Tips for Raising Grassfed Cattle on a Small Farm

I want to start a small family farm let's say at around 20 acres what are the considerations I should be thinking about if I want to do cattle ah the the biggest thing was cattle is like the the upfront investment not only just for the cows but the infrastructure like it's not it's not really super inexpensive to get going you know this pasture was established you know with the seed and the drill rental and the fuel and the whole bit I mean this is about a hundred and fifty bucks an acre just to get the grass established you know we've got a lot of fence up here there's you know eight thousand nine thousand dollars worth of fence back here we've also got buried water which isn't something you have to have but it's a very nice to have particularly if you're gonna have cattle during the winter if you're in a winter region where it can freeze there's a lot of upfront costs that that that come with making cattle super efficient I rotated these cows standing back behind us yesterday there's you know forty thousand pounds of live weight it took me 15 minutes to manage them for 24 hours I mean that was tearing down a line setting up a line moving a water or 15 minutes done come back and check on and make sure everybody's there that's all that's required but to make it that fast you've got to have all this infrastructure that we just discussed and that's that's a high upfront cost and I think that's something that's difficult to wrap your mind around if you've never you know been an entrepreneur before particularly with something like a 100% grass-fed cow you're looking at at 24 to 30 month return on investment from the time it's born till the time it's finished what's the least amount of acres you start a cattle Enterprise on um I think you know if you've got some other enterprises going on that you can stack in there like with you know 10 to 15 acres like you can you know you can do a few head of cattle it's not going to be a full-time occupation certainly I really feel like you know 20 acres you're getting to a size where you you can do some serious beef honestly once you get in that 20 to 50 acre range now we're talking about like that could long-term once all of your expenses are out of the way your upfront cost you've got a cow-calf operation built like that can almost be a full-time occupation for one person if you're talking about 50 acres so those are kind of three different scenarios that people can think about depending on how much land they have access to starting with stalkers versus cow-calf stalkers start with stalkers do not go cow calf first cow calf's expensive you know the stockers you can flip a lot faster you can buy a 12 month old cow and then 12 to 18 months you you've got money coming back in you're not feeding the mama cow through the winter momma's and babies take a lot more management experience at least in my opinion than stockers if you're getting healthy stockers from somebody you just put them on some grass and go you know one size fits all in terms of infrastructure you can have very basic high tensile fence in place to manage them one single hot wire is going to manage them you've got little baby calves you got to put up three of these front and back and they're still going to get through them and then you got to chase them and find them and it's time-consuming and I think the the the big black hole that people can get sucked into with cow calf is you do all this reading right and you're trying to find the perfect breed right and you do all this this reading and all these websites and a breed associations job is to promote their breed and make them sound like they are you know the best that has ever walked the face of the planet like they're the best mothers they're the easiest calving they produce the best milk it's the best tasting beef like and then if you go cow calf you invest all your money and cows and calves and you find out I don't like this breed well you sunk all your seed money into a cow calf operation whereas with stockers like well you can buy some angus you can buy some Hereford you can get some red Devon's or south poles or you know whatever it is you want to try and you can like see like well how are these guys in a rotational grazing system or you know how do they finish you know what do they look like what it's their personalities like are they dice or they jumpy or you know whatever it's you kind of try before you buy in terms of you know marrying into one breed but when you try if you're running them on grass buy out of a grass based system if at all possible at great lengths if you have to drive three or four hours to get stalkers if you can get them out of a grass only system that's paramount to whatever breed you're talking about you've run through some quick math buying a stalker to what the return on that investment is going to be sure and there are two ways to look at that are we selling it in bulk are we selling it retail by the cut you know today if I go by let's say a 500 pound animal even if I'm paying on the high end let's just make it easy you can probably find cows cheaper than this most definitely two bucks a pound that animal cost me a thousand dollars to manage it for I'll even say 18 months one winter that's key because we have to feed it hay in the winter you know I'm gonna have another three 350 maybe 400 bucks in it with some hay land rent mineral you know just some very basic costs that you would expect to have and let's say when we get it to market it's it's a thousand pounds we sell our bulk cows so if somebody's buying a half or a whole for three dollars and 25 cents a pound live weight which is a lot higher than that two dollars you paid for it but you're doing a lot of hand-holding there you're managing that animal for 18 months that's a long time there's a lot of Labor there there's a lot of risk it's not like a chicken that you have for eight weeks and if it dies you're out five to ten bucks you know something goes wrong with this cow you can be out a thousand dollars plus eighteen months that's a lot so bigger risk my book needs to be bigger reward so we'll take you know that investment where we've got a thousand ish dollars and we might sell it it might be a three thousand dollar cow by the time we get it to the butcher but you know we've got to haul it down there we got to find the customer are we going to collect a deposit we've got to walk them through the cut selection process we've got to own or be able to rent a livestock trailer a truck we've got to have a butcher that we have a relationship with I mean there's a lot that goes into that and then walking that customer through this cut selection process of what do I get turned hamburger versus roasts and steaks and there's a lot of education that goes into that I've got a whole web page on our farm website that talks about beef cuts and I still after people read it I might have to spend an hour on the phone with them at least the first time there's a lot of hand-holding and management we have a very high level of customer service