All right, well, good morning, everyone. Glad you made it here to Jackson. Of course, I'm Greg Judy. We ranch in central Missouri. It's halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. And we do have a really nice area to run livestock on because we are in the Rolling Hills.
So about five miles east of us, it's all prairie. And so we actually don't have to compete with all the row croppers, with all the subsidies that the government's handing out today. You just can't, it's hard to compete with those guys.
And so we're in the rolling hills where there's not a lot of cropping. And so we're able to get these leases on some of this land. And if you're just starting out and you're looking for land to lease, that would be something that I would really make a mark on is try and find an area where you're not having to bid cash.
You know, these row croppers can give a cash rent of, you know, $150 to $250 an acre. You can't do that. You've got to find these roaring hills that they can't crop or get away from large cities. And that's what we've done.
I grew up in this area. I was fortunate. It is home to me. And I'll get more into that on the leasing the land part, but we've been pretty successful in obtaining leases. And we were forced to. I mean, we didn't have any money.
We were going broke. And I realized, you know, I had to do something different than my neighbors. And I was following all the professionals, what they told me to do. And at the end of the year, there wasn't any money left in my pocket.
Everybody else had it. And so I'm a real big proponent on trying to keep as much money on the farm as possible. And we're going to talk about that in the next couple days of how our journey has brought us to where we are at today.
And a lot of it had to do with it has to do with the philosophy and your daily life and the way you believe. You've got to be willing to do what other people won't do. You've got to be able to accept ridicule because you are going to be made fun of because you're different.
That's a big one. That's a hard one for people to get over. We still are different in our community. Everybody looks at us like we're nuts. And I like that. And I think you need to adopt that kind of mentality.
You've got to have this mentality that if the neighbors aren't talking about you, you're probably stagnant. You are. You've fallen back into this groove and you're not really challenging ideas outside the box.
And I think that's huge. I think we need to have young people around us. We have an internship program, and Jan and I didn't have any children, and so we like bringing in young people to teach the next generation how to farm successfully, ranch successfully.
And we need more young people. I like seeing all these, there's a bunch of young guys. I love that. They are the next generation. So the average livestock operator in the United States today, the average age right now is 69 years old, 69.
So within the next 15 years, over 50% of the farms in the United States are going to be transferred to somebody. And if those young people aren't on board and don't have that skill level, you know, I think that's something we've got a gap there that we need to start working on.
But it's an exciting time to be in agriculture. I really believe that. Everybody, if you get into this mainstream, the doom and gloom of everything going on, it can really depress you. So I'm going to challenge you all, don't let that happen to you.
Everything that you see in life, just, it's always the glass is half full. You got to have that optimism because if you get into this thing, well, you know, Bob's against me, Mary's against me, the government's against me, the county's against me, pretty soon you can't think.
And you just get this feeling like, well, why even try? You don't know. There's a lot of things that are going goofy today, but it doesn't matter. Only control, focus on the things that you can control.
I'll give you that little tip. Focus on the things that you can control. And everything that you do does make a difference in the world. Everything positive that you do makes a difference. And a lot of people say, well, you know, I can't change what's happening.
Well, you can change what's happening to your daily life. And I'm a big proponent on that. So, you know, Jan and I, we started out, you know, we just started leasing land and then we started custom grazing other people's cattle because we didn't have any money to buy our own animals.
And now today we are debt-free. We own all of our animals and we've both been able to, well, I quit my job at 50 in town and Jan just retired. But I think you've got to set goals and we're going to talk about some of that too.
You know, setting goals and how to reach some of those goals. But it sounds like we have a pretty diverse group here. I mean, there's people that are kind of working with dairy, there's pigs, the guy on the backs, chickens, people wanting to get into cows and sheep.
So that's what we're going to be talking about. So the pros and cons. We're going to start out this morning first on the pros, the pros of multi-species grazing. Number one, multi-species tells us what?
