Getting back to our talk here. We got started, well I did back in the late 80s. I did everything wrong. You know, I bought the farm, I bought the cattle, and I almost went bankrupt. And changed the whole story around.
We started, thanks to an article by Alan, I read, you don't have to focus on owning the land. Do not do that. Just making a living from it. And so that's what we've been doing. And we've been pretty successful at it.
We work at it. We've developed some systems that we just keep reproducing, replicating it, and we find out that it's working fairly well. If I can get this thing to go... Which one is it, Jim? This one will move it forward.
This one will move it backwards. I was going backwards. Don't touch it. I'm always buttoning. Okay. Just so you all know, I was pushing the backwards button. I'm always going backwards. This is a picture of our personal farm.
This is a Judy farm. This would be the thing you'd see coming down our driveway to our house. We got into this. We've kind of changed our grazing system a little bit. You're going to see some of this later on.
We've been doing the high-density grazing now for two years where we stock very heavy, we've been as high as 700,000 pounds per acre. We're concentrating on that, and the results we've seen have been pretty breathtaking.
This is a brief history. Our first, in 1999, I already told you, I was not doing very well. Agriculture didn't look like it was going to be a place for me. Bought this farm from my dad and my uncle. All I was doing was making the interest payment.
Just trying to keep the bank off the doorstep. And every year, at the end of the year, that's all I could make. I thought, heck, I'm going to be 100 years old before I get this paid off. And it was a very, very, very disturbing feeling to work all year long and never get anywhere.
And so that's when I started doing something different. We started using leverage. We started using other people's land and other people's cattle. And then things really started to work. And I met Jan.
I call her my stabilizer. You know, Jan and I started dating, and I wanted to see what kind of woman she was. I got her out on the farm right away. And I found out she was an outdoorsy woman. She liked being outside, and that was important to me because I wanted to share my life with somebody that had the same values.
She likes being outside. I like being outside. And she stayed right with me every weekend. She didn't have to, but she did. And that was a time when I was really struggling. She was my stabilizer. She was there every weekend.
And she helped me build fence. She helped me work cattle, move cattle, whatever it took. And I didn't want her to get away, so I asked her to marry me. And she said yes. That's been the turning point.
That's when things I thought really kind of took off for us is now we had each other. And before it was just me against the world. And now it's a team. That's a picture of our lifetime link farm. When we got that farm, it was all broom sitch.
The idle landowner lived in Dallas, Texas. He had given the fertility away of his farm until nobody would bail it anymore. He let a guy come in and bail that hay off every year. And he didn't realize what he was doing, and I called him up, and when we leased that farm, the whole thing looked like a wheat field.
Just brown, dry grass. But with the correct grazing and using other people's livestock, we didn't have any livestock. I'd been forced to sell our cows. So what do you do? We started getting other people's livestock.
Immediately started paying off debt. Debt's a killer. I had a guy tell me the other day he could be making a pretty good living every year if he didn't have to pay the bank. Seriously. I mean, that interest will flat get you.
And the banker's more than happy each year for you to come back and just keep doing this thing. So, you know, how do you do it? How do you get rid of debt? Well, we didn't have any money. And so we started looking, you know, we had a system up and running, and we saw how well it was working.
So we started concentrating on all the other farms around us. And the next farm that we got, I didn't know him either, Advente landowner, but I got him to come out and look at what we were doing. And he was fibergass.
He said, you mean my farm could look like this someday? And I said, yes, with our management, it can. But you've got to be patient with us, and this is what it's going to take. And I wrote out a detailed lease, land lease, and when we got additional farms, of course, and then we can graze more cattle.
I saw right away what we were doing, we had an unfair advantage. We didn't own the land, we didn't own the cattle. All we had to do is ramp this thing up. Okay? People say, well, how do you get all the cattle?
You just start. You may have to start with 10 head, 20, whatever. But if you do a really good job with those cattle, good word and good work spread. And that's what's happened to us. And now we're getting a little more diversified.
We have self-finance or own herd of cattle now. Doing a little bit like Gordon has, or we have a livestock account. The livestock build up so much money, we buy some cattle. That's worked pretty well for us.
We've also become, we're just concentrating on trying to be more diversified. You know, we want the custom grazing. We want to own our own grass genetic cow herd. Now we've got a hare sheep flock. You know, we do pastured pigs.
