 My great-grandpa homesteaded in Sioux County, North Dakota, north of Thunderhawk. And my other great-grandpa put together a ranch that my mom and dad still ranch on and that I grew up on. I chased Mickey for six years before we were married in 2001. I was working for a bison ranch, a man from Ohio. We ran Buffalo for him until 2002 when he sold out. And that's when he gave us an opportunity to buy the ranch. My wife was teaching school 30 miles away. And in 08, we had an opportunity to sell that ranch and lease it back on a long-term lease. And that's when we bought the place that we live on now. And we run the ranches as their own separate ranches because they have their own separate challenges and problems with the grass that's grown there, the soil that's there, or the water that's there, or the lack of water that's there. We started building cross fences. And I started attending grassland schools, tried to go to one a year, and felt like I really enjoyed and I got really excited about improving the range. When we got married and I was teaching, I wasn't really involved with a lot of the practices on the ranch, and it took me a while to learn exactly what was going on as far as rotations and grazing because I didn't grow up this way. But when I stopped teaching, I was able to start attending some of the classes that Justin went. I realized there is so much more into ranching than most people see from the outside. I've been working with Justin and Mickey for close to 20 years now, working on their grazing plans, helping them to develop their natural resources, talking quite often with Justin over different questions and stuff that you would have, where there would be over cover crops, bale grazing, grazing rotations, plants identification. There's been a huge improvement in the plant communities that are here. Like Justin had said, there's two different ranches. One is in the pure shale soils, and so is almost a completely different plant community from the one that is south of McLaughlin. That's more of a sandier ranch. But the plant communities have greatly responded. I mean, we're seeing a lot more diversity, seeing a lot more of the desirable plants. We've seen some sand blue stem grown on the side hills. That's a pretty good indicator of a healthy system. There's a lot of lead plant, which lead plant is a pretty desirable plant. We've just seen nice improvements in utilization on everything and good distribution. I started building cross fences, just trying to get all the exact same acres in the pastures. We added pipelines to the wells that were there. Once again, I'm pretty sure Ryan drew them all out, and we pretty much followed them that way to get the most efficient water line we could. There is no shallow wells. It's pretty much deep artesian water. And so getting water distributed to the cattle and for grazing distribution has been a challenge. I guess without the water, it's hard to do the cross fencing and getting the good rotations and stuff. But we've done quite a bit of improvements getting water distributed, so you're seeing the benefits. It's easy to see where you needed improvement once you start fencing, because there's still areas that aren't getting grazed. So we saw trees growing where the dams were. We saw different species of grass growing. They will be in a different pasture every year at a different time, so they'll be grazing at completely different species. Right now, in a pasture where we just moved them out of, they were grazing lead plant and prairie sand reed, and they're grazing things that they won't graze a month from now in that pasture. They won't be in that pasture next year at the same time. They'll be in a different pasture. And that has helped a lot with the variety of what we have growing there. It was something my dad had always taught me growing up, that we need to take care of our cattle and take care of our range, and be stewards of this amazing gift that we've been given, this amazing opportunity to raise a family while managing grasslands and be able to make a living doing it and a chance to improve the land that's there. I like to ride horses, and I love to cows. I like cane, riding horse, and calving and branding. Probably a day branding with my family, and then we go jump in the dam when it's really hot out. My best day on the ranch would be a branding with all of our family and friends, and eating lots of good food and dessert, and probably also jumping in the Grand River afterwards and riding a lot of horse. We don't know yet, but if the girls or the boys would like to continue our legacy and continue ranching, we want to take the best care of the land that we can and teach them how to do it as well. Koi has a huge passion for ranching and farming. And Riley talks about hunting and maybe building a hunting lodge someday. And there's so many things that they could be involved in. They learn every day here, things that would help them in the future as far as work and ethics and taking care of the land. Not many jobs do we have that we can do with our family and where they see a benefit of their work and a teamwork to bring it together. I am so thankful for that opportunity.