 I wanted my kids to experience what I did growing up to learn how to work, to learn how to think, to learn how to be independent of your own man and develop a love of animals and nature. We're in the Black Hills, South Dakota, currently in Custer County, just a few miles outside of the city limits of Custer, where my family has been on this place since roughly about the late 40s. We make a living raising cattle right here on this ground on the Forest Service and our private ground. My folks bought this place in 1946 for $11,000 by the way. This place has been several different things. My dad chose to dairy, they milked 35 cows. My dad had some tough luck in the 50s to be able to run that size of a dairy at that time. We had a pretty long dry spell. The Forest Service pulled my dad's day use permit and he couldn't keep as much livestock. 1978, we had the opportunity to buy the term permit and that's when my wife and I and my dad and mother got into the beef cows more as a full time deal and of course my kids were little and it just grow from there. Me and my sisters and family grew up raising cattle out on the back permit here on the home place. Our job every day was to grow out and a couple times a week checking on cattle and moving our pastures. We used to just kick everything out in the summer and we'd go catch them in the fall and bring them in, we'd calf. Then roughly in the 90s we had to downsize our operation a little bit with the expansion of the Peter Norbeck wilderness. We took in some of our grazing allotment boundaries and we lost some numbers and the National Forest Service gave us some extra numbers on another unit up north. Currently, me and my wife and my kids, we are running about 150 mama cows on our private ground and on the Forest Service pastures and then we're helping dad out on his operation also where he's running roughly about 90 head on the forest between the forest in the summertime and private ground here in Custer County and Bennett County in the winter. We have 47 active grazing allotments across the Ranger District and the Hellcandy Ranger District is located on the southern end of the Black Hills National Forest. So we work with approximately somewhere between 80 to 90 ranching families and they graze somewhere around just under 10,000 head of cattle, typically between the summer months from June to October. Within those allotments we've got various types of permits, grazing permits of course that we deal with. Most common is your direct permit or your term grazing permit where there's just a solid block of national forest system land that the rancher grazes his livestock on during those summer months and then we've got the term private land permits where especially here in the Black Hills you'll see an intermingling of private land intermixed with Forest Service land and so those are the types of permits we issue where maybe that private land piece will also be grazed in conjunction with the forest. The United States Forest Service is set up under the Department of Agriculture. One of the products, agricultural products that the forest provides is forage. So one of the many uses of the national forest is livestock grazing. The elk and ungulates they'll go after that fresh regrowth because that's the most nutritious. And so what we're doing with the cattle is keeping forage fresh in the meadows and keeping it from getting stagnant and that's been a benefit to all grazing ungulates on the forest. We do our best as Forest Service personnel to get out to every place that we can during the summer but obviously with that much country to cover we can't get everywhere. So it's just invaluable to have great grazing permatees like Tim and Clayton that know the area, know how their cattle utilize the area and know what can be done to better improve grazing management on the national forest. When the myrtle fire burn us out and pringle on another unit and we think it's roughly the year of 2015 we combined our units and... We pulled our cattle out of there essentially two of those pastures burned up and we had to get them out of there anyway because of the fire which raged on for several days. So we hauled them home. We didn't have anywhere else to go. With that we had a large number of amount of fence that was burned up along the highway and so it was at that time where Tim came to us with the thought process of running the cattle together in one herd to allow us time to get that fence put back up down there along the highway. Thought that was an outstanding idea because then it again allows us to better manage the amount of time that we rotate through these grazing pastures. What we really saw then was the change in the grass by running the way bigger numbers and initially it showed up on this pasture too and by the rotation it so improved the grass it's just pretty remarkable. It's starting to see a vast improvement in both your covering composition of your native species within your riparian areas as well as your uplands. So it's been it's been very good to see it's been looking through the long-term monitoring comparing pastures to this year you can really see vast improvement in resource conditions. This place hasn't changed much in 70 years. It's provided an experience that none of us will ever forget if we don't take care of what mother nature has provided. I don't know might be the end of man.