Greg Judy Feb 2019

my name is Gregg Judy we were in Central Missouri and today we're gonna be talking a little bit about using livestock to heal the land and with our grazing practices in Missouri we've run 16 farms released twelve of them and we home four of them and we rotate livestock around our landscapes and so we're focusing on feeding the soil feeding the animals and building healthy soil healthy food for local communities and so that's the what that just so we're gonna be talking about today is using animals to heal the land okay it's an honor to be here in front of you all this morning you know we we farm and ranch in Central Missouri it's about halfway between Kansas City and st. Louis we're right on the edge of the Ozarks we're not in farmland we're in grazing land it's the rolling hills and so that's what's kind of giving us our competitive our competitive advantage is we're not competing with grow crop farmers so we're on land that is not suitable to put a plow into and so we can take some pretty poor land and we can do some pretty neat things with it today that's what I'm going to talk a little bit about is using livestock to build healthy soil and profit folks if you can't it all starts in the soil and you know for many years I called myself a grass farmer you know it's what I was and you hear me mentioned today a little bit about Ian Mitchell in us he's a South African high density gray sir that actually turned me around and the first time I heard he in thought he didn't call himself a grass farmer he called himself a microbe farmer and so he took it another level down he's looking at the soil and that's what it's all about folks we've got to take care of our soils and I think I'm kind of preaching to the choir here a little bit but it's just extremely important you just can't have better soil and I even take it one step further I don't get comfortable seeing bare soil if my animals make a boo-boo and you know we're out there in a rainstorm or something and we create a bare spot on our farms or ranch I don't I just don't turn a blind eye to that I fix it immediately you've covered that soil up I'll look at the soil as nature skin and if we remove nature skin she's gonna pay us back and in our area she's gonna pay us back with weeds we're gonna get weeds she's gonna put a weed there to heal that soil she's not gonna leave it bare and so and we've got to keep an eye on that that's what we're focused on folks is you know we're basically trying to convert land that we've got some pretty mediocre land I mean we're talking about topsoil one to two inches you know it's it's not very thick but I tell you what it's amazing what land can do when you start doing the correct things to it and it doesn't take very long for it to start working in sync and it was in nature in nature if you look at trying to manage with her instead of beating her up all the time you start getting along a lot better and that I used to wake up in the morning every morning and my focus was what can I kill today so did you know there everything was trying to put me on a business and when I started looking at there's things out there why are they there just like the invasive species you know we've got some of those on our farms like the autumn olive bush and everybody's freaking out about it's taking over the whole Midwest and I'm like that was me I was in that boat now we've we adopted a different attitude we're gonna learn how to make money with autumn olive but I'm gonna talk a bit about some of that changes we've done so basically what we've got folks who've got this herd out here and we're trying to be more translucent of what we're doing with them we're moving around these landscapes and we're basically doing their predator-prey relationship so we don't have the mountain lions we don't have the grizzly bears we don't have the pack of wolves anymore but you know what we do have that and without electric fans folks we just couldn't do what we're doing we've got 16 farms today every single one of them is is high tensile wire we don't have any barb barb woven wire when you lease land it's got to be economical defense and you can't go out there and spin you know fifty two hundred thousand dollars putting up a perimeter fence a barbed wire with steel post every eight to twelve foot when you can take this stuff and put a post every thirty or forty feet with one wire because folks once your cattle get trained to hot water it doesn't take much to keep them unit it really doesn't it's more you know there's more animal weight in pounds per acre below the soil than there is in soil and healthy pastures and then there is above it and that's something that I really focus on I used to drive across my pastures in my pickup truck I didn't think about it why only one day I went out there you know I I'm like wait a minute there's critters down there eating they got a good salad bar they're working in my soil they're building houmous and I just drove across their dinner plate and I compacted that soil we don't drive on our pastures anymore only with ATVs it's got to be frozen and then of course we can bring a heavier implement out but when it's not frozen boy we just we just stay off of it again this is some of the lease lands this would be a brand-new lease we've had that one now for two years it doesn't look like much right now at that time that picture was taken but you know what I would have burned that that's what I used to do when I'd get a lease farm and had a bunch of thatch on it like I'd throw a match to it burn it get rid of it and then I going behind that when I burned it and I'd throw some seed down on it well folks there's a ton of carbon there it's been accumulated over 50 years we're in the life-giving business we don't want to kill stuff and so by using the animals to trample that thatch onto the ground I got this huge explosion of grass and earthworms and centipedes and just all kinds of soul life remember this burning promotes plant spacing the plants get further apart if you continually burn a pasture every year the plants will get further apart grazie promotes plant density it brings the plants closer together use that animal hoof it is a great tool you just got to learn how to use it so that's my soil building recipe I had a mob of ruminant animals I start tramping the carbon onto the soil surface and here's the big one you've got to give it a recovery period folks it is a grass plant and if you come back too soon you're gonna be out of business you can't graze a plant that's not recovered well you can but you're not gonna be doing as well this is a field this is on the lease farm we ended up buying this farm or the cattle bought it I started adopting a little bit about hemming off her two gordon-gordon hazard yeah Gordon hazard he just passed away I think it was last year he was 90 years old great old Mississippi Rancher and somebody asked Gord and he said well you know how much did you charge those cows for that land out there and he had 1,800 steers and he was moving them across his ranch and Gordon had about I don't know three thousand acres eight bought over time he said what's your land use charge on them stairs and Gordon looked at the guy and he said why don't charge them steers nothing for that land they bought it I didn't well that's pretty good you know that's that's just the way Gordon thought you know and so we I've got we've got an account so every time we sell any livestock we have to land accountant and a little bit goes into that and when the animals can afford another farm will buy it we don't go into debt not saying you don't have to go in debt starting out you may have to do some of that but folks the thing has turned us around is the leased land I read an article back in 1997-98 somewhere in that time period and the title of that article basically the gist of it was there was one coaster that changed my entire life and it said your sole purpose in life should not be to own the land but to control it and boy I tell you that turned the light ball bend in my world and we started looking around the neighborhood and there was a lot of land laying around that people weren't doing anything with and so I say for young people starting out today if you can get your hands on some lease land it preserves your equity use your equity to buy livestock later on you can buy the land but starting out it's pretty tough I did that and almost lost our farm and I had a job in town too so getting the land leased allows you to get your numbers up you know we're up to we range somewhere between three to four hundred head of animals that's just cows we got sheep we've got pigs we got chickens and other things you can't get your numbers up if you're in debt right off the start there's no money left and that interest payment just kills you absolutely I've been there I think we need to get animals back on the land you know tipple talked about that yesterday a little bit and when I grew up for us where I am right now as a little kid I can remember moving into that area I was born in northern Minnesota on a dairy farm up by Duluth and didn't take too many years my mom got tired of the cold winter and said we got to move out of here some of it to Missouri been there ever since but one of the things I think when we moved into that area every single crop field around us had fence on it and in the corner of the crop field with a little pond everybody grazed through crop residues everybody and now those fences are gone the ponds have been pushed in and the soils turned a different color it's not black anymore I think we need to clone Jay fewer and put him in every single in RCS office in the United States what do y'all think I mean I've heard more sex more success stories than farmers and ranchers around here due to what this group here has started kudos to y'all y'all do great work here fantastic you know what's amazing to me is you're always growing season so short and yet you're still just knocking it out of the park I think that's awesome so we're