 We are on the south side of Summit Lake by Summit South Dakota on a game production area that's managed by the game fishing parks. We lease this pasture from the game fishing parks to do early season grazing, trying to control cool season grasses, help to keep them in check and hopefully give the warm season grasses more opportunity, better opportunity to get a better hold out here and trying to work to help them manage their area so it's better for the wildlife and we're getting some benefit out of it by our cows that get into eating the grass. We've been working with the game fishing parks for over 20 years, grazing not just this parcel but three other ones right here in our area around the lake here and been seeing a significant change going from the cool season to the warm season grasses. They want us in here and we try to be in here the first week of May so we're here to mow things off with the cattle. Working with tenants like Mike and knowing what their goals need to be to make them profitable and to make it worth their time and to manage that with our goals as far as providing the best habitat we can. You got to give and take a little on both sides, it can all be what the game and fish wants or all what the tenant wants. A lot of these areas got fairly degraded because back in the past our main management practice was no management at all and the Kentucky Blue and Brown grass really invaded these native prairies or grasslands and they became the dominant species there. Probably about 15 to 20 years ago we had a co-worker named John Leeser started really trying to progressively manage these grasslands and get them back to the way we wanted them or as close as we could. Cattle were one of the big pushes previously. We probably grazed before then but we would probably do a season long graze once every one out of maybe three or four years and just come back and graze it again. The approach we've been going at now is the heavy spring grazes to really try to knock back that Kentucky Blue and Brown. Here in South Dakota and across the west there's just an awakening that we can't do the public land management without good conscious private landowners that are willing to work across boundaries, work across fences and I think that's what our example here at Summit Lake is where you've got a trusted private producer that works on a relationship with the managers and in turn they trust him to make good solid decisions based on mutual goals. It took some time to build the trust because in the beginning you know we'd come to them with ideas and they might say I don't know and not all of our ideas happen right away. Working with Mike McKernan up here on the Summit GPA really makes my job a lot easier. He basically is myself out here on the grassland so I don't have to come out here and be watching every little step he makes because I know exactly what he's doing out here is exactly what we want done. He knows his plants well, he's okay with having some weeds out here. He knows it's a cycle and with the proper grazing out here those weeds will come and go. He's even collected spurge beetles and spread them out on our public land on his own to try to manage the spurge population. Always sending me cool pictures of stuff he sees out here so that's always fun too because you know that's the biggest thing is you know we don't have a big crew so having a guy that you can trust out here doing the right thing is good so when we do end up coming out here to check it out it's looking the way we want it to be. I think a lot of people when they see the cattle on the ground and they see the grass you know being utilized or getting nipped down and they think nothing's going to be out there. Why are they you know the private guy is the only one benefit in off of this. But I say to those people if you come back in the fall or even mid-summer and see the change in the habitat you'll understand why. You have a lot better hunting opportunity out here because of the cattle doing what they're doing on the ground versus if we just did absolutely nothing. It's just nice to see that we've got cattle producers understanding so much more about the need for healthy grasslands healthy wildlife and we've got managers understanding the need that we also need really healthy profitable ranchers if this thing is going to work in the long run. In my view a long term success on game production areas would be having a high diversity of plants out there the forbs the grasses the wildflowers everything else out there and seeing the wildlife come back see the insects that are out there diversity I mean we hear it all the time but it's diversity diversity in grasses diversity in the insects and bugs diversity in the birds if we've got multiple species of all of them out there then I think we're being successful.