What Is the Greatest Challenge to Being a Grass Farmer? by Jim Gerrish

When most people think about the challenges of grass farming, they think of drought, markets, weather, or livestock. But according to Jim Gerrish, the greatest obstacle is often much closer to home. 

In this thought-provoking article, Jim explores the mindset required to become a true grass farmer—and why changing the way we think about land, profitability, and stewardship can be far more difficult than changing grazing practices. He also shares why family dynamics, tradition, and conventional agricultural thinking often stand in the way of building a truly regenerative, profitable operation.

Whether you're just beginning your grazing journey or have been managing pasture for decades, this article offers valuable perspective on what it really means to farm in harmony with nature.

Originally published as an article by Jim Gerrish in the Stockman GrassFarmer magazine and later adapted as a chapter in the book Grassroots of Grazing.

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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.

Several years ago, I received an anonymous letter from a frustrated grass farmer. It was
five pages long and it outlined a 30-year struggle to convert the family farm from a very
conventional 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.

In 2020, I spent a day with a farm family and when I left, one of the family members put
an envelope in my hand and suggest I read the contents some time later. I did and, lo and behold,
it was the same letter I had received anonymously years earlier. Now I had a face and a person to
attach the story to. The victimless 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 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 $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 barb-wire fence on the quarter-
section line, how can you accept weird shaped pastures created with a single polywire? The
whole cultural construct must first change.

As long as the mentality is that it is 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 is 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 head 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.