 So, Monty Williams, my wife and I and my daughter Pacey, I've been up here since 19, well my grandpa started here in 97, we've been here since 2004 operating this land. We run a cow-calf operation with a background operation and a yearling operation as well. When we first come up here we were running 200 cows, now we're running about 600 cow-calf pair and running close to 400 yearlings in background up to about 700 calves in the winter time. So things have drastically changed since 2004 when we first started so we've had to make a lot of management decisions in order to justify running a lot more livestock but with today's production costs we got to push the numbers every time we can. Some of the things we started doing was starting to spray pastures, trying to control some undesirable weeds out there, including some years it has to control even the sweet clover. As bad as you'd like to leave it but if you're not going to utilize the pasture till August or September the sweet clover isn't doing you any good anyway. So if we go in there and spray some of them things off after some of the other things that we're wanting to clean up we also end up with a really good clean pasture by late fall to return cows into. We also found that our production just goes way up by getting rid of a lot of our weed pressure that we're able to push our numbers quite a little harder on some of these pastures and when we first took over some of these pastures they were pretty badly abused and by cleaning up a weed pressure really helped rejuvenate a lot of them poorer pastures. A lot of benefits by that, rotational grazing, putting in water system, changing some fences to help utilize everything. We try to start in different pastures every spring to give all of our pastures a chance to have a rest. We also after the Atlas Blizzard we had a really good wet fall and good spring actually give the pastures off the entire year off that we were in during the Atlas Blizzard because they were they were so stomped out and so badly destroyed but we were just stuck out there and we couldn't move cattle. I mean we just had to toughen it up and let the cattle kind of beat the ground up more than we'd ever like but it was amazing to see even by the next fall how good them pastures come back that you just didn't think that you could stomp one out that bad and and still have that kind of regrowth but full moisture is always good that that's a big start to any of these grasses in the spring. So on the crop ground all this ground was just in hay production when I first come up here and for several years I left it in hay production and then we aftermath graze a lot of these hay bottoms but due to old stands lack lack of alfalfa left in them we knew we needed to rejuvenate a lot of things in order to get the regrowth that we were wanting and a lot of the times we're giving up a second cutting or a seed crop if we don't have more alfalfa so I've been a no till guy for a long time anyway and so it was just easy to go in there spray things off start over without ever working that ground and and to get a real good kill on the grasses that are out there and still raise a crop that same spring the only way you're really going to do that is using no till and chemicals. Then I've come back into it usually I go in there with Sorghum Sedan or a millet that very first year so that I can get things cleaned up and don't plant it till June but I get two shots at controlling what I've got out there and cleaning it up from there we'll go back into it with probably winter wheat or if it's too late we'll use spring wheat and then follow it with winter wheat and then I've been wanting to use cover crops for a while but never had a place to put them until now and so this is my first year at actually putting the cover crops in one for the compaction the water infiltration and then the fall grazing because it's just great to have somewhere to turn out some some weaned heifer calves in the fall and and to stretch them along instead of pushing them in the feed yard all the time that I think we can do our soils some justice and and still get some good use out of livestock across the land and instead of isolating it farm ground versus livestock I think we've got to be able to use that same ground for both all the time. You know the other thing I've done is I've changed my calving dates we still calve the heifers in February because we can get the heifers bred in late May by the first of June and get them out to grass so we're dragging them along in the feedlot a little later into the spring than you want but then you can go straight to grass with them so you're forced into cavern in February with the AI cycle but I took all the cows and I moved them back into April instead of starting them in March the weather the mud the the soils I'm in are such a heavy clay here and the mud just wrecked me and it was actually better in the cold but I'm getting older and and that just isn't as much fun as it used to be to get up and spotlight cows all night and and it just really wasn't working we're having too much death loss too much sick calves so we've changed all that to April about the April 10th we start calving the cows everything I try to calve out on them in the pastures now took the labor out of it to where we just ride on the cows every other day and I'm also finding we can run more cows through the summer because we've got a lighter calf by our side not eating as much and so we can actually push our numbers a little higher again so I'm also weaning that calf then still in the first week October so I'm weaning the lighter younger calf earlier and putting him on feed but at the same time when I managed to do that I gives them cows more time to flesh and up going into winter and so then I actually winter graze all the cows most of these cows here won't see any hay year round that we are strictly arranged graze deal unless the snow gets too deep but you know until we see 10 inches of snow I can continue to graze cows with just a supplement program they're just huge if I don't have to put them the time and money and labor into feeding them cows like I said I don't know a lot of people like to go out and take them cows and I think more than anything it's saying get a count make sure they're all there well I've got them out in the breaks and I really don't need to see them cows every day and I've got them on a free choice supplement so as they come into water they can get the protein and the energy they need out of the free choice supplement and I just have to make sure water is always open and available to let them cows get by like say weather gets really bad well then I'll have to start to put some feed into them but I think last year I had 500 cows that we never fed a hundred bales to all winter so I haven't had to spend the money on the feed and I'm able to sell a little more hay in the process and I quit back here or quit creep feeding the