Combine Herds and Calve on Green Grass

Combining here the first two points of profitability and harmony since, honestly, they could switch places. Both cut down on labor significantly and typically increase calf survivability.

However, after this entire year plus a few months of almost constant mud and having unfortunately purchased several unadapted cows, I’ve come to realize that if one is to combine herds into one mob, you must allow a great deal extra winter grazing forage to allow for substantial trampling waste to keep them out of the mud. It is true that there is some value to trampling, but feeding the microbes is more efficient by cycling it through the stock. It seems i can never learn all the lessons i need to in the course of one lifetime.

For reasons I’ve discussed before, my cows have been calving in mid-April – knowing that that can be a challenging time of the year. A real problem with calving out of sync is the problems continue through the year with breeding out of sync and weaning out of sync. This year (2023) my cows should start about May 1. Next year, i may move to May 15.

Your time is just as important as anyone else’s – be sure you are paying yourself and others a fair wage with benefits or your operation is a hobby and not sustainable nor regenerative.

Another issue is a problem with calving in a managed/movement grazing scheme is leaving calves behind. This happens all too much. Although it takes some planning, it may be best to not disturb the cows whilst calving and give them plenty of space. Sure, this will result in some loss of grazing efficiency, but having relaxed cows and heifers with better opportunity to bond will likely outweigh the loss of grazing best practice.

Cleanliness is paramount in a calving paddock as is being well drained with no ditches or draws. It may very well be that those need to be fenced out to avoid calves dropped into ditches and cows and/or calves smashed and killed in the mud. This has been a very expensive journey for me in that regard, even in the summer as cows are seeking cool.

Life is a balance. Harmony – Decide your goals, temper them a bit with time and grace to make mistakes. Learn from others’ mistakes since you do not have time to stumble over the same rocks. Do not forget your family and their interests and don’t underestimate how quickly the years will pass and your strength and stamina will begin to wane. Position your operation to handle the unexpected changes life will throw your way. Sharpen that pencil.

Dr Dick Diven (Low Cost Cow/Calf) suggested that in toxic endophyte country like ours in north central Missouri, fall calving may be a way to avoid the highest toxins during breeding season. However, that is completely out of sync with nature and results in huge wintering costs trying to maintain a nursing cow on winter stockpile or hay. The best time for cows to calve here is May-June – the same time during which bison have been naturally selected. Manage the toxins in your pasture and select animals which tend to thrive despite ingesting them.

Create something beautiful today!

Finally, my brethren, whatever is
true, whatever is honest, whatever is
just, whatever pure, whatever lovely,
whatever of good report, if there is any
virtue, and if there is any praise, think
on these things. Philippians 4:8 HRB

Quickest Ways to Profitability & Harmony

This list is old news, but reviews are seldom a waste of time. Oftentimes, we need to revisit a topic to find the low hanging fruit of our business or keeping a home to be more effective in our lives.

Questions to ask yourself:

“Am i asking the right question?” How can i do this without spending money? Do i need to do this? Am i very efficiently doing the wrong thing?

If you think it won’t work for you, then it won’t. If it’s something we don’t want to change, we will set up the situation to fail on purpose. We often are the biggest stumbling block to harmony in our professions and relationships by refusing to seek a solution which, oddly, in many situations would not only enhance our lives, but be more productive and profitable as well!

As Kit Pharo says, ‘The easiest money you will ever make is the money you don’t spend – and that money is tax-free.”

In ranching:

