 Well, as Candace said, we farm in ranch west of Pier, about 30 miles in Stanley County. We farm about 2,400 acres and have 3,000 acres of grass. This is my wife, Crystal, my oldest son, Jonathan, my younger son, Justin, and my daughter, Katie. We never have a dull moment around the place. Katie keeps us well entertained. As you can see right here, this is where we're located in Stanley County. It's kind of a rolling hills area, not a lot of flatland. And much like everybody else, we try to go by the five principles on everything that we do, try to keep the soil covered as much as possible. We've been no-till for 27 years now for the minimal disturbance. Trying to keep a living root as long as possible. We have diversity in our crop rotations, plus all our animals. We don't have just one specific chicken, one specific goat. We have diversity in all of our livestock as well. And we're trying to integrate livestock onto our cropland as much as possible. These are a few keys to our farm. Family is very important to us. The children are getting big enough where they really like to get out and do stuff. They like to put up electric fence, take down electric fence. It makes it a lot of fun if you have your family involved, it's not work, it's fun. So with the grazing rotation, we've been doing that for about 10 years now, and it's really come a long ways. And we really like having wildlife habitat. These are a few pictures of our family and on-the-job training. It's nothing better than having the kids out there right beside you working right with you. It makes the job a lot funner. Our chickens, we went to a lot of presentations up in North Dakota, and they had the eggmobiles and all that. We've got one that it's not completely finished, but we mostly have them right around the farm right close. They're free range, we just shut them up at night. And as you can see, there's different varieties of chickens. We got different eggs. We sell right direct to consumer with our eggs in town. With our goats, they kind of serve a few different purposes for us. Our youngest child had milk allergies and rice milk was the only milk that he could drink. So we tried dairy goats, and the dairy milk didn't affect him, so that's kind of how the dairy goats got started. From there, we've expanded a little bit into the registered herd where the kids really like to show goats, and so we've been doing some goat shows with the registered herd. A majority of our marketing on our goat kids is that we have a rodeo contractor that we sell most of them for goat time. They like the dairy goats because they have the long legs and they don't grow as fast. We kid in two different sections. We'll start probably any time after Saturday we'll start. We have to have them two months old and be ready in March so that it will be ready for the practicing of high school rodeo. And then we'll kid a little bit later, and then those ones will be ready for 4-H rodeo. So that's kind of how we've marketed some of our goat stuff. They work really well around the yard on stripping the weeds. They prefer the weeds before the grasses. They're a stripper grazer, and the saliva in their mouths will sterilize the seeds, and so that kind of, around the place, it's really taken care of a lot of the weed problems with no herbicides. When we pick our different diversity of crops, we like to have a different diversity in roots. Having a fibrous root, a tap root. If you have a diversity of roots, then the weeds don't become quite as much of a problem because they can't get through the different diversity of roots. We've done full season and after a week cover crops. The full season cover crop has been working a lot better for us than the after winter week planting. On this full season cover crop right here, the mix was under $10, and we only had seven and a half inches of rainfall the whole season, and that's the kind of growth that we got off of it. We had 90 head of yearlings that we grazed for 38 days on 72 acres. When we do the cover crop, where we put the fence in, we'll take a rotary mower and mow it up high so that the posts can be seen by the livestock and they don't run through the fences. This is the type of residue that we had after grazing on that cover crop for 38 days. As you can see, there's still plenty of residue out there, and there's food for the microbes underneath the ground to have, and we need to keep them healthy as well as up above the ground. We've been rotational grazing for 10 years, and it's really helped improve our pastures a lot. We went from six pastures to about 60 pastures, and we try not to start in the same spot every year. We rotate where we start, and that helps with the different plant communities. This year, in this pasture right here, we were talking with Leland Schoon, and we were trying to work on the five principles of having a living root longer in our pasture. This year, instead of having it broke into these many pastures, we broke it into six pastures, and we would be in there for 10 to 15 days the first time, and then we came back for twice the amount the second time, and that's to help keep the living root going longer