 Okay, the story of when we first started trying to figure out what to do in, we'll call them drought situations for now. They're actually, my idea on that has changed. But back when we first started this, we started out as a yearling operation with Mary Lou's dad, partners with him. And I always seen, after we started running cows, that we have no way to get out of cows if we hit a drought or a fire, or we lose grass. So that's when I started thinking about a drought plan, if we're going to call it that, of how to take care of that. And it took me a few years, but 20 years ago, we come up with the idea that we're going to run more than one herd. We're going to run our cow herd yearling operation with steers. We will run our steers over on the grass. And then we started bringing in other people's cattle. So any one of those can go. The steers or the heifers, we can stop that if we're short on on forage. And that's where our drought triggers come in, that each one of them, the first one we sell our steers. The second one is we turn down the custom cattle. And the third one is we get rid of some of our cows. And that is prior to getting into a drought. And it's been working for us real well, but it took us a few years to get it. And then every time the drought triggers kick in, we make new ones. So it's a moving target all the time. We go by last year's moisture. And specifically, the September on, a large portion of our moisture in this country comes from full moisture and winter snow, which between a third and a half of our moisture for our growing season comes from that. So if we don't have that moisture, we're already trying to get rid of cattle. By December, we pretty much know that we're going to be short. By February, we know whether we're going to dump cows. And our first trigger date is March 15. That's when our action plan kicks in and cattle are gone. And in March, April, and May are three trigger days for different classes of cattle. And that's when we start making our decision, or the decision is made, but that's when our action plan kicks in to get rid of cattle. One of the reasons for our action plan kicking in early is you still have a market. If you're proactive instead of reactive, you will sell cattle before the market drops and everybody else is out of grass and doing the same thing. That's why we start in March of selling cattle. And the market's still up. And the other deal is with year-lends, you've always got an option to sell them. They're always worth basically the same money. But if you wait to sell pairs in June and July, everybody else doing the same thing, and there is no market for them, you basically have to give them a killer price or less. So that's why we're proactive and try to get rid of them early. And if you sell cattle in March, everybody keeps waiting for the rain, which comes about once every 12 to 18 years where you get rain in later on enough in the spring to keep you going. So if you're out of cattle, but you have a lot of grass, it's real easy to get cattle to come in. I mean, there's neighbors wanting cattle. If you've got money in the bank and grass on the ground, you can rebuild your place pretty fast. That's never been a problem. I've got a list of people I could call and we could get cattle in here in two to three days. But I would usually wait, like right now we're in a two-year gouth. I wouldn't bring cattle, extra cattle in until probably end of June or middle of July before I'd ever bring cattle back in if we get over eight inches of rain this spring. One of the things that I would advise people in situations where we're already in two years of a gouth here, people are already out of grass. They think they're out of options. They're scared to make a move. In some of the steps they need to probably take in this situation is you've got to become reactive or proactive instead of reactive. You need to get ahead of the curve here, start getting rid of cows. I mean, we're here in April right now. We have two weeks where we start calving, but a lot of guys have already done calving. You need to get rid of those cows. If you don't protect your ground, your soil, you won't have grass down the road. That's the huge one right there. Don't worry about the love of them cows. We've all built an operation from the ground up. There's nothing wrong with doing it again. Even the people that are old enough retire, which I could be considered one of those, there's a lot of shortcuts I've learned over the years that I can build a herd a lot faster than I did this herd here. So do not be scared of selling cows. If you sell cows right now and it goes to rain in by July, you can restock. There's no problem there. The ranch resources we have is what anybody has is how you plan your operation from year to year. And our number one resource on our place is family. And we have family that comes in and helps us. We have five kids and they come and go to help. The second most important thing is our grass. If you don't have grass, you cannot make money. And then the land and grass to me is kind of close together because we've got to take care of the land in order to have grass. The cattle's number three, they can come and go. Never ever want to fall in love with your cattle. You try to get rid of them as much as you can. Equipment is the last thing. You can always get around without any equipment. You can always make a ranch work. You just gotta figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it. But the biggest deal is family. If you can't keep your family happy, none of this other stuff matters at all. It all goes