1. Combine animals into as few herds as possible. One or two is best. One cow herd, one bull herd kept separate until breeding season. Having one cowherd will greatly reduce the number of bulls you need to cover the cows. A single herd moved multiple times per day will actually improve productivity of the soil and increase desirable plant species (aka regenerative ranching) more rapidly than some popular managed selective grazing programs. Think outside the box on this one. Although one herd is ideal, sometimes there may be a reason for another. In the season of life you are young, strong, energetic, it is important to have cash flow and other income streams. Use separate pastures (leased or owned) for short term use. For instance, you may have a herd of yearling heifers or steers. Perhaps you want to breed your yearling replacement heifers to easy calving bulls. If you have many multiple pastures, miles apart – consider another use for the far-reaching ones. Perhaps hay it in the summer, then allow to grow for short term yearling grazing (sell the animals before winter). Lease or sell the land and focus on the main portions. Chances are very good that profitability will increase, labor will decrease, family life will improve.
2. Calve in sync with nature. In our part of the world of north central Missouri, one would look back in history and learn when the bison calved. This is typically mid-May through June, perhaps a bit into July. Oftentimes you may hear, ‘when do the deer fawn?’ But deer are more like sheep or goats than cattle and breeding season weather needs consideration in many parts of the world. While you are at it, shorten the breeding season to discover your most fertile cows.
3. Let cows raise their calves. In extreme weather conditions, it may be necessary to wean calves early and sell either them or their mommas or both!
4. Select animals for your breeding herd from your own stock. Starting out, try to find local animals raised the way you will be. This will likely be nearly impossible, and you’ll end up culling a lot. Expensive up front, but long term is the best solution to finding adapted animals which can perform without expensive inputs.
5. Incorporate some sort of managed grazing which allows adequate rest from grazing. I use Real Wealth Ranching techniques which is a way of incorporating nonselective grazing, identifying adapted animals, matching calving/breeding season with forage availability, increasing profitability, and creating harmony in your life and human relationships. There are other management practices that may fit your lifestyle or season of life better. Explore and understand the protocols, realizing that often you cannot pick and choose and still have the management work.
6. ‘Kick the Hay Habit‘ is the name of a book by Jim Gerrish, but it is also great advice for reducing costs. Hay and all the labor and machinery expense associated with it seldom makes sense in today’s ranching world. There are exceptions – especially weather related – but by and large it takes a huge bite out of the bottom line.
7. Reduce overheads! Stan Parsons said you only need a hammer and a wheelbarrow to be a financially successful rancher, and the wheelbarrow was questionable. Now, i might be paraphrasing, but his point is clear; that which rusts, rots, and depreciates is not an asset and likely adds labor and other unnecessary costs. Machinery, buildings, vehicles, even a stack of hay!

Decades ago, i sat in on an introductory Ranching for Profit course taught by Stan Parsons and i thought he had the craziest ideas. I’ve long since embraced many of his precepts, but the concepts need to be revisited to keep on track. I’m constantly making mistakes and forgetting to keep my life in harmony with my work.

Hopefully, future blog entries will dig a bit deeper into each point with real life, personal examples, and experiences.

Shabbat Shalom!

Create beauty and harmony!

It Might Have Happened

With the continuing rain, it’s too muddy to drive in to shift my cows to a new paddock, so once again, I’m ‘hoofing’ it across the previously ploughed ground to their paddock.  Today, as I walked across the muddy ragweed and cocklebur infested paddock, I spotted something very white and roundish on the ground.  Nothing to do when finding something so unusual, but to stoop and pick it up.  Alas, nothing but a broken piece of porcelain, which –  guessing –  was once a drawer pull or door handle.  Not one to just toss away such treasure/trash, I contemplated about the story it could tell.  Possible, if my Grandma Falconer was still alive, this little bit would bring memories – good or bad – we’ll never know.  I found it just back of where the old house, yard, hen house, and cellar once held sway on the Bowyer Farm at which Grandpa and Grandma ‘went to housekeeping’ back in 1940.

 I trekked on down to the little creek (crick, as we say) and washed it off a bit, but carried it to the cows, shifted the cows, and brought it back.  As I passed where the old homestead once stood, I imagined my dad and his younger brother dashing out the door to catch up with their papa on his way to milking cows, with momma hollering out ‘DON’T….. slam the door” as the screen door bangs shut behind the two boys.  Momma sighs…

Of course, I don’t know that any of that happened, but grandmas, grandpas, moms, dads, and children are much the same – we say the same things to each generation – some of it sticks and is good and sometimes it seems they/we hear nothing.  And, sadly, too many times now, there is no mom or dad to instruct their children not to slam the door.

Shalom!

What Is the Greatest Challenge to Being A Grass Farmer?

This article is printed in the most recent issue of The Stockman Grassfarmer and written by our good friend, Jim Gerrish.  For more great articles like this, subscribe to The Stockman Grassfarmer.  If you are interested in an upcoming speaking engagement or prefer private consultation, contact Jim.