We've got a few goats. We're starting direct marketing. We're going after more, and we've also secured more farms. Today we have 10 farms, including the ones that we own, and they're all within about a five-mile circle of our house.
One of the things that's easy to do when you make money is to spend it. And, you know, the old adage is, a penny earned, you know, if you save a penny, you've earned a penny, but you didn't spend it.
So that's kind of what we do. Starting out, you know, we really max, we tried to maximize all of our concentration on capturing every bit of free solar energy we could on every blade of grass. And I think that's what's really put us over the top.
We have neighbors that have bought a new tractor. I'd like to tell you all, all the metal, they concentrate on buying that new pickup truck. Fertilizers, you know, we just don't do any of that stuff.
And it's amazing how quickly our capital has started building. And it's like Gordon said, you know, if you've got just a little pile and you start putting it in there, kind of pat it down, and boy, pretty soon you've got a pretty nice pile there.
But you've got to guard that pile. You just can't be frivolous spenders. We do spend money, but we watch what we spend money on, and that is good water facilities, safe handling facilities, and we pay cash for everything.
We've taken the banker out of our operation. Boy, that's a good feeling. I could associate with what Jim Gerrish is saying this morning about being in debt. Well, I didn't sleep good. I really didn't.
I hated the fact that I didn't have control of my life. Somebody else did. And it was like somebody else owned me. They could tell me what to do. And I didn't like that feeling at all. And I'll never go back to that feeling.
I don't plan on it. On the handling facilities, people have been to our farm and go, man, you've got some really nice handling facilities. Well, we were trying to run cattle and makeshift stuff, and I got hurt twice in one year that could have been career-ending hurts.
Luckily, they weren't. That was kind of a red flag out to me saying, great, you know, you need to do something about this. Because if I get hurt, you know, we're probably going to be out of business.
So we made the investment. To us, Jan and I both, we hadn't really been exposed to a lot of success, not this kind of success, where everything we seemed to do was really, we saw a direct result, you know, boom.
And so we basically, you know, we believe success is a lifestyle. I'm sorry. Well, at least I didn't touch that one. Jim told me not to. All right. Sorry about that, folks. You put tape over that, Jim.
So, you know, I think it is a lifestyle. I've seen people that live a lifestyle that you think they're very successful. I wouldn't trade their bank accounts for anything. They're so far in debt they can't see out.
So just what you see on the surface, that doesn't mean anything. I have a very good friend that lives in Harrisburg, a little town down the road, and he is so tight. It's just the way he is. Okay? This guy is probably the second largest landowner in Boone County.
To see him, you'd think the guy didn't have a dime. But that's just his frugal, and that's why he's got what he's got. The guy is super frugal. There's nothing wrong. People call me tight. Well, don't call me tight.
I don't care. We've invested everything into livestock and savings. Richard Perry was saying this morning, you know, if you can get something that pays you back interest, pay yourself first. And we try to do that.
If you have cash and it's accessible as human beings, it's very easy to spend it. And so we try and get it out, you know, get it out of something, you can grab a hold of, there's always something on the farm that'll grab it and take it.
There is. So don't keep it where you can get to it. These are some of the investments we've made. This is a farm we got. Got a 10-year lease on this farm. It's free. This is a school teacher that's a deer hunter.
He had a bottom down here that was a solid thatch. He never saw any deer. Wasn't any reason for any deer to be down in there. Just fesky thatch. And now that whole farm is about 50 to 60 percent clover in the fall of the year.
And we manage this farm for deer season. We've got that on our grazing plan. We can't be on that farm from November, well, from November 1st, and I don't like being on it even from the middle of October because I want some regrowth out there for those deer hunters.
And that regrowth is good stuff. The cattle just mobbed it off, and so they got a nice, tender, you might say, food pot after the deer. And so the way we got this lease, though, is this landowner, I gave him a copy of my book.
He's a school teacher. He sat down and read the darn thing in one night and called me up the next morning and wanted to sign the lease. We built a pond on it. He paid half the cost of the pond. I paid the other half.
And that one tank waters 80 acres. We do the mob density on here. This is the spring of the year, and they're a little bit looser stock there, but basically we just move from one section to the next.
We use all poly water, and you're going to see that in a minute how we do all that. But I don't mind spending money on something like that. You've got to have water, but you don't need to get crazy with it.
