 I grew up in a little town called Page, Nebraska. In 97, my dad got offered the job to move up to Fort Peer to manage the farm operation for lower-brew farms. I was just graduating college. They wanted to add on to a livestock program and a ranch program. I was asked to come up and start running it. I've been here ever since. On top of this ranch, they do have 88 irrigated pivots of corn and beans. The land and the cattle and equipment is all owned by the lower-brew farms, which is an entity or an arm of the lower-brew Sioux Tribe. They have hired a management group to manage the cattle and the farming operation. I've been here 23 years. A new farm manager has moved in the last three years. My dad ran it for 20 years before that. That's how we got started. All the pasture land has been bought or leased since 1998. The farm has a farm board that is the overall controlling partner of what goes on. And they are very on board with intensive grazing, the way the farms are managed, the way the cattle are managed. There are tribal members that are on the farm board that are very good to work for. But on top of that, they are all for the way the land is taken care of and the way the cattle are rotated and the work that goes into it and the upkeep of the ranches. I've worked with AJ on different conservation plans. I started working with AJ when I moved to Pierre, I think, in 2014. The improvements in the plant community has really come from careful management of how those units are grazed and that management is used to suppress species they don't want, such as brome, and really help foster an environment for the native species that they're trying to promote. When I came on to the place, they just bought the ranch. We put it directly into an intensive grazing system, which my goal was to rotate, rest, and recover. So I started rotating the cattle, started out every 20 days I would move them, and then I split the pastures from that first year to now I'm moving them every five to 10 days in 15 to 20 different pastures through the summer rotation. I also rotate through the winter a little bit longer. It would be 30 days to 45 day program in different pastures. We started on a calving rotation to where as soon as they calve, we rotate every day and move the pairs out of the pasture they're calving in. I have seen huge benefits in the amount of head we can run per acre, the pounds of grass that come from the rotation, the regrowth when we go back in. Every pasture will get at least 90 days of rest and recovered time before I go back in. The cattle have benefited from it. The pounds per gain have benefited and we've ran, I would say, 40% more cattle on a rotation program as opposed to running a season long grazing. It absolutely helped with the grass. It made the soil better. It made us run 40% more cattle. It cheapened up our daily cost of grazing. In my younger years, I always heard old-timers tell me that on a drought year, you're going to run out of water before you're going to run out of grass. Never until this year did I ever picture that that would be the problem. Probably two years of straight drought in this area, we missed all the rain. It was by far the toughest year this year I've ever had. All the dams were dry. We've never got to use one dam this year. Since May when we started calving, we fenced out that first pasture in May. That first dam, since then, we've had to fence out 30 more dams that we rotate into. We haven't used a single one. We have pumped out of a few to get water into another tank. We've also developed a truck system that carries 4,000 gallons of water that we back up to the tanks just so they can have enough water. We've had to open up two pastures at a time so they would have enough water. We've turned the ranch from a 350-cow herd to a 650-cow herd. And by doing that, you have to get enough water. I figure on a hot day and a dry day like it was, we had to have 18,000 gallons of water. And the only way we could get that without dams was by putting some type of water system in that actually holds water towers, basically is what I call them, to hold the quantity of water. So when 600 cows want to come drink, they're gonna have the water available. And without that, this 10,000-acre ranch would have easily lost 5,000 acres of water just by the dams being dry. And just one water tank wouldn't have supported 600 cows. They're improving the grasslands. They're improving the ecosystem. They're improving wildlife. They're also improving water quality. So as you think long-term, there's so many benefits that come along with improving your plant community. I mean, everybody's gonna enjoy the wildlife. Everybody's helped by improved water quality. It's not just the ranch itself. It spreads to so many other places too. What's in it for me, I figure nobody really owns the land. We're only here for a short time just to manage the land. So if I can leave this place better than how I received it, which I feel I am doing, that's what drives me every day to do this.