 I'm John Shuebeck and we farm by Centerville, South Dakota and this is my wife Megan and my oldest daughter Emery. She's six, she's a first grader and then my son Eli, he's a five-year-old preschooler and then this is Anna, she's two and then Oliver our dog right here. Our farm operation is a family operation. We first, the Shuebecks first came to the Centerville area in the 1870s and it's been passed down through the generations but I've only been here farming for three years. I got out of the Marines in 2012, I guess that'd be four years now. So we returned home, we bought some land and then slowly got started into farming that way. So yeah, the biggest things we're looking at is trying to mix more small grains into our rotation just so we can throw pests, disease and weed cycles off. You can, if you're going corn, soybean then there's, you know, different pests that can either last through the next year's rotation or there's weeds that just get caught up in that warm season crop cycle whereas if you throw a cool season crop like winter wheat or even oats in there you can do away with some of those problems like water hemp or even mare's tail. You can get around mare's tail with using something that is planted in the fall. So we've been using more and more of that. Along with that we've been using more cover crops. We do winter rye mixed in with our corn soybean rotation where we plant winter rye after corn and it grows before soybeans and it's really cut down on the mare's tail. Our fields have been completely mare's tail free because of that rye. It just totally suppresses it and then we've also gotten some grazing benefit out of that. We've put the cattle out on the rye and gotten at least a month of grazing out of that which really enhances the profitability of it. The other big agronomic push we've been doing is reducing our tillage. Biggest reasons for reducing tillage is in South Dakota we've always got a problem with moisture especially the eastern third we either have too much or too little it's never just an even amount so like this spring we had way too much and but then in the summer we had way too little and so if you can find a way to carry that moisture forward it really helps out and that's one of the things we're trying to do with no till is take that spring moisture carry it through the summer and we can really increase our average yields that way but also no till is just really good for conserving the soil. We see on some of our hillsides where you'll see where there's been a lot of erosion and no till has really helped us to cut down on that. A lot of people talk about no till being a problem and with planting with cold soils you know they say that you have to get out there and till it to dry it out and warm it up but I just haven't ran into it so much yet I mean the spring was really really wet but we got our crop in the same time as everybody else so that's not to say that you might have problems at times but the soil does a lot better job of managing that moisture when you've got all those soil pores they can soap that water up a lot better so soil health has been a big focus for for me where I've incorporated no till I've incorporated cover crops cover crops and no till go hand in hand you get the most benefit out of cover crop and the big thing you're you're trying to do when you put that cover crop in a no till situation is encourage microbial diversity to encourage beneficial species to come in and also to sequester nutrients some of those nutrients are mobile in the soil like nitrogen and sulfur and cover crops help make sure that that's not not lost from the system so that's all part of soil health I think about the the future of the land with most things I do you know when I do no till I'm trying to keep that soil there and there's there's a lot of erosion that took place in the in the 30s and on this particular farm right here you could still see that erosion even in 2012 when there's that severe drought and just the tillage does not work well on on these great plain soils