 My grandpa was a Pearl Harbor survivor and was getting out of the military and his soon-to-be father-in-law thought he'd need something to do when he got out of the military. They bought the original place here. I was in 47. My grandpa ran it and my dad took over early 70s and then I took over in 2010 full-time. My dad and grandfather did a great job setting this place up for rotational grazing. They always did the take half, leave half. I take it a little bit farther. They used to have four different groups of cattle. I want to get to just one group of cattle and right now I have two because we can't really cross the fence at any more than it already is without a lot of labor. We can just put more cattle in the pastures for a short amount of time and just move them faster. He's doing what's best for his ranch and he recognizes that and that all started with getting a good inventory, ranch inventory done on his place and Dave Steffen helped immensely with that. And you quickly realize when you're doing an inventory on a ranch like this because of the ruggedness of the terrain there's a lot of limitations especially if you're wanting to set up a rotational grazing system. And what John has figured out is what that threshold is for him and what's going to work best for his ranch. Four years ago in September when I went to the South Dakota Grazing School up in Chamberlain, I was just kind of on a whim. I was trying to figure out how I can improve this ranch, how I can make it more efficient. And I went up there with one question in mind I had really bad worms killing my sod and there was no rhyme or reason and I still don't have an answer for that. They still don't know. On the south facing slope on my pastures it'll be completely dead and nothing comes but thistles and it's Junebug worms I guess. There's no rhyme or reason if it's overgrazed, undergrazed, not grazed at all it doesn't matter it's just in different spots throughout the ranch and it was upsetting me because I don't want to spray more thistles than I really do. I didn't really get that answered there but what I learned with the rotational grazing there that it doesn't matter if it does happen it'll correct itself if you follow your grazing plan. There were some areas that I sprayed the thistles then cheat grass came and I got cows in there and they ate that cheat grass off when I was young and now I was all back to native grass and you didn't even know what happened. So the grazing school I didn't know what to expect when I went there and then when we go out and have to figure out animal units with cattle out there and a little electric fence and then learning plants and stuff I loved it. Still I drive around our place and look at grasses and teaching my boys the grasses and stuff and I did the follow-up program with Dave and I'm going to make Sean keep coming to actually incorporate your grazing plan and take your knowledge that you learn there. I mean it's a three day course and it's all day and it's a lot to take in so with that follow-up program you get to slow it down a little bit and actually implement it into your place so it was great. I learned a lot. When I met John I just I knew right away he was he was at the grazing school for a purpose he wanted to learn and you know that makes our job so much easier when you got somebody who's real passionate about what they're trying to accomplish. It's changed how he has been able to say I need more water or I need to stop putting the cattle here this year. He's super aware of what he needs to do and when he needs to do it because he knows what the grasses are doing. We have 54 tanks on the place that my dad and I have built on so our water situation is amazing. We're very fortunate that in the early 90s my dad put in the initial pipeline and I just redid it last year. It allows us to fare a drought quite fine. There is a main well up on top that it's stupid deep. They pump it to the surface there and then it free flows throughout the ranch and there's 28 tanks off that well. It's all artesian water so it's good good water and on the east side of the ranch we have rural water pasture taps all the tanks run off them. My dad and my grandfather never cut a cedar on the place. They didn't have any back in the day. They just exploded in the past 15 years. For a long time we just did it on our own just cutting cedars trying to get ahead of it because if I don't get something done the boys are just going to have a nightmare on their hands. So we started just shearing with a tractor then we moved on to skid loaders and shears and now we're going to do a big burn. He's right in the heart of the river breaks here and this is you know some of the roughest country in the state and so the area that he wanted to burn on his ranch we quickly found out it would be a much easier and a much safer burn if we could incorporate three more landowners and do we call them a landscape burn where we can utilize natural fire breaks so we don't have to put a lot of labor and ground disturbance into cutting fire breaks just to burn his section of the ranch. We work with the Mid-Missouri Burn Association that some local ranchers started Rich and Sarah Grimm and Dave Steffen and a bunch of them started this because their cedars are a way worse problem. If we don't do something now that's what ours is going to look like. They've been battling it for years along the Missouri River there. They have entire pastures that they can't even run cattle in down there because there's no grass left. And we're starting to see that or we're losing the grass to the cedars and so we want to try to control that before we get as bad as they have gotten out there. We have two very rambunctious boys. We have a 11-year-old Dale and a 9-year-old Tucker. Their dad has become this grass nerd and he's so aware of what's going on around him in the ground that the boys have taken this huge interest in trying to keep the ground healthy and they actually are turning more into botanists and environmentalists, not just ranch kids and not just ranchers. So they're really aware of the ground around them and their dad is sharing that knowledge so that they end up with more information to make this place better. The natural resources are the foundation of your ranch. You've got to take care of those first and to see that that knowledge is being spread to everybody on this ranch is really exciting.