 Neither of our families owned ranches that we could inherit. Simone's dad had cowboyed for his whole life, but always for other people. My dad was in the lumber of business, always working for other people. They were on the work-inside agriculture, but not the land-owning side. So when we wanted to make the jump from working for other people, which is what we did for the longest time, to maybe owning our own place, it was a big dream. It was a big jump for us to take. I'm Simone Wind. We're on a ranch about nine miles east of Newell, South Dakota. I'm her trophy husband. We've been married 17 years and we've owned this place 13 of it. We bought this place in 07. It doesn't get a lot of rainfall. It's a difficult place to ranch, but it's ours now and we're trying to make it better. So the ranch is 3,400 acres. It includes five miles of sensitive riparian areas. It has three creek drainages that cover about 350 acres. When we bought the ranch, it was divided into seven pastures, ranging in size from 400 to 700 acres. Six of them were a mixture of upland and riparian. The one that was completely upland was 450 acres and it had been used for a year long horse pasture for 75 years. So you can imagine what it looked like. It was mostly bare ground and cactus and the rest of the ranch wasn't too much better. Over that first summer, we took a hard look at the way the ranch was run. The NRCS and Matt Stoltenberg had done some range inventories for us and surveyed the grass production. And we knew from those surveys that the livestock carrying capacity under those management systems weren't economically or environmentally sustainable. The other thing we did less than three months after taking over the place was go to the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition grazing school. That grazing school was a huge first step in getting us to rethink how we were going to operate the ranch. We started to look at different ways that we could turn things around on this ranch and fix the damage that had been done on these grasslands. It was over that winter that we came across the story of the Mortensen Ranch. Their story was about recognizing the damage that had been done to the land over a century of cattle grazing. When you're cowboying, you might have role models like Buck Braneman, Ray Hunt, you know, horsemen and cattlemen. But when you own your own place, you have to find a new role model. You have to find a land steward. And the Mortensen's for us, that was that new role model. The bringing back of natural processes and the way that they did it and the way that they thought about their property, even though it was quite a ways from here, it was very similar to what we had. We had some experience with rotational grazing and electric fencing before we bought this place, and we wanted to use those methods on the ranch. We also knew that given the choice, cows will beat up on the riparian area and eat every blade of grass until they move up into the upland. So the first thing we knew we had to do was separate that riparian corridor from the upland fields. And to do that, we would need about 13 to 15 miles of fence along that riparian. The upland upfields also needed to be split because they were way too big. So that was another six to seven miles of fence to start with. So we started out with an equip and the equip only included one mile of fence. And we knew we'd need to find some extra assistance to get this management system in place. So that's where Matt Stoltenberg came in. When I first came out here, I couldn't remember being down on the creek bottom and just some real range 101. We were doing some clipping and weighing. We're doing some plan identification right away. You could just tell that, hey, they're actually interested in this. And sometimes it just takes one guy that's going to give you the assistance to get over the edge. And Matt was that one guy for us. I like cows. I've never owned cows, but I like them. And I have a strong stance that they're a net positive on the landscape. You have to have a hoof out there on the prairie. That's how it evolved. They did this all with livestock grazing in their management style proved that it can be done. And they've got the data to back that up. They've got excellent records that show the progress that's been made. It's not just the trust me. It really is an improvement. It's they can show you photo point pictures. They can show you measurements from transit lines and the change is real. We've made lots of water improvements with pipeline and tanks. But it's the grazing system that's really changed things. And here's how it's changed it. When Matt came out here and he did his inventories, our upland fields were producing 400 to 600 pounds per acre. That was in 2007. We're now producing 2100 to 2800 pounds per acre. This year before the drought, we were producing 3000. And that wasn't even in the peak of the season yet. In the creek bottoms and the meadows, we were producing 1000 to 1500 pounds an acre in 2007. We're now producing 2000 to 3000 pounds per acre. And all those trends are still increasing. Our creeks and riparian areas also have continued to heal the channel with and depth or about 50 percent of what they used to be. The bare ground along the banks is eliminated. It's got prairie cord grass, rose, Western snowberry, willows, new trees, saplings everywhere, reeds and swamp grass, cattails. And those trends are also still increasing. Now that half the ranch is ungrazed all winter long, we have antelope, we have deer, and they don't hurt our fences. You don't notice any impact on the grazed ground. They're light eaters. You know, we don't have hay and stackyards here. We have absolutely no problem with wildlife. We think that's just another indicator that what we're doing fits in with the natural cycle. I think that one of the things that we want to leave is the place better than we found it. Our little speck of the universe is going to be a little bit better than what we started out with. That's important to us. We're making it better for somebody down the road.