Kind of like Ian Mitchell, he's wisened me up quite a bit. Ian Mitchell Ennis from South Africa. People get carried away, spend a lot of money on water. Cattle do have four legs. You know, they can walk to a water.
Building cow numbers. Well, I already told you, you know, we're building our own herd, but we can't get the numbers of cows that we want as far as the genetics. So we're going to always do the diversity thing where we have custom-grazed cows, which gives us cash flow, just like having a check every month.
We're also saving heifers and putting those in the herds, in the herd or in the mob. And those heifers that adjust to our management style and can survive in our system, they go into the cow herd. The ones that don't, they're out.
We're also in a unique position that we're financially secure enough. We're saving every single yearling we've got. We're not selling them as 400 pounders. We've got them straightened out. We've got all this cheap grass.
Why do we want to sell a 400-pound cat where we can sell an 8,000 or 9,000? This last year, you know, we sold some steers at 11 to 1,200 pounds as grass-finished beef, $1,400 to $1,500 a piece. The only cost that we had in those was our grass from our custom graze, you know, from our farms.
So I think that's a good thing. If you can put a product on the table or a saleap product of the grass, I don't see anything wrong with that. These are some of the cows that were grazing. Those are some of ours.
Most of you have probably heard of South Poles. They're a four-way cross, beef cross. They're originally developed in Alabama, but they work pretty good in Missouri. I told you earlier we got into some hair sheep.
We got into the hair sheep originally for weed control. And we found out pretty quick these darn hair sheep can pretty well survive on what's out there. They don't need a real good forage. Weeds. They really go after the weeds.
The iron weed, they'll eat any kind of weed. Milkweed, bone nettles. If you've got briars, you won't have not after you have sheep out there for a while. They'll graze them out. They go after blackberries.
So what we've done, instead of spraying our weeds and our briars, we've taken those weeds and briars and turned them into meat. This isn't just a hair sheep flock. This is a parasite-resistant hair sheep flock.
We don't believe in worming. First of all, I don't think it, I think if you have a hair sheep flock or any kind of sheep flock, if you've got to worm them, it's not sustainable because you've got to get those darn things up.
And we've got neighbors worming their sheep every month in the warm season. They were in a 38-inch rainfall area. In Texas or in the West, it's not a problem. But in Missouri, it's a real problem. And when you start worming those darn things, boy, you're putting a crutch under them, and you're never going to get out of it.
So we, right from the start, did not worm. We lost a lot of ewes. This last year we lost maybe three. This year we've lost, I don't know, several lambs. You're going to lose a few lambs. I mean, when you're running that many sheep, you're going to lose a few.
But, boy, it sure makes the sheep business a lot more funner when you don't have to worm them. We just don't do that. So we don't trim their hoods. We don't dock their tails. We don't worm. We don't give them any kind of shot.
We don't help them with their lambing. There's no lambing. No lambing assistance. We don't even go in the pasture when they're lambing. And what we found out is they do fine. We lamb on the pasture in May when the grass is green.
Something we found out, we started our first year, the ewes that we bought were bred to lamb in March. You don't want lamb in March. It's too cold and there's no grass. So we thought, well, we'll be smart.
We'll move it up to April. Well, this last year we moved it up to May. We like that a whole lot better. Now you've got a full month of green grass in that ewe. And when she does drop those little ones, boy, she's primed.
She's in good body condition. She can give a lot of milk. You don't have any health problems with your little lambs. And they just go right on. They just go right on. So trying to mimic Mother Nature as much as possible.
That's what we're doing. And we don't wean the lambs. We leave the lambs right in there with the plot all year long. The only management practice that we use on these that requires any attention from us is when those little ram lambs are about 16 weeks old, you've got to get them castrated.
They're sexually mature at 16 to 17 weeks. And that's one thing I will warn you about. You do not want your ram lamps in your ewes. You're going to be lambing in the winter. You will have some, we bought some from a guy and a friend of ours did.
Luckily, I didn't. I was primed to buy like 50 of them and the weather was so bad that I never got them and got them and it was a blessing. It was a blessing because the guy that did buy them, he lost about 70% of his lamb crop.
The darn thing started lambing in January, February. That's not the time to drop a little eight-pound lamb out on the frozen ground. There's nothing out there. So the only thing we do is we castrate the ram lambs and we do provide them a guard dog.
