 My grandparents lived here and I grew up a quarter mile away and now I live here with my family. We're primarily grassland, but a lot of the grassland's been converted to cropland in the last 10, 12 years and that's pretty unfortunate in my eyes. I think right here where we're at is a good cattle country. We're about eight miles west of the James River Valley where it gets a nice flat fertile farm ground from Westington Springs East. From here west it's rolling hills and our operation is primarily cattle based cow calf and that's what we utilize all the grass for. When I started farming with my dad 20 years ago, we farmed at least twice the number of tillable acres that we're doing now so we've converted half our operation back into grass in the last 20. Sometimes we miss the big cycles and the crop prices. We were planting grass when other guys were breaking grass and they cashed in on $7 corn but you got to kind of have a long term view of this when you do it. You can't just expect immediate returns right away. We've done a lot of work with NRCS, Fish and Wildlife Service and Game Fish and Parks. They help kind of guide us through it. They tell us what grasses will grow best on these particular sites and they come up with the grass mixes for us and then we've utilized a lot of their cost share programs and that helps. You know it's an investment to plant an acre crop ground back into grass. You're looking at $100 for the seed and then you got to rebuild your fences around it and then put water on that acre. All three of those things can be cost shared through either the NRCS or Fish and Wildlife Services. They'll foot the bill for most of it if you're willing to work with them and sign a contract saying that you're going to leave it in grass. We got a 180 acre piece of ground that we planted back to native grasses. It was a six-way mix of big blue stem, side-old scroma, western wheat grass, green needle grass, Indian grass. Come middle of July through the first October. The production is just phenomenal. But right across the fence from that, in that same section, probably 25, 30 years ago, my grandpa and dad and uncle bought this section of ground off a bankruptcy auction and the whole thing was farmed. We planted probably 60% of it back to grass the first year through an EQUIP program. Built some fences and piped a little water out there and all they planted was brome grass and intermediate wheat grass and alfalfa. That produces great in a normal year for the month of May and the first half of June. You get to the end of June and that's going downhill. And right across the fence we planted that six-way mix of native grasses and we get probably three times the production off of it is what we get off the cool season grasses. That's what we're banking on as our native mix is to help us later in the summer here. I know that the soil health is better underneath those native mixes that we're putting in because we're getting deeper roots, better infiltration, and we're getting a bug population out there now that wasn't there before. We're starting to learn about the benefits of the bugs and the insects, not only like honey bees but also the dung beetles and stuff in the soil. Long term, my kids talk about farming. They love being out here, you know, and that's up to each one of them if they want to do this or not, but I'm trying to kind of encourage them, tell them what this is all about and how it's a good living. They can see that they love it out here. They got all the bottle calves named and they name a few of the cows and they love riding through the cows and checking them with me. I don't know what their plans are, you know, they're still young yet, they got a lot of time to figure that out. So I hope one or two of them decide to come back and run the farm.