focusing on the soil food smorgasbord now some folks that look at that folks this is a picture of the pasture that got away from us so in the springtime people ask them how fast do you move your animals well it depends you're getting a lot of moisture and that plants are growing quickly we tend to move our animals across our farm faster you get into June and July and it gets hot we haven't had a rain for eight weeks and the plants that slowed down within we slowed our animal movements down because if you don't you're gonna get around your farm too quickly and you're gonna be back too soon and then your grazing plants that aren't recovered so here's that pasture that would have got away from us what I mean by that is in the springtime we start out grazing and we're just taking the top third of the plant we got three fourths across our farms and everything sent up seed heads and so we just stopped grazing forward stopped and we act like we didn't own 25% of our farm we went back to where we started in the spring because it was ready to graze again already and we started grazing again animal performance through the roof because the animals are grazing very palatable high-energy plants we let all this stuff go but now we're coming back this is the end of July August we haven't had any rain look at the mass out there and those animals absolutely did a number I just got some more pictures of what happened there we make sure we don't graze the roots folks if you're grazing your pastures down I don't care what time of season is even in the wintertime if you're taking it down where you can put on it with a golf ball you're taking your pastures down to short residue it's all about residue stocking density versus stocking rate you know stocking this is the number of the animals are on a paddock for a certain time and stocking rate is the number of animals are on your farm for a calendar year so don't get those two confused there's that same pasture and so we would have put up a paw of art and we're getting well the cows have been brought in there and we left them in there for 12 hours at a hundred thousand pound stocking density per acre and that's what they did so they didn't trample a hundred percent of that on the ground and I get a little bit upset when I see people's oh we got a new kid no you don't need the new good you got at least some of that standing why would you want to leave some of that forage standing catch the wind I heard somebody say great soul the wind down there's also critters living in those clumps you don't want to nuke it all down but look what that young man's holding up in his hands there that's my litter that's my armor and then four weeks later it looked like that so we've got a lot of legumes coming up through that Kentucky 31 fescue and we've got a really nice armor on the soil there's no bare soil there but it's just amazing what's coming up if you pull that back you still got that nice armor of layer of compost there but the earthworms I've turned a lot of that into soil there it is that's black gold folks that's better than gold you can't eat gold look at that that's an earthworm turd that's a big one he must have worked on that all night okay Ian's a big guy Ian's from Africa he took that picture he laid down on his belly Ian go about 320 he's laying on his belly I'm like what are you doing said I got to get a picture of this turd and that was a big one but folks seriously on earthworm castings Jay Jay's got a great experiment going out of anokhin farms he was he brought me out there and I was in heaven because he had worms man he's got worms out there like you wouldn't believe I don't have any tub does how many tubs of worms you got out there Jay 30 and he's collecting worm juice yeah it's pretty neat experiment he's doing sir-sir grazing winter stock Paul I think winter stock Paul especially in the Midwest we're at it's it's a huge cost savings I mean you can graze in the wintertime when everybody else is feeding hey it's because they don't have any grass I get I get this all the time people will come by and they'll see me out there moving a wire and they've got a hay bale in the back of their truck and like well Greg may work on your place video - never work over here and I'm like you know it's that darn fee that's what's keeping them from doing it and he said well I don't want to take the time to move that wire like what time you start your tractor up and against the warmed-up I've already moved those animals I'm back to the house it doesn't take any time to move animals once they get broke there's another close-up picture winter stockpile grazing the beautiful thing about fescue in the Midwest is it does stay green partially green all winter long now a lot of people are cursing Kentucky 31 infected fescue that's what that is that folks if you learn to keep diversity in fescue other plants besides that and don't graze it down to the dirt then finding out now that Kentucky 31 the toxin levels the highest in that first inch and a half to two inches above ground so don't graze it that short if you grace it down to the ground fescues gonna you're gonna have some impact on your animals so it's again it comes back to management I figured you North Dakotans would love that picture I'm grazing through snow alright don't make you make fun of my snow but I've got a little snow there and I walked out of the hotel room this morning I couldn't believe it it made me really appreciate Missouri weather the wind was blowing this morning man it was you're tough people okay I guess the untuck ones have already been weeded out but you're all very tough but the reason I was showing that picture is that's advantage of keeping a longer stockpile in the wintertime where you we have some Sun and we'll get some warm periods through the winter if you have forage sticking up through the snow it will melt the snow away from that area if you can get temperatures above 30 32 degrees and that's that we found out once that forage is grazed off and it's shorter then you get a snow over it won't melt off anymore that forage actually heats up the snow around those clumps this is broken soil and that is a former crop field that was nuked in Nuuk to nuked with herbicides pesticides fungicides and it was soybeans soybeans soybeans soybeans soybean every single here I don't think I ever saw the farmer plant anything but soybeans and I remember when I least step for him I went into that field that fall and it was is it was ugly it was ugly there wasn't any residue there was washes all through it because there wasn't anything to stop the rain the rain was not soaking in you could take a spade and go down that deep and it was dry under the soil so it was capping over no earthworms and the ground was covered with cockle burrs cocklebur seeds so the guy had a bunch of birds they've gotten resistance to whatever he was spraying him with and so that was what I grew the first year and I'm like okay I've got this mob grazing a thing going on I'll just graze those cockle burrs off I did those cattle ate every single burr in that field and I like me and I've whipped these burrs guess what happened more they came back worse you know what I did I pushed those cattle so hard that they ate the the palatable plants the resort to grass and clover some fescue Timothy down underneath that they ate that first and they ate it down to the ground then they ate the cockle burrs and then I started noticing cows limping about two weeks later I pushed him so hard that I compromised animal performance it was Jimmy talk about animal performance today the way I whip that field folks is I acted like I didn't own it and I have to thank in for that because he was there in the Fargo's Greg when you can get tired of grazing cockle burrs this is the second year I'm like well I was kind of tired of it the first year and he said then they quit grazing it like you're grazing it he said what's the most vulnerable time of a weed when is that it's when it comes up in the spring he's a little bitty guy well cockle birds come up about in Missouri about May 30th well I was going in the first of May and grazing that field off the orchard grass and the clovers and things and when I grazed it off well now I gave sunlight to all these little seedlings and they all came up and expressed themselves and they got eight feet tall and stocks on them about that big around of course I didn't know in the brush attractor and so I was the laughingstock of the neighborhood so the next year I didn't graze that field in the spring I went around it and I flipped it flipped it in one year those little birds came up in June but I had foraged that tall over the baby burs and they never could express themselves and we've never had a problem with that field since and so I say this as long as you've got weeds and you focus on those weeds you're gonna have weeds you gotta focus on what you want and just graze the tips of the plants that you want don't graze those good plants down too short let them put out their wings and put pressure on those other plans that's how you have whip weeds that's my soil life builder that is that Balin or that I built from scratch and we pull it behind you can put me hundred pickup-truck we use our ATV mostly like that and all the bales are pre placed and so we'll have our bales out across our farms in the winter time different paddocks we don't put them all in one spot and I do not use bell rings I will I will not use bell rings if I live it up here I would be doing Bale grazing I can't do Bale grazing in Missouri I tried it we're two puggy we get too many thaws and the ground gets just soupy if you've got a bunch of cows around a Bale they just destroy the sod absolutely destroy it but my unrolling it I've got some pictures that we've done it's pretty neat what happens and we get some snow gets deep enough that I can't even unroll we'll make a win row I've got a little V pile and I pull behind the truck and then we unroll the hey bring the livestock in it looks like that we