We're in an area where there's lots of coyotes and if you don't have a guard dog, you're out of the sheep business pretty quick in our country. We have a lot of bobcats. So we've got to have a guard dog.
We do have something, y'all remind me at the end of the talk I'm going to go over with, we may have a way to get away from the guard dog. But anyway, right now that's what we got. You know, we try and focus on unfair advantages.
You always, you know, you hear about the way to leverage, you know, find a way to leverage what you've got. That's kind of what we do. Our land leases, people are always kind of kidding us, ribbing us.
Boy, Greg, don't you, how do you sleep at night? Your land leases are so darn cheap. Well, if you came out and followed us over a week's time at the work and the thought process and working with the landowners that we do, you know, they're not free.
There's still a lot of work goes into it. But if your land lease is economical, it sure makes you want to try a little harder to keep it that way. Our highest lease is $5 an acre a year. And we're getting paid to graze people's cattle while we're building our farm soils.
What's better than that? We're using other people's land, other people's cattle, and we're growing more grass each year. What we've got tied in it is our management. We're selling our management. So it's kind of a win-win solution.
We've taken a lot of the risk out of the ranching business by doing this. The multi-species, you know, the goats and the cattle together, and there's probably a hog somewhere out there. The more species we have mixed together, we kind of like that, the diversity.
They each prop each other up. Starting to do some direct marketing very early in the game on this. From our early results, it looks like we're doing pretty well with it. We don't have a tractor, okay?
So we don't have the ability to sow any annual legumes or annuals, winter annuals, any of that stuff. We just do fescue, red clover. But what we're finding out, with this mob density grazing, where we're really beating up the ground with the cattle hooves, we are getting a lot more diversity of cool season and warm season grasses.
And the quality of them has increased tremendously. We didn't see that before. I'm going to get into that after a while. There I go backwards again. So, you know, we're building the business one customer at a time.
My wife, Jan, she works at the University of Missouri in biosciences. And she works with a lot of educated professionals. The higher your education level is, you know, those are target customers. They're concerned about their health.
And that's how we're moving a lot of our meat. Resetting target goals. You know, talked about earlier, Jim, talking about goals. When you set a goal and you reach that goal, I know, well, I think I told the story at another conference, and some of y'all may have heard this, but I had the goals written on a refrigerator, and I wanted to become a grass farmer.
And we had a guy come in and wanted to use a bathroom one day, and I had it on the mirror in the bathroom. And he came out and said, you're going to be growing marijuana? He's a grass farmer in marijuana.
So I hadn't set him straight on that. Seriously, though, I think once you set a goal and you reach it, you can get sluggish, stagnant. You think you've reached your pinnacle. And so you constantly got to be investing, I think, in new ideas, new technology.
And it doesn't have to be expensive technology. It's stuff that has been around for eons. We just need to go back and relearn it. You don't have to spend money on fancy machining or anything. A lot of us just learning, I think.
I know I was extremely guilty of thinking that I'd learned about everything there was about grazing. Heck, I found I didn't know anything. There was a lot that I don't know. It wasn't that I didn't know anything, but there's a lot more out there.
I think all of us have room to grow, and that's what's exciting about this whole thing. You know, Jan and I do a lot of brainstorming. We write down stuff and try and target out kind of what could happen, a lot of what-if scenarios.
And it's good to, you know, Jan and I will bounce ideas off each other. Before I didn't have, you know, before I met Jan, it was just, you know, what would happen if I did this, my own thought process.
The more minds you have in this, you have kids, I'd highly recommend getting the kids involved. I don't know how many of y'all know the people in Colorado, the James Ranch. They have bi-weekly or every month they have a meeting.
They all sit down. Even the little kids have input into the meeting of the ranch, what they're going to do. And if they're not on the same page, they work it out. That was just amazing, having that terrific story.
You know, Jan simplifies things. I'll sit over to this, you know, and she'll say, what do you think? And hold on, you know, and I get it all out. And what about this? She may come at it at a completely different angle.
And I'm like, dang, that's too dang simple. You know, us men kind of like to overcomplicate things sometimes. So I'll come back a lot of times, darn, that's too simple. This is a big one. I think handing out praise, people are really, you know, if you're, I've been around a fellow that's very proud for many, many years, and it would kill him to hand out a praise to somebody.
