A Midwest Journal

A Mooving Video about Cows Saving the Environment

Just had to link and forward this one.

This is exactly where I’m heading with my studies on mob grazing.  Holistic Management Institute is at the forefront of getting farmers to graze both efficiently and effectively.  Ultra-high-density grazing is where we need to be in order to achieve a sustainable life process on this planet.

And nothing beats carbon-sequestration (stuffing that CO2 right back into the soil) than mob-grazing cattle on perennial-grass pastures. And nothing beats the taste and quality of beef than grassfed beef cattle raised this way.

I’m right in the  middle of an overdue whitepaper on this – where I will lay out the business plan for this type of scene.

There’s a lot of hope for this area – and the light-hearted approach this video takes is a great start.

If Al Gore’s histrionics and his data-massaging chronies at the Climate Academia weren’t enough, we actually find out that they are missing the boat entirely. Not that they are wrong, but they are only looking at a small part of the problem.

The reason? Money fixation.

Al Gore is personally profiting from his doom scenario – funneling government funds (read: our taxes) into his own pocket. And those Climate Gate scientists are riding a cash cow, since foreign governments and petro-chemical companies are pouring money into this area. So it pays to keep a controversy growing.

**update** Climate-data-related scandals list keeps growing…

The problem is – they are shouting down the wrong rain barrel. So-called “greenhouse gases” are the symptom, not the cause. They factually are not even the real problem, but a relatively minor distraction.

Yesterday, I ran across a couple of links to some fascinating data.

• Alan Savory’s talk at Colorado College
• Jim Snyder posted a link to a dire list of the environmental troubles we face (Mother Earth News article).

When you view these together, you’ll see that we have been being lead in the wrong direction. Too narrow a view.

The Situation: Government-Sponsored Commodity Bankruptcy

The problem has been that we’ve been steadily moving away from our own land as it ceased to provide a viable  living for the families involved. Instead, these generations flocked to the cities for “jobs” and our culture started living off petroleum- and mining-based products, both exhaustible resources.

Our current president has been funneling billions into “green energy” jobs and payola – but the problem is that this is again the narrow view. According to the capitalist/free market explanation, we’ll start recycling when it’s profitable to do so. And our environmental activists (read: Alinsky radicals) would take all the power they can get, even if it means destroying any ability to fix the actual problem.

The core problem is that the land has quit producing a viable living for the families on it. Two factors in this: commoditization of produce, and increasing advertising dominance.

Farm produce has been cheapened by creating a few product lines of commercial value. All corn is yellow. All beef is black. All sheep are white. And what the farmer pays isn’t enough to keep them farming – unless they also manage to carry substantial debt. So profits are sucked into bankers’ salaries, bonuses and benefits. Meanwhile, they use corporate and government-backed university research to use a pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer cocktail to genericize the produce so it can fit into an assembly-line model.

Advertising, meanwhile, has been used to base our society on instant gratification and subconscious desires instead of working to educate and raise the sights of people to attain their best qualities.  TV and media are advertising supported, so their quality (and trustworthiness) also goes into the tank — along with the culture. Why? because advertising is based on psychological profiles (as Cialdini covers in “Influence”) which take advantage of subconscious desires, rather than pragmatic wants and actual needs. (Just look at what’s happening to the credit card industry in this recession to see what happens when people wise up…)

Look, it’s really simple. There is no need to continually centralize any industry. Or locate them on the coasts. Consider Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke model. Rural cities are tending to fall over each other to give tax credits in order to lure factories and warehouses for their jobs. (Of course, some companies simply pick up and move when the tax credits run out…) But the point is that there, again, are people who want and need jobs in rural areas because the farms don’t produce enough income to support everyone – despite agriculture being the leading industy for the area. (Remember that high-debt overhead farmers are carrying? It’s invested in monster machinery which is able to handle massive acres in days. A handful of people with thousands of acres – compared to a building which doesn’t even cover a quarter acre that pays several hundred people to unload, sort, store, find, pick, and ship boxes. Do the math: which one pays more taxes?)

And so you see how the government scam we are under has a vested interest in making sure we all live in big cities, bunched up together – like cattle in a feed lot. “Economies of scale – subsidized.”