were done and so we're spreading a lot of carbon across our farm and the manure and the urine and then we get a snowstorm that's our driveway down to her house that was just about three weeks ago and it got deep enough if we couldn't unroll hay again so what I did is I just took the blade on my tractor because I'm so adamant about getting those bales back out on the land folks we don't bail any hay we don't own any baling equipment we buy our hair and we unrolled in between every one of those rows and I'm telling you what that's gonna grow some grass that's gonna grow some grass and by moving across our landscape all winter long the cattle are on clean ground all the time we don't worm we've never wormed I've never put any warmer on any of our animals if you don't make animals stay on dirty ground where they're exposed to the manure or if you don't make them graze the plants down too short you're not going to have a heavy worm load there's a picture of it some of the cows out cleaning up the hay from a distance the neighbors saw that and they just thought we were nuts like what's he doing out there and all those wind rows well next year you'll be able to see right where that snow is packed and where it wasn't the grass would be taller in those wind rows for sure so we get done at a farm we got snow on we can't haul those cattle we've got 16 farms and they're all spread out in five miles but they're all in a five-mile circle and so well this particular drive here I think we were walking about 300 head and we do it at ten o'clock in the morning because I am a full-time Rancher now everybody goes to work we put them on the highway occasionally I don't like using the highway very much but this was a necessity we were in a snowstorm there was another storm coming right behind this one and we walked those cows and cat everything down the road and there they are going to the new farm so we've got some stockpile on this farm and we're gonna start we had to feed hay there a little wall and we do the same thing with our sheep now in the Sheep we don't feed them anything sheep don't get any hay a sheep has a foot that can dig like a deer okay and so what I did is I went there's about twenty four inches of snow out there I just took my tractor and I made wind rows all over that field like that and those sheep went down and got that forage I mean they are so aggressive and we've we've got a lot of timber on our farms those sheep will go down in the woods and they'll eat Oakley's and do just fine it's just amazing how tough sheep are people just starting out you can run a whole bunch more sheep on the same amount of ground can cattle and the return I'll give you a real quick primer on sheep you can take a um that's seven months old she's born in May bring it around to December first and you can put a ram into her not all of them will breed that first year but some of them will about 60% those ye lambs will give you a baby when they turn a year old you can't do that with cattle so you have a lot quicker turnaround just starting up you're trying to generate some profits to keep you on the land sheep I would definitely look at we get ice this followed the snowstorm so we just didn't we just barely got the snow part of it melt in this hit us we worth out power for three days the roads are impassable you couldn't get to the cow and the cattle were three miles from her house you couldn't get to it on a vehicle so we thank goodness we have the ATVs and the hay was there we were able to get all this ATV and unroll hay to 300 head of cattle there they are now we're stripping again we're back grazing today we're grazing at home but when you have stuff like this the ice folks and cattle trying bite that off it just falls on the ground they can't get their mouth around they can't get the tongue around it but you get one or two days of Sun on that and it's good so you know people say you don't don't feed anything the winner I think Hayes a good insurance policy you need to have some especially up here but if you don't have any and you need it you're in trouble we call these our solar-powered soil builders again they're on stockpile that's winter stockpile and I just love it when my cows can feed themselves and I don't have to so here we are in an open savanna this had been an area where we went in and cut some trees out the trees are so thick that there wasn't nothing growing in there but leaves just dry leaves coming off the trees once we took and opened up that canopy and we would feed hay in in the wintertime we unrolled hay in those trees this is what came up now folks we don't put any seed down and in he's always nailing me about seed he's like Greg there's never been a seeding done as efficiently Mother Nature has in your seed bank I mean from the time the earth was created or has been seed being dropped the problem is we don't grace correctly to let it express itself so we need to figure that one out that's a that's a pretty cool picture there this is the pigs in the timber so the pigs went through there we raised pasture or woods pigs we don't put them in the pasture they're always in timber so we're moving them we don't let them nuke our woods the pigs are moved about every two to three days we give him large areas but we have found out about pigs in woods don't let them get bored it's a big gets bored he's gonna root and you build a barrier Volkswagen in it I mean a big hog they can really tear up your land but if they flip the logs we feed our pigs once a day in the morning and the rest today they have to work for a living we don't have welfare hogs and we're not gonna put a feeder out there they just lay around their feet are neat and I think that's far I'm eat so good I mean this pastured pork that we're selling is unbelievable it has flavor it has taste and I tell people you know I do a quite a few videos I've got a YouTube channel and I've got one video on there of our pigs eating hickory nuts folks that feeder that we fed the grain in was set him full they have left that when I put the hickory nuts in there they left their pig feed and came to the nuts so pigs know what's best and so do cattle so this would have been an area that the pigs went in then we did put down a cover crop in there that's a nine way species and it just exploded up and then we brought the cattle in behind that so there's an area that we weren't getting any production out up far as forage it was just too shaded the pigs kind of busted it up and we seeded it this is the farm that we used to lease we end up buying this one as well that was somebody I don't know I never did understand that paddock but we did hit it fairly hard that winter and that's what came up in the spring but why didn't it come up in the other patty because that that is the paddock division right there but it's just amazing somewhere in the history there was a somebody put a lot of clover there and we never saw any clover until we started grazing it correctly by the way folks that's too much clover you can kill cattle grazing that so make sure if you're gonna grade something looks like that if the clover is a little bit over mature maybe or later in the morning when all the dews off of it you don't want to graze or wet clover with a bunch of cattle you that much you can get in trouble we talked a little bit about bruising the soil we want the animals to move across our landscape and they had that cloven hoof and see there's billions and billions of microbes living on the root hairs of those plants and when the animals walk across the landscape and step on that it wakes them up and they all start sourcing food maybe the Predators start going after other little guys and eating them there was a great video and I think it's still available online it was by dr. Pat Richardson have y'all heard of dr. Pat Richardson she's a professor I believe is that Texas well the Longhorns I believe she went there might have been in Texas Tech I don't remember but she put a video out she went out into a very diverse pasture that was being mob graze a good rotation a lot of soil life and she dug up a shovel full of that then she put it in a bucket and screened it out with what some kind of filter and she blew it up on a 60 X micro micron microscope it looked like Jurassic Park there was a Tyrannosaurus chasing a worm that long this worm it looked like 60 legs on each side he's chasing him he's got this big old spike on the end of his nose and he can't he jumps on it he drives his spike into it and you can see the flood of that worm coming into his body and then his eyes light up he's got these great big yellow antennas on his head when I saw her video that's when I stopped driving on my pastures cuz Pat said Greg if you set down to a nice t-bone steak you got a baked potato there may be some dressing and you getting ready to eat and somebody takes a tractor and just bus across your table top of the dead scorn it you can be a happy chap nope so quit driving on your microbes don't be doing that Pat would get mad if she saw you step on a spider it was all about solo life it's all about soil life do cattle destroy riparian areas yes if they're left there they will do that if they're not they do that this is a farm we least we've had us since 2001 two hundred and fifty acres and it was continuously grazed and it was a wreck that was solid dirt all the way down to that little Creek and at that time there was no water in that Creek because when it rained it just flushed that whole farm down to the neighbor now we've got catchment we're catching the rainwater that Creek is flowing now you don't want to step off in it it's deep it's waist-deep there's frogs in there there's fish living in there there's Coons there's all kinds of stuff along that riparian zone now but we grazed it different when we put animals on that for a short period short duration then we moved them we didn't leave them there so I think cattle can really heal riparian zones if it's done correctly but look at the diversity in that picture I mean there's