down the tube. One of the things you got to be careful about on a ranch is your income streams. If you depend on one thing too much, for instance, if you run a cow-calf operation in this country and all of a sudden you run into a drought and you have to sell them, you have nothing to fall back on. We started out this place running yearlings. And everything worked pretty good that we turned it into a cow-calf operation and quit running yearlings. That's when I seen that we only had one income stream and we could get hurt. So that's where we went with running our yearling steers. Because we moved our Calvin date later so our steers were smaller at sale time in the fall. So we run them over and that was another way to harvest grass in another income stream. And then we found out that sometimes we have to bring in other people's cattle to help harvest our extra excess forage when we have it. So that's how we protect ourselves because we have several other income streams. We have other ideas. We just have an implementer at this point. But that's the three ways we have different incomes coming in. One of the things we've got to be careful of in low forage is how much surface protection do we have. And one of the things we've tried to do here forever is leave a thousand pounds of forage behind our cattle and that protects the soil. And it's not wasted grass because it feeds the microbes. In the number one most important livestock we have on any grasslands or farmground or anything in our soil is the microbes. They're the number one things you have to feed. If you bury your soil on 85 degree day on bare ground it's hot enough to kill microbes. On the 85 degree day when you have the ground protected and covered and shaded it'll be 10 degrees cooler underneath that canopy. So if you think you're wasting grass you have to figure out what your microbes need first. In I think it's Kansas State or Colorado one of the two said you have 800 pounds to feed the microbes. We leave a thousand pounds to build soil health. The more you leave the more you build soil health but there's a fine line there on your financial end of things where it starts cutting into your finances but if you go too far that's long range finance that you're you're taking away from you. But there's no such thing as wasted grass or a wasted bale it's all feeds of microbes. Okay when we when we manage our land to keep it covered the the response is so much quicker because the microbes are still there and the cover on top of the ground which wasted grass if you want to call it that is not wasted because it stops water from running off and it also stops the compaction of that raindrop hitting that soil and in making real fine particles and then it seals it up. But that that's what keeps our rain going down into the soil it gives it allows it to to go into the soil before it runs off. The response time after rain on well-kept soil healthy soil that's covered is so much quicker the NRCS many years ago I learned it after a drought where you bear your ground it's three to five years before that those grasses actually recover for their their root reserve and all of that and and you don't want to graze them until three to five years later very heavy at all but if you leave your land covered in three to five months you can be back in there with almost a full herd it recovers that quick. Okay the importance of planning our grazing rotation is is it's so important we pretty much have a certain rotation already figured out the only thing we do is we bury this number of cattle a number of animal units per day we take off of our land but we start planning what we're doing the previous fall with our fall moisture in November of the of the previous year we start trying to figure out what we're doing we assess what we have out there and we already know how many cattle we can get through with no rain no more growth and then we plan from there up and if we get rain in the fall snow in the winter then we start adding more cattle to us and then rain in the spring if we get our annual rainfall that's when I start bringing in more cattle because we have plenty of plenty of forage left besides what we need but the first thing you do is got to figure out what your your base herd your cow herd needs every year and figure out how many acres they need for the next year and then that's when you can start bringing in other cattle your yearlands or your your custom cattle but but figure out for your cows and then figure out what you have left over you should always have some left over in a year like like we're having right now now whatever we have left over is going to go to build soil health because we've already turned down our our custom cattle and and we've already sold our steers so the whole deal is is uh doesn't hurt to have leftover it's easier to take care of that than there is to not have enough left but the grazing rotation matters our biggest adjustment on when we rotate our cattle is how many acres do we give our herd per day or per week or three days whatever we move that's the only difference we make but at the end of that that summer on that rotation we have to have grass left over and and that's kind of very important that you have that figured out one of the things ranchers need to look at in years like this is is what happens when the next drought comes with their water one of the things that we need to figure out is in every every ranch has it including me the corners that we don't use there's certain plots that we can't get cattle to well now is when you got to figure out how to get water there and