What Is the Greatest Challenge to Being A Grass Farmer? By Jim Gerrish

MAY, Idaho,

Allan Nation used the term “grass farmer” to describe a new type of agricultural producer who was something beyond the conventional mold of a farmer or a rancher.

The true grass farmer is someone who understands the foundation of our business is harvesting solar energy and converting it into a salable product.

A grass farmer strives to create a healthy landscape where water infiltrates and does not escape the boundaries of the farm as runoff; someone who understands that life in the soil is as critical to farm production as the life above the soil.

A grass farmer understands the fewer steps you put between your livestock and the direct harvest of solar energy, the more likely it is that you will be profitable.

The true grass farmer is someone who becomes one with their landscape and the life within it.  Grass farming has been described as farming in harmony with nature.  This is contrary to many of the basic tenets of conventional or industrial farming where nature is viewed more as an enemy to be vanquished.  Droughts and floods.  Weeds and bugs, Scorching summer and bitter winter.  All of these are aspects of nature conventional farmers and ranchers do daily battle to overcome.

It is very hard for most conventional farmers to understand grass farmers.  For this lack of understanding grass farmers are often ridiculed, ostracized, and sometimes, sadly, beaten into submission to the gods of iron and oil.  Sometimes that conflict is fought in the local coffee shop, sometimes across the neighbor’s fence line, and sometimes across the kitchen table.

That brings me to the consideration of what is the grass farmer’s greatest challenge.

Four years ago, I received an anonymous letter from a frustrated grass farmer.  It was five pages long and it outlines a 30-year long struggle to convert the family farming operation to an entirely pasture-based grass farming business.  The letter writer asked me to somehow tell this story and try to help other farm families struggling with the same issues find some resolution.

I thought about that letter quite a bit at the time and tried to find something to pull out of it for a monthly column.  I came up empty.

Earlier this year, I spent a day with a farm family and when I left, one of the family members put an envelope in my hand and suggested I read the contents some time later,. I did and, lo and behold, it was the same letter I had received anonymously four years earlier.

Now I had a face and a person to attach the story to.  The victim-less crime now had a victim.  How many times do we experience that in life?  Some issue that never mattered an iota to us becomes a cause when it becomes personal.

I think the greatest challenge to becoming a true grass farmer are those family members who cannot see the farm with the same vision.

If your brother is a crop farmer who sees only gross income, how is he going to switch from growing corn bringing in $1000/acre to a cow-calf operation with a revenue of only $300/acre?  That is a very hard sell.  But, why does he have a job in town?  He says he can’t make it just farming.  When the breakeven cost of growing a bushel of corn is $3.85/bushel and the price is $3.46/bushel, a gross income of $1000 doesn’t pay the bills.

If you have a gross margin of $240/calf and it takes you three acres to run a pair year around, the gross margin per acre is $80.  Which enterprise is actually better for the farm?

As long as your brother looks at gross income rather than gross margin per acre, he will never understand grass farming as a viable business.

When you have been taught all your life to till ground, kill weeds, spray bugs, and take whatever price the elevator offers you, it is hard to understand there is another way to use the farm.

If your culture says land must be divided with a 5-strand barbwire fence on the quarter section line, how can you accept weird shaped pastures created with single polywire?  The whole cultural construct must first change.

As long as the mentality is that is it OK to spend $100,000 for a new tractor but you must buy the cheapest electric fence energizer at the farm and home store, grass farming will not move ahead.  As long as the thought process i that the land rental rate is too high to run cattle on that field so we better plow it up, grass farming will never advance.

When farmers can wrap their heads around the idea that Mother Nature is our friend, then grass farming will move forward.  When we truly believe our mission as stewards of the land is to create a living landscape on every acre of ground we manage, then we will become true grass farmers.

Sadly, that is why we still say we advance only one funeral at a time.

Hate to start the New Year with such a downer thought.  Let’s see what February brings.

 

Jim Gerrish is an independent grazing lands consultant provide service to farmers and ranchers on both private and public lands across the USA and internationally.  He can be contacted through www.americangrazinglands.com.  His books are available from the SGF Bookshelf page 26.  He will present a Stockman Grass Farmer Grassroots of Grazing Schooland a Stockman Grass Farmer Management-Intensive Grazing School in February.  

