 My dad was a farmer not because he loved it because he tried to keep the operation alive And and there were some decent years in farming when when he could do that, you know But he he'd give it up a long time ago and wanted to make it a grass operation a cow-calf operation You know if we could Winner on grass as opposed to rolling up hay and roll feeding it out every year That's what he was aiming for One thing about this ranch, you know, it's in the Cheyenne River break, so it's marginal land at best This is cow country and always always will be This year we're facing a pretty severe drought and been forced to make some decisions One thing we've had to do is destock a little bit and the way we've been doing that is Least an extra 50 head of cow pasture up in Elm Springs in addition to what we graze here And so we took 50 cows out and we'll sell those early Really, we haven't even gotten into our summer pastures. We're just now getting into them We've been grazing through all of our hay meadows our alfalfa and all of our annual planted crops just to extend the grazing season The crops both alfalfa and the annuals didn't do well enough to put up hay on so we decided to graze them and Give our grass that much more rest and that much more time to maybe catch a rain What that done is allowed that native grass to mature and get its maximum potential growth under these conditions and Prayed a lot for rain. We started using some cover crops and trying to keep a live Plant in the ground as much as we can and then on the grass. We're just trying to manage cattle By rotating and not being in one spot for too long Under drought conditions, it's it's such a Fast-changing thing and if you don't make the adjustment, it's easy to damage your operation These decisions are hard decisions to make But our goal is to save it for the future save the grass that the cattle can be replaced if we can keep a little seed and Save our grass it'll it'll come back. We'll be there again. I personally feel quite blessed that have The opportunity to grow up and live in this environment and raise my family my grandsons All the generations before me have got it to this point I just like to maybe pass it on to my kids in a better condition than it is, you know