 My great-grandfather came to South Dakota back in about 1913 and moved into a neighboring farm. This farm was operated by my mother and father for a number of years. Growing up I had no thoughts of ever becoming a farmer or rancher or livestock owner. I was probably trying to follow my brother's footsteps and went on to SDSU and got an engineering degree. Just prior to graduating my father had had a conversation with me wondering if at some time I would ever want to come back to the farm. And that was really about the first time I'd ever even thought about it. And he said, yeah, that's a possibility. But he said, you know, it's more important to go get a job and then come back when he was older and ready to retire. Well, unfortunately, just a few months later he had to go in for some elective surgery and never made it out of the hospital and died. And so I had two months of school left and got my degree and came back to this farm. At that time this farm was 75% crop ground. There was a pretty good size cow herd that we did have but otherwise it was mostly grain dropping. It didn't take long, I guess, until I decided that there was just too much investment in machinery. I didn't have extra labor around to help and harvest times and that. So gradually it's transitioned into doing it all into grass. In 1996 we pretty well completed what we were going to have into into grasslands. What we have left that we do crop is necessary for winter feed. We were strictly a cow calf operation. We background the calves and would sell them in the spring. And that was the livestock we had. We had three daughters and when they got to the age of like 4-H and that we started some sheep projects and if you've been around 4-H kids you know you can't sell female breeding sheep that have been a 4-H project. And so they stay on the farm and they become breeding stock. My wife grew up really wanting horses, she was a town girl and so we ended up starting with some registered POA horses and wouldn't you know they had to be fillies and wouldn't you know they ended up having to go back to the owner to be bred and then the next thing you knew we were in the horse breeding business. Through it all yeah, we have three species of livestock that are here. We've learned there's a lot of good things that happen when you do that. Right now the sheep market is actually much more profitable than the cattle market. The sheep work so well on some of our pastures that we were having weed problems on. They take out the Wernwood sage, they'll take out if you have some leafy spurge and so I think what you've seen today some of the places there that there's some that's just grass. And so in those situations we usually don't graze the sheep and cattle together. What we do is the sheep run all summer on it and they're pretty much picking out all the broadleaves and leaving the grass alone and so weeds or there's clovers up there and like I say the broadleaves weeds they'll eat those and clean them up and they're leaving the grass. So then in the wintertime when the cows come home we will graze as long as we can up on those same pastures that the sheep were in all summer long. I've heard Rick say that he doesn't have to do a lot of spraying. I do believe that's wise because he has all these multi-species that are symbiotic and helping each other out and helping reduce that weed pressure. I'm very fortunate that this farm still had over 100 acres anyway of native prairie that had never been plowed. When I grew up I never remember grass being any taller than the top of your boot to go walk across it. When we added these other grasslands and began our some call it rotation I call it restriction and unrestricted. Sometimes you're there, sometimes you're not there. When we could keep cattle away from our native during different times of the year and really just let it flourish we started to see all that diversity that you talked about all the forbs that were out there all the different types of grasses. It's just because that we have these other cool season pastures and that we're allowed to do that. The first thing I think you recognize when you walk on this farm is the diversity in plant life out on his pastures both as native and non-native pastures. Visual from the road but when you start walking out there you see all different kinds of plants and forbs mostly native that you just don't see in a lot of places so I think that's the first thing you notice. Rick does an excellent job with his grazing management and helping to create that diversity and maintain that diversity also. I saw an old photo. It was an aerial photograph probably back in about the 1940s of several sections around here. I don't know what time of the year. It must have been like a fall or something and it's all black because everything is plowed except for every hilltop shows up white meaning by 1940 it had already lost the topsoil that some of it had probably only been farmed for maybe 20 years or 30 at the most and I saw that and I thought, is that a legacy to leave future generations is that we're going to erode all this land and so I do think about that. Whatever comes after me, it's their decision but my decision right now is it's going to be as good a shape as I conceivably can make it. Good Lord will just have to decide what he wants done with the next time around.