We have diversity. And so anything in nature that is single species, whether it's animals or plants, it will break down. If we have an orchard and all we have in there is apples and there's nothing but trees with bare soil between them, people like to keep that thing clean and bare, you're going to have pests.
It's the same way in pasture. If you just have a pure pasture of Kentucky 31, not even like this, even Kentucky 31, that's not good on the animals. Now you may not have as much problem with army worms.
In our area, army worms don't like Kentucky 31 very well. So you won't have the army worms, but you won't have good performance on your livestock. So once you bring one companion plant in to fescue, it turns into be pretty good forage.
If you're running a cover crop, we found out now in the last 15, 20 years, the more cover crops you put in together, the more root systems you have down there. They all source minerals and they make root exudates and they trade with each other.
Certain like brassicas are better at sourcing and making fungi. Our buscular mycorrhizal fungi. Folks, we don't have enough fungi in our soils. I mean, it's lacking big time. We need to work on that.
And the cover crops can help on that, bringing in, you know, just good management. So we're trying to replicate nature at our best. That's what we're doing. And so multi-species, it just adds, it harvests more dollars.
And folks, we as farmers, we're supposed to feel guilty if we make a profit. At the end of the day, it does come down to dollars. We have to make a profit or we can't stay on our farm. So we need to not feel guilty about it.
And a lot of farmers feel guilty if they make money. So guilty that they'll go spend it just so they don't have to pay taxes. And that builds up on you. So is it a weed? If it harvests solar energy, is it a weed?
A weed is there for... Why is that weed there, Caleb? Why is the weed there in our pastures? Cover the soil. Cover the soil. That's right. And so Mother Nature will pick out a weed that's suited to that soil deficiency.
So in our case, you know, years ago, the soybean field that we took over, it needed cockleburrs. Mother Nature put the whole thing into cockleburgs. And those cockle burrs are working on trying to rejuvenate that so I wasn't too crazy about them, but that's what she had there.
And so I had to work with that. Sometimes you'll see a whole infestation of Canadian thistle. It's there working on the soul for you. There's a big push now. Everybody's getting excited about the bow nettle, or some people call it horse nettle.
This time of year, you'll see it all over your pastures. Don't worry about it. It's just, it's a species, and nettles, they are not competitive like cockleburs are. They have a little bitty leaf. They're not going to crowd out a lot of solar energy.
They're not as competitive as, say, cockleburs. So I don't even get excited about them. I mean, we have a few nettles, but to me, nature put that nettle there for a reason. So I guess what I'm saying is don't get focused on the weeds.
If you're focused on managing weeds 100%, that's all you're going to have for the rest of your life is weeds. You've got to focus on what you want. And we're going to talk about that. Got to focus on what you want.
So problem plants, if certain plants, now horse nettle, goats will eat that, but our sheep kind of nibble at the leaves when it's tender, but other than that, they don't monkey with it. But some of those problem plants can become food.
And, you know, Ceresa Lesbadiza, we talk about that one. We've got, you all have got that down here, don't you? Ceresia? That guy's smiling. He's had some experience with it. It is a nasty one. And Ceresia likes a monoculture.
It'll come in, and cericia has a lot of tannin in the leaves. And when that tannin drops off on the ground, it makes that soil conducive just to cericia. It'll kill out the other plants. But cericia is also a favorite of sheep.
Sheep will eat it. Our cattle, if you've just got cattle, you're going to have trouble probably getting any use out of it. So what we went in on our Sri Celeste fields, the ones that are really bad, if we can't get sheep in there, we'll mow them off.
And you mow off Cerius Celestipadiza and you mow it fairly short, like down to four inches, three to four inches. I call that short. And when it grows back, it's some of the best cattle feed you've ever seen.
It's tender, and the cattle will eat it, and they like it, and they do well on it. It comes back real tender. Now, in Missouri, I'm going to give you dates. You've got to adapt that date to your region, but in Missouri, that would be about the third week of June.
