 It wasn't until 2007 when I was introduced to the Weston Price Foundation that I really found the focus on wellness that I was really aiming for. And this international organization focuses on food, farming, and the healing arts. And all of those are of interest to me. And it was at one of the conventions that I heard Jody Butterfield speak about doing rotational grazing that coordinated with the pasture land across the road being sold. And so we ended up buying a piece of ground across the road that we had watched being overgrazed for 30 years. It had been pasture that had always been overgrazed, always been sprayed. And Mary really didn't like either one of those facts too much. So she thought that we should buy this ground. And she didn't really tell me much about this until about two days before the sale that she was interested in buying this. I hadn't even planned on going to the sale to be truthful with you. And so anyway, I did contact some people about getting financing if we should have gone to buy it. Went to the sale and it ended up getting the ground. And I knew at that point that there was going to be a lot involved with it in order to get it to what we wanted to be. It's been a journey and it's been a love of hers. I'm glad we did it. In 2014, we started working on rotational grazing. We had to have someone come and clean out the cedars in the pasture. We had to work on the fencing. It was overwhelming kind of at first. We've had help with getting water systems set up. And I'd say the water system has been our biggest challenge. It's been a constant learning curve to figure out how much to leave, how to move them, how much to give them at first. We've started with cattle. We have advanced to having cattle and sheep and we've got chickens. It's been an interesting ride. We've had a lot of help from a lot of people, a lot of suggestions. Three years ago, I met Dave and Mary and was invited out to their place. They were looking at doing a variety of things including reseeding smold crop ground, working on some grazing management things. We kind of invested and focused on how can we make this a regenerative process. How can we make everything kind of integrate with the resources that we have, with the soil, with the plants, the biology, using cattle as a tool, trying to get some good sustainable water on the place and wildlife and pollinators and insect species can we work with to make this a natural balance. We've had various people cattle on the land. We didn't own any cattle and so we've been just looking for renters and what it really boils down to is finding people with the same mindset. I put an ad in the paper. I lost some grass down in Nebraska and put an ad in the paper and Mary got a hold of me and presented me with the option of running cows up here and she has a program where she rotationally grazes and I kind of do the same scenario down in Nebraska. We've been fighting kind of the last two years pretty dry conditions here in Southeast South Dakota and the cattle we've been grazing them hard and fast early and been pulling them off and that has really helped the pasture conditions. Mary called me about 14 months ago and said, hey, you want to rent some more land and of course we always want to rent more land and then she said, well, there's more to it. I want to convert my crop land into a pasture. She was real willing to allow things to be different than the original plan with the dry weather and not being able to seed the grass seed in last summer, changing it to this year. I think the most important thing to Mary was to get some cattle out on that land as soon as we could. Then Mary presented this opportunity for us to convert this land into pasture. I was excited. Here's a whole quarter. We can divide it however we want. We just put those three dividing wires out there and now we can do what we want with it and this is like what we've always wanted to do with our operation. We have the same goal. We really would like to improve that piece of ground and we will all get pleasure from seeing it become more and more fertile and it will behoove us both if that's what we can do. For me personally, I had three goals when we started this project and one was to just improve that land across the road that bothered me being so overgrazed and the other was to just mentor a different aspect of agriculture to the young people. That was really brought about by my mom. When we showed her this project, she said, oh, your dad would have just loved this and he would have, but she said, you need to show this to kids. That was what started this tour process is I talked to Mark Miesar about ways that we could work with the students in his class and he was all about it and we started this annual tour of the pasture. We've been doing tours every year for the students in Bonhomme and Avon High School. We usually have a trailer, we put some big square bales on a trailer so that they can write on the trailer and we'll take them out to the pasture and show them the different things that we've done out there. Today, Dave and Mary have invited out high school students from two local communities and those students are going to be coming out and they're going to be looking at some of the changes that have happened over time and look at the resources and it's important to remember that a lot of the kids, even in the Midwest, our families have changed to where we're not all rural, we don't all have the connection to the land For some of these students, this is the first time that they'll actually see, you know, plantings and seedings and touch the soil and talk about its carbon content or its organic matter to be around livestock and see how they graze, to see watering systems and fencing systems work. So it's a great opportunity and we take for granted the fact that not everyone has the opportunity to have a connection with the land and the management and the stewardship. We've certainly improved the ground, we've certainly been able to mentor. I'd like to end up with grass-fed beef for my family because I really believe that is the best way to raise beef. We're not there yet, but we're coming.