everything in there even my hated cocklebur there's a few of them in there you know it's just it's it's another plant okay but there's all kinds of stuff in it and my neighbor he's still grazing the other way I'm catching his soil it comes down my Creek his soil covers up my grass it lays it over to my grass grows back up through his soil and plants it that's how my my Creek banks are up in England they're up and eating with his soil he doesn't want it so I'll take it he just doesn't like his soil that's not water source if you're trying to raise livestock I don't carry cattle pigs whatever even chickens folks can't you know livestock are 70 75 percent water and you're making them drink that that's not good there's water good clean water I have a rule of thumb that in a pinch if I wouldn't drink and I'm not gonna force my animals to drink it and there was actually been some studies done if you provide your animals really high-quality water just in one growing season that calf away 50 pounds more the calf that was on that cow you'll get another 50 pounds of game just by giving them good water the lower the class of animal in other words a baby goat they are so picky they've gotten to have really high quality water or they're not gonna do well a cow you can get died a little bit better with some brackish water but be careful this is a plant that we're starting to see come up on a lot of our farms that's eastern gamagrass eastern gamagrass covered missouri back in the day of the buffalo settlers came in they started clearing land and plowing it and that disappeared folks we're starting to see this come up on that 250 acres just clumps of it all over the place where's it coming from I know the guy that owned that farm before I did and he didn't have gammon grass he didn't feed it in gamagrass hey where's it coming from I tend to think that's something that I've been laying that seed bank on a long time Hemi all familiar of the seed head of gamma grass it's got a seed armor on it that's equivalent to steel it's got a real hard shell on it and so it can last a long time in the soil but when I started giving this forages in my pastures along the recovery period in other words I beat it up a little bit with the hose then I get off of it and give into these full recovery periods in the summertime that's when I started to see this and this the big blue I didn't plant that one either so we're starting to see that native warm-season grasses reappear on our farms I'm excited that's the grass that they talk about in Kansas the you know the the settlers to be riding on a horse you've all probably read this they'd be sitting in their stirrups or in their saddle and the grass is taller than their head that's what they were talking about big bluestem cuz it'll get eight to nine feet tall now you don't want to graze it you don't want to let it get that tall in a grazing system that's that's a little bit I mean that's not too bad they'll still eat that pretty good the beautiful thing about big bluestem is it doesn't have any toxins in it it's very palatable it's really good for wildlife and it's got a deep taproot bow on it this one here Dan Shepard used to carry the gamagrass said he dug down with a trackhoe in his gamagrass field and it was 18 feet he went down 18 feet and found the end of that route now if you get in a drought here and you got plants that's got roots even eight feet long 18 feet are you kidding me that's like a tree so I'm kind of excited about these warm season grasses coming back we did some experiments with cover crops where we no tilled cover crop right into our fescue and that was done the end of July which is probably a little bit late but it rained every day through the month through the days of July it was so wet this is three years ago and that was at two weeks this is what it looked like eight weeks later people said you can't drill that into Kentucky 31 you've got to spray it you know but you got to kill your Kentucky 31 first I'm like well I don't know I didn't spray that and you look how tall the fescue I'm not a very good row crop or look at that look at the skips I'm a terrible terrible in real but that's how tall the feschi was and it still came up and competed that was eight weeks of no rain that made a lot of good grazing so if you do some of this cover crops and you can preserve some of your pasture maybe for some fall grazing I'd be looking at doing some of that the dung beetle we've got a lot of dung beetles now you know back when I custom grazed we custom grace for seven years and I tell people you do what you got to do to make a living and it was really good money especially for something that didn't have any and it got me out of debt it paid off we were actually able to build a savings account and bought her on her debt free with other people's money by grazing their cattle on other people's land that's what noblest ranching book was written about but back to what I had to do had to sleep with the devil but I mean by that I had to poor Ivan Mechelen cattle if I didn't know Ivan mekt those cows and they came into our farm I didn't get cattle and the easiest time to do it was when they're coming out of the chute so we live and make all the cattle and I know our paths we're not breaking down they weren't breaking down but I did it anyway today you can't find them a nerd pad on our forums folks this is a really instrumental tool we need that guy and that's why right there that's a big hole it's about the diameter of a nickle and right now you know the dung beetles come into your manure pass and break those down they're putting holes down that date well if you've got ten thousand holes around your farm or let's say three or four holes underneath every Manor Pat what happens when you get a rain darn right you're soaking up water it's not running onto your neighbor's also that dung beetles rolling up a ball he's putting it down in the bottom of that hole just like this that's him that's pretty nasty looking in it I mean that's just gross I used to look at these little guys folks every morning when I go do chores I milked a cow for 12 years at home I made the mistake asking my dad if I could milk the cow when I was second grade and I got a couple streams going in that buck he said son it's yours he walked away but I remember going out to milk the cow in the morning and those things were everywhere this is before Ivan mech was ever developed they were everywhere and we didn't have him in her we didn't have hardly any Flies folks the Flies lay their larvae in that manner pat and it's lies hatch out and they attack your cattle there's a video it's kind of cool this guy here that's doing all the ride and that's the male he's the man there's the female on the back pushing she does all the work that male rides it and his counterweight keeps that thing rolling and they'll roll it close to a hole and it goes down in the hole she'll dig a hole and place that in the bottom and the baby dung beetle hatches that's what he eats and that cycle started over again folks the manure Pat is the most valuable asset on your farm if you're putting wormer down the back of your cattle or you got back rubs out there or whatever any kind of petroleum product you pour it on the back of those cows you're slowing up that break down those manure pads it's costing you money we can't climb inside of a cow and get the rumen to tell how good a job we're doing grazing but we certainly can look at the manure pets folks and I look at that manure pet I get pretty excited you know why because I can tell by looking at that that my cow is gonna get bred she's gonna breed back the calf is not going to get scours the calf is putting on weight probably not going to see any fescue foot no pneumonia because that rumen is working perfectly you'd like to see that little pond in the middle and I'd like to see the stacking on the edges and I don't want it very tall maybe two inches max if you've got them stacking up that tall your cows are not performing very well you're feeding them too much cellulose the plants are over mature and they're gutting is having a hard time breaking that down if the manure is real runny there's several things that could be going on with that one is you may be getting too much protein in them you making them graze the plants down too short move that up where they're just grazing the top part so you plant your stack that thing will start stacking up going in or if it's real runny she stays running all the time she's probably got parasites cellar don't learn me a whole herd cuz you got one wormy one the rest of them are building up some resistance and you go in their room y'all heard you've kicked the crutch out now you got a crutch underneath all of them you don't want to do that this is how we put up our paddocks we use an ATV we've actually got a better system that's still ATV but it's designed a little differently healthy soil is equal healthy animals there's a lot of people that are starting to do and get any more interested in doing grass-finished beef folks even the big boys want a piece of it you've got Cargill you've got Tyson they all want some of this grass-fed market and that's because it is the highest profit margin there is right now and beef is the grass-fed because it's hard to do it takes longer and what we're finding out a lot of people jumped in with twelve fourteen hundred pound cows and they're trying to finish steers out here on their perennial pastures it doesn't work so well you've got too big of an animal just remember this learn to hate leg if you've got a leggy animal that you can read a newspaper underneath huh if you're going to open up a newspaper and shove it or nice this belly and read it without touching the ground you got too much leg on your counts folks that space between the bottom of the bell in the ground sells for nothing it's air learn the light gut people come and they see lands like gosh look at that dang thing it's got a big old belly Greg I'm like yeah it needs a big ol belly to store all