It gets about that tall, and the cattle just don't like it. But you mow that stuff off, and on your next rotation, boy, you got some really good forage there. Cattle are going to eat the heck out of it.
And they'll do well on it. It's actually almost as high protein as alfalfa. It's that good. It's got a deep tap root. It can take heat. It can take drought. And so I'm not going to spray it and kill it.
All my neighbors are like, you need to spray that. Everything they see, well, you got to spray that. And I'm like, if you get in that mentality, you're wanting to kill everything. Pretty soon, did y'all know that for every critter on your farm, the bad ones that are chewing, like I'm talking about pests.
Like if you got a cornbore or whatever, you've got a pest out there and you spray him, you've killed 1,700 beneficials. For every bad pest, there are 1,700 good ones. That's directly from Jonathan Lundgren, probably the leading plant or the insect specialist in the United States.
And Jonathan's been warning people, look, we're going to wipe out the pests. We're going to wipe out all these insects. We're not going to have any natural predators left. So when the pests do come in, we don't have any predators there to eat them because we've killed them all.
So don't do that on your farms, guys. Ladies, don't do that. If you start spraying, you're going to be killing some things that you're going to need down the road, and then you're going to have this massive something come in and just wipe you out.
And it's because you don't have any predators. You've killed them. So I like to control brush. You know, the control, the brush and the weeds, that's what we're talking about. Sheep, goats, solar powered versus fossil fuel.
I like to use solar powered vehicles. Now, we do own a tractor now, but for 35 years, no, it's 40, for 40 years I didn't have one. I made do without. And I finally bought one. We got a sawmill now. I needed a way to get the logs to the mill.
At least that's what I told my wife. That's why we bought it. Mowing does not control the problem. Plants do. The animals do. So that's what happened to us on our lifetime lease. So we've got a lifetime lease now on a farm, and the owners would come up every summer and they'd spend their whole week.
They'd go rent a tractor and a brush hog and they'd mow the whole farm. And the next year when they came back, they're like, where did we mow? They couldn't tell it. It was worse. Each year it kept getting worse.
And that's because there wasn't animals on it. So you can mow until your wheels of your tractor fall off. You're not going to control the problem. You've got to have animals and they're helping you. So when you mow that stuff off and it comes back vegetative, boom.
You need to have your fencing and your water. We're going to talk about that. So there's so many things that multi-species of animals help us with on our farm. Leaves removed. So any plant, I'll give you a good example.
Honey locusts, honey locust trees, which are the thorny ones. They don't do so well with sheep because sheep, that is their favorite number one food item, is a fresh honey locust tree about that tall.
They just strip them. They just take all the leaves off. And in about two years, every honey locust tree is dead. They'll kill them dead. And that's without any tordon or all this other stuff that you can put on them to spray them.
If you're going to. Hope you're enjoying the presentation and we'll jump right back in. But I wanted to first remind you to visit the show notes for freebies, deals, and more. While you're there, don't forget to join our email fit to stay up to date on all the current events.
Now back to the show. Control thorny or woody stuff on your farm and you want to get rid of it. Animals can do that, but if you want to get rid of it quicker, it takes a little more labor for sure and more money.
You can cut those off. I'm talking about thorn trees like this. And our landowners, we have several of them. Some of them don't want us to grow those honey locust trees. And for us to keep the lease, we have to control those.
And so we go out there and we'll actually cut those right when we cut and we paint the stump. And we use one gallon, I'm sorry, one quart of crossbow to five gallons of red diesel fuel. And we mix it in a five gallon bucket and put a lid on it.
And then we go out to do our cutting. We'll have a gallon can with a paintbrush in it. And that's it. We paint the stumps as soon as we cut them. If you're going to paint a stump on a multiferse bush or a thorn tree or any unwanted tree that you don't want out there, you've got to paint it within three hours of cutting it.