throughout the year. We're in the CSP program, and we take pictures every year of spotting the pasture, and this is just one of our spots. We really like how there's good ground cover, and they trampled down the grass, but that they didn't use to keep a soil armor. We had a big creek that runs through one part of our pasture, and we fenced that off so that the cows wouldn't congregate down in there. As you can see over here, there's still some improvement to be made, but this part right here was like that, and so it's starting to cover up the soil and covering the ground for us, and so we don't have the impact of the animal just staying there and making it be a dark soil, and running down the creek. If the water runs through the creek, you got a good filter right here, so your water going downstream will be good and clean and filtered instead of having the dark colored water and all your nutrients running downstream, so this has been very good in filtering the water. This is one of my tools that I've bought lately. It saves on the back pretty good on having to roll up fence. You can roll up quite a bit of fence in a hurry, and I know it doesn't help with the exercise as much, but I put up plenty of fence, so that helps on taking it down real quick. This is one of the other tools that really works well on our operation, as it gives us more residue to keep the soil covered. In my part of the country, you can really lose a lot of moisture to evaporation, and so if I can keep that water in the ground longer for the plants to use it, then it's way better for the plants and the biology under the ground, so we've been using this for about five years now. As you can see, we've had a very diverse crop rotation. We don't always have a set rotation. We'll see what a field needs. If it needs more carbon, we'll put a higher carbon crop in there. We've tried a little bit of everything. We've had a baby food market through grain millers with our oats, and so that's one of our specialty markets that we've been able to hit with some of our crops. The wildlife really benefits from all of these things. If you're doing the right thing, the wildlife will appear. We had lots of birds in with the cows. We've experienced the butterfly migration, and the pheasants are doing all right, too. We planted a bunch of trees about 15 years ago, and they're just now getting to be pretty good protection for all the wildlife. The rotational grazing helps for nesting for the pheasants and for the grouse and prairie chickens. They really like having all the rotational grazing and having a place for them to be and make their lucks and stuff. The cover crops brings in all the bugs, and then when you've got all the bugs, then the birds will come with it. We've been converting a little bit of crop ground back to grass. Try not to farm the poorer stuff, put it back into grass, and make it work for the... We've been trying to take the haying away and be more grazing on the hayland than haying it. Also in our CSP program, we have leaf stands, so we have strips that we leave in different fields for the wildlife to graze during the winter. I've been working on getting more integration into my crop ground. You can do a few simple tests on your farm, and our kids really like to do these different tests. We've got the slag test where you can get a chunk of soil and see how your aggregate stability is. We've got the whitey-tighty test where we had... There was a spot where we had bare ground and no living roots, and we have a spot where there was cover ground and living roots, and this was the cover ground with living roots, and this was the bare ground with no living roots. You've got the infiltration rings, which they have kits here today that you can get and do those simple tests on your farm. We also had a field day where the NRCS office came and they took samples out of our field and used some of our rangeland and some of our farm ground and put it on the rainfall simulator. It was really cool to see your own ground on the rainfall simulator. I'll back up here. So we really like to help educate the youth. Last year we started our first annual farm day. We weren't sure what to expect, but we ended up getting 70 kids and 30 adults, and so it was a really good educational day. We had four stations in the morning, and then in the afternoon we split them into two and we had chickens on one station, goats on the other station, and just made a full day of it. This year, May 2nd, 2020, we're going to have another one, so feel free to look us up and come out and visit. Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. We've got a website you can look us up on or like us on Facebook and follow us. Thank you and we'll hear from Sean now. Like Clevee said, I'm Sean Freeland from Caputa, South Dakota, which is just east of Rapid City, just past the airport, about six miles. Dry Creek Farm and Ranch, I guess we call it, so this is kind of our topography. This would be Rapid Creek, which flows from the Black Hills, comes out of Pactola. Primarily we are a cow-calf operation, is this the deal working? I'm guessing, a little bit higher. Anyway, so we're primarily a cow-calf operation, have some irrigation, about three pivots and some flood-irrigated ground, and so historically what we would do on that irrigated ground is hay that, we'd have alfalfa and orchard grass or something on there and we'd hay that and then when that alfalfa got wore out, then we would take it out and plant millet or some sort of, something sedan grass or something like that and chop it. This is my family, my wife Christy, my daughter Riley and Ryan, 15 and 17 year old girls they're getting, one thing that's happened with this kind of change of mindset for me is our operations changed and they've been able to help out a lot with that. Our goals, I used to look at holistic management as, you really had to be a greenie to be that. If you were going to be a holistic management, you were willing to log change yourself to a tree and take a bulldozer to the belly, kind of a deal, but now I see that it's not necessarily that way, it's just look at stuff different and ask why it's there, what's it doing, why did that come up in that spot? If I'm going to do this practice, how is that going to affect something else on my place? But I always ask these questions, is it going to be regenerative? Is it diversified? It has to be profitable. Can I scale it up? Is it multi-generational? Can we use it as an educational opportunity and it has to meet our quality of life standard. If it's going to put too much strain and stress on us, we're going to figure out a different way to do it. We've talked this to death, the five principles of soil health, but it needs to be said. It's an important factor. So I'm just going to talk just a little bit about how we kind of got started. Like I said before, on our pivots, would be just primarily alfalfa for five or six years when that stand got old, we'd take it out and plant a warm season in there for a couple of years like sand and grass or something like that, and then we usually plant triticali in the fall and then hay that and then no-till alfalfa into that triticali stubble. This year we were terribly dry, not this year, but in this picture, we were extremely dry and I don't know, somewhere we heard we could graze this triticali. So we said, all right, let's see if we can hold on to our cattle a little bit longer. And we started setting up electric fence on this triticali. So we grazed about 200 yearlings on there, and I mentioned this to Jay Furrier. I said, I planted triticali and grazed it. And before I got that out of my mouth, Jay said, you didn't have enough livestock. And he was right because when it starts heading out, they're done. And what we did is just took the tractor out there and drove around, and those yearlings followed me around for about an hour, and they stomped quite a bit of it in. And then I just took my no-till drill and planted this warm season deal into it. And so that drill kind of took care of the triticali. We didn't spray it, didn't do anything. Between the livestock and the drill, that kind of took, that terminated the triticali. And then we planted this mix in there. I started kind of doing these slides for producers around in my area because it was like jumping off a cliff for me. I had no idea what to expect. I knew what kind of tonnage I could get if I hate it, but I planted this with the intent to leave it stand and graze it as my winter feed. And so it was extremely difficult for me to take that leap of faith and decide to plant this stuff. At any rate, we planted it. This is kind of what it looked like in September. We had a little rain shower I think this morning, and somewhere I was doing some soil health digging and probably on the internet watching videos or something. And I came across this slide and the first thing that caught me was 25 earthworms per square foot equals a ton of earthworms. And a ton of earthworms equals 100 tons of casting on the surface per acre. And then I read this, macro port equivalent to 4,000 feet of 6 inch drain tile per acre. And if any of you guys have tiled, you know the amount of water that is coming out of 6 inch drain tile is tremendous. So I got all excited and fired up and I grabbed the family and I said, let's go look for some more, see if we can find some earthworm castings and see if we're anywhere close to that. So we stomped out there and kind of spread the stuff back and this worm just kind of crawls up and meets us at the top. And I was so blown away that we had a living worm, let alone castings. I forgot to count all the castings, but you can see they're everywhere. So now I do this quite a bit. I'll go out and kind of dig through stuff and see if I can see earthworms. I've actually got video of worms cruising across the soil like that and feeding just grab, they'll stop and feed on a leaf or something. So why are we planting those cover crops? I think this has been said a lot here the last couple days, but it's for diversity, right? The different roots, the depths, the sizes, the different stuff on top, we're trying to mimic what Mother Nature does on the prairie. And so I think we're kind of doing that maybe in a little bit of an extreme way. So this same field we left and tell about