 Amy and I both grew up on ranches. We got married right out of high school, owned a business within a year of that. I was working full-time construction and she was busy taking care of the general store, the Stoneville store. We are in Union Center, South Dakota. It's about 50 miles east of the Black Hills. We're definitely out in cow country. We have four sons and ten grandkids. The ranch where we live now came up for sale in 1984 and we purchased it. We'd already had a business here, the Comac Ranch Supply Farm and Ranch Supply Business, and the gentleman that owned this ranch came to me one day and said, you need to own this place. I couldn't agree more and so we purchased it in 84 and then since then we've we've added on to the ranch I think six or seven times. I currently serve in the South Dakota Legislature in the Senate. I chair the Agricultural Committee and people ask me why did I get involved. I started out as a county commissioner and moved on to served in the House of Representatives and then I've served several terms in the Senate. I've always been involved in the Ag Committee. To have people that are producers and have a good understanding of the workings of agriculture, have a good understanding of conservation efforts and that the the say the cost-share money that ranches get or farms get for their efforts. It's an effort that's going to benefit every single citizen of South Dakota and it's going to benefit every citizen of the U.S. in one way or another eventually. We always thought that we would like to have a cabin in the Black Hills or in the woods or something like that and not having the face to think that I might be willing to forego an opportunity in and do that sort of thing. I thought we better start planning our own forest right now and we did that the first of them 30 years ago and we have a we have a forest. I grew up planning the trees you know the one place we call the forest. I planted that when I was in the eighth grade helped put the drip irrigation to get those trees going well and now I get to walk through them and you know you have 28 30-foot towering pine trees so it's been fun to see the transition the benefit for the wildlife and you know it's just beautiful to see something green in the dead of winter when it's a whitens in the winds blowing across the prairie. We've planted 30,000 trees and 100 years from now the only thing that the evidence of Amy and I being here is going to be the kids in the trees and the wildlife the guests. The guests would be deer and bobcats and coyotes and fox and skunks and coons and big mule deer and whitetail and antelope and the hundred different species of birds that most folks never see. The two biggest things we've done are adding the water systems to get water out into more remote parts of the range we get more even grazing and better utilization out of the range that we have and also the rotational grazing systems especially the one where we we took 1800 acres chopped it into 13 different paddocks and we do a once-through rotation the bigger pastures will get ten days the small pastures will get five to seven days and we've been able to increase the caring capacity on that particular piece of range by almost a hundred percent and we're growing more grass with a better diversity of range species than was there before so that's been pretty awesome to see that transition the plant population is greater than it was before the cattle do better you know it's not hard to implement the system the fencing the fencing is is definitely an input cost but moving cattle is a very simple process we'll go out there they're ready to move we open the gates come through close the gates get good harvest efficiency and that plant species is grazed at a different time every year so you're not grazing those early season grasses at hard every year that particular paddock will have about 400 days of rest every single year and it'll only have cattle on it for five to ten days so that's been an interesting experiment and it's going very very well whenever we can we take the bale processor and feed over the top of areas that are scarred by cattle trails or erosion that sort of thing and and what we found is that it heals those areas it cuts the the healing time by 80 or 90 percent unbelievable so really does well that way and the other thing we've done recently is we've just set a complete round bale in an area where we might have a monoculture of grass that isn't the most desirable price and read is a fine grass but there's a lot of times of the year that the cattle won't eat it so if we set a bale of that in the middle then and change the the nutrient profile of the soil then all of a sudden you have some western and some things starting to come through that so the reason this food security and water quality is available for us to enjoy every day and air quality is because of what farmers and ranchers are doing when it comes to conservation efforts and and caring about the land and making sure that everything is better today than it was yesterday and better this month than it was last month and better this year than last year