Solution: Farm Your Way Out

Naturalists such as Alan Savory have been studying this particular situation for years. And they have been looking to the historical evidence of our earlier civilizations going the exact same route we are currently going – only they did it just for local empires, not globally as we are currently doing.

The trick is in rebuilding the soil through restoring the natural intensive grazing of heavy hoofed animals. The government policy has been to remove more and more animals from the land, which actually results in top soil loss through erosion – and ultimately creates deserts, as Savory reports in the above MP3.

For me as a cattle farmer, the fascinating point is that it’s far more profitable to raise grass-fed beef than it is to raise it through “conventional” (commodity-style) means.  Inputs drop dramatically, while a premium is paid to enterprising farmers who market directly to environmentally-responsible consumers. The beef produced is healthier, higher in nutrients and omega-3’s.

The bottom line, however it that by improving the soil through proper intensive grazing, you increase the density of plant life, which actually increases carbon sequestration. So instead of using fossil fuels to raise grain, ship it to central feedlots, feed it to masses of cattle who stand and live in their own manure (creating more methane meanwhile, which is released to the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by nearby plants) – grass fed beef simply add pounds of beef while being part of the ecosystem.

The land improves and adds topsoil which in turn sequesters more carbon. It is possible to have agriculture be a net sequestor of carbon instead of the contributor.

Now, as you add topsoil with permanent pastures, the increased density of plants require more animals added to continue the process. You have to add more cattle to “keep up” with the improved growth. Several different studies show that this tops out at about 400% of the earlier stocking density.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations shows that where you earlier could keep only one cow per 2.5 acres, this increases to an average of one cow per .8 acres. Same land, same water supply (which improves, BTW).  At an average commodity auction level of $800 per animal, this gives you a potential income of selling four yearing calves off that same acreage, or $3200 for the same land area. After paying off inputs for fencing only (don’t need other supplements, and even vet bills can disappear), and subtracting winter hay (which isn’t needed in a true mob grazing/ultra-high density grazing scenario) – where some local farmers get $60 profit per head, grass fed beef gets around $600 per head.

10x profit potential. You don’t have to raise corn, just shift pastures every day. Leave the tractor in the barn, sell the combine and grain silos. Invest in more fencing.

Go from grain-fed beef to grass-fed and see 4000% increase in profitability. At least on the back of that envelope.

Practical results? Better quality beef, improved quality of rural living, less dependence on foriegn fossil fuels. And you get to enjoy the pleasures a life surrounded by Nature’s environment for the rest of your life. (And it only takes a few hours a day to do this – looking for a part time job that pays 4x what you’re making now?)

It’s not that money is bad. But if you look at the broader picture, you can improve your life quality and have all you want. Just have to get smart and take the blinders off to see the whole picture.

Now, this takes into account the paradigm that you believe (or tolerate) the idea that some gases can create a “greenhouse effect” and add or detract from global temperatures. Jury is still out – and has been for some time. Another discussion, another time…

But Time Magazine recently did an article covering how some “greenies” on the East Coastal have decided to get into raising beef in order to save the environment. Not just any of these academic megalopolis types, but real bona-fide environmentally-resonsible authors who walk their talk:

None of this would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that [these] …are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post’s gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it.

Turns out that the studies these radical activists are quoting (and I have a great deal more on how bogus thse are in a later post) are actually missing part of the data.

When you spend all that fuel raising corn or other grains, and then all that fuel transporting this grain to feedlots, then coop up animals in unhealthy conditions where their manure ferments and creates more gases – guess what? You’ve just made a ton of all sorts of these gasses to get your beef.

Now, grass fed beef, especially in mob grazing, takes a different approach. Perennial grass consumes these gasses. Beef, when rotated in a managed grazing program (especially in high-density mob grazing) actually stimulate this growth by cropping, fertilizing, aerating, and cultivating that pasture so that it actually gets healthier and lusher – making it grow more and consume more of these “greenhouse gasses”. The article covers this:

“Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint.” Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones, their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.

When you add that in with local processing (not trucked hundreds of miles), you then cut the net gas level enormously.

You also have to take into account that a lot of the studies producing this data are very, very flawed. But I’ll go into that later.

Some interesting quotes out of this article :

By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That’s certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon.

