Well the decision to partner with our neighbors the Waltners and how we were going to partner on this task took quite a few months. We had two primary goals to merge. The Waltner’s wanted a straighter fenceline so that plowing and harvesting in their big machinery was easier. Our shared fenceline used to look like this on the east side.

You can see our lighter color pasture against their dark green crop. You can also clearly see the property line as it stairsteps down and to the right. After many many negotiations, we agreed to the following:

Don’t change the property lines. Just create a working agreement between the parties.
Remove the end-of-life mulberry trees along the shared fence line on the north end of the pasture.
Make the fence “straighter” as it crossed the properties.
Net zero land for both parties. Because of the nature of triangles, as we straightened it out we “lost” 11 acres of prairie and “gained” 11 acres of cropland.
We will manage the weed situation in the released triangles from their portion.
We will put up a high-tensile fence around our pasture so we have grazing as an option.

Here is what we ended up with.

You can still see our old property lined shaded by darker appearing soil and their new cropland by the lighter appearing soil.

We could not have accomplished this without the ridiculous effort of Anne Waltner, our neighbor and Tom Gruber, our other neighbor and grazing partner.

We also had amazing help from a group of land lovers from Sioux Falls SD.