 There's a lot of pride in what I do back on the farm, you know, my great-granddad who was original partners with my granddad, which makes me fourth generation. He wasn't in it long, but he was a big part of my granddad getting started, you know. So there's a lot of pride with it. You know, I certainly didn't want to do anything else because of the pride that I had in the family business. I feel like my son's at least one, if not both, will kind of be that way. It's just hard to say they're nine and 11, so you never know. But of course, right now, they both say they're going to work on the farm. But when I'm says he wants to shoot birds, that's going to be his job. And the other one is going to drive the feed truck. And I hate to break their heart, but that's not what they're going to be doing. When you tour the farm and you really grasp it and you see it when the hatchery is going and we're fully staffed and the air freight department moving. And there's just so much energy and excitement here. And it's just it's just an incredible experience to to learn about it. My father back in 1949 got out of the Air Force and was a got a veteran loan to terrorist for the Agriculture Department, bought bulldozers in the vein. He was cleaning out some old cattle ponds and he noticed these men in those cattle ponds. Well, he started catching them before he just killed them by draining the water and we're selling them and he decided he wanted to try to raise some. So he and his brothers in Yazoo City, Mississippi built their first menoponds. But the demand for bait just exploded. Well, he was having to supplement what little customers he had with wild bait that he would go around the country and buy from these river men that were catching them wild. So he bought some from a gentleman right across the road from us today that he trapped them in his rice field. They'd come out of Biomedum and he took them back to Memphis and sold them and just said that's the hardest best bait I've handled from all over the country. So he didn't know whether it was the latitude, longitude, soil type, water type or what why these are the species or why these fish did so well. So he came back and vetted with the man and he bought some more. He built some, bought the property right across the road from him, first 800 acres. And he started raising those menoponds. And from there, it just went all the way to 7,000 acres at one time. And then as these core lakes got older, the fishing populations decreased in them. When the fishing started falling off, well, we pulled back to about 3,500 acres. And that's what we're pretty well farming today. Kind of my first experiences on the farm were riding around with my granddad and my dad as a kid. But quickly I found out when I turned 12 years old, just kind of like my dad did. He said when you turn 12 like I did at 12 years old, you're gonna start working on the farm. And that's why I quickly realized that it wasn't all just shooting snakes and frogs and so I started under the shed. That was kind of my first position for the first two to three years, 12, 13, 14. Loading fish, grading fish, cleaning, sweeping up bats, cleaning out bats. Putting ice on trucks. When I got big enough to drive a truck at about 14, I would get me off from under the shed in the afternoons and I'd go put out fertilizer and put out lime. And I thought I was hot stuff then, driving a truck three times my age. And old beat up trucks and cab overs with no power steering. And so that was kind of my first shot at it. And I still thought that was fun and cool. And at 15, I started working on the same crew. He moved me out there out from under the shed. And so kind of got me, got the experience at saining fish and harvesting the fish and started driving trucks, bringing them from the same crew to the shed. And my freshman year, I remember my dad asking me, what are your plans? Are you gonna come back? At the time, gosh, I didn't think there was anything else in the world to do. But so yes, I told him I was coming back and went to U of A Fayetteville and got an Ag Business degree. And then my junior year, I think he asked me again, are you still coming back? Because he just wanted to make a future plan. And we were at the point where we needed to grow what we really needed to do to do that was we needed more fish, which meant more brood stock, more acreage, more men for our matting process, our hatching process. And it was just gonna be really tough. So he knew that there was plenty of research out there showing that a hatchery was that hatching shiners in a hatchery was possible. I graduated in 98 and came back in that fall, we built a building and being one other guy started plumbing and for four straight months, all we did was plumb a building and put in tanks and all that. And by springtime, we had a hatchery built. This is our hatchery that operates in April and May. And we produce for golden shiners produce around 1.3 billion head is our capability for a four to six week period. We also produce our goldfish and black salties in this facility here. And what you see behind me are hatching tanks. And these hatching tanks, we have 180 of those. And we try to average around 2 million to 2.5 million head per tank per day. So the facility you see behind me can house up to 350 million fish at any point in time depending on how we're using these tanks and how many eggs we try to put per tank and that type of thing. But all the fish that we sell in a 12 month period are all hatched in April and May in a six week period. So we've got to have fish that are from the small size of our market to the large size of our market 12 months out of the year. And even though they're all hatched at one time pretty much throughout the year. Once the hatchery was built, we knew that we were getting approximately 2% survival on all these eggs. And then through the hatchery, we were getting an easy 98, 99% survival. So just in that revolutionized our farm, just overnight. And then soon after that, we hired a guy to