you know working in animal behavior type environment I knew all that I still couldn't train my stock dog and it took me five years to decide I needed help and then I found another producer who was also using dogs and started working with her and that I bought a trained dog and he taught me more than any person. The Sarah Grant was to help me educate livestock producers on how to use stock dogs. A lot of livestock producers by a pup think they can train it themselves to have it help them and often they find that's not the case. There's a whole lot of intricate things that you are moving the livestock are moving the dogs moving and to be able to teach it how to work well and respect the stock and respect you takes a lot of experience and you can't get that from a book or watch any videos. So the program was a hands-on they can bring their dog income and then I had a gentleman here Jack Knox from Scotland who's been raising training and helping people use stock dogs for 50 years so he was here to help everybody learn the best ways to be able to accomplish what they needed to get done. Now my name is Kevin Beal I live in Burlington Kentucky just south of Cincinnati Ohio and run about 30 head of cattle 135 acres of the neighbors and so I've been to several Jack Knox clinics here at Denise's it's been extremely helpful that's you might want to learn to fly an airplane you can buy a book and read how to be a pilot you go out and somebody will rent you an airplane or you can buy your own you might be wanting a hundred to do it or one in ten thousand but probably want somebody to give you some help and okay this is you know it's it's not as easy as it looks. It's been very valuable to me and helped me with my cattle operation and it's saved me a lot of time and a lot of energy and but I would do it over again I buy a started dog there's no way around it. If you're just getting into this you need it to start with a trained dog. So that dog has the experience to be able to help you learn where it needs to be how to work it it already knows about stock and then you're just kind of along for the ride and that dog will teach you more than you could ever learn from a person from lessons from anything like that. So once you have that dog working well with you you know a couple years down the road would be the time to get a puppy. Getting a puppy when you first start it's kind of a blind leading the blind. Pup doesn't know what to do you don't know what to do and it's usually a wreck that's the way I started I don't recommend it.