the first part of January and this is what it looks like in January. So this is right before, this is the day before I decided to turn cows into it. And as you can see, there's still lots of green stuff in there and collards and kale and that sort of thing. And the deer up and down our valley, our valley is primarily alfalfa production. And so the deer are usually spread out, well, this year we were terribly dry and I had a ton of deer in this cover crop deal. So that's just a turn up that the deer nod off and my hunters, they think the cover crop deal is pretty cool because they get one of these guys out of there about pretty regular. The other thing is, so I think I back up a little bit. So after I kind of figured this cover crop grazing stuff, I was like, holy cow, this is awesome. I don't have to feed cows anymore. So anybody that knows me knows I'm kind of hard on equipment. So we kind of quit the feeding and we just put up paddocks in these cover crops and try to graze through them. So this is kind of the first day of grazing. Like I said, all those deer in there, I was a little reluctant to put up electric fence just because this is only about a 60 acre deal and we had a good 200 deer. We had white tails and muleys in there and so I didn't put up electric fence. I figured they'd tear it out. Since then, I figured out if you just kind of watch where the deer exit usually when you pull in there and usually the deer will just hang out in there anyway. They don't move, but if you if you got to go move electric fence, they'll usually take off. But if you figure out which way they like to go and build that fence with them, it seems to work pretty good. They don't tear it out as much. And I could probably, I think Levi's idea of mowing that strip where they can see the post. I think that would completely solve the problem. We just drive a four-wheeler pickup in it and it knocks it down. So sometimes I have to make myself kind of look away from my cows because I used to put up a lot of feed. I'd feed in a feed wagon, had bunks everywhere, and those cows got fed every day. And it took me six hours or so to get through all my chores just feeding. So anyway, we turned these cows out on this cover crop. This is February 25th last year and it was, I don't think it was 20 below, but the wind was blowing probably 35, 40 that day and I think it maybe was 12 above or so. But as you can see those cows are just out grazing and I thought, well, are they starving? So I mean, they should be all humped up somewhere. So I got out and got a little closer and I mean, that cow does not have a mad face on. She's not balling at me. The next cow over is not watching what I'm doing. They're fine. That's what they want to do and they're better for it. That's one of those things that I love about this system is once you start kind of moving them in paddocks, you can move a lot of cows anywhere you want to go. Just by, my wife is excellent at it. She goes out and calls them and they just, they follow her just like that and you take them wherever you want. As I said before, I didn't fence this off and so, but one of the things I watch closely, especially now that I'm kind of more know the soil health deal quite a bit more, is how much are we leaving and I want to make sure that I've, you know, I'm leaving at least half of what I had in there. So when we were trying to figure out the seed and the different mix for that deal and I knew what I could get hay in it. So I was looking for about five tons of dry matter if we planted that cover crop and I see dealers said, yeah, I think we can do that. But what he didn't say was, you're going to have to, you know, leave some. And so now I kind of, I watched pretty darn close to make sure we leave some. But if you don't, when that biology fires up in the spring, your residue goes away really fast. When I, I guess what I do now is I'll just go through in the mornings. I'll walk, take my cup of coffee and walk through my cows. And I'm just kind of, I'm looking at the cow condition, the hair color and see if they're still looking good. And I watch for this manure pat and make sure that it's not starting to stack up. I make sure that it maybe is slightly puddled, you know, everything's, and I'll wait until I see a cow go and then I run over there and check it out. We took a fecal sample, sent it, sent it off to the nut lab deal or the nut ball deal. And you know, there's lots of good stuff here, but one of the things that gets me is we were looking for about a third of a power and a day of gain for those cows. And they're gaining 1.2. And so this is later on, and keep in mind I didn't, I didn't have this fenced off. So if you build paddocks and move them, you know, every couple of days or every day where they have a fresh ration, it's no different than what you would put in your feed wagon. And then they can go out there and grab the green stuff and then some of the dry stuff and they mix it all together. This deal here, I let them have the whole thing. So they'd already picked off most of that green stuff and they're eating, you know, probably the sorghum, but they're still doing really good. I