But the activist radical vegans will argue that if you don’t eat meat, it will save you eating those hormones and so the greenhouse gasses as well. Time rebuts this:

To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. “I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country,” he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland. (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. “The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world’s ills is ridiculous,” he says at his Maine farm. “A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO2 than I am.” A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they’ll “be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals,” he says. “And even though we can’t eat the grass, we’ll be turning it into something we can.”

As I’ve said, there’s a lot more to bring to light in this area. I hope to do more this week on this, as the research has been stacking up and needs an outlet.

For now, check out the Time article and decide for yourself.

Haven’t talked about my Missouri grass-fed beef cattle in awhile, so I stacked up some ideas meanwhile – and so I blog now:

We’re still on how to make more profit raising beef cattle, which is the first reason I’m researching mob grazing. There are other apparent benefits (such as being more environmentally responsible), but that will come later.

Milo as standing winter feed instead or hay or stockpiled grass

This year’s experiment in lowering input costs has been to raise milo (the idea from a local farmer, Harry Cope) so the cattle would eat it instead of having to feed hay this winter. I got it into the ground a bit too late, so I’m now just hoping for a very long fall before the first killing frost (3 nights of below 22 degrees) and so allow it to make seed heads. Now, a recent post over at Yahoo Groups – GrassFed Beef gave me pause, but a later post there gave me more ideas.

First, if you’re feeding grain to animals, it messes with their digestion and throws off their Omega3/6 ratios. So it’s fine to feed corn as a grass, but not the seed heads (corn cobs) it produces. (That’s from a purist standpoint. Factually, they love corn like candy. So IMHO, corn-cob chunks are a good training treat, but not good as a diet.) So trying to grow milo and feed them the grain head in winter is counter productive to making high quality beef.

Second, it still cost me to put that milo in – but probably a fifth what the same ground would produce in terms of the cost of putting hay up. So it’s still cheaper – and the experiment hasn’t run its course yet. If seeding it so late that it doesn’t really get properly developed seed head still leaves a lot of stalks standing above the ice and snow, it’s probably a decent investment and cost-saving production.

You either have to stockpile grass, or feed hay. Growing milo as as a stockpiled grass source is cheaper than hay, but not as cheap as stockpiled perennial grass.

Now, I started a couple years ago putting hay out on a field, staggered, so I didn’t have manure accumulating in one spot (as well as the mess and expense of firing up the tractor and driving through mud to deliver bales. Last winter, I got the tractor out once – and that was to pick up bales that weren’t going to be eaten that winter.

My approach with this was to put those bales on a nearby crop ground (right next door, across the fence) and put that on the poorest soil, where big sections of the topsoil had essentially been removed by earlier farming (erosion). The trick was that with all that manure and old hay left there, it was either feast or famine. Didn’t disk up very well and didn’t take planting well, either. It took most of the next summer to really digest, and when I did get something planted in it, it took off like all thunder – lots higher than anything around. Or it just sat there, waterlogged. Got the original idea from one old boy who fed round bales without bale rings to his Auxvasse Missouri Longhorns for several years on the top of one worn-out hillock and wound up with a very lush pasture out of it.

But really, that area isn’t a high producing section anyway, so I’m not losing much, I figure.

Hay as fertilizer for worn out crop ground

There was a thread on that forum lately about buying hay as fertilizer, which got me thinking. Yes, it’s cheaper to buy hay than make it. The trick is in how you feed it. Setting it up as big round bales isn’t all that efficient, as you still wind up with concentrated circles of manure, and a center with old hay. (Now the cows and calves love to lie on this when they’re eating the next bale over, so it gets some layers mixed…) But overall, it’s not all that efficient.

I did unroll a bale once down a hill and saw how they went through it. Since it was on a pasture, they ate most all of it and it wasn’t showing the next spring.The trick, with feeding anything in winter, is that the ice and snow cover it. That is where the big bales (or even small square bales thrown out on top of the snow) are easier for cattle to feed.

Some people actually advise growing your fall pastures up tall and then cutting and winnowing that grass so that it is in long, high rows so the cattle can then be strip-grazed on it (they’d waste it by tromping and laying on it if you feed too much at once).

