 I'm Randy Schultz. This is my wife, Jean. We're in West Indon Springs, South Dakota, in Gerald County. And we're on the ranch my dad purchased in 1995. It's a cow calf and hay ranch. There's some farm ground. I actually grew up in West Indon Springs at the edge of the hills. My first husband and I, we ranched northwest of town and we raised our three kids out there. It's a wonderful place for kids. They learn a lot of responsibility. They grow up to have a good work ethic. My daughter is back farming, ranching, raising cattle and performance horses where she grew up northwest of town. The boys still farm. They've purchased acres of land out there and in their second job is farming. The cross fencing was something new to me when Randy and I were first married. It's just way different because there was so much flatter land up there than in comparison to Turtle Peak. Right after we came, we got involved with cross fencing. The original ranch here had really only three pastures. An 800 acre pasture, a 500 acre pasture in this calving quarter we call it. That's about a quarter, 160 acres. Through NRCS we were able to cost share and divide up the ranch. Moving the cattle around, you know, you get better use of the land. We're running about 170 pairs right now. That seems to be a pretty good capacity for the place. We start the cattle in the spring on a pasture that's heavily bluegrass and brome. That bluegrass is not palatable very long, so that's a good place to start them. We don't mind beating up the bluegrass and brome. After several years, though, in this first pasture, the big blue stem in particular came back. You get more diversity with your cool season and warm season grasses as you move your cattle and have shorter duration grazing. If the cattle are on the same pasture, they're going to keep eating their favorite plant and those plants will decrease and the less desirable plants will come in. Moving the cattle around in smaller paddocks just increases the diversity of the species of grass. We had about almost four miles of cross-fencing cost shared. I think we're up to about 11 different pastures that are somewhere around 200 acres. I've got a rotation and I've rarely changed it. I know it's good to change these rotations, but we've just got into a routine that benefits us. When we first moved here, gathering the cattle in the fall was quite a job. We maybe needed seven to ten horsemen up here to get them out of all these gulches. So I will say that the cross-fencing really helps with gathering your cattle. And, you know, they get to a point where they want to move, so it's really easy to move them now. Yeah, you pretty much just open the gate. The water is another story. When we moved here, it was very similar to what we see this summer. All the lakes are foals, the dams are running over, very wet. And that's how it was designed. When NRCS came out and we drew out the cross-fencing, well, we had all these natural lakes and dams and dugouts. Well, the extreme dry and the extreme wet, it's been the cycles. For instance, Baker's Lake has been full three times and completely dry twice. So you go from a cycle of everything being full to everything being nearly dry. So we did not do enough water lines and we did not foresee the dry years when we did this. So we did an emergency pipeline clear down to Baker's Lake when that lake was dry. And so we had to kind of adjust things as we went along. We should have brought Roger Dwyer out, the previous owner, and he could have told us that no, you're not going to have water there every year. That's going to dry up. So the water resources weren't developed the way they should have been right to start. So water is the complete key. The more water you can pipe or the more piped water as opposed to dugouts or dams, you want clean water for your cattle. And so that wasn't perfect. We kind of learned as we went along. We weren't supposed to have anything in one of these historic lots for more than 45 days, which we didn't. This little backgrounding lot is called a clean water diversion. Let's say you get three inches of rain in a single storm. The only water that would go downstream would be the water that actually falls right in the feedlot. But we have a grass buffer on the downstream part of the feedlot to filter out anything that would fall directly into the feedlot, and then anything west of the feedlot goes in this diversion around it. The story of this ranch is all the different cost shares we've had. I started off with South Dakota Game Fishing Parks helping us with the deer depredation. U.S. Fish and Wildlife helped us with this dam down south and, of course, NRCS through EQUIP program. We did these water lines and all these cross fences. So that was huge, that NRCS was the big player in all of this and they also helped us with our backgrounding lot. I don't know how we could have done any of this without these cost share programs. We were able to start the year, everybody got their crops in pretty much, which we couldn't do last year. So we've had more than ample rainfall. You don't see the pastures this green in July very often. All the dams are full. It's more than a good day. It's been a good summer.