 Okay, so our next speaker here will be Dean and Ken as Lockner. They are producers for the near-rehigh South Dakota. Here to share their experiences with working with the laws of nature. Water, wind, and soil. The Lockners were featured in the 2018 Our Amazing Crazy Lands video during which they explained the importance of the benefits of diverse grasslands, including the positive impact they have on wildlife, pollinator species, and soil health. They have worked to increase plant species, diversity of their grasslands, and have done quite a bit of work in the different types of grazing management, pollinators, and seeding of perennial. So, one of the things, I went to their presentation yesterday, one of the things I'd like everybody to do when their finishes come up here, and look at all the things that they've stopped doing, and how that's increased their quality of life. Although, one of the things I see up here was, they did not replace a toilet in the second house, and then after looking at Dean's underwear, I think maybe he should have done that, but at any rate, it was Dean and Ken as Lockner. This particular photo was taken from the top of the Rehills in 2019, and explain a little bit about where we live. The Rehills up here have, they're about 300 feet higher than the town of Reheits, two miles away. Our ranch is in between the two. Over 200 feet of that elevation drop is in the one mile stretch to our place, the rest is down at Reheits. So, we have a lot of potential runoff from the Rehills. There is a four mile stretch of gravel road that runs perpendicular to the slope of the Rehills, and if you look at the next slide, you can see what that potential runoff can do to a road. This particular photo was taken during the spring of 1997. We had an incredible amount of snow and there was a lot of runoff, and it ran over that four mile stretch road in 14 places. Who has to pay for these repairs? Greg Vavra with the South Dakota Local Transportation Assistance Program estimated that it costs over $20,000 per mile to upgrade one mile of gravel road from fare to excellent. And the question is what caused this damage? Was it a rain event, or was it land management choices? A law of nature is water runs downhill. It always has and always will. Precipitation varies drastically from year to year. If you have poor water infiltration, you'll get runoff and roads washed out and topsoil in the ditches. Our ranch historically was farmed minimum tillage. We used a chisel plow and it was overgrazed. You can't change the amount of rain that you get, but you can change the management and the water infiltration of the land itself. Another issue that we saw, if you look at that bare spot in the center of that photo, we have a very mixed soils in the re-hills. Our soils are what the glacier deposited there, so we can have anything from sand and gravel to hard clay pans. That particular area wouldn't, it had been farmed a number of years and it really wouldn't grow anything anymore. If you look at those same clay pan areas in native prairie, about the only thing they'll grow is western wheatgrass. So, the question is what is the root of the problem? Were old management practices the cause? So we had started converting marginal farmland into well-managed grazing hayland with roots up to 12 feet deep to increase water infiltration and to stop the runoff. Our initial seedings were just monocultures of big blue stem and switchgrass. We didn't really know what we were doing, we just knew we needed to make some changes. This photo was taken in 2017, which was actually a drought year for us, and this is the same spot in that previous picture where there was a clay pan. And we finally have things starting to grow in it now. We did inter-seed western wheatgrass and cison milk batch and common alfalfa into our monocultures. And the amazing thing about the monocultures is that the amount of other plants that we did not seed that eventually came into those areas. And of course bluegrass and bromegrass doesn't surprise most people that they would invade, but we have native forbs and stuff, so you know the seeds were there. And there are actually more plant species in our grass seedings that I didn't seed than the ones I actually put there. A law of nature, diverse perennial roots protect and preserve the soil from flood and drought. This photo is actually the first field I had planted to switch grass. And if you look at the variety there, we had 178 pairs in this pasture for about two weeks. We pulled them out on June 4th, and by June 29th this is what the pasture looked like. This was in 2018, and this was just an average rainfall year for us. Most of you are familiar with the tidy, whitey test we've had demonstrated here quite a bit today. And we buried our first pairs in 2017 during the drought. When I buried them, the soil was so dry it was hard to even dig up the soil to bury them. And I wanted to see the difference between native grasslands, and then we also had a Borrome-Alfalfa field that was planted about 13 years earlier, so it had been grass a long time. Which one, the top pair obviously wasn't buried, but which pair do you think was buried in the native and which pair do you think was buried in the Borrome-Alfalfa? The one on the right was in native grasslands. So it told me that we had much greater biological activity in lands that have never ever been