get water over there so years like this you can utilize it better and in normal years you can rotate better but the one of the huge things is in uh in the drought is figure out where you need water tanks one of the things we started out doing is moving our tanks with our cattle and we've we have probably over 8,000 feet of overground water waterline that we move all over we can put cattle anywhere on our ranch with with temporary fence in the temporary water but once you get it figured out where you need your water then it's time to go in with permanent tanks for sure and that's one of the processes we went through as we started out with the temporary over the ground pipeline and now we're going into the permanent permanent tanks and uh really really helps you get to every corner if you got water in the right place so the cows don't have to go so far or be without water for so long but you got to have that water out there to help get to them far corners one of the things we do with our our grazing plan our drought plan is the value we have in it is my family already knows it pretty much what we do we're in the process right now of teaching them how to do that and they know that this this will work on down the road and one of the huge values of it is of it is teaching them how many pounds can we take off and in uh we have uh certain years we've taken 200 pounds off but the value of that is is is it didn't hurt my land for next year when we get rain we're going to be okay we still have the ground covered and we have the ability to come back in that and in our our kids understand that that there's a huge value in taking care of our land and it helps to have your herd in a smaller area because you can control exactly what you're doing to the land and in on the land so that will keep our land viable and increase our health every year even in a drought we're increasing our soil health and that that will keep the the lasting value of this place and it keeps the legacy in front of our kids and they understand what we're trying to do some of the options we have of uh when we have too many cattle and not enough grass is in our our position right here we can start selling yearlings and turn down yearlings the other the other thing we do is we'll start sorting out our old cows blem cows or anything we don't like and sell them some of the other options that are that are out there is uh go to a feed lot you can dry lot your cows there's people around here that do that you can look for grass somewhere else and in this situation it's got to be quite a ways away from here because this is a big grout and there's a lot of people looking for grass sale barns is a good one i learned from my father and i'm many years ago that if you have to have to put wheels under a cow do not go buy the local sale barn if it's in your your drought plan uh action plan after a trigger date kicks in that you're going to find feed that's another story but if you're if you're reacting to a drought and and start looking for something you're probably not financially able to do it and it's almost impossible to feed your way through a drought unless you have real deep pockets and and i guess i'm not willing to go there whether my pockets are deep or not i'd rather replace cows than to to have to buy feed to get them through one of the big things on a on a ranch is your relationships with other people your your uh number one of course is is your personal relationship with your family but i'll start on your business relationship you have to have a team of people to help you figure out what to do and they're they are for your business and they are a huge mentor network out there for the grassland coalition and and voices for soil health i use a lot of them i have uh people all over the united states and some of my mentors are even overseas i don't talk to them very much but you got to have a mentoring network and there's a lot of people out there that are willing to help and uh i'm one of them but i still use mentors i bounce a lot of ideas off of people and you you got to have that relationship with people and there's a lot of people out there that's want to help you and they've made mistakes and and call them talk to them they'll they'll help you miss mistakes but you will still make mistakes so visit with them about that too because we all want to learn but then the personal relationships that's that's huge you know i got certain friends i can call and still bounce things off of your family that is so important you've got to be able to communicate with your family and have them be part of what you're doing and and be on board with what you're doing and in in our case here we started something 20 years ago with our grazing but prior to that this place was was uh belonged to my father-in-law so right there we started legacy we're the second generation in this legacy of making the soil healthier and all this a couple years ago our kids came to me and asked me what can we do to keep your legacy going and uh that's the first time i knew my kids were interested in what we're doing here and want to keep things going but for them to come and ask me how to keep the legacy going of what we've started here and my father-in-law started was probably one of the most important things that's ever happened to me with my family and but you got to be able to keep those lines of communications open with with everyone involved and uh right now we do have uh have family that that help us i don't know five kids they will all help us when they get an opportunity and uh hopefully someday one of them will take over