try to keep something living all the time. So if I can't, if my plan is to have that full season for winter, I still try to put something in in the springtime, you know, oats and clovers and peas and whatever, just, just a ton of stuff. And I think Tom mentioned it earlier. I try to stick with about, you know, don't know, I don't go over 20 bucks an acre on my seed. This is kind of embarrassing after seeing Derek stuff, but it's kind of showing the mycorrhizae starting to association with the plant ruts a little bit there on some oats. I was pretty excited about this. This would be one of those springtime cover crop deals. And we were extremely dry still and planted this and with the intent to graze it. So we had quite a bit of red several different varieties of brassicas in there. And I've had a little bit of experience in trying to hay brassicas or something with a lot of brassicas in it. And it's just like pouring out a can of spinach. It's just tough to get it to do much and dry down in my experience. Anyway, so we decided that we were going to hay this anyway, because we're out of feed. And so I hired the local spray guy from town and he came out and sprayed it for me. And about an hour after he left, we got two and a half inches of rain, which for us in the computer triangle, I call it, that's a lot of rain. And it rained for, rained all week. We got eight inches of rain that week. So needless to say, my stuff wasn't, it was pretty well dried down by the time it was, where a guy could get in there and hay it. So we just drilled right into it, that full season cover cop deal. And if you think about our valley, it's been, our irrigation ditch was set up, I think in 1880, I want to say 1889. And so it was been flood irrigated and hayed for that amount of time. And everything's been taken off and fed pretty much down by the creek. And so I figured, well, you know, this was kind of a bummer. I didn't get anything out of that, but I think I probably did. I probably fed some soil and built some carbon there. And I don't know, I didn't look at it as a terrible deal. There's still some biology happening there. I was happy to see that, just pulled up one of those dead oats plants. And then planted that stuff right in there. And a lot of people thought that I wouldn't be able to, in my neighborhood, didn't think I could plant into that heavy residue, but it was, it turned out fine. This is kind of what it looked like in September. So one of my beefs with this deal is, like I said, I'm not a farmer. I mean, I'm a cow calf guy, and I know how to put up hay. But after kind of been learning this deal, I'm starting to figure out the cover crop stuff a little bit, I guess. But one of my beefs with it is planting something every year. And I mean, once this stuff is dried up and done and dormant, it's done. So we kind of, I tried to figure out a way to extend that. So we end up flying some rye onto that living cover crop. And with the, you know, hope that we could get some more living roots going there for a little bit longer. And hopefully in the spring, it would fire up and we'd have some grazing. So this was the only time we watered in 2018. We put about an inch of water on just to kind of germinate this rye. And it wasn't a runaway by any means, but we did have some life out there underneath there. So I would probably try that again, but I think it would work a little bit later in the season. One of the things we're kind of starting, we're just getting into this. This is our first pivot that we've tried this on. So we planted a kind of a diverse mix of grass stuff. Um, Jay fear has kind of the same mix. And I don't remember where I saw Jay fear speaking. I think it was in wall and, you know, he's talking about how fast our native prairies are able to build soil or grass is able to build soil. And he was talking about having sod and taking out a strip and planting corn in there. And I was fascinated by it. So I thought, well, you know, at least for me in, even if it's, even if I don't keep it. If I just have it in a rotation, let's say I only keep it the same as I would have alfalfa, if I plant grass on this, I can hay it, I can calf on that, I can graze it. You know, I might be able to get some seed off of that. I can take some pretty cool pictures on it. It's a, I don't know, I'm pretty excited about it, but we planted this in November about Thanksgiving time and we were able to graze it a little bit last August home. Some of the things to consider and that somebody brought this up in the last session, doesn't always work. So this was my first shot at planting cover crops in this field and planted away, ran out of seed and ran to town and just got milled and finished and the millet did great. And it actually did way too good. It did great the next year and a couple of times. But some of you guys that know chemicals way better than me figured that was carryover and which I asked them, I asked them to spray around up and that's it. I don't, we don't fertilize. We've only, I've only fertilized one time on since we've been there in 15 years, I guess. But I don't know. I thought that was a wreck, but my neighbor's cow