How To Graze Sheep - Documentary

[Music] I'm Keller McEwen and this is my wife in four murders we farmed passively while he and I were both working full-time jobs I was practicing small animals veterinarian and he was a employee at Exxon chemical I grew up on a farm cow calf operation we did inherited some cattle and some land but we couldn't tell you how many cows beyond or where they were when Keller proposed the idea of moving out into the country and farming it took me hmm 15 seconds to agree yeah yeah there was no question about our first decent property was not to cousins we got a few cattle and we just kind of worked our way up to to the herd where we are now and when I took up a hobby of competitive sheepdog training I got a few sheep and so began the story I have a cow-calf operation she has a sheep I currently have 200 production Katahdin use 80 Katahdin door fur crosses which we haven't used any dewormer on since 2003 the Katahdin is better suited to buy micro environment and then I've been choosing B sheep for years letting only the strong survive Jin natural selection he runs about a hundred and fifty head of mama cows very limited deworming on the cattle - since the two species complement one another and help to deworm one another environmentally so our plan includes the rotational grazing were smaller pastures soil health and growing a good grass good fencing for her sheep and water minimizing inputs and marrying nature cycles and the animal cycles matching those two things up building a good foundation soil health is your foundation and your animal health follows and I would like to run 500 sheep to be my ideal goal but it's still gonna require yet another spin [Music] the sheep guys into building different types of fences there they're a little bit harder to contain just putting a fence across something we'll give you a 65 percent increase in the efficiency of the use of that land my name is Stuart Gordon the area range conservationist I work for USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service breaking you're given land area up into smaller pastures there are many benefits to it the main one is that the desirable plants get a chance to rest in between grazing periods so that they don't get over grazed and become diminished and get replaced by less desirable plants for 50 50 cattle 100 acre pasture not so good for 50 cows dividing a 520 acre pastures better divided into ten ten acre pastures better 25 acres we just notice a big difference in our amount on the quality of grass that we run just we started 30 years ago what most people would call weeds the cheap love is in its good form so I have two bush hog or a whole lot less than sheep are one-fifth the size of a cow everything about them is more a little bit more difficult so you can use them as a barometer if you get sheep right you got cows down so sheep like to eat a mixture of grass and forbs cattle prefer primarily grasses if we use the sheep and the cattle together we get a more diverse plant species they love toiletries very few toiletries in the cheap areas that we great when we graze sheep other plants that people would be spending herbicides on we got sheep it's a good thing there was precious little continuing education support knowledge or none offered about sheep so I would attend the Southern University has a seminar once a year a sheep and it was just a goat seminar at that time and I would attend that that and Stuart Gardner would give lectures about rotational grazing and comparing how deer sheep and goats complement one another for grazing they don't host the same parasites so it breaks the parasite cycle which basically is the animal defecates and passes the eggs into the manure then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat they live in the manure and then they get down on the salt surface and they get in the grass and then the cattle or sheep or goats come along they bite the grass that's two inches or lower close to the salt surface they bite that grass they pick up these little microscopic larvae and there goes the cycle again now the parasite is back in the grazing animal so after I attended that for probably three years in a row and would come home and tell Keller about it scratch our heads and think I don't know yeah maybe maybe you want to give this a try [Music] we've been able to increase our organic matter in the soil here about one percentage point we need line in our soils so if we have a place under a gate that's wallet out he'll put a pile of lime there there's an example right here of a management strategy fraud is the third biggest problem sheet faced predators parasites and then hoof disease will put this lime and instead of pouring a concrete pad we intentionally put out big chunks of lime so that they're gonna get this packed into their folks while they're drinking water they can medicate themselves preventive maintenance and improve the soil all the same time one of the best methods is is what miss Roberta does and what I do is we select highly animals that are resistant to don't get and we try to keep the offspring of those and they seem to pass that along it's important to understand that these bacteria are in the soils different places so if I was to go to Oklahoma and buy some hair sheep and bring them down here to South Louisiana there's a bottom 90% chance that those animals most of them would get hoof rot down here because the bacteria that's here is different from the bacteria that's in Oklahoma you'll see underneath every tree a population of grass is growing that's a better quality grass well that's because the sheep and the cows poop to there and gave put your phosphorus and you potassium there this is this is not an intensive intensive but it's more than just turning animals out on grass like to beat grass if you can manipulate your environment and make a healthier animal then you your life is healthier Organic matters the yardstick by which you measure success by which we measure success when I look at my water runoff you know you know heavy rain it's pretty clear losing a lot of soil the animals going in they're utilizing the top of the forge and and ideally we want to use the top half of the forage and not graze the bottom of it and then remove the animals and when that plant has a substantial amount of growth left above the ground then it can maintain a much deeper and more healthy root system therefore when you do get periods when you don't have adequate rain say two to three weeks for weeks like we get here in Louisiana the plants are able to have deeper more fibrous root systems that reach deeper into the soil and can utilize the the moisture that's at a deeper level you can work for short-term profits or long-term profits so get a short-term profit long-term loss if you're renting that land it's not your problem and it might be believe you to mine the resources and leave nothing behind or I am going into business with my son-in-law and my son my name is Ross Collins and I'm married to Agnes Collins so last year I gave my son-in-law a generation of sheep and he's also started a seed company and Marcus different kinds of seed so our vision is to come down here work with her parents and learn what they know and eventually we want to work our selves into some niche markets so we are starting them off with their own herds in this case you got a couple of people who like they said they didn't grow up in the traditional hardcore farming world it's something that they've always held onto and dreamed about and and at this point over the past five years they've really been able to pursue that so felt with the difference on this floor and versus another one is that really put a lot of money in the fencing and that's for the posterity sake you know it gives us an opportunity to talk together to it usually it starts with business but we get to we get the chat as well so that bring this together in that way which is it's pretty cool farming is a big gamble what's right under one set of circumstances it's not right under another set of circumstances and we can't see in the future no what you can actually do not what you would aspire to do what looks great in the magazine but what you're actually gonna get up and do on Monday morning and for us that's smaller pastors cramming more animals in there for a shorter period of time working with nature and utilizing the natural grasses and forbs that you have and promoting their growth you asked us if we were profitable a big part of that equation is low cost inputs if you are not spending money on an emergency basis putting your finger in the dike but creating a self-sufficient sustainable ecosystem then you're ahead we want to get to a point where we have a no.9 producing animals each cow produces a calf every year each sheep produces we hopefully that's kind of our goal right now passing on to our kids and our kids passing on theirs and it's this is what she's been working for and now she's passing it on so we wanted to continue that as much as they wanted it to be continued it's a huge problem with our farms in this condition country we sometimes aren't able to pass them laying down to the children because of various different things inheritance taxes and that type of thing if we just decided this to life we want to live the lifestyle you know we want to raise our kids here too so that was very much something that led us to into farming and agriculture my own motivations for rooting them in the law and grandbabies I mean I just can't think of anything more fun [Music] you

Channel: Louisiana GLCI

Views: 15,126

Rating: 4.9555554 out of 5

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Id: xR5udiMms3o

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019