It doesn't cost anything, folks. It's the best thing you can do. You know, somebody makes a contribution, reward them. Tell them. Good job. Good thought. Wow, great idea. You know, promote this cohesion.
That's what you've got to do. Because a team will be in me every time, or I. You know, I can't stress that enough. This is something that we work at quite a bit. Because if we don't keep our land, our landowners keep a girl, you jump through a lot of hoops with those landowners.
Well, folks, if we don't, we're going to be out of the grazing business. We can't afford to own the land. Not to graze the kind of system that we have out here. We can't run the number ahead without all this land.
So if we lose the land, we're out of business. So, you know, we've really worked on these landowner friendships. I think it's extremely important. I have people call me all the time and say, well, I had this land, I got this fixed up, and I did that, and he kicked me off.
I lost the lease. Well, there was probably some warning signs there right from the start. I don't sign a lease unless I can get seven years. You need a good year to get the darn thing up and going. You're going to put some fence in or whatever, water system.
You can't go on a one-year lease. You just don't do that. When we started out, we did take a few five-year leases, but we don't do that anymore. And I lost a good lease probably two years ago. There was about 60 acres, solid grass, pond right in the middle, about two and a half miles from our house.
I went over and talked to the guy, and he wouldn't go seven years. All he would go is four. He had a real concern by tying up his land for seven years. And so I walked away. And ever since then, all he's done is give the hay away.
Why is the hay seven away? It's just my... That's something that. It's in the Bible. Yeah, it's in the Bible. It's in the Bible. Hey, that's a quote from Mal. That is our target. We don't, you know, if you're going to put the fence in and the post and go through the management, work with the landowner, improve the land, why not get something out of it?
It's going to take a couple years to get the darn thing up and going good. You need five years of good, productive grazing. Don't go any less than, we don't go any less than seven years. Starting out, you may have to go that three to four years.
And I probably would. If I was a new grader just starting out and that's all I could get, I would go for it. Because that's my door. That's my opening in the door. Y'all can't expect just to start out at the top.
Because I'm crazy. My God, we took some crazy stuff. I wouldn't dream of taking stuff like that now. But we took some wild cattle. We took cattle that when they came out of the trailer, we didn't see them for a week.
No, seriously. I hadn't even heard of Bud Williams. I didn't know who he was. If I had, I'd have tried to do... What's that? Yeah, the cattle hadn't heard of Bud either. These cattle, honest to God, when that door flew open, they took off running.
They ended up down in the bush. And I didn't see them for a week. The only way we moved them that whole summer was I'd leave the paddock gate open. They were broke to hot water. They had been running against hot.
I swear they'd never seen a person. The only way you could move them was you open the gate, you put a bucket in the gate, and you leave quietly. Quietly. And when you came out the next day, you snuck up and you closed the gate and you got out of there.
Because they had moved themselves. And I did that all summer long. And at the end of the summer, the cattle owner came to pick them up. And you talk about a circus. The way we got those cattle in the corral was each day I'd got to feed them.
I just kept moving the feeder closer to the corral. And we finally, I snuck out the window while they were eating. I slammed the gate behind them. And the cattle unloaded them up and they averaged 0.69 pounds a day gain for the whole summer.
He was ecstatic. I'm like, 0.69. And that was when I was getting paid by the pound, folks. I worked all summer for 0.69 pounds a game. So I took some pretty rank stuff. We don't do that anymore. But starting out, you know, don't expect for everything to be a cherry.
Boy, we've been through some really tough stuff, Jan and I have. We grazed a group of cows that came out of Nebraska. Those darn things were range cattle. They'd never seen a person on foot. Never seen a person on foot.
It was either horseback or in a pickup. And when they turned those out, they were the same way they were gone. I thought I can tame these down. Well, I tried, but I got them tamed by the end of the summer.
The way you tagged those calves is you ran by the cow on the four-wheeler, you grabbed the newborn calf, you threw it up on the seat, and just give it the throttle and go like heck. Because that cat was trying to kill you.
No, I'm serious. And you didn't want to mess around. You wanted to make sure you got the cap on the first grab. Because if you did in the second grab, she was right up in the middle of the four-wheeler trying to knock you off of it.
Jan was riding side saddle one day on the four-wheeler, and we had a cat that we'd missed the first day, so now it's two days old. It could run. So I'm doing about 30 miles an hour beside this cat. I said, Jan, jump off and get it.
