 I'm Brad Magnus. I live in Huron, South Dakota and we're on our ranch which is 13 miles south of St. Lawrence, South Dakota. The ranch history is, well it started back with my grandfather, the first piece of ground that he owned. My dad added to that. I bought my first piece of ground in 1979 and we've added to the ranch since then. When I bought that first piece of ground we hired a retired soil conservation service guy by the name of Elder Mueller and he came out here and taught me how to identify grasses, telling me the difference between warm season and cool season grasses. Taught me that all plants strive to reproduce and taught us about rotational grazing. He helped us a lot. I thought I knew about grass. I didn't know nothing and be honest with you. We don't farm or anything. We had a bunch of warm season grasses that we used to harvest for seed that the CRP thing disintegrated so we put harvesting them for seed so we put up our own hay. All our cows just get fed grass hay all we want. We're in a drought this year so we're seeing that this year that guys are weaning calves early selling cows because you're out of grass. Now thankfully we got some rain a little bit ago that kind of pumped the brakes a little bit but we're still in a pretty serious drought that you're going to see a lot, a lot, a lot of cattle come through that are sold just because it's too stinking dry and everybody's out of feed. Now we like we've always got the safety valve so we run in our yearlings on grass and we've never come to the point we've gotten really close but we haven't come to the point yet where if we're out of grass we can just pull a trigger and dump the yearlings and then that frees up however many more acres to graze cows because the last thing you ever want to sell is cows. There's two things you don't sell cows in land. We pretty much try to calf in May and June because we have a livestock auction market and we're busy there in the spring of the year and this place is 42 miles away from home and so we need those cows to be able to calf on their own and I don't have a big barn so if a storm comes up in the spring I don't have a place to get all the cattle in. Because we calf so late I guess I'm feeding those cows up till and while they're calving in the month of April, in the month of May. I think you get better utilization in the fall probably because you're able to go back into places that you've been and I usually try to come off knowing with the full intention that I'm going to go back later and when we do go back I don't want to graze it down to nothing anyway because I want it to catch snow so that I'll have something come spring in here. We do rotationally graze but not just for the sake of rotating but with the object in mind that we want to utilize cool season grasses which we have a predominance of and rest the warm season grasses so that they don't get exclusively grazed out by continuous grazing. We're in southern Han County in South Dakota which is part of the Prairie Pothole region and we took advantage of the US Fish and Wildlife Service program to put an easement on our wetlands and our grasslands so that they won't be broken and be preserved for grazing because I'm in the cattle business for the future. And as a result of not wanting to drain every pothole to plant corn we've seen an increase in wildlife not just the ones that you hunt but the ones that you listen to too. I mean it's quiet out here when you just take time to hear nature. The wetlands are teeming with wildlife and there are all kinds of advantages to having that wildlife around because they utilize the prairie as well. I was always impressed with the Magnus family and their operation, their stewardship, grassland stewardship and also their ability to operate through dry cycles and wet in the prairies and balance their operation with nature. We don't manage for profit, we manage for stewardship and have learned that if you're good stewards that is profitable. So rather than chasing the last dime that that acre can produce we want to restore that land to the best condition that it should be in and by doing so you get more grazing out of it as a benefit. If I'm going to be a good steward to the land I also need to be a good steward to my family and I want to give them the opportunity that I had which is working with my dad. I haven't gone to work a day in my life. I just enjoy, I don't need to take a vacation. Some people do but I enjoy what we do so much that I don't need to get away. I just have fun.