calves since I'm backgrounding all the calves now I'm getting a better gain on them calves by actually backgrounding them myself instead of using the creep feed in the summertime and again it's labor I mean trying to find time to run out and fill creep feeders every week versus well let's just wean them ultrasound the cows the same time another less you know one less trip through the crels with the cows I mean everything is about labor around here because it's just my wife and I and maybe one other hired employee and to run this mini cattle we we just can't do it without more people and most of the time they're in any more money available to hire more help if you can find the help in the first place exactly and like I said a free choice distillers and salt is what I've been doing and putting them actually into my creep feeders and put them available but I say my water is open 24 hours a day that way as the cows come into water it's available instead of going and calling all the cows in to feed all at one time now you might get a better job of every cow eating the same amount if you're putting them out there I mean calling them in but on the free choice I guess it kind of comes down to how much salt she can consume and how much energy she wants to consume at the same time because not everybody you consume the same amount of salt my wife don't use much salt and I use it on everything I can't imagine the cows are any different so you do have to watch that a little bit you'll have some cows it'll get a little thin on you more than you want but again when we don't have into April or May I'm not that concerned about it I mean there's going to be a little bit of a lack of clostrum on this situation because that cow got a little bit thinner and you want but that cow has a lot of time to recuperate we just got done preg testing cows and we were less than four percent open on 600 cows and amazing how we were like 74 percent bred in the first 21 days of April for next year even though cows that calved in May and June have caught up for this year but it rained lots of green grass cows are fleshy lots of time to recuperate they bred up really well you know when we used to try and get under 10 percent breed up before and we're calving in March and April it was tough you put a lot of feed in the cows and I said I just don't put much feed in the cows anymore the cow kind of has to pay for herself around here anymore generally here in western South Dakota where I'm at we're a very typical 16 to 18 inches annual moisture it's a very dry land country so we really got to take advantage of a lot of our spring moisture we got to conserve that moisture and you know leaving some old grass out in the pastures having some shade some canopy something to help catch some snow I've all been really beneficial to everything I've been doing and you can even see it out where I feed that if it's muddy I'm feeding in the feed bunks if I do have any cows in here on feed because typically like my first calf heifers then they stay here and on feed until we go to grass but when it's dry I just keep changing where I feed every day and spread out all of your nutrients and it's amazing to see you can follow the feed wagon as to where you fed the next summer and you can see how much better the grass is just by doing that as long as you don't over stomp it you know you're still going to have your problems around your water source that you can't get away from but if you can get out and and move that feeding location every single day that your pastures will just rebound like you can't believe that you've really overused all winter long when we destroy it I try to put it into about a four-year five-year crop rotation and primarily the first year and the last year are going to be forage production again so hey mill it and then try to do a couple cash crops in there of winter wheat spring wheat possibly some safflower as a cover crop back into alfalfa again to try to winter graze any of them that I can and if I can go back in and plant some cover crops anytime we can grow that kind of forage just to graze is just a remarkable return on my investment the thing I've learned from even Dr. Beck was the best cover crops are cleaning out your seed closet so I did buy the turnips and radishes but I also use the leftover BMR and the leftover millet seeds and I'm letting a lot of volunteer wheat come back I went out and sprayed the the wheat ground after shortly after harvest cleaned up the weeds and then the volunteer flush come in there and I'm letting it go as long as you can control the weeds out there the winter wheat will be great grazing it does use a little more moisture than I'd like as a cover crop but in the long term as long as we get some snow and and we have some canopy I don't think it's going to hurt me and looking at the soils so far from what I see it looks like it's been a really good really good choice and I'm I'm excited to get some calves out here and graze them this fall to see how they do on it and then to turn around and destroy it to in the spring to plant it back to more than likely some of this will be back into BMR for silage for next year with as a cover for alfalfa out here I do a lot of things different and surprisingly I planted the the cover crops an inch and a half to two inches deep which everybody tells me not to do and I do it because I have to put that seed into moisture in order to get it to germinate it when I planted it the first week of September it was really dry but I was planting it into moisture and I got all them cover crops to come up there the radishes and turnips really come up fast I was impressed how quick it does but I also plant alfalfa that deep too for the same reason is I got to get the seed to germinate and I've never had a failure as long as I've been using a no-till drill and planting alfalfa seed deep in turn I also see longer stands of alfalfa because we set the crown lower on the alfalfa plant into the soil so I don't have as much winter kill and I also have fields stay way smoother for years to come so when I'm out there haying it I'm not beating my equipment up I've changed a disk bind mower conditioner and so I'm able to run it faster speed so I gotta have the ground smooth enough to do it so I've had to make a lot of adjustments as the equipment changes and the soils change and and what we're doing with the soils but I mean I don't see why we can't raise three ton alfalfa dryland year in year out with a little bit of spring moisture and the other adjustments I'm starting to make now is we just ordered some pivots to start putting in off of some other water sources that we have available and I'm kind of looking forward to what we can do there with the cover crops and the no-till under under pivot irrigation out here and on some of my better ground so things continue to change every day for me too that we've got a lot to learn about the soils and what we can do with it