I'm making sure I'm getting paid for that customer service time you know but we can make 2,000 bucks roughly on a cow after 18 months of work so when you start to break that down you know per month you're really only making about $100 per month for a cow and you've got a lot of a lot of risk there and if you want to retail it you can definitely make more money but you've got to be able to retail some pretty high prices and a pretty good farmers market in an urban area to make that happen we can make an extra six seven hundred bucks on a cow if we retail it if we sell every steak at a very high retail value which we can particularly in the summer but I don't go overboard trying to retail too many cows we've got a lot of demand for bulk you know even if that that high price and and the customers paying for the butchering they're still getting you know 100% grass-fed beef on chemical free pasture in their freezer for about nine bucks a pound and that's everything from a t-bone steak to ground beef that's a pretty good value and that's that's how I approach that I don't ask them do you want to spend you know eighteen hundred dollars on a half cow it's butchering or $3500 on a whole cow it's do you want to spend nine dollars a pound on phenomenal tasting highly nutritious 100% grass-fed Black Angus beef they see that as a good value one thing that always comes up is how do learn how to start rotationally grazing how often you move your cows how do you know when to move oh yeah how do you get people started there uh definitely you want to you know do some reading watch some videos you know I mean the guys like you know Gregg Judi Joel Salatin Gabe Brown Cody Holmes a lot of these guys have a lot of good stuff to watch but you can kind of see behind me here that this grass has been pretty knocked down and then you know what I'm looking at over here is pretty lush and quite a bit taller we move our cows every 24 hours so if you mess up you've only messed up one paddock you go out you look at you know the next day you come out you're looking like well it looks like they over grazed so I better give him a little bit more space today if the grass looks the same where they're headed to or how they left a lot in here they really didn't eat it so I'm gonna I'm gonna pinch it down a little bit I'm gonna give him a little bit less space today and that's the assessment you do every day and after three to four years of rotational grazing you really start to develop a pretty good eye for you know what's your life weight what your pasture doing you start to learn looking like well I think the carrying capacity per acre is about this and it starts to go up as we rotationally graze you know that this in 2012 was a burned out genetically modified soybean field and had 1% organic matter and we could only run about 10,000 pounds an acre and that was really pushing it we're doing over 20,000 pounds in acre now we've literally doubled the carrying capacity of this pasture by rotational and grazing but you know that's how you start is just looking at they ate too little they ate too much they're famished they're about ready to knock me over to get to the next paddock I need to give them a little bit more and then you just keep you know observing assessing and modifying what you're doing day to day how would you describe over grazing or eight to much over grazing where they've like nibbled the plants down below you know like this and there were some areas in here where they've done that we've got some tall stringy stuff in here I'm trying to get them to knock down so I'm willing to let them over graze a smidgen here to get this tall stuff knocked down you don't want to see super short turf you know like you when they leave you want to see some tillers still left on that plant that's that truly over gray and over grazing there's a fine line I mean they're studies that show like if you can raise 50% of a plant you've done no harm if you graze you know 60% of a plant you've done 10% harm if 70% of a plant you've done 60% harm like it it drops quickly so that's that's kind of my tip for over grazing you know like you want those those plants is still kind of cover your foot you know up to you about your shin your ankle as you're walking around after the cows have left there's a lot of rules of thumb out there when it comes to grazing what you leave what they eat how do you define that for you well a lot of that people will tell you that it really depends on what you're trying to do in a given area and if you're you're trying to really knock stuff down you can you can pinch them down a lot more so if you give them a rectangle you know they'll tent they'll tend to knock down more if you get more of a score they'll they'll graze more but my general rule of thumb assuming I don't have some ulterior motive right I'm just day-to-day I'm trying to graze keep up the grass that in the animals not really after anything management wise on on the ground other than building soil which I'm always after I really like Gregg Judy's rule you know and his general rule is graze 60% trample 30% and leave 10% left standing so when we've got some seed heads back here behind us that are left like that's fine we want this because eventually the seeds are gonna fall to the ground that becomes our future seed bank particularly if these are varieties that that we want to have out here so I think that's a really good general rule of thumb particularly to start with and then like once you get some experience under your belt you can branch out from there I have brand new land that's never been grazed before do I just start grazing see how the cattle do yeah I think you know like if you've got some some land that's got some grass on it and you don't even really know what you're doing like I don't like to give rules of thumb in terms of cows per acre but if you're in an area that gets modest to good rainfall I you know like go to acres per cow or maybe even two and a half acres that's that's really really conservative I throw some cows out there and see what happens you can kind of see like what for just start to come back learn to identify forages and then you can start to make determinations like I've got some really good forged as out here I don't really feel like I need to do much or you know I'm not seeing a whole lot of clover so I'll look into maybe like you know frost seeding some clover or drilling in some some clovers so I can add that variety into my pasture but that's a great way to start you know throw some cows out there get some some reels and posts and just just move them every 24 hours that that's that's the big thing is to move them around let this rest for you know 30 40 50 days whatever it takes to let come back and then you move the cows through there again you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 112,243

Rating: 4.8992805 out of 5

Keywords: grassfed life, darby simpson, cattle, grassfed beef, homesteading, farming, permaculture, grazing, rotational grazing

Id: n8zwYxRVmyc

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019