If you wait longer than three hours, don't even bother painting it because you're not going to kill it. What happens is when you cut that tree, the sap in that tree starts receding down to the tip of the roots immediately.
And when you put that brush killer on there, it's pulling it with it right down to the tips. And I mean, it's done. I hate using any kind of brush killer, but that's another reason I'm not certified organic.
That's a tool in our toolbox. I don't use it very much. But if we're building a new fence and we just leased the farm three months ago and it's got some fence on it just ate up with honey locust trees.
And we went in there and we cut those dudes because we had to put the fence in. I didn't want to recut them. And they will. They'll come back mad. They come back with five, six, seven trees out of one stump.
And then they got those big, long, nasty thorns on them. And so we treated them. And I'm liberal with that brush killer. I want to see brush killer going down the sides of my stump, not just on the top, but on the sides.
If it goes down in that bark, it gets them. And so I was out there last week looking to see what kind of control we got on them, and there's no sprouts coming up. I've got a nice clean fence, and the landowner, he's happy, I'm happy, and so it's a win-win.
And that's why be careful, don't have somebody else telling you what to do on your farm. That's the biggest thing I have about organic is they tell you what to do. And I don't like that. I don't like people telling me what to do, especially on my land.
And then I got to pay them to tell me what to do. Sounds like somebody's taking money off the farm. Multiple species of animals, all they do is they strengthen the whole. We're talking about the whole, everything, and that's what happens.
Cattle and sheep, of course, they act as dead-end hosts for the parasites. And so the cattle can ingest the sheep parasite, and the sheep can ingest the cattle parasite. No problem. But now if you put goats and sheep together and you run them as one flock, they share each other's parasites.
And usually what happens is the goats get, it's harder to build the parasite-resistant goat than it is a parasite-resistant sheep. And so you're putting a whole lot of pressure on those goats. And you might end up with a bunch of really wormy goats if you're not careful.
And the sheep can kind of take it. That's been our experience. Now, there's a good rule of thumb with goats. If you make them graze below their kneecaps, that's when you're going to start getting parasites.
If you make them graze above their kneecaps, you're not going to get very many parasites. Because the parasites reside in that bottom layer of your forage. They're trying to keep out of sunlight. The sunlight cooks them.
So pigs, they turn manure, which if you can turn that manure, we're talking about cattle manure. The pigs, you know, either following the cattle. We used to run Tamworth pigs, and the Tamworth, that's what we started with, and they actually were running right in with the cows.
They lived with the cows. They moved with the cows. And they loved playing in cow manure. They didn't eat it because the cow manure was all grass. So we weren't feeding the pigs any grain at all. The pigs had to make it on clover.
That's what they ate. Clover and acorns and whatever was out there. Snakes, anything that moved, a pig would eat it. But the pigs liked to play in it. And we didn't have wallers. We didn't have a lot of wallers.
And pigs in the summertime need to keep some kind of moisture on the skin when it's really hot, especially if there's a lack of shade. They've got to have shade. Anyway, they would roll in that manure.
And when they did, and root through it, they were turning it. That kills the parasites, the flies. Because you've got all these maggots in those fly, in the manure pads. And the pigs really worked on that.
Of course, chickens, they ingest the fly larvae and they'll pick through the cow pads. The animals that we're focused on right now is cattle, sheep, goats, guardian dogs, pigs, chickens, and wildlife.
So we're trying to bring all those in. Right now, we're basically cattle, sheep, guardian dogs, and wildlife. We had a married couple that was living on the farm. They were doing the pigs and the chickens.
Isaac, our full-time guy, he's getting interested in pigs. We'll see where that goes. But you've got to, for a centerpiece, we call it the mothership. What is the mothership of your farm? We're going to talk quite a bit, you'll hear that term a lot.
You've got to find out what that is. What is the profit center of your farm? Which animal is that? Okay? And also it helps if the mothership is the one that you like the best when you wake up in the morning.
