 My name is Dennis Hoyle, I live in the middle of Edmonds County in between Ipswich and Roscoe. I have a cow calf operation, I sell some grass fed beef and I'm in the pheasant hunting business. My little family, this farm started with my grandfather and my great-grandmother in 1910. My father lived here all his life and I lived here all my life. We have been both green farmers and livestock producers. Where we have the livestock, our organic matter is five and a half percent or higher. Where we've farmed, it's in the low to mid threes. I want to bring that back and I'll put it back the way God had it. Not necessarily all grass, although I'm not sure I would mind that. The first thing we did was to no-till. We stopped doing damage to the soil. Now we're adding cover crops, putting livestock back on the land. We're grazing, having livestock graze cover crops out in the fields instead of a combine we have cows. Therefore just about everything stays there, nothing gets hauled away except the gain. That's one of the things, also the cover crops improve infiltration. It's a way to pull carbon out of the air and put it in the ground. Carbon and organic matter are basically the same thing. So if I can pull carbon out of the air and put it in the ground, I'm making the soil healthier. A plethora of information out there. Lots of YouTube videos. There's something called the NRCS that works. It tries to help once in a while. The internet has a ton of things but there is very good help at the local NRCS office. Happen to be a member of the Soil Health Coalition and there's a lot of help there. There's a lot of experience on that board and I enjoy learning from them. My mentors are great. I've had several. And if I get to be one, I hope I do as well as the ones I've had. I think I have some things to offer in some areas but there's a lot I don't know. I still don't fully grasp how much life there is underground and what it all does. The first time I heard about Michael Reisel's fun that I thought the man had lost his cabbage. And now I understand that Michael Reisel, one guy, can do some amazing things. So, like I said, I'm a third grader. I have a lot to learn. There's so much information more than I can ever comprehend. I'm old enough that people think I should retire. I have no desire to retire. As long as I have my health, I want to keep doing this because it is fun. And seeing some improvements and trying to teach it to my kids. I learned a lot of what I learned from preceding generations and I feel obligated to pass that long because there's no point in me raising my organic matter on this land if it's just going to get sold and turned into corn and beans and conventional type of farming. That wouldn't be very beneficial. Our resource concerns, things we are just beginning to realize that our soils are degraded. I didn't know my soils were degraded. I was improving my soils before I knew they were degraded. I didn't know what the organic matter was back in 1986 when I started no-killing. I was saving moisture and I figured it would reduce the erosion, but there's a lot more to that. And I know some really good farmers who don't know what their organic matter is. They probably know their NP and K, but they don't... It's not on the radar for them at this point. And it wasn't on the radar for me a few years ago. A while ago when you talked about cover crops, people looked at you a little funny. Well no, it's not that way so much anymore. Water quality is a big concern. The better job we do of getting water to go into the ground instead of running off to the ground the better the water quality will be for whosoever downstream from us. Water comes together and gets more concentrated and gets in the more populated areas. It's a very big concern. Whatever we can do, even little steps, a few years ago we had major water here and we had big washouts. There was a waterfall in Edmunds County. There shouldn't be any waterfalls in Edmunds County. And had we had perfect infiltration we just still had water running because it was just that the conditions were so, but it could have been a lot less. We wouldn't have to have this 1,000 acre lake out here that used to be an 80 acre sloop. Vocally-wed is a chance to give input, but also to get input. I mean to share. There's some neighbor around here that's doing something that I don't know about that I need to know about. And maybe there's something I'm doing that some neighbor should know about. I once heard John Wooden speak and he says you can learn by your mistakes but it doesn't have to be your mistakes. You can learn by other people's mistakes and that's something that has stuck with me. I'm trying to learn by other people's mistakes. And I make a few of my own so I can help other people understand what not to do.