the grass we've bred the gut out of our animals folks we got to get the gut okay that's just a pretty good int then it's kind of lopsided it looks like he's got a little bitty head that's if that pictures funny that one looks better on this side for some reason learn to look for this the brisket folks too many people are butchering our animals before they're finished and it's giving grass-fed beef a bad name oh you want lean beef no you don't if it's lean and doesn't have any grass fat on it what you've got is a shoe sole and when you grill it it's like eating one and people say well I tried that grass feet that grass fence that is nasty and as I chew it a piece of rubber well yeah it probably was you got to get some finish on these animals you need to have the wrinkles in the neck you need to have the brisket filled out I think I've got another picture here of a better picture that was not finished you know how I can tell right there you look on the tail head of the animals that tail head should be fat you should have a minimum of three wrinkles on the tail head otherwise that animal should not be processed it's not ready now their stomachs getting close see the wrinkles there's one two three this was not ready he doesn't have any fat on his tail head there's one thing about that picture if you don't if you just getting into livestock and you're going to pick out some seed stock try and find animals that look like that I don't care if they're black yellow purple whatever but make sure they're slick they need to shed off their winter hair coats the sooner they can get rid of that winter hair coat they're performing better if they don't shed their hair coat that animals not going to make you much money it may not even breathe that I think we need to use unfair advantages I mean you can take a you like that you know that's a 168 hour hair CPU and she can give you three I first he just gave me two cuz you know she'd she'll do better three will pull her down a little bit but they can race three but when you can take one and get to that multiplication thing it's hard to do that with cattle we ran the Rams we always take the Rams out and put them in with the pigs this is when we had Tamworth people said you couldn't land with the pigs or we did and people were concerned at that hog would eat that baby lamb we found out that a hog couldn't catch a baby lamb and also if that a hog steps one more foot closer to that lamb guess what's gonna happen yep not yous gonna bust that hogs but it's gonna let out a big squeal so then we are going to work in the morning they got the animals on the road and that is my neighbors soybean field the fence is not hot but once you get your animals trained folks you don't have to make that fence hog they're not I've never had an animal go through that because they get used to moving they know you're taking them to a better place something that's going to be fresh and clean and they're just happy to go I mean but one of the things I've learned on long cattle moves and I'll share this with you is get out of sight what I mean by that is once you get them on the road you get that full you get out of there because if they can see you they're gonna run and when they run they're gonna leave junior at the back of the cattle drive you got baby calves a whole bunch of them getting piled up back there because the calves have taken off they're just anxious to go and they're trying to follow you but if you get out of sight they'll walk and if you leave a bunch of baby calves at the very back of that category what have you got a rack that's right they'll go back to where they saw mommy us and that's back to the last farm and you're not gonna stop them they're gonna run through you but we've learned the correct way to do that carbon we got to feed the soil and good grazing management trampling the carbon we like to use the idea that every grass blade trampled gives you two back we've been ridiculed for that comment I don't care it's still the focus I'm trying to give something back folks I've got a landowner he just passed away two years ago and he was 93 years old and when I went on to his farm buses so that old God would be out there waiting for me when I got off work at night that's what I still worked in town and Marshall would go what are you gonna do tonight I said I'm gonna move cows and I'm gonna put in the paddock and that old guy would walk along behind me stepping in my post putting the wire on cuz he saw it working 93 years old when he passed he was probably 85 at that time but but it always tickled me was Marshall would look at me when I got ready to leave his farm he had 160 acres and I'd be there for about probably eight days eight or nine days and he always great why you leaving he said I've got a lot of grass left here I'm like Marshall that's why I'm leaving because when I come back there'll be more that it was hard for him not to take that grass because he thought I was wasting it and that's hard for it's hard that's a hard step to get over folks I'm gonna warn you it's tough I had a guy get scared because he grew a bunch of grass he got scared and I told him how to do it he was feeding hay he ran out of grass every every summer he had run out of grass he's overstocked and I said go go over here across the road and his brother had 40 acres he wouldn't do anything with that's it put a poly wire around put your cows over there this spring don't put him on your farm until your grasses have a chance to get going he did that well then when the grasses got going he brought us cows back in he start grazing I lost track of him he called me up in July he goes Greg he said I had a problem I'm like what he goes I just had too much grass he said I went got my mower and I bailed it all he bailed the whole farm he mowed it all off and bailed it and I'm like sir I said you met a really really really bad mistake there all I said I've got on the grass he said my god is just going to waste bailed it so he called me back in September this isn't this is in July in September he called me back and he's real quiet he goes Greg it hasn't rained he said I'm out of grass what should I do I said feed the hay he had it he had it he buggered it up he had it he had that forage he had his whole farm restored all he had to do was keep grazing but he got scared don't do that you will get scared you grow a lot of grass is scary Carbon rich soil dig your soil up learn to keep a spade on the side of your ATV or in your pickup truck or on your bicycle whatever mode you have keep something with you digging your soil look at it it should be a crumbly you know when you when you look at that soil there's a little particulate sand there I mean we get a rain we don't get much runoff anymore it's got to be a heavy rain I'll show you a picture I think I've got one here we had like eight inches it was a natives 4 inches but it came quick within like three hours just hammered us and I'll show you what happened but look at that I mean that's good healthy soil and the plants good healthy plants we're trying to keep it simple we would like to run one herd as much of the year as possible I do consulting all over the United States and I go into people's farm the first thing I see is multiple hurts I'm like oh my god I mean there'll be a herd over there that'd be one over there that'd be one over there that'd be one over there I'm like what are you doing well that's my black herd and we can't run the red herd with the biker and this group of effers has got to be bred by that bull so they've got those segregated over there and so they're moving around their farm seven herds at one time folks that's a death sentence to your grass you're just not gonna have enough time for those plans to recover so the first thing you do in a drought if you get in in a drought the strongest tool you have in your grazers toolbox well first is to cut to cut the bottom 15% off your herd you should have those numbers written down which cows need to go to town and don't name your cows I'm serious it'll kill you I was on a farm Virginia this this this cow needed to go to town she was a flytrap Oliver ribs are Sean said what are you doing with that one well that's Molly I'm like Molly yeah that's Molly that's my daughter's cow Mike Molly's needs to go to town because she had flies all over her and those flies were in they were attacking the good cattle they get rid of that bottom 15% just sell them get rid of them but the next tool you should use this combine your herds when you have three herd or let's say to her G combine them into one you automatically doubled your recovery period the people say but great you got them all and that herd now they're gonna graze more yeah but you can tighten them down and yes they at me over graze that area you put them on but you're trying to build time you're trying to build time out in front of your cows so it in that time view you may catch a rain and if you do you're gonna grow grass if you're grazing around like this seven herds it doesn't matter if you get any rain you're not gonna grow anything you're just not gonna grow anything the biggest profit Robert is hey we do live in an area we can do winter stock Paul grazing man I was watching the Bale grazing yesterday that just makes sense to me I mean you're getting all those nutrients out on your land it cuts down on your starting the tractor up your labor and those animals have shelters out there with that hey the hate laying around them it just looks like a really good deal to me that's what I'd be doing if I lived up here and they're healthier our animals we don't have any buildings now we don't get minus 40 or this guy was talking to meteorologist the meteorologist y'all set some records this year we don't get that in Missouri but we can get cold for a while I don't park cattle up on top of a ridge you know if it's gonna be 20 below wind chill that night all the time find a draw maybe some brush where they can break the when I'm not gonna park them up on top of the hill and I think