For that poor crops ground above, here’s the next idea: Unroll that hay in contours across the land, so it will catch runoff. But use the rake to pile it back up in windrows. Then feed it that way to the cattle, with the electric fence running perpendicular to the rows, which keeps them eating only as much as they need. No more moving frozen-down hay rings or cold-to-start tractors. Plus, the ground is in better shape to try to crop it next spring. At least that’s the theory.

I’ll try this theory on the milo ground which didn’t produce well (same areas that don’t have any real topsoil.)

Just another idea until I can perfect my managed grazing to the point where I have the nice electric fences all over and can easily move my cattle every day.

Meanwhile, you farm with what you got.

Research on mob grazing continues – to make profitable grass-fed beef cattle.

Next up is to figure how to do the transition from conventional grazing over to managed grazing and then to mob grazing. First situation is both existing fences and water supply. Existing fences are built for rotating pastures when they eat everything off – conventional grazing. They aren’t set so that I can partition them easily with portable electric fences. So I’ve got some engineering to do.

My approach is as I’d been advised, to start partitioning pastures for a few years and see where you are using the temporary fences – and then put a permanent electric fence there so you can set up temporary ones which use that as a power source. So you aren’t hooking up and taking down a battery and charger every time you move the fence (current arrangement.) Means the cows don’t get moved as much as they should. (You can get around this by pivoting off a corner and giving a new pie slice each time, but there’s no back-fence which some prefer for mob grazing so what was just grazed gets to rest and re-grow.)

So I’m studying my existing fences and how I use them to see ways I could set up something that allows more mobile set up and breakdown. (Plus rig the permanent fences so the cattle will keep them cleaned up with no brush growing over them.)

This winter, at least, I’ve got a sizable set of stockpiled grass from our too-wet summer – so I can see how this does over winter.

Plenty to do with what I’ve got to work with. Always got to like having options…

The goal is to knock out cost of winter feeding and to increase the quality of forage I already have. Both will increase my profits for finishing beef cattle on pasture only.

- – - -

Update: While I was doing further research on mob grazing and grass fed beef, I found this story from Eat, Drink, Better. Seems that some of these big packers haven’t been able to keep their beef clean enough from the manure they raise it in. That’s the problem with grain-fed beef, that they simply raise these cattle in their own manure. And keeping the meat from being infected becomes a real problem. Because bacteria is native to manure. Plus that particular strain of e coli is more prevalent in feedlots than pastures.

More later – my research on this is  continuing…

While these aren’t commodity Angus, they are some of the best grass-fed beef cattle you can have – but this post today is about mob grazing, not selecting the best genetics for your cattle. That’s another subject I’ll weigh in on at some time – how we’ve gone away from the healthier, more efficient animals farmers used to breed. But the college guys are starting to figure this out with all their number crunching…

Now, yesterday, I promised you more from Greg Judy of Columbia Missouri. And I found a nice, short presentation of his over at the University of Missouri website. This was from their Missouri Forage and Grassland Council 2000 Annual Meeting, held October 30-31, 2000 at Lake Ozark Holiday Inn, Lake Ozark, Missouri – and since then I understand Judy has changed and improved his grazing techniques even more.

Leasing Land For Custom Grazing Stockers

Greg Judy
Greg Judy’s Custom Grazing Farms

Background I have been practicing management-intensive grazing (MiG) for six years, mostly with stockers. In the spring of 1999, I started leasing farms and developed MiG on most of them. Although I am in the custom grazing business, I am also employed full-time as a lab technician for an electric utility supplier.

Presently I have 600 acres with 350 acres in grass, located 20 miles northwest of Columbia. I own 200 acres and lease the remaining 400 acres. The leased land is split into five different farms which range in size from 40 to 150 acres. All my farms are rolling hills with 2 to 4 inches of topsoil over a heavy clay base.

The following is an outline of how I got started in the custom grazing business and some tips I have developed along the way.