run the hatchery once we kind of perfected that, and then I started working on the airframe system. And so there's a lot of fish are shipped overnight. A lot of ornamentals, but a lot of those ornamentals, there's one or two or three or four fish in a box. So it was pretty easy. Well, we needed to be able to ship pounds of fish in a box. At a rate, they would survive 24 hours or more. And then at a cost, then they would be marketable. Through the airframe system, we've kind of revolutionized the way Minnes are selling across the country. We just send them direct overnight FedEx now. So not only debate shops, but John Doe homeowner with a pond in his backyard that wants to feed his fish, John Doe homeowner that has a tank in his garage and he fishes every weekend, or he's retired and fishes every day and needs lots of Minnes. We ship to research facilities at universities and zoos, aquariums, wildlife rehabilitation centers. So that allows us to ship all over the country to a lot of different places. So it's really opened up our customer base. One of the most innovative products we have in terms, if you can call it product, would be the Black Salty. At one time, when the markets were really in the doldrums, we decided to come up with a new product that was acceptable all over the country everywhere that would accept the goldfish. This product is a goldfish, but it was selectively bred to withstand salt water. And we were thinking about getting into the salt water market. But they actually started catching on in freshwater. And 95% of them now are sold in freshwater for trotline bait and for striped bass and for largemouth bass. Even people catching crappie on them, right? As far as we know, it's the only patented trademark fish on the market, especially used for bait. So back in the early 2000s, while we had the hatchery, kind of at its early stages, Dad and I went offshore fishing, decided, hey, we've got to be able to raise some bait for the offshore market. So we came back to the hatchery and started playing with some fish, different fish, and doing some selective breeding and all that. And to develop the fish is just super tough, saltwater tolerant. And it makes a wonderful saltwater bait, but also a very, very tough freshwater bait. Aquaculture is a lot like row crops or even ranching. If you don't take care of the land and the water, you're dead. So a lot of the conservation efforts on our part are, we drain ponds only when necessary. When we do, we pump the water to the adjacent ponds and let it gravity flow back. Other than a large rain event, we don't release water. We're not allowed to use off-farm surface water because of our inspections, state and national inspections. So we've got filters and pumps, and we pump water over and over and over from pond to pond to pond as much as we can. We try to never let it go. So therefore, we're using less groundwater. That's one of the biggest conservation efforts we do. We've got a lot of biosecurity things in place because of the fact we don't need off-farm fish coming in. We don't need off-farm invasive plants coming in. You know, and all that is a big part of our conservation efforts. So we're here in Lone Oak standing in front of our business academy, which is part of our high school. And Jamie and I ran the millage campaign last year to raise $12 million for our local school district to build an agricultural-based business academy. It's a partnership with Arkansas State University through BB, and we're going to be teaching courses as in diesel mechanics, which is tractor repair, agricultural classes, where they actually teach the students to, you know, plant row crops, what chemicals they use, what types of tractors you use for what types of crops. You're also going to find industrial technology classes. There's going to be an aquaculture classes, which is specifically based towards fish farming, which is our specialty. And the good, the awesome thing about this business academy is it's, it's going to be taught by our local farmers. And our school district got a waiver from the state to allow us to have our farmers and our local business leaders come in and help support these classes. So Lone Oak being a rural community is a great match for an agricultural-based school. And by teaching these kids these agricultural classes, we'll be able to stimulate our own economy and provide an education for our kids to actually stay in Lone Oak and work in Lone Oak in the surrounding counties within Arkansas. Well, I didn't grow up on a farm. And so when we first got married, Jamie drove me out to the farm and said, this is where I want to live. And I think it was pretty much went with the territory. And in all honesty, I love it. And the sunsets are incredible. The adventures the kids have just in the backyard swimming in minnow ponds and shooting snakes and learning how to fish. I mean, it's a dream for any kid. And it's such an honor to be a part of that and really see their tradition continue just through their eyes and how much they adore Jamie and learning what he loves to do. But it's really a dream out here, living out here. My hope for the future is, number one, to stay in the business, stay profitable, have it here for the fifth generation. But by doing that, we're going to have to become more innovative. We're going to have to continue to diversify. We have got to continue to go direct, and no doubt, the day of the wholesale market being something with longevity is just not there anymore. So we have to continue to go direct. And we're constantly fighting regulations, whether it be with the Department of Transportation, transport fish across state lines or whether it be with the US Fish and Wildlife and the bird depredation issues we have. So the hope for the future is to be able to continue to do that. Hopefully have a great business environment, not only in the state, but in the country for agriculture and aquaculture to continue to grow and to have a fifth generation be able to step in one day and take over.