thought it was pretty cool. So they kept crawling through the fence. So we, we made a deal and, and he ended up grazing his cows on there. But some of the things to consider, maybe it may be not, maybe it doesn't always work, you know, the first year, back to that holistic deal. Melissa would be a marsh elder weed growing after we grazed that cover crop and, you know, look at the, look at the size. This is my wife standing there and she's just about as tall as me, but look at the size of that root and how big around it is and how straight it is. Something's going right there and that, and that weed is, you know, using something that I missed. So I don't get terribly concerned about them unless it just, you know, runs over because I'm, I'm just grazing it anyway. I threw this in there just to kind of show what not to do. I had way too many brassicas in this mix and it chewed up all my carbon and didn't leave any residue the next year. Well, we have a little bit of grazing alfalfa. So I mentioned that we sold our hay and equipment and anybody that knows me knows that I like to chase coyotes. I used to like to chase coyotes and we'd enter a coyote contest every year and me and my partner would usually win for about four or five years. We'd win the coyote calling contest and, but when you block out chasing the coyote bale and hay, I figured it's time to get out of this hay and deal. So we've got a little bit of experience of grazing alfalfa and what we did there was just set up this little slivers and let them in, you know, in the afternoon or late morning, give them a little sliver and then let them go back out and pick on the prairie. And I'd say that worked pretty good. We did, we did lose one, but he kept jumping the fence and beat me to the punch every morning. He was in there. And that's kind of what the alfalfa looked like the next year in our summer pasture. We still set up some paddocks and graze, do some electric fence and move those, move those year lends around on that stuff. We've done some bale grazing and this is, you can see the bare soil there and how dry we were. And this, I always call this pasture my bad ground because it's, it's just tough and, but you can see how tough it is. But this, a lot of this is my fault. I didn't leave enough there and, and it just wrecked it, but the bale grazing deal, I'm really intrigued by it. It's 30 below and I didn't have to start a tractor, didn't have to do anything. I went out there and moved some electric fence, but we tried to leave some residue there. Maybe we might have set those bales just to smidge too close together. We ended up kind of leaving some residue there. This would be July and it ends up getting a little weedy in those spots, but I think that's something I can tweak. But you can look at the difference of the grass. It's robust and you know, some thick leaves. This would be right next to it looking down. And you can see the difference. It's, it's doing way better where we bale graze, but I'll see. One of the things we did this year is we planted some rye into that millet that kept grieving us. So we thought, well, maybe the rye will take care of the millet. I bought a roller crumper and then we planted, we no-till pumpkins into the rye after we crimped it. And that worked, that worked pretty darn slick, I'd say. So we used this, our place as a kind of a trap and we get kids out there for the pumpkin patch. And then we have a, we had a cover crop maize this year. So like I said, we like to use those kids or use this stuff to get kids from Rapid. We're only about 15 miles from Rapid. This would be a 10 acre maize and it worked pretty good. We had quite a few kids come out and then we've got them at lunchtime, we gather them around and teach them a little bit about soil health. One of the things I've seen change on our place is we're starting to see some biology. I guess we quit pouring our cows a few years ago. Now we've got some dung beetles showing up. You know, lots of macro pores, lots of infiltration starting to happen. Pollinators are around. We've got wildlife. Instead of chasing those coyotes down like I used to, I just whistle and they come to me. So one thing I think we focused on for so long. I mean, you can see the pride in this guy's face as he's looking at this wheat. And you can see that he's I mean, he's intent. He's focused on this. And I think we probably should be focusing on maybe a little bit below ground sometimes and maybe maybe sacrifice just a smidge above ground. I think Dwayne said this best. He said a nation that destroys itself, nation destroys its soil, destroys itself, rules have outside it. But Dwayne brings it up quite a bit and he says, if you look around here, this was this would have been all crop fields. And this was probably a thriving place, but they just wrecked it and had to move on. This is kind of something that popped into my head one day. It's not about how much we can take from the land. It's about how much we get from the land without so that's kind of the motto we try to live by. So I think I'm out of time, but if anybody's got any questions for Levi or I will be around all day. Let's get it on.