Finding Land to Lease

• When I first started, I took a platte map and drew a 5-mile circle around my farm. Then I concentrated on prospective idle areas with no fences. (This gives you more bargaining power for a cheaper lease.)
• The minimum lease period is 5 years if you have to do any development to it. Try to get a 10-year lease if possible. The years can go by very quickly!
• The land must have around 70% open area or it is not economical for me to lease it.
• Large hay fields with no fencing are good prospects; the landowner is locked into haying it every year because of the lack of fencing.
• A bonus is several ponds or a creek that runs through the property.
• If the land has no water, I offer to build a pond on the property if I can deduct the cost of it off the lease. (Ponds add value to the property — emphasize this to the landowner.)
• The more items that are in place on the property, fence, water, corral, etc, the less bargaining power you have.

Advantages of Leasing vs. Owning Land

• No Farm Payment.
• 100% of lease payment is tax deductible.
• No land taxes.
• Minimal equity needed to get into the grazing business.

Approaching the Landowner

• Some landowners are very cautious at first, but just tell him you noticed the land was lying idle and ask if he would be interested in allowing you to graze it.
• If you have a farm that is set up for MiG, ask him if you could show it to him. Make sure your farm is clean, no trash, just pretty pastures of grass and cattle.
• Ask him what his plans are for the land: Did he buy it to retire on or as an investment?
• Explain to him that your goal is to make his land look like yours. This is probably your most powerful tool!
• Explain to him the concept of MiG. How you will rotate the cattle through a series of paddocks, allowing rest periods for the grass.
• Explain the benefits it will add to his property: Increased fertility because of better manure distribution, more diverse grass species, less rain runoff, improved build up of organic matter in the soil, increased legume content, more wildlife and less brush.
• Explain to him the sequence of events that will take place to put MiG in place on his land and that it will take two to three years for some land to show progress.
• Explain to him that all ponds and woods will be fenced off to exclude livestock.
• Explain to him that the value of his property will increase substantially as a direct result of your management.
• Write a proposed lease and ask the landowner to read the contract, make changes, etc. Make sure both parties are satisfied before signing it.

Getting Started

• Have liability insurance policy for all livestock. When custom grazing, the stocker-owner is usually responsible for the policy.
• When starting out with an idle property, use the forage that is already there. I always run cows the first year to clean off the duff, along with lots of brush. By strip grazing you get better duff removal.
• Learn the patterns the cows graze, and visualize where the paddock divisions should be placed.
• I use high-tensile 170,000-psi wire with ratchets and a high voltage low impedance fencer. It is not a big deal changing a paddock division; just move one high-tensile wire.
• Frost seed 3 to 4 lb red clover on all pastures.
• Fence off all ponds and run a siphon hose over the dam to the tank.
• Fence off all timbered areas.
• Concentrate on improving the water supply and quality.
• You can have the best grass in the world, but without a good water supply, the grass is useless.

Stocker Management

• Take the stress off new calves by stopping fence walking. If calves are allowed to, they will walk themselves into a health wreck.
• Make sure you see every calf eat and drink on arrival before you leave them.
• Spend some time with them; let them know that you are not going to hurt them.
• Start with 400-pound stockers, and hand-feed them for a week on paddocks to tame them down and train them to move.
• All calves should have had their second round of shots when placed on pasture.
• Use a Capture rifle to doctor any calves that are sick. This is a huge benefit, as you don’t have to get the whole herd up to doctor one calf.

Materials Needed

• Small pickup
• An ATV is a time saver: no ruts, handy for broadcasting seed, and a good vehicle to use when building fence.
• Wire and posts
• Miners light that fits on a hard hat. This is the one tool that I use the most because of my off-farm job. By having the light on your head, your hands are free to work at anything.

Tips for Keeping Your Overhead Low

• No heavy metal machinery
• No boy toys
• Don’t buy anything that RUSTS.
• No stock trailer and truck; hire this work out.
• Loading facilities should be functional, not elaborate.

Good Investments

• Water availability
• Lime, P&K
• Legume establishment

Landowner and Lessee Friendships

• Some landowners, once they start seeing the results of your management on their property, get really excited and emotional. I’ve had a landowner ask where I could use a couple extra ponds; he built two right where I needed them!
• Sometimes the more you do, the more the landowners want you to improve their land.
• I had a landowner give me a turkey and ham for Christmas. He said, “This is for all the work and improvements you have done on my farm. Words can not express how happy I am with what you have done.”
• I personally get a huge sense of reward from this kind of landowner satisfaction; you cannot put a money figure on it!
• I had a landowner give me back a full year’s lease payment. He said that I earned the lease by the amount of work that I had done on his land.
• A landowner changed my lease contract. I had a ten-year lease, and he gave me a lifetime lease (my lifetime) on his farm.
• I give landowners a quarterly update on the progress that has taken place.