We were talking last night about women's work and Carolyn's, and he all did any weird jobs. I almost got up and talked about that. For some reason, Jan wouldn't jump off. But, you know, we've had some really, really rogue stock.
We did bucking horses for a rodeo outfit. I won't go into all that. We did find out one thing. Rodeo people are different. How did they do this electric fence? What's that? Yeah, the question was, how did the bucking stock do with electric fence?
You ever seen a kite string? Yeah. Those big draft horses would hit those electric fences and they'd just keep going until they had a whole collection of them around the neck. When they got to the far end of the farm, they were still getting shot.
And there was posts laying everywhere. But you know what? I did that for two years. And it was some of the best money I ever made at that time, I thought, because I didn't have any. It kept me afloat.
Every Friday I would get together with a guy. I had to round the horses up on Friday nights. And I'd get my horse saddled up and we'd go after those horses and we'd chase them. So I ain't round them up, just chase them.
And finally, they'd get tired of being chased and they'd run in the corral. I hadn't been to Bud's thing yet either, so I knew how to walk them up. And so, you know, I guess the lesson from all this is I'm glad I went through all that because it really makes you appreciate things when things do start to work better and things will get better.
I could have given up during that time and said, you know, this just isn't worth it. But I'm glad that I didn't. And things have gotten a lot better. On the landowners, you know, we keep, back to the landowners, we keep in touch with them bi-weekly.
I send them emails. And I don't care what it is. It can be a little thing as we had a baby, you know, had a couple of twin goats last kids, or the sheep were lambing, or whatever. I don't care what it is.
Any development on their farm, whether you're cutting up a tree that fell on the fence, we send them an email. These landowners that we have are very busy folks. They don't get a chance to get out to their land very often.
So we are their eyes and ears of their land. So they're depending on us to give them their farm fix. We call them farm fix. They need their farm fix. And we have one of the landowner calls almost every week from Dallas, Texas.
He's got to have his Missouri fix. He really does. He's living in the middle of Dallas, 10 million people, and he keeps his sanity by calling us to get in contact with this farm. That's what he's living for.
This guy's in debt. He still owes on this farm. He's looking at buying another farm right next to it to expand. Seriously, this guy is just nuts. He's one of our best cattle owners. He's one of our best landowners.
We send him pictures and updates of their farm. You know, I don't care what it is. We keep a digital camera in the truck at all times because you never know when you're going to see a picture that's really good and they appreciate that.
It doesn't take any time. You know, you snap a couple pictures and email a picture of their farm. It's really, really good in the green season. And man, you can get some beautiful pictures. And they enjoy that.
We give them, we just sent the guy back from Dallas with a cooler full of pastured pork from the farm. He said, Greg, I'll pay you for it. I said, you're not going to pay me anything. This is a gift.
And I said, take it back to Dallas and split it up with your sons. Y'all enjoy it. Just little stuff like that. It doesn't cost that much, but it sure goes a long way for building trust. That's the one thing I really am proud of with our landowners is we do have an extremely high level of trust.
It didn't get that way overnight. All the landowners we have, we previously did not know. So it wasn't like we grew up knowing these people. We built it. We built it one phone call, one email, one good task at a time.
This is a Sunday afternoon. Jan and I had about a hundred different things that we probably could have been doing. But I got the idea. I woke up that morning. I said, Jan, let's call the doctor's daughter and see if she wants to go horseback riding.
And so we did. And believe it or not, the doctor's wife showed up, which is just unheard of. She showed up. We had three horses saddled up, and we took them horseback riding. And the girl had her boyfriend with her.
They were doubled up, I think, on a horse and Jan and the wife. And then I would go sometimes, too. Anyway, his wife and I were staying back at the barn while they were riding, and they were just having a ball.
And right down the barn from us, we had the mob in a section of fence, and it was calving season. And this cow dropped a calf out there, and I asked the doctor's wife if she'd go out there and help me tag this calf.
And she got more charge out of tagging that new calf. And it was still wet, you know, just been had. And the doctor emailed me the next day. It was on a Monday. He said, Greg, he said, my wife couldn't shut up about that new cash.
And he said, I just wanted to thank you. I just can't thank you enough for what you did with my family yesterday. Folks, this