that's one of the things it has made our success as we remain flexible we always meet in the morning and we'll draw out a plan I do have a full-time farm manager now and we keep an internship one and we'll sit down and discuss the day and we always draw up a plan but it's always it may be changed if they may be changed and we hit the herd because I'm gonna hit the herd maybe we're getting rain or it's getting colder or whatever you've got to be flexible don't go by a calendar if you're moving your herd around your farm on a calendar it's gonna bite you sooner or later learn to look at the forage what does it look like when you took him out what's it look like when you put them in and learn to monitor animal performance I hope I have some pictures in here I think I do good how you can do that questions to ask where's the money going if I don't do this folks I used to throw money at stuff just to try and fix it usually after I spent that money I still had that problem I used to put out a lot of seed because I was excited about all this new seeds gonna just flip the pants off of what I got out here and I'm gonna get rich it's gonna be so much more productive my cattle get fat we're gonna have more cast whatever healthier tastier grass-fed beef I think it's a big red flag when you got to change the forage on your farm because folks in it will come back I've seen it I've seen it all over the United States guy in Georgia put in 500 acres in max-q he sprayed he's sprayed it with Roundup is Kentucky 31 and the next spring what came back he got a stand all right but the next spring the armyworms came in and just decimated the whole 500 acres ate it into the dirt monocultures don't have single species in your plant in your pastures the more species the better so before you spend money ask who's gonna make the money who's making it it may not be you this is another video I wish we could play it but you can see the green that picture was taken weeks ago but look how green that fescue stays oh and this is a fescue everybody's trying to kill okay that stuff stays green all winter long and the cattle do quite well on it budgets I don't spend money on anything with it eats grass when I first started out folks I didn't have any money so I couldn't spend any and I think if you have a lot of money that might be a curse I've seen it I've seen it I've seen people with a lot of money get in the cattle business and they really struggle because I think they can spin their way success it doesn't work that way the way you have success in grazing is to be monitoring what's happening on the land what is the soil what are the plants what are the animals telling you and money can't do that farm sanity items how many tractors have calves that's a good one metal destroys wealth it's got to eat grass and we just feel like we're investing in our future we changed our paradigms years ago we're 80 percent least 20 percent owned and we're starting to add more of these lease farms back to us we're actually behind them now because the animals can do that we sold all of our equipment we do have one tractor and we use that in the wintertime to plow snow but you know we just would focus in on building soil with ruminants and I think if more people would do that they would get along a lot better and I'd say you know what's cheaper than free so we can use solar energy to grow the plant and grow a fat animal like that look how fat he is that animal has a hard time walking you know when you get one finish you said have a waddle in his ass when he walks okay get behind and they water when they walk that animals ready to eat and he's going to be a good eating experience and for y'all just starting out you only butchering a few and I talked to a young guy last night he was concerned about switching over to grass-fed he said I just don't know if it's gonna be any good or not well when it's butchered do you go to the arbiter and the butcher and we always go in about the seventh day after it's hung and we cut a ribeye out of it just take a ribeye out bring it home and grill it make sure it's medium-rare don't overcook it and if your teeth glide through that ribeye first bite they glide through it and you'll have to chew it for five minutes to swallow it that's a good eating experience he's gonna be good if it's tough grind it I think grass-fed hamburger we can't keep it inert we just can't keep it I mean it just goes as fast as we butcher so grass-fed hamburger might be something you want to focus on until you get a hold of your genetics maybe your Ford just get better and then you can start selling steak another tool that you can use I'll show you real quick take your steak lay it on the table top use your finger and set it on top of the steak and just let the way that you in close your eyes and let the weight of your hand go down through that steak if it feels like a tar Polian there's some resistance there that's probably gonna be a tough eater but if your finger glides through that meat and you can feel the counter top boy that's gonna be a good one you can go ahead and Grill it but it's gonna be good so that's what we do we'd like to think ourselves as regenerative minimal inputs we grows things without cultivation don't open up the soil Pat Richardson did a study in Texas or she took a very diverse passion erxi measured the soil life in it beforehand this she had a farmer go through it with a disc and the disc was not setting aggressively it was just straight so all it did was cut holes in it I think it went down three inches one pass she went out there and she took she resampled that pasture it killed 80% of the soil life one pass yeah so we need to keep the soil covered up don't be cultivating it you should see improvement each year if you don't see things getting better to eat you need to step back and look at what you're doing okay because we are in the solar energy collection business that's what we do and so one of the things that we do in the springtime we like to give them a head start I don't want to go out there we were taught early on some of the greatness schools and you had grass as tall as your fingers you needed to be out there on it okay you needed to have those cows out there immediately otherwise the grass would get away from you well we found out and we got out we got the animals out there early we were lopping off the baby's head so we took immature spring plants they have low energy high protein and our enema performance just sucked it was terrible the tails on them would be runny runnin manure going down them here's her rat today look at that so that's early spring we always keep some winter stockpile so that was grass that was growing the previous year I'm sorry the previous fall that dead stuff see the brown in there you see a brown haze through there okay this paddock was never grazed in the winter time so in the spring when the spring grass came up it's almost at boot stage or what is boot stage boot stage is right when the seed head is starting to emerge we nailed it we came in there and took the top third of that and the cows when they grazed it they got a little bit of that dry matter with every bite full of grass it perfectly balanced the rumen perfectly it used to be dangerous to stand behind one of our cows in the springtime because I mean there would be squirts going five feet out just too much protein there wasn't anything there to slow up that spring grass we feel like grass is probably the moon one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal we can build healthy soil it's a free solar panel it controls erosion and we have an animal that we can sell it into that it's folks we need to keep the water on our land you realize now they just came up with a bill I believe this new jersey they're gonna start taxing you for your water the water that runs off your land they're gonna tax you for it because that water is going into the sewer system they don't like that so if you have a lot of concrete on your land the water leaves are gonna tax you for rainwater it's another tax that they dreamed up that it may come I hope we need to keep the water on our land you know that's what this cover crop and soil health things we're talking about doing I like to invest money into animal eats grass gives you a baby every year while building soil how much forage do you leave folks when you move those cattle out of that paddock there should be enough grass in there for one more day without over glazing the remaining plants and you got to develop a grazers eyes so if you go out there and you give them a strip the size of this room and they've taken over half of it you probably need to give them a bigger area the next morning don't get blindsided and keep doing it the same way every day so we're just taking the top third of the plant that's what we're doing now and what we found out folks and we've switched our grazing to more up taller in the plant or in on the performance just skyrocketed we haven't had pink on now for three years heck we used to get 15 20 cases of it every summer we'd have a calf that start watering and if we were lucky it just it would get over it in about three weeks you can have a spot in the eye they're really bad ones they've been turned white they'd lose the eye we don't get that anymore why we still have the same cattle same farm or grazing differently we're grazing for energy animals are getting fatter quicker the frame size most of our cattle we start out with the big ones we were at 1,400 pounds for a cow 13 14 now our cows are somewhere between nine hundred to a thousand pounds and we found out that these cows can winter they can winter and keep their condition on quite well and they don't have that newspaper underneath them they've got short fine bones learn to look at the bones on your cattle if you've got great big bones a lot of thick bone I'm talking big bones on your calf that's a high-maintenance animal that animal is gonna need a lot of hate she's gonna require a lot of nutrients to just to keep her maintenance