disturbed before. This is one time when losing your shorts is a good thing, except this only happened in the native prairie. And this was just in eight weeks time. We incorporate livestock as employees. Cattle love to spread manure for free every day of the year, and why not let them fertilize for you? Twig Marston, he's a field beef nutritionist for Hubbard feeds. He made this quote. He says grazing is unquestionably the most economical feed delivery system, period. On our ranch, we also do manage grazing for others, and we charge on a per thousand pounds per day basis so that we assure that we're not overgrazing with oversized cattle. We also use electric temporary electric fencing to fence off riparian areas. This particular photo, this is a draw that actually has springs in it, and water flows quite freely in the springtime. And if we allowed cattle to get in there, they're too lazy to walk another quarter mile to water. They'll just keep drinking out of those little sipping holes I call them in there. And they would totally destroy that, it would just be a muddy mess. Those are Maximilian sunflowers, and they're just abundant in there if you give them the chance to grow. This is the happy cows after I removed the fence, and within, as we pulled them out after about three days, but there was only about 10% of the blossoms left. They actually selected all the blossoms and really went after it. Another thing that we use a lot is we do strip grazing and bale grazing, all to keep putting manure back where it belongs on the land. I'll let Candace talk about these next things. I'll just handle this. Okay. Really? So, one out of every three bites of food that we eat depends upon pollinators. So we just choose to look at what nature is willing to do for us for free, and let's work with them. Next slide. So, I think maybe you can see if you look really closely. In 2019, we hosted 300 hives of honeybees, and we appreciate the honey all year long, and enjoy sharing it with our family, but they're really happy with the diverse mix that they find in our native pastures. I get to talk about the fun stuff. We love, especially with the grandkids, letting them know that they can come out whenever it's the monarch migration or watching the birds just right outside the window every day. We keep the bird book and the binoculars right by the window, and the monarchs just thrive in the ever-changing, ever-blooming prairies. So this is a picture during the monarch migration, usually early September when we see them come through. But the monarch numbers are falling 80 to 90 percent in the last 20 years, and monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed, so we need to manage to try to preserve and allow milkweed to flourish. We see yellow swallowtail. I'm concerned their host is the ash tree, and of course with the emerald ash borer. I'm just not sure what the consequence of that's going to be. But three-fourths of the fruits and vegetables that we eat depend upon pollinators, so we cannot ignore them. This is a picture of a sulfur butterfly on the native data gave feather on the native prairie. So we do need to preserve native prairies. 40 percent of all insect species face extinction. The National Geographic calls the current death of insects due to neonicotinoid seed treatments that cause fat loss and insect apocalypse. And a 2019 South Dakota News Watch report tells of a groundbreaking study conducted by scientists in South Dakota, and it's found that the world's most widely used family of pesticides, neonicotinoids, is likely causing serious birth defects in white-tailed deer. And this was first observed by producers in Montana. So the law of nature, birds are important pollinators of wildflowers, and many grassland birds are endangered due to habitat loss. This is a picture of a bobble ink, and we just enjoy seeing many of those in our pastures today. We've witnessed such a dramatic increase in the diversity in numbers of bird species since implementing conservation principles that just simply allow them to flourish. These pheasant grass, partergiegels, hawks, owls, it's just, it's a bird paradise. And we're passionate about allowing them to live in our vicinity. Is this 1935 or is this now? This picture was taken in 1935. Plowing and drought equal dust storms. It's a law of nature. The wind will blow. Hugh Hammond Bennett is called the father of conservation. He was the first chief of the soil conservation service that became the NRCS. And he said, out of the long list of nature's gifts to man, none is perhaps so utterly essential to human life as soil. What do you see in this picture? If you look really close in the center, there is a vehicle in there. We've made a lot of progress since 1935, or have we? This photo was taken by the South Dakota Highway Department. It happened just a short distance from our ranch on Highway 14. This was a dust storm off a neighbor's no-tilled field. And it's still happening. This is the consequences of that dust storm. Vehicles ran into each other. They couldn't see each other. My wife and I sat a mile away from Highway 14 and watched this dust storm. We saw a big white-sided semi waiting to go through the dust storm and they finally released this line of cars and this big truck to go through. And it was a bright, sunny day. You could see this semi, you could have seen it 10 miles away. As it went into that