 Be curious and be willing to learn your whole life. Patience is a quality that you need if you're going to sustain something over a long period of time. Ralph Waldo Emerson has a saying, and I'm not too good at quoting or poetry either one, but he says, adopt the pace of nature. Patience is your secret. You know, we could have, and the ancestors that have gone before them, we could have done a lot of things that would have probably milked more profit out of the land in the short term. But what would it have left as a result? You know, either somebody else to try to clean it up or to try to restore it. There's a lot of conservation stories that are centered on having to fix things. And you don't have to fix what you never broke. So that's not to take away anything from those that have inherited things that are broken. You know, I look at my own little place, it's broken. I have to fix it. I have to work really, really hard to fix it. The Bean family for a few generations now has had the foresight to say, you know, if we don't break it, we don't have to fix it. There's a big thing now called regenerative agriculture. But if you don't destroy it, you don't really need to do that. And we've kind of done that with a lot of our environment. We kind of tend to use it up faster than it's made. I'm not saying it's all wrong. I'm just saying it's hard to have a balance there. I first met Neil back in the early 1990s. The service had a program where we restored wetlands on conservation reserve program lands and pasture lands in other areas. And Neil didn't have any on his conservation reserve land, but he did have a couple drained wetlands that were in his pasture. Not necessarily land that was the original Bean ranch, but as they grew larger and purchased more land, some of those areas had wetlands to restore. And Neil was all for that. Wetland restoration involves installation of a ditch plug and a drainage ditch. The areas that we did restore those wetlands in, they were areas that had recently been farmed, and Neil seeded all those areas back to grass. Early in the 1990s, we had a called the wetland creation program. And Neil was the chairman of the Marshall County Conservation District. And he signed the very first MOU with Partners for Wildlife to construct water sources for cattle. And in the same token, then we did construct several ponds on Neil's land. Wetlands are important on this ranch. First of all, what I like best is wildlife are attracted to wetlands. If you don't believe me, go out there early in the morning and try to shoot this video. You probably wouldn't be able to hear me talk. They're important also because they provide a water source for cattle and forage. The soil holds that moisture so in dry years the grasses and vegetation that the cattle eat are attracted to that. Wetlands also are nutrient traps that keep the nutrients up on the landscape instead of down in the lakes or rivers. They recharge aquifer. Equal systems can cover huge areas or they can be smaller like a ranch or something. And ecosystems are like a giant spiderweb in my estimation. Every strand is connected to every other strand and if you watch a big wolf spider in the barn where they have a spiderweb built and you watch a fly come along and he hits it and this wolf spider immediately goes over, sucks the juice out of the fly, whatever. And if you break one of those strands the spiderweb will still function pretty well but it will never be as good as it was when all the strands were there. And if you break too many of them you break down the very structure of the spiderweb. And that's all the plants and animals and living things in an ecosystem are the strands in that spiderweb. If we break one, so what? It's not a big deal. You break a couple, it might still work. You start breaking too many of them, it breaks down the ecosystem and we don't have what we had before. So that's what I'm saying, patience and not just trying to get everything you can in a short period of time. That's kind of counterproductive to what we're trying to do. This isn't a place that is like most and the reason it is this way is because of the conservation mindset and not to exhaust all the things that we have here. Wildlife included, you have kind of almost a duty to the land to treat it well. If I have kids and they are interested in coming back here then I hope that I'd be in a position that they certainly could and I hope that they would have that proper mindset instilled in them by that time that they would do well with it. Whether or not I'm here. As long as Nate remembers what Grandpa said about flexibility, about rolling with nature, about not trying to dominate it, going at the pace of nature, this ranch might look different in a hundred years but I bet it's going to look a lot the same.