going okay you can't eat bone this animals got very fine bone structure how often do you move them we talked a little bit about that already in grazing rules fast growth you go fast moves slow growth slow them up observe your livestock grazing behavior and you'd move those animals there shouldn't be a death triangle I hope the goodness I've got a picture of it up here I'll show y'all what that looks like watch your livestock drink if I start going to your water source and they're licking at your water and they're walking around that tank licking at it they're not putting your head down taking deep gulps but those animals are telling you you've got bacteria in your water they're trying to find a place in that tank that doesn't stink there's my neighbor on the right that's us on the left and she's got 100 there's I don't know probably 20 head of livestock on that we've got 300 on the left side but they're only there for about eight days there's 45 acres in that farm we just move him around and she's convinced that we get more rain than she does she is I can't convince her so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna set a rain gauge right there so we can we can compare the rain I like that picture a lot of armor on the ground folks this next one is my picture I'm not proud of it then I'm gonna show you anyway look at that that was my first year of mob grazing and Ian was very diplomatic that fall he came he saw what I was doing he's like Greg you might just try give him just a touch more litter on the ground he didn't tell me I was stupid or ignorant he just said you might give him a touch more litter so he's pretty diplomatic now he just tells me I'm stupid we've gotten to be really good friends but folks look at that burn this into your mind you don't want cows to breach under the wire if they're reaching under that wire taking a risk of shocking their necks they've gotten that darn hungry or they might even be down on their knees reaching under there you didn't give him a big enough area you should have moved them sooner or given the larger area so burn that in do you see any of this absolutely not the cows ate it all that's not a very good picture of limiting them but right there's that hip bone and right in front of hip bone as a depression there I've got better pictures I hope but there's a depression right in front hip bone on the left side of the animal it's not on the right it's on the left side if that depression is sunken in you've limited you're a cow herd and if you continue to do that they're not going to breed or not very many of them will so if you have a low breed back you need to look in the mirror it's probably your fault you didn't feed the animals correctly so I changed my mindset a little bit our methods 2006 we were doing we were doing management intensive grazing on just a two day rotation two days to day to day to day every two days we moved him and in 2006 that herd Ian speak and we started doing more of the high-density mob grazing and this is some of the results we've seen we're starting to see it a grass volume pickup higher quality more diversity and lastly it allowed me to quit my job in town that was my goal and at age 50 I was able to walk away from my town job and it's been I haven't looked back since but if I hadn't switched the way I graze I'd still be working in town because folks we were able to double our numbers now it took me several years to do that you can't go home from this conference and double your numbers it's not gonna happen but when you start doing some of this you will start to grow more forage and gradually bump up your stocking rate don't go out and buy twice as many cows it'll be a wreck these are the results we're seeing we don't put down line the fertilizer or no seeding we went from four acres to two acres per animal unit you know won't work for a thousand years basically that's all we're doing we're duplicating nature one species supports eight diversity is king on our farm we embrace that we feel like bare soil is death to plants and it looks like this if you get a bare spot in Missouri it will crack open it just cracks open folks on your farm looks like that you are done you better neither feed hay or sell your livestock because if you believe them out on land like that and you keep grazing it may take you 2 to 3 years for that farm to recover because you took off everything don't don't get to that spot I snuck across the fence on my neighbor's I knew he wasn't there he might have not been happy but I was after taking pictures and this is another picture that's that for him we got the four inches my neighbor that doesn't like his topsoil look at the color this is my neighborhood this is coming off our property that was that four inch rain look at the color of the water a little bit of a difference there examine your soil what's down there okay look down in the soil stop burning I hate I just hate but I see people burnt the Amish community I love the Amish we've got a big community not far from us and they're you know health stewards of the land they're all burning they're even burning there's corn stubble I'm like what are you doing burning your corn stubble but they've got this idea that if they burn it it'll be better to be nice and bright green in the spring it's not gonna end good it's not gonna end well spider webs signs of life this is our steps we've got to get taller plants you can't grow an armor on your soil to graze in it when it's that tall you're never gonna get any plants toilet trample on the ground starting to do some of this this is some of our civil pastor work so we go in and trim out some of these trees this is an area it was just second growth trees there wasn't much good trees in there and we do a TSI which is a timber stand improvement and they come in behind that we get lumber we saw some lumber off of some of the logs we take out then the shiitake we're getting into shiitake and then of course you get firewood but then the savanna so we're getting this beautiful civil passion or at the end and this is the process we bring the cattle in unroll the carbon in the wintertime that's followed up with pigs coming through there that's some of the lumber we've got our own sawmill now we're sawing lumber we're starting to build some things with that this is the shiitakes I just played with this a little bit folks we had all these trees I'm like what am I gonna do I can't cut all up into firewood and so I started growing food on logs and today I started out with 40 logs today we've got 2,000 look at that you can grow food on wood I see trees out here you got to keep him in the shade you got to watch the hydration them you can't let them get too dry but you know we're getting $10 a pound and they'll fruit four times the summer that's $40 per wall okay there's a harvest that night we cut a hundred and eighty pounds that's $1,800 in one harvest that's some of the furniture rebuilding we've went with the live the live edge people really like the live edge folks we used to burn those that's a cedar that's eastern red cedar I used to burn them or make a post out of them now we're selling picnic tables got the trees out there that's one of our soil life workshops who held everything lame Ingham I love this quote is nothing in nature's given it is one that's what's being taught to our students today a lot of them that's engraved in AG building I'm not going to tell you where it's at it's in one of the states but we're teaching kids it's kind of a travesty it is unless you get a bigger chemical or a meaner one or a bigger piece of equipment and beat mother nature in submission she wins no we need to learn to work with her and we can heal our farms we can heal our soils in our communities this is in Africa Diane's place bunch of goats and in Africa they eat calls that harvest energy that's a kudu Ian can sell kudu off of this farm to his neighbors the meat and course to shoot that thing it's $12,000 so you were looking at some of that the recreational we do have our own Airbnb now and folks we got to get people out on the land the people here in Bismarck they don't know what's going out on your farm get a website going get an email list let people know where you're at give them your story three cow marketing hemming y'all heard of that three cow marketing write it down three cow marketing is done by Charlotte Smith she's the best in the United States she will teach you how to do that email list you've got to get your name out there in front of people they will buy your story they're not gonna buy your product they're buying your story who you are what you're doing that's the customer you want Charlotte Smith three cow marketing that's our Gracie school that we hold every year at our farm you tonight will be holding it this year and that's our website there's a lot of stuff on that website FAR's videos and I also have a YouTube channel I'm posting I've been kind of crazy with it lately I'm putting one on about everyday just covering some of the things I think they're instrumental on remaining profitable building good soil getting the right kind of livestock and having a high quality of life folks Ian said back in his in the early 1900's in Africa the banks one of the farmers on their board they wanted the successful farmers on their board because if they were smart enough to run a farm by God they wanted them on their board of directors and today you're not you're a farmer because you weren't smart enough to be anything else that's the that's kind of the thing that's being taught and it's just the opposite we're at the top of the food chain without farmers everybody stars so kudos to all y'all for being great farmers and thank you all questions for Greg there's one right here hold on thank you for this presentation it was great um when you say you keep your herd your herds together do you keep your finishing animal with your cows that have calves and you move them all together or how does that work the question is and we move the cows together do