That's the one that you should really feel charged about when you wake up and you want to, you know, what trips should trigger in the morning? What gets your heart going? To me, it's cattle and the sheep is right behind them.
And then three, I mean, I just really enjoy working with the land and the interns and the guard dogs and all the mushrooms. It all starts falling in from that. So animals that can self-harvest their food.
That's what I'm all about. And that's why cattle are number one and sheep are number two. So there's the Tamworth. We actually ran them with the sheep. We had a renegade group of sheep on the cattle farm.
And these are sheep that wouldn't stay in. And I sold most of them, but there was 40 of them that got out. They wouldn't stay in. And they were from Texas. They weren't used to staying in fence. They just went wherever they wanted to go.
Well, I picked out the eight best ones and I sold the other 32. I kept eight out of 40. I picked the nice big fat ewes and kicked them out on that farm with the cows. I'm like, you either make it or you don't.
We had goats in there too with those cows. And there was a guard dog over there that lived with the goats. And it took two years for those goats to accept those sheep. They wouldn't graze together. They're like, no, that's not a goat.
We're not going to hang out with you all. And they finally, after two years, because it always made me a little nervous, the sheep out there, and they didn't have a guard dog with them. The guard dog was with the goats.
And I'm like, man, I'm going to lose sheep. But the sheep learned to stay with the cows. They're always in the vicinity of the cows. There was a lot of coyotes on this farm. But we never lost any lambs.
And we actually lambed with the pigs. And everybody was talking about, you've heard people say, well, that hog would eat that baby lamb. Well, he would if he could get close to it. But that little ewe there, she weighs about 120 pounds.
She's looking at that 250-pound pig like, dude, you take one more step. I'm going to nail you. And we saw that a lot. I mean, they would. That little you would take off running and hit that hog just as hard as she could right in the cycin it.
And that pig would let out a scream and take off running. And so that's that hog knows that's about as close as he wants to get or he's going to get attacked. Those pigs, to get them bonded onto the cows, I fed those pigs corn in the springtime.
We first got them. We got them. They were probably 40 to 60 pound feeder pigs. And they'd never seen a cow before. And the cows had never seen a pig. And it was a real rodeo for a while. I mean, it was.
Those pigs, they'd get close to the cow. The pigs are so curious. And they'd go up, how y'all doing? And my end of them cows are bawling. They're circling their calves up in a circle. And they were just all in a circle like it was a pro.
It was amazing to watch. And the bull was in the front. The bull was in the front. He's like, don't you come up here. And the boar, he was the most, he just loved everybody, you know. He'd walk up and that dang bullet hit him.
He'd let out a squeal, week, and he'd go right on into the cows. No, I want to see the rest of y'all. And he just kept on going. And those calves are bawling and running in circles. And I'm like, they're going to run them cows through the fence.
And this went on for 24 hours, a full day. The next day I went out there, there's a pig grazing, there's a cow grazing. They worked it out. And the rest of summer, it was no problem. They didn't even care about the pigs.
They just didn't care about them. They'd lay down in the shade. And I'll tell you how good the pigs would lay down right now, and they'd even be touching a cow, laying there sleeping in the shade. And I wasn't this sharp, but Jan was.
She knows those darn pigs would go up to a cow in the summertime, it was really hot, and they'd run out of manure to roll in, they'd bump a cow to get it up. They'd bump that cow, and that cow would get up, empty out, and the hog, ah!
He'd roll in that manure. They'd run out of stuff to roll in. That pig learned to bump a cow to get a manure pie. So this is an invasive that we have. This is called Autumn Olive. It is taking over the whole Midwest.
The Conservation Department brought that in there. This tree was brought from China in the 1700s, 1800s as hedges. In China, they used them as hedges. And somebody brought them over here for wildlife habitat and started propagating to the conservation departments all through the Midwest.
