 My farm is located southwest of White Lake, South Dakota. We did Homestead, I think around 1884, the Sioux Flow family, and then it's just kind of come through the generations. My parents still live on the farm. My wife and three kids and I live in town still in White Lake. I've been farming probably for about nine years now. About three years ago I started full-time farming on my own here. When I started farming I did want to find a way to integrate the livestock back into the crop ground. I've been starting to graze standing corn in the winter, and if I'm short of grass and I have to get off my grass so I don't overgraze it, I just save more corn. I've found it's a very cost-effective way to feed your cattle. I do usually supplement with one or two alfalfa bales a week. I just roll it out to them. So I do supplement a little bit of protein, but other than that they're just basically grazing the corn and digging through the corn stalks. I have three different groups of pastures, and there's several smaller pastures within each group. I try to rest one group for the full growing season, and then I graze the other two groups. And then the next spring I come back and graze the one that I rested early in the spring, and then I usually get multiple grazings off of that one. My production the next spring is quite a bit more than the other pastures. So it makes up for what I was losing the year before by not grazing it. I feel like it gives some of the native species a full year break to maybe get more established. What Reid and his family are doing here is they're not only protecting these grasslands and maintaining them in these large blocks that are attractive to birds and wildlife, but they're also managing them in a way that we have these undisturbed blocks for nesting. We have disturbed blocks that allow foraging and display behavior for grouse and other species, and you just see that mix of habitats, and we have an official name I guess it's called heterogeneity of habitat, and a rotational grazing system usually provides the best mix of those habitats versus a continuous grazing system where typically you see those habitats are more homogenous across the landscape. He's starting to realize a lot of benefits from that increase in native plant diversity, and I think a lot of that can be tied back to the fact that he's grazing pastures at different times each year. He's leaving residue, he's not overgrazing, he's keeping minimum plant heights for plant health and vigor, and he's providing a recovery time so any time spent is very short. He's giving those plants a long time for recovery to occur. Another thing with the diversity in the pastures I've been seeing is not just the diversity in the plants, but I've seen a lot of dung beetles this year which I haven't really seen in the past, and I think that's helped controlling my flies, that with different bird species that are helping to control the flies. My farm is finally starting to perform more like an ecosystem like I'm trying to get it to. The farther you get along in rotational grazing or more intensive grazing, it seems to me like the plant stand gets thicker. There's just not as much opportunity for weeds to get started, so they just kind of get choked out by competition, and if they germinate they'll probably end up dying. They just don't have an opportunity to express themselves, I guess. I've grown cover crops now for the last four years. I plant cover crops after my small grain harvest. The last few years I've tried full season cover crops just for the purpose of grazing. I've tried actually planting cover crop in the spring, grazing it in the spring as well, and then planting another crop into it as well, so I've tried that. I would like to increase the organic matter up to what it was supposed to be when this was all prairie. I got to do a little more research to see what this was at before it got settled. With proper management I think people can exceed that. What Reed is doing here is he's getting organic matter back into the soil. If you can increase organic matter in your soil, you're insuring yourself against drought. You capture more rainfall, and when you capture more rainfall you increase your total production. The resulting in that total production is going to be beneficial to his livestock and his bottom line. Reed has been a great example to use when I'm doing the planting process with others to maybe a full season cover crop will come up in a conversation or during a planting process. And I'm able to use Reed as a contact for them or an example. He's done a lot with his grazing, not as conventional, he's more high intensive grazing, and that's something that everybody uses on a daily basis. He's been really helpful in helping me learn to pass this message on to others. These grasslands developed in a certain way with disturbance, and there was a plan here that there was an order in place and it was working very well to maintain this landscape and take care of all the little things from birds and bees and other insects to water and grasslands. And what he's trying to do here is he's really trying to restore that balance and bring back that connection between all of those different small pieces so that this area, this farm really functions not only for him but also for the wildlife and for just society at large also to provide a number of benefits. Having kids definitely makes me think about what I'm doing to the land. I mean, I want it to be in better shape than what I took over and I want to instill on them the principle of conservation and soil health so they hopefully will take it to another level and continue where I'm starting, I guess.