Final Thoughts and Comments

• You need to set a goal. Start out by asking yourself, “Where do I want to be in five years?” Then write it down where you can read it everyday. This helps keep you focused.
• This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. There is a lot of work involved to get all the proper elements in place.
• Be innovative; always ask yourself if there is a better way of doing things.
• Read all the grazing books you can such as Stockman and Grassfarmer.
• You can pick up a lot of good tips by attending grazing schools and pasture walks.
• You have to be 100% committed to making it work. The first year is the hardest, but the second year is a lot easier. Things start to fall in place as you go.
• Hard work, along with good management, does not go unnoticed. You may pick up other farms just by people driving by and seeing the dramatic difference you have made with the idle property.
• I have been offered several farms to graze strictly as a result of my progress on the farms I currently lease.
• Keep the leased farms neat — absolutely no trash or idle machinery.
• Manage the property as if your livelihood depended on it — it may someday!
• I personally get a huge satisfaction out of taking a piece of marginal land and making it into a grass-grazing haven.
• Sometimes we hear a lot about the doom and gloom facing farmers today; don’t get caught up in this treadmill. You control your own destiny. There is a lot of idle pastureland out there, and if you concentrate on being a good grass manager, in time, you will get all the land and cattle you want.
• Go for it and remember to have fun on your journey!

When I last posted about this hot topic of grass fed beef, I mainly outlined the economics of it and how to lower costs and raise profits by:

1. Getting off the corn standard and switching to grass-fed beef cattle production,
2. Figuring out how to direct-market your beef to local (big-city) clients who prefer to pay extra for higher-quality food,
3. Going off feeding hay in the winter by mob grazing (intensively-managed grazing).

And I said I was going to have to do some homework in this last area. So I’ve begun.

I had a long list of PDF’s to give you, but unfortunately, this blog didn’t want to link you to them. So I’ve included the links to them as I found them on Google and you’ll have to copy/paste these into your browser to get them. Otherwise, see the end of this post for the exact words to type into Google to get the same results (and links you can actually use.)

Of particular interest right now is this Greg Judy from near Columbia, Missouri. His is a name that keeps coming up. I’ll be quoting him in a later post to follow (tomorrow).

PDF mob grazing references:

Mob grazing gets the most out of forage

CHAD Peterson sent his first mob- grazed cattle to the feedlot last … Mob grazing acclimated them to close eating quarters like they face in the feedlot. …
magissues.farmprogress.com/AMA/AM05May09/ama036.pdf

Mob grazing offers 200% more forage

GREG and Jan Judy say mob grazing has nearly zeroed their input costs. For example, they once spent $5000 per year frost-seeding and reseeding clover. Now …
magissues.farmprogress.com/MDS/MS08Aug09/mds043.pdf

Grazing program maximizes profit

GRAZIER Greg Judy believes a technique called “mob grazing” is better for … He has been using the mob concept, also known as high-intensity grazing, …
magissues.farmprogress.com/MOR/MR06Jun07/mor014.pdf

Grazing former CRP land takes care

king or mob grazing during the forages’ dormant season. Animal performance may be sacrificed, however, with mob grazing. Stands seeded to weeping lovegrass …
magissues.farmprogress.com/TFS/FS09Sep09/tfs007.pdf

Keep learning; apply what you learn

“mob” grazing techniques, has found bison will not tolerate quite as much crowding as cattle. Historical reports say bison grazed by the hundreds of …
magissues.farmprogress.com/AMA/AM05May09/ama039.pdf

Mob Grazing Missouri Farm Practice

Using what he often calls “mob” grazing, or high-stock-density grazing,. Judy estimates he’s only taking about. 30% of the forage from each paddock …
magissues.farmprogress.com/wfs/WS08Aug09/wfs046.pdf

Mob Stocking

in mob grazing is that it is less forgiving to the bottom enders. In a smaller herd, lower performance animals don’t get. As the plant matures, …
www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/May08_Salatin.pdf

