 The education process for us started when we moved on this place. And I will tell you it's never ending. My name is Lyle Perman. Welcome to Rock Hills Ranch. We're the 2014 recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Conservation. I started ranching and farming with my father. We drained wetlands, used heavy cultivation, and season-long grazing. It probably became apparent to me in the mid-80s during some dry years, plus economic hardships that brought about change in terms of how we ranch today. I felt that I needed to come up with a way that would make our ranch drought-proof. So how could we move from a boom and bust type of situation to one where we had a plan? And that was the importance of learning how to live with all inhabitants of this ecosystem and raise a family and make a living doing it. One of the things that we've done as a couple and that Lyle and Luke have done is really worked at educating ourselves about this particular patch of ground. What works other places doesn't work here where we have limited rainfall. We have highly erodible ground with lots of rocks and lots of slope. It doesn't make sense to farm it at all. It's best suited for raising livestock and for raising protein. And that's where Lyle's heart has always been, too. My name is Luke Perman. I'm the fifth generation of Perman's to ranch in this area. Growing up here on my family's ranch, even going back to my grandpa, he was never afraid to try new things. I think my dad was a little bit like his dad in that he was an early adopter of some practices that were going to not only probably enhance the bottom line of the ranch but also make it better for future generations as well. I suppose maybe I'm cut out of the same cloth because I like to try new things and with the goal of making a better grassland, better in terms of it's going to be here longer. One thing that we've learned in operating this ranch is to use the holistic approach. And it's a question of what do we do to solve the problem. And we've found that you have to take the holistic approach because invariably the decision you make may have consequences. There might be collateral damage. So we try and look at the whole picture when we make management decisions. We planted some of the crop ground or what had been crop ground to grass almost right away. And it was neat to see the native plants come back because that's always been my thing. I like to ID things. I have a degree in biology. And so the ranch has been a hands-on experiment in prairie ecology since the beginning for me. The permins are probably one of the few operations around here that I've worked with anyway that has taken the initiative to see quite a bit of their crop land back to grass. Just from a stewardship standpoint that's phenomenal. You don't see it much. You see the other aspect of it. You see the conversion. The world's population is exploding rapidly. So I understand, very much understand the need for increased food production. But on the other hand, there has to be a happy medium with everything. One way that the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition helps and supports people like the permins is, you know, use them as a model that other people can use and have tours at their place or you have Lyle come speak. And they can take away things that work from a working ranch. This isn't lab type stuff. This is items that are going on on a real working ranch and people that are making it work. What we're trying to do on the land is important. And various governmental entities or non-governmental entities have provided assistance. Technical and financial assistance does on a ranch to install various conservation practices. But all of that's for naught if people don't learn. My name is Garth Gadsden. I'm a student at the University of Missouri where I'm from the state of Missouri. I'm here on Rock Hills Ranch this summer as the summer intern. So one of the projects I've been working on here lately is trying to trap some dung beetles. There's a lot of different kinds. They're helping our cattle out as well as our soil by reducing the flies. With so many benefits of them, we just want to get a better handle on what we have and what we can do to make them better. We felt there was a need of education. We felt that there were things that we were doing on our ranch that's important to share with other young people. And what better way to do it than create an internship and try and bring those young people to the ranch to teach. From the standpoint of education, the young people that we're trying to attract to the ranch, we feel our future decision makers that impact farming and ranching in America. You know, thinking about how I can pass things on to our kids. I'm less concerned about whether or not they come back to the ranch as I am concerned about, are they going to have the values that, you know, as a parent that I want to teach them. It's neat to me that my three-year-old son and my three-year-old daughter are already learning about what they could possibly do someday if this is what they choose. And they get so excited to go with Dad and if they get left behind there's lots and lots of tears. And it's just really special to me that we can do it as a family because it is our life rather than just a job that we go to. The potential, I think, is unlimited, really. Right now I'm not at all thinking about adding more acres. I'm thinking how do I stack more diversity on the acres we have because I think there's a lot more room for that. In the short term, it doesn't always pencil out, but in the long term it will. If we're doing things that are taking care of the soil and taking care of the plant community, that's just going to be here 50 years from now. What will it take in management practices to restore what was once here? That's our goal. Well-known conservationist Aldo Leopold said, the landscape of any farm is an owner's portrait of himself. It's our goal at Rock Hills Ranch to portray the portrait that leaves a legacy for others to follow that we can be proud of.