(logo clinks) (cow huffing) (gentle music) (birds chirping) (grass rustling) - Always and forever the land is like the first thing.

(gentle music) Every week there's a new surprise.

Sometimes every other day.

(gentle music) And if you only look, you'll see it.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) (wind chimes ringing) I live in Curtis, Washington and have lived here my whole life.

This place is home, of course.

(coffee dripping) (gentle music) But to me it means family.

My great-grandparents on my dad's side immigrated in to the valley in the mid-1800s.

I grew up here and now my children have grown up.

(birds chirping) (gentle music) I just like living here.

I think I'm probably rich beyond compare and it's not with money.

(gentle music) (door whooshes, clatters) Are they all here?

Come on, Skinny Mini.

Come on.

Basically today I'm a retired farmer.

But I'm still an active farmer, and I'll be a farmer till the day that I die.

And probably I'll still be a farmer because they'll put me in the ground.

(hay rustling) (gentle music) (birds chirping) I was born here.

You were born here.

Jack was born here.

You know.

Maybe I'll see some great-grandkids, like, grow up here.

(gentle music) (grass rustling) (crows cawing softly) (gentle music continues) This is the lupine plant.

(grass rustling) (gentle music) We knew the lupine was there, but it was just a native plant.

A woman who worked for the state was on the bike ride that weekend and she saw it growing out in the field and she's going like, "Oh, well, that's Kincaid's lupine out there.

And that's that rare plant."

And it's the host plant for the Fender's blue butterfly which is extremely rare and very endangered.

It kind of just changed the whole thing.

We got a call on the phone and a person we didn't know said the federal government's gonna make a decision on what to do with the lupine on your property and they're gonna be telling you what you have to do to maintain it.

People definitely were anti cow.

Well, the cows are not hurting it.

The cows are helping it.

They're gonna spread a little fertilizer.

They're gonna open up a little bit of that ground and eat out the competition, and then that gives it more of a chance to naturally just be able to survive.

See, the cows are going to eat this.

They're gonna chomp that off.

But they don't really like the taste of the lupine, it's not their first choice, so they're just gonna leave it.

Grazing it is an important part of keeping this whole ecological system going.

It's just knowing the land and understanding what it'll do for you.

(wind chimes ringing) Isn't the last day of summer this week?

Soon the leaves will be falling.

(paper rustling) (gentle piano music) When the bloom comes, the bloom is just spectacular.

(gentle piano music) (plants rustle) So we're beginning to get into where the lupine's gonna be blooming.

Oh, look here today.

Boy are we blessed.

And see there's quite a few of them, son.

(plants rustling) You can kind of tell by the size of the stalk and the way they bloom if they're an older plant or a newer young plant.

(plants rustling) - My mom was like, we gotta do this, you know.

And now I have the fourth generation, my kids, and they're like, you know, starting to understand we gotta protect the species, protect everything.

(birds chirping) This place is a biodiversity heaven.

There's no place on Earth like this place.

(birds chirping) (faint chatter) (plants rustling) (birds chirping) - [Mary] To me, it's kinda like God's country.

(gentle piano music) I would hope in the future, and I see it coming, that people more and more understand that if we don't take care of things and we allow them to slip away, for one thing they're never gonna be back.

So the lupine plant is that marker in our environment that we have to draw a line.

We have to say, if we don't protect this what's the next thing we're gonna overlook protecting?

Somewhere along the line, I assimilated all this to take care of Mother Nature.

(birds chirping) (gentle music)