May-June 2007.pub

did not go into brain-shutdown mode. Their incredible experiences with. “mob grazing” is shared on pages 4 and 5. Folks, this is BIG! …
www.pharocattle.com/May_June_2007.pdf

Microsoft PowerPoint – INTENSIVE GRAZING 05_19_08.ppt …

May 19, 2008 … plants. Mob grazing can replace clipping. … Mob Grazing. • 1000000 pounds of cattle per acre stock d itensy. Mob Grazing …
msucares.com/crops/forages/intensive_grazing05_19_08.pdf

MFSI’s Return to Your Roots Newsletter Mob Grazing proves to …

Mob Grazing proves to. Benefit Grass and Cattle www. mvskokefood.org. By Rita Williams … few “mob grazing” consult- ants springing up around the …
www.mvskokefood.org/news/June%20Newsletter.pdf

MOB-GRAZING OF MORPHOLOGICALLY DIFFERENT . AESCHYNOMENE SPECIES”

Two studies were conducted using the mob-grazing technique to … “Mob-grazing” with a high stocking density on limited land area for a short period of …
www.tropicalgrasslands.asn.au/…/Vol_21_03_87_pp123_132.pdf

Now, if you want to search for this yourself in Google, type in “mob grazing filetype:PDF” and it will give you all sorts of PDF files.

So have fun with this!

(While I don’t raise Holsteins, we’ve certainly had some tall grass this year.)

For grass fed beef, you really have just two major profit points – as long as you’re feeding hay:

1. When they’re weaned.
2. When they’re yearlings.

Anything else gets eaten up in the winter hay cycle. While a grass fed beef is only about 22 months old at harvest, it’s gone through at least 2 winters, usually 3. Because you have to add in the 9 months of gestation to the cost – which takes it up to nearly 2 1/2 years.

Cost of hay isn’t just baling it, you also have to fertilize the land it came from, or it won’t produce as well for you the next time (and eventually, you’d only be raising short, unpalatable weeds – or sand.)

So working to finish cattle actually takes the remaining profit out of that last 8-10 months. They are going to put on their final weight, but this is also where they lose their efficiency of gain – each pound of gain takes more and more pounds of forage to achieve. And so the relative efficiency of grain-fed beef, who are harvested at about 14 months. That is, if you have the cheap grain to feed them.

Trying to finish cattle on grass usually means another winter of hay, which is additional cost. Auction prices for beef gets you paid commodity prices, which are as low as buyers can get away with. So your fertilizer cost, plus equipment and fuel, eat up any profit from those last few hundred pounds.

Now Missouri has lots and lots of tough, but tasty fescue grass. So this is why it is one of the top beef-producing states. Mostly, it has feeder or stocker (yearling) calves which are then shipped off to feedlots for fattening.

What’s becoming more popular are grass-finished beef, locally marketed. This is where you get your premiums and the reason for finishing anything at all. When you can jump the final price up above your costs for that last year, you can then simply be able to make any profit you want that the final consumer will pay for.

Example is that while a cow at auction will bring about $800 and your 600-pound carcass will cost you another $300 for processing – this comes to somewhere around $2.00 a pound for the whole animal. Visiting the local big-city market found that just hamburger from a verified grass-fed beef was bringing $5.50/lb. and sirloin steak was $18-19.00 per pound.

Now, that was individually wrapped, USDA-inspected. But it shows that farmers taking over their own market can reap the profit harvest to the tune of somewhere around $3,000 per animal.

Without taking your own marketing into your own hands, you are really stuck with sellling yearlings at auction, your next best profit margin.

To create a sustainable farming solution, increasing profit on grass fed beef at commodity prices is to take out the hay costs – which entails something called mob-grazing. By intensively grazing cattle and letting the land recover (one expert at this says his cows only see the same spot twice a year) – this actually make the grass lusher and means you don’t have to feed hay at all, there’s plenty out there if you ration it during the winter.

The other point would be to get a premium above commodity levels – in other words, quit selling a commodity.

But I’ve got far more to study on this. I sure would like to move onto finished cattle, but there’s going to have to be some changes in order to “mine them them hills” of grass to see more gold.