 

 

Grandpa Falconer

We all have people in our past who have helped us through the tough times and often we don’t recognise the impact they had until we are much older and those wiser ones are long past from our lives – perhaps even have died.  I didn’t know it at the time, but reflecting on the years i had with my grandpa – i realize now – he was my hero.

Sure, he wasn’t talkative or a hugger, but showed by example, a work ethic of getting up early (and making me get up early by pulling my toes to wake up), he would already have some chores done before i dragged my laziness out and ready to go do the chores that were away from the house.  The importance of finishing a job which included putting things away and cleaning up.  But, i LOVED going with him.  He’d let me drive the truck while he threw out small round bales to the cows to feed in the winter, taught me how to drive the old Farmall 460 and clip pastures with a 9 foot sickle bar mower AND how to change out a broken section.  And even when i drove (i think i was about 10) the pickup into a deep wash out along a ditch (he was on foot looking for a calf), he was more concerned whether or not i was hurt rather than upset about any damage to the pickup or that we had to walk a mile to get the aforesaid 460 to pull it out.   Additionally, he taught me how to ride and have a love for horses.  That was my passion for years.

Back from chores, every morning we stopped in at Tolly’s Garage on the western edge of Purdin, MO which had a population of 236 at the time – less now.  He would reach in for a Coca-Cola and I’d select my favorite – Chocolate Soldier.  Then i could just sit and act like i was one of the guys in the office area.  I was part of a small and important community even at age 8.

Today, my grandpa would have been 100, but he died August 9, 2008 and i continue to miss him though he corrected me a lot about how to raise cattle.  I’m still learning and still need correcting, but thankfully, i don’t make the mistakes he chided me about.

How many people get to farm or ranch the very land and legacy that his or her grandparent’s built?  Not many, but i do own and directly manage at least a portion of their legacy and i could not be more honored to carry on a tradition of land and livestock management.  I call this farm Tannachton Farm to reflect our Scottish roots and the commitment to regenerative and sustainable stewardship.

Heritage, Legacy, Tradition, Family  – cling to what is good

Cheers!

tauna

Grandpa with his two sons, Stanley (my dad) and Stephen.  circa 1943

Me on Danny and Grandpa on Gypsy

Grandpa with my three yayhoos, Jessica, Nathan, Dallas

Grandpa always drove Chevrolet pickups, so do i!  Thanks to cousin, Heather for this great photo.

 

 

 

Jim Gerrish on Making Change

Another great article by Jim Gerrish, consultant and owner of American Grazing Lands, published in The Stockman Grass Farmer.

Published as “Grassroots of Grazing” Jim’s regular column provides “Making Change is about Creating a New Comfort Zone” in the December 2017 issue which offers his observations about how people in the grazing/farming/ranching world accept or reject change often needed for the business to survive, or more importantly, thrive so that the next generation will be willing to be involved.

His closing comments of the article:  (you’ll have to buy a back issue for Jim’s full article as well as great articles by other authors)

“I had already come to understand people were not going to change just because something made biological and economic sense.  We all have to be comfortable with the idea of change before we will be willing to even consider change no matter how much empirical evidence is thrown at us supporting that change.

For many of us that comfort level is based on acceptance by our family and community.

I have found it is much easier to sell the ideas of MiG (management-intensive grazing), soil health, grassfed beef, summer calving, and a myriad of other atypical management concepts to someone who has no background at all in ranching and no tie to the local community than it is to get someone with 40 years of experience on a family ranch to change.  The lifelong rancher may grudgingly agree that those ideas make sense, but the most common retort is still, “but I can’t see how we can make that work here.”

That individual is absolutely correct, until you can see that it will work here, it probably won’t.  The biggest part of that “will it work here” question is how the rest of the family sees it.  The better a family knows itself, the easier it is for that one rabble-rouse to make a difference.  If the lines of communication are broken, the more likely it is that things will continue to operate the way they always have.

Then we are back to that sad situation so common in multi-generational agriculture:  We advance one funeral at a time.”

Jim Gerrish is an independent grazing lands consultant providing service to farmers and ranchers on both private and public lands across the USA and internationally.  He can be contacted through www.americangrazinglands.com

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