 Welcome to the Dowd Ranch. I'm Rick Dowd and this is my wife, Marlis. We are the 2010 Leopold Conservation Award winners. We hope you enjoy a tour of our ranch. To one Leopold Conservation Award has been very humbling, rewarding. God has truly blessed us with this award. We didn't realize that you could get an award for doing the things that we had been doing all these years and that there were people with thoughts the same as we had. How you take care of the land, it takes care of you. It's just been very rewarding and Marlis and I have talked about this several times. The award has been tremendous, but I think the nicest thing out of this is all the people we've met, the friends we've made. And there's just some awesome people out there. They're doing some awesome things outside of the box that, you know, by winning this award, we've been able to visit with those people and be in touch with them. And we're just learning so many things. We moved here in the fall of 73. We started out with just a trailer house and one barn and we've added since then. So it's been an ongoing process of learning how to take care of things and 10 years ago when we started and switched our operation, we were in our season long use with our land. And I could tell our winter pasture was being depleted and our summer pasture wasn't getting used enough and I knew we had to balance that more and I didn't know how to do it. And a gentleman by the name of Rick Peterson from the NRCS at Kadoka, he suggested that maybe I might be interested in going to this ranching for profit school, which I did. And that's when the light bulb went off that, you know, through rotational grazing, calving in sync with mother nature, everything would start falling into place. And so it's just within the last year or two that we really noticed everything is starting to click together. The main reason we want to conserve this land is so where we've got something better to pass on to future generations. Any more you go out, if a son or somebody wants to come back on the place, you've got to buy the neighbor's place out, be able to bring them back home with rotational grazing and improving your grass. I foresee the future that you don't have to do that. You can increase your cow herds. You can increase your grass. You can retain more of the nutrients here instead of watching them run downstream and have them be more profitable. We're here at one of our range monitoring sites in one of our summer pastures. We've got six of these sites throughout the ranch where we're monitoring the grass that we're producing throughout the year. At the end of our grazing season, we will remove this cage. We have a ring about so big in diameter that we throw down. We clip everything inside of this ring. We put it in a bag and we weigh it. We take that ring and we throw it out here in the grass where these cows have grazed. We will clip everything in that ring, weigh it, measure it, and we compare the two. We know exactly how much grass we produced right here and how much was consumed. Last fall, when we were coming out of summer pasture, moving back into winter pasture, we left more grass in summer pasture than what was in winter pasture. Even though we had clipped that twice, we moved back here. There was less grass. I had a gentleman tell me 10 years ago, if you're gonna be successful at rotational grazing, you're gonna have to rotate through your winter pastures in the summertime to clip them, stimulate them, get that grass to produce them. That light bulb went off last fall. When we moved back, we left more grass in summer pasture than what we came back to here in winter pasture. Also, we made the switch from the March and April and we've gone to the May and June cabin and we haven't looked back. Our main goal is to try and match our cows' nutritional requirements with that that the grass is producing. And here in May and June, our grass is coming on lush. The amount of energy that it's producing is high. Right now, our calves, our cows are calving. Therefore, their nutritional requirements are high. My advice is go out and go to these grazing tours, demonstrations, schools. When I first started out, I thought the only way to get ahead was to stay home and work as hard as you can, which is all right to a point, but there's so many things out there for you to learn, to observe. There are people out there that are willing to help you to tell you what you're doing and how you can improve what they've failed at and what they've accomplished and how you can go on and learn from their mistakes. So where you don't have to make those mistakes again. I think the main thing I want to get across is we take care of the land because in return it takes care of us and our livelihood. And I think the two things have to balance. We don't come in and misuse the land. We don't misuse the animals. It's all in a nice balance and we try to keep it that way. And I think for us, we're such a minority, the farmers and the ranchers. We need to get this word out that yes, these people are taking care of this land to the best of their ability and hoping to pass it on in better shape than what they originally found it.