 this is a beetle conservation district owns um one of about 400 acres here they've got piece of ground they're able to take possession of about a little over 20 years ago 20 25 years ago everything you're looking at was at one point i'm actually irrigated cropland they took it they got rid of the irrigation units and see this back to a mostly native warm season mix um they do have some native cool seasons there also but it's predominantly a warm season mix they lease it to a young producer a younger producer in the county um who runs his livestock out here um here several years ago um working with the board um decided they had a good opportunity to kind of turn this into a demonstration demonstration farm or production farm whatever we want to call it um um so uh working with the producer we came up with the way to kind of do some different uh grazing management out here it was just divided into three large units um and now we've got it divided into about 13 separate units um so there's a lot more movement of the livestock out here we've got some cells that are more of our traditional rotation and then we've got some that are a little a little more intense so it's a high hoof count for a short duration our goal out here is really just to demonstrate to to producers showing them that a lot of this stuff can work um and that actually it's beneficial for your pocketbook too you can actually maybe increase your herd percentage out here have a few more livestock out here and still have more grass so yeah we've provided this area several times with fence um we use the old irrigation well to provide water so we've piped in several thousand feet of water pipeline out here we put in some tanks we centralized all the tanks just to allow some flexibility if we ever want to um throw some hot wires or electric fence fence out here to increase our management I do a lot of monitoring out here to keep track of what we're trying to do if we're actually accomplishing that or if we need to change our management or look at things differently we've got more of a range line specialist fence out here every couple of weeks during the grazing season he's checking for forage production and just the plant community out there for what we're trying to accomplish if we're seeing more of something or less of another what we're coming up on right now is we call this our soil health plot it's just a small 10 acre field that was previously managed just for a food plot you know so it'd be sorghum or corn they just not a lot of fertilizer to it very little fertility added and then they would just get under in the spring here several years ago we just turned this into our no-till soil health demonstration and so our goal out here is a couple of things um take a lot of soil tests out here so we can collect a lot of data um so actually over the past course of the past four years we've taken the organic matter percentage from just under three percent to right now we're at 3.9 almost four percent so it's a pretty quick turnaround that's even faster than I would imagine we could go up one percentage point for organic matter um it's obviously no-till we throw uh some type of cover crop out here no matter what the what the commodity crop is out here we intercede in the corn um we follow a small grain crop out here uh with cover crops um harvest it and immediately come back in with a cover crop mix even last year we had soybeans and we did some cereal rye with some clover in it that came up in the fall and then over wintered and that came this spring um this spring we let the cereal rye come up and it was really dry we just didn't catch any rain this spring um so we terminated the terminated the cereal rye um and our intent was to follow with the row crop but we were just so dry we didn't think we're going to have good luck so we changed our change our management changed our thoughts and we just put a pretty diverse mix of cover crops out here we got about 16 different species out here most of what you're seeing is um is the millet but there's a lot going on out there so the district's owned it for 20 25 years but really we just started implementing a lot of this this grazing system we started installing the fencing and water lines here just a couple years ago and this is the first year we were able to fully implement it as designed um the crop land stuff uh with the salinity plot and the soil health plot this is our fifth year of doing that okay um so really not i haven't been really doing it too long out here but we're already seeing some things that have turned around even faster than i would have hoped you know the organic matter percentage on the one up there is one example starting to restore reclaim some of these saline spots is is definitely one area where um i think i i'm pretty realistic in in the time frame i know it in those those areas didn't form overnight so we're not going to get rid of them overnight um but i certainly think it's realistic where a producer can do something like this and get some pretty decent production off them in a couple years you know i think the part that excites me most about with the district has with their land out here is that we can use this as an opportunity to show producers that this stuff work that what we're trying to sell it works um you know we're not just out selling conservation just to sell conservation uh we're actually showing that this stuff can work it can be good for your land it can be good for your pocketbook you know and in the end those two two things your pocketbook in the in the land improving on both of the proven on the land is going to improve both and i'm hoping that producers are as they come and we give you know one-on-one tours out here they come to our field events or our tours they can see some of this stuff it draws a lot of interest whenever we take someone out here we've got tours out here it always over the next couple weeks we'll have lots of questions you know what was in that mix again or what'd you do here again you know i want to try this on one of my quarters so really we're seeing improvements and what we're doing out here um to be honest some things don't always work you know but that's part of learning learning too and i'd rather have us do something out here and not work that way we can we can tell someone that's making a living out there in the land don't do this because it doesn't it doesn't work um or do this or hey we had great success with this maybe this is something you should look at for your operation our producers can see this and they can take it out to their operation to make it work and then their neighbor says hey what'd you do over there you know why are you doing that and they talk with their neighbor and you know and i just kind of hope it has that ripple effect you know you just drop that rock in the pond and the wave just kind of keeps going out and that's what excites me most i think is that guys can they can make this work on their operation it's not just the conservation guy telling you to do this because he because he likes conservation so