we keep the cows and calves and the heifers and the bowls all together you've got a you've got to watch the Bulls when you have them into the cows if you don't want to be winter academy so you know you get the bowls out of there but we can run the Bulls pretty late one of the things that we we don't do is we don't wean we haven't weaned now for 13 years we let the cow wean the calf and we'll be found out now this is not a hundred percent so don't take this to the bank but our heifers are not breeding early and that's because we'll get an occasional heifer that'll be dirty but not very many of them that's because we don't treat them like peppers numbers they're not taken out at seven months we don't feed a murmuration to make him put on a lot of weight and so they're not cycling and we've also found if you don't break the mother-daughter relationship of the heifer with the cow there was take her out wiener then throw her back in the herd she's more apt to take a bowl that's what we've been doing it's working fairly well but boy here a minute up here folks you've got to control your bowls you don't want to be winter calving I guess you get there are people that aren't wintering cam you got calving barns and that works for you that's fine but it's a lot easier to cab and mother nature and you have a lot higher quality of life yes ma'am talk up I can't hear your finishers oh the finisher the finishers is more when I was I'm sorry I didn't understand the question yeah on the grass finish thing with the cows there's their run right with the mob when you're finishing bees in the mob you don't watch the cows you don't watch the calves you don't watch the bows you watch those bees make sure they're getting all they want to eat you can finish the bees in a mob you don't need a set I was doing that Ian came to act came to my farm is if what he doing something stupid like that for I had a leader follower her not my fault my leaders were there's the finishers and then I had my cow calf heard behind him I'm like well Ian they're getting the best they're getting fat he says so what you're telling me in Africa on the Serengeti and you got a million wildebeest going across the Prairie the little of the young was gone we got to leave and get fat no they get eaten by a lion you can still get in fat and your herd you don't need two herds you don't you absolutely don't but you've got to focus on those make sure they get enough to eat don't be doing high-density before the to know you're putting them in real tight and everything's fighting for something to eat you got to loosen them up a little bit but you can finish him in the mob yes there's yeah you talked a bit about pigs in the woods and keeping them from nuking it what were you using for a cover crop or what shade friendly seeding were you doing I use it for a cover crop on the pigs in the woods behind them it was a nine way species I was getting it from a walnut creek in Ohio Dave Brandt his son and it was just a nine Way species it was all warm season a warm season yeah but the pigs do an awesome job of working that up folks you got to keep a-movin though you got to break your pigs to hot water and you do that in a crowd when they're little guys they're feeder pigs pigs easier to break the hotdogs they don't have any skin I'm sorry any hair and they get shot oh god they hate it yeah on these animals that you've that you're finishing to to go to market how do you control any deleterious effect from say a noxious weed or something like that I know in New Zealand when they're finishing they will go on to a monoculture that they're very they know it's a it's a it's a good pasture and they allow that 30 days so so the question you're asking me is in the finishing period how do we get how do we keep them having off-flavors and our finished product by on a diverse pasture well folks there's some weeds out there there it's not a constant supply of them I think diversity is good it's makes your pastures stronger and I sure don't want a monoculture anywhere on my farm if I've got a pasture that I've got to put them on to finish him and it's a monoculture I'll be out of business cuz there's gonna be a flea beetle something's gonna come in and attack that I don't want that I think in nature I mean deer they get fat they're not on a monoculture of soybeans or corn they're constantly moving and that's the key we move our animals twice a day all year long even today well I mean those cows are moving this morning they'll be moved tonight that's what happened in nature you don't sit you know you didn't have a million a million Buffalo staying in one area they'd run out of feed and they defecate it so bad they all have parasites they moved keep them moving animals like to be moved and it's good for them it's good for you in the land question there's a question there in the back that was a good question uh when you grew the shitake mushrooms on your timber that you harvested did you introduce mushroom spores to get them to grow or how did you the question was how did we inoculate our mushroom logs folks the mushroom logs all come out of the tops the tops of the tree your SAP would stuff that's only suitable for firewood you don't grow mushrooms on the logs not the log portion of the trunk the mushrooms live in the mice in the SAP area the SAP wood okay you drill a hole in it you put your spawn in and you seal it we use fields and forests out of Wisconsin it's the best I've found in the United States they have all the tools it all you ought to have is a little router bit that goes in a drill and it's got a stop on it you drill a hole in it you put your spawn in there and you seal it take your wife's electric skillet okay put your thinking wax in there to meant to melt your wax and then never give her back your skillet that's an that just skillet for your mushroom logs folks once you inoculate them they're good for they're good for five to seven years you never have to reenact you laid him again ever but you got to take seven months seven to nine months for that mycelium to colonize that log in other words it goes all through that SAP and there they set up shop in there okay and then they just explode out of those holes you drilled I will give you a tip if you're gonna do this cover your logs with a breathable dark cloth mushroom logs can't take sunlight well they take a little bit but not full sunlight so you put some kind of cloth over them to kind of shade the Sun but also to protect them from the woodpeckers woodpeckers like to pick that spawn out once that spawn colonizes that log you're good to go after that you don't have to worry about woodpeckers yes integrate your marketing with all these different products how do we integrate our marketing website have you been to our website you need to go to it across the top folks there's like seven or eight columns in under each column you click on it that's what's available it's just it's a really good forum and I just started it in January we had an old website it wasn't worth a darn it was hard to use this one's awesome I would highly recommend looking at that as a model for y'all to see if you don't have a website look at that one you know what to copy it but it's a good format for posting stuff in there it's all local it's all local we don't well the only thing we shippers books you know we get my books but everything else we're selling that Bale and roar now I've got a guy manufacturing that I call the great Judea original Balin Lord there's people driving all the United States to get those baling rollers they didn't know about it I put a video out go to folks you didn't go to youtube and get your own channel and start spreading the rumor what you're doing on your farm once it goes into YouTube format you can grab that video and embed it in your website it's easy it's so easy to do I'm not a high tech person but I got onto it pretty quick I'm serious you got to you got to put your shingle out there you gotta let people know what you're doing because they're not gonna find you you have a great story you're crazy you're raising great animals healthy food healthy so people don't care but they care about you they don't care about your story you're a building or a relationship but it all starts to that email marketing list yes the question is do we supply mineral with our cattle absolutely we're doing free choice minerals I didn't have a picture on the bed it's got 16 holes in it we call it our traveling laboratory the animals get to pick what's missing from that mineral box cattle poop out 80% of the mineral back onto the land over time by moving around your farm like that the animals will remineralize your farm what's missing that's what we've been doing for 11 years our mineral usage is down 65 percent in 11 years ian is down about 85 percent but he's been on it for 20 years animals know what they need they know what they need if they can select they will pick it out we're using free choice enterprises out of Wisconsin one more question yes in the back in your transition away from evil mech how did you deal with lice how did we deal with wise you know transition away from either mech we still get some lice now if we get one that's really bad we'll call her and just get rid of that animal why aren't all the bear skinned some have pretty darn good resistant the ones that really get ate up get rid of them problem solved we all want a recipe we all want something that we can just fix it but you can just fix it sometimes it's calling folks we are their predator I'm gonna leave with this with the quote we are that predator in our herd you'll never have heard any better than what you call for get rid of them quit making excuses for them they don't care those cows don't care if you make a living they really don't it's up to you you've got to get those animals off your farm thank you all you

Channel: Menoken Farm

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Id: tPmYlRMuXo8

Length: 84min 30sec (5070 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019