dust storm, it absolutely totally disappeared. That's how bad the visibility was. Again, this was a no-tilled field. If you remove all the residue from a no-tilled field, it doesn't work. This is the same date. This is a different field. This happened to be a soybean field. This vehicle that's coming out of the storm, you couldn't see it just a few feet back. And where it's coming out of, where it's cleared, our grasslands are right beside that field. That is the contrast. You can see all the poles there, electrical poles. We have another photo from the other direction. The dirt was much higher than this photo. You could only see five poles' distance. The rest of them were totally obscured. This is a little bit later that year. In June, we had three inches of rainfall in two days. This is another field. Silt and corn stalks were filling the ditches along Highway 14. Water ran over Highway 14, and they actually had to close the road. Why is this still happening? Prevention is our responsibility. Land management is the problem. This is that same corn stalk and silt runoff that filled the ditches. And this is a field that this has happened to almost annually for as long as most people can remember. Is this a public relations issue? You bet it is, because we've heard a lot of people comment about this same field over the years. This photo is also the same in the video that you saw at the beginning. This was taken at the same time. But in 2017, we only had 12 and a half inches of rainfall. And this pasture was very brown three days before they came to take pictures. We thought, oh great, they're scheduled to come when the ranch looks like it's brown and barren. And this is how green it looked after three days from finally getting a rain. And if I remember right, it was a half inch rain at the time. But we only had 12 and a half inches for the whole year. And of course in 2019, we had record rainfalls. And perennial roots drink deep and yield record production of forage and hay. We had no prevent plant on our ranch. Fields just across the fence never got planted. They did manage to get in there and spray and kill the half a dozen weeds that were growing there. What if you need to stop doing some things to become more profitable and make your soil healthy? Are you willing to challenge your traditions and make changes if it leads to soil health and more free time? All the things on this board are things that we stop doing to become more profitable and find time for us. And you can come up afterwards and just look at all the things that we actually stop doing by making management changes. Which road would you prefer to drive on? This picture on the left was that in 1997 when we had all the water run over the roads, the picture on the right is 2019, the same stretch of road. And we did not have the runoff that we had in those earlier years except in places where we had some culverts plugged with snow. The great conservationist Wendell Berry said it well, there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places. We have seen miraculous regeneration of soil health when we worked with the laws of nature, when we stopped old land management practices that destroy health, and everyone in here can too. We feel that we have a responsibility to mankind to maintain healthy soil, to learn and respect the laws of nature, to use a stewardship-based land management ethic, and to practice regenerative, nourishing and sustainable agriculture. The question is why? We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. And this is our clan from Christmas this year. There's 18 of us now and we're all together. We would like to thank our millions of valuable employees. There are more soil microorganisms and a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on the earth. Why not let them work for you for free? It should say billions. We really want to give thanks to NRCS and the South Dakota Grassland Coalition, the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition. Many of these photos were taken by our daughter Lindsay Palmer, photography, and from the South Dakota Highway Patrol. This is our contact info. We do have some business cards if anybody wants to ask us questions later. At this time, we would be willing to answer any questions that you might have. That is continuously variable. It depends on so many things. It depends on moisture, how much stuff you've got out there, whether I don't want to do it that day. As an example, I've done everything from moving on a daily basis, and I tend to do that more earlier in the spring, moving more quickly. The extreme is probably two weeks. This last year, we had an abundance of grasses, and we really weren't worried about damaging anything. We just didn't have enough livestock. We'd let it go two weeks before we'd even move them, and you could have went in there and bailed two bales to the acre after they left. People ask me a lot, well, what do you do? I said, never the same thing twice. My visual is to look at what's there and make my decisions based on what's there. A lot of things, for example, I have no question that you could go in there and move those cattle every 12 hours and do more efficient grazing. For us, it became a quality of life issue that we have grandkids and family and other things we want to do in life, so we don't always do that. Go ahead. Very much so. If you come up and look at