And believe it or not, I would buy them. You can buy 25 of them for five bucks. These little autumn olive trees. And man, they didn't tell us they would get loose, and they did. They've got a red berry on them.
I mean, thousands that are actually quite good. I love eating autumn olive berries. If you like sour, you'll like autumn olive. If you don't like sour, you're not going to like them. But they're really good for you.
Anyway, that's the same tree right over here. So that was before, that's a closer picture. I got up close and took that one. But that was done with cattle, not sheep. That was done with cattle. Now I had them in very high stocking density.
It's hard to find an autumn olive tree that isn't nipped on. The deer, the deer love them, and they just constantly are nipping on the tips of those leaves. So to me, it's another invasive that we've got to control on certain landowners.
They don't like them. But we leased the farm three years ago. It's 120 acres, and it had great big ones on it out in the field, out in the pasture. I took out all the cedar and all the honey locusts, but I left those great big autumn olives because I didn't have any shade out there.
And I talked the landowner into letting me do that, and he goes, well, I don't want them getting loose on my farm. I said, they won't. I said, I'll brush hog your field every year. And I do. I go out there in July, about the end of July, and I'll brush hog it, make it look nice.
That's what he wants. And he lets me get to keep the autumn olive trees. But folks, we got, you know, 350 to 400 head of cattle. On a hot day, they get in around those and they put out a lot of shade, the big one does, and those cattle are comfortable under there.
So they can rub the flies off their back on that. I mean, the deer like them. I've seen turkeys kind of huddle up underneath them in storms. So be careful, you know, this brush control, once you kill that, a tree that size, it's going to take you 10 to 15 years to get that tree back.
And I made that mistake starting out on a lot of my lease farms. I was so centered on, I want grass, I want grass, I want grass, that I cut too many of the trees on some of our farms. So don't make that mistake.
You can always take them out later. Bring the animals in, graze it, and see which trees are kind of in the way, or maybe we could do without that one, because it's competing with this one, and mark them.
Whenever you do tree management, you're going out to take out some trees. Leave your chainsaw at home. Have a roll of ribbon and tie a piece of ribbon on the trees you want to keep. There's probably going to be more that you want to take out on a really brushy area.
So tie a ribbon on the ones you want to keep. If you go out with a chainsaw, you're going to cut some trees you shouldn't have cut. But it's a lot easier to go after mark them first, and then you can just cut.
But don't do it the other way around. Yeah, so they graze differently. The cattle are more grass and legume. And sheep like legumes too. Anything with a broad leaf is food for a sheep or a goat. Sheep and goats will eat grass.
Like right now, our sheep flock is going, we're giving them big paddocks. We're moving them fairly quickly because we're growing winter stockpile right now and I don't want those sheep to take our grass down too short.
They're not even touching the Kentucky 31. They're going after the clover, which doesn't bother me a bit because we're in October, what's the day, 13th? 14th? 14th. Our first killing frost in central Missouri is usually October 10th.
So we've already stole three or four days from Mother Nature. She didn't frost our clover yet. So I'm just letting the sheep graze the clover. That doesn't bother me because it's going to get frosted anyway and it'll turn brown.
So if I can put extra weight on a sheep by letting them eat that clover and they're not even touching the fescue, that's good. Because now the fescue is getting a free ride. It's just going. And that's what we'll eat in the wintertime.
So multi-species, this is Ian's area in Africa. He's got, of course he doesn't have the buffalo, but I'm sorry, not buffalo, elephants. He does have these. And he sells these. So in Africa, when you own the ranch, you also own the wild game.
There is no seasons on hunting. You own it, you can harvest them any month or any day of the year you want. And Ian sells these to Europeans. They like shooting those things and they'll mount that head and put it on their office wall.
And Ian gets $2,500 for a warthog hunt. And Ian's like, that's an ugly thing to be hanging on your wall, but you take the money. So he calls it harvesting solar energy at a different level. So in kudu, he's got some massive kudu on his ramp, big ones.