all the things on this board, it's huge. Repeat the question. The question was, what changes have I made to managing my cattle? I do not. This will be my fifth year of not using insecticides anymore. I didn't do this because I thought it was a good idea. My approach was what I was doing wasn't working. We talked about pouring cattle for lice. My experience was I'd pour cattle for lice and they rub just as much as when I poured them, as when I finally decided I'm just going to quit and see what happens. There's no change. They say, well, you've got to switch products. You've got to do this different. None of it made any sense. It didn't work. I said, there's no point in spending the money if it doesn't work. There might be a couple of weeks during the summer that the cattle are a little miserable with flies. I will say that if you don't change your management, some of these things won't work. Because of rotation, we're moving on and the flies aren't being hatched in the manure and repopulating the cows. I think you do need to make management changes. I used to run a spring calving herd and a fall calving herd. I used to sell club calves. We stopped the club calves. We stopped the traditional March and April calving. I'm now a May-June calver and I wouldn't ever go back. We graze as much as possible, as much as a winter will let us do. Right now I am feeding bales, but we do try to always have the manure back out on the land. If I feed bales, I'll feed in four different pastures. All I've got to do for four days is open the next gate and let the cattle graze. I always feed in a new place in clean areas. Anything you want to add to that for changes? There's many more on the board. We stopped AIing. Part of the reason we used to artificially inseminate was we were in the club calf business. If you wanted to be competitive in that, you had to do that. One of the reasons we quit AIing is that my wife also said that the bulls like to do it and they will be doing it this year. Never the same thing twice. The past four or five years, actually I had sold my calves off in mid-October right off the cow. One of the reasons I did that is we used to wean and do everything right and have them all vaccinated and do all these things to them. We take them to the sale barn and they wouldn't sometimes bring less money than the guy who took them right off the cow and sold them. I said, I'm not going to do that anymore if I'm not going to get paid for it. Because we have May and June calves, my calves are way lighter than most of the calves at the sale barn. We'll weigh 100 pounds more than mine. Those lightweight calves bring such a premium price that if you calculate what the people with heavier calves get for that extra 100 pounds, it's a lot of times only 30 to 60 cents a pound for that extra 100 pounds. I've seen no point, you can't put that kind of 100 pounds on for 30 to 60 cents a pound. Now this year, it was totally different. I still have all my calves. I didn't sell them and I did wean them this year. But it depends on markets and stuff too. The one key thing I've learned about whatever we're talking about here is flexibility and observing and making changes when you need to make changes instead of getting stuck in the rut. Probably around 500. Make me an offer. Do you want to queue up? You want to introduce the video? Okay. Yeah, go ahead. This last video, first of all, is there any other questions? Probably the thing that's most concerning to us right now is land transition. What's going to happen, most of our land is rented from six different family members. This is 2020 is our last year for a contract with some of those and we know that siblings want cash now. They don't live around here. You can explain the soil health story to them as much as you want. It doesn't matter. They want cash now. That's our biggest change is what's going to happen after this year. I know you've had speakers here that talked about land transition and we have no choice in that matter. Family decides to do what they want to do and Candy's really good about sending out a newsletter every year about the practices we do it, why we do it, try to educate. There's maybe one of the people we rent from that listens and kind of understands it until it comes down to the cash part of it. We still want the cash. That's our biggest concern. You want to share it quick? Okay. We're sharing this last video. There's a lot of troubles going on right now in agriculture. As we're walking our path of life, we sometimes come across obstacles. If you see this path here, you see the obstacle in front of this child. The child's our grandson. Sometimes we just need a little bit of encouragement to overcome our obstacles. You'll hear my daughter's voice in the background being those words of encouragement. I think we've received a lot of encouragement here from a lot of people. You would think of all the speakers here today that we all got together and had a theme and a plan of how we were all going to coordinate. I've been surprised how we've had so much coordination without doing that. We're all thinking and doing things and we're learning from each other. It's been an amazing conference. Thank you for having us. You are welcome to come up and look at this board of all the things that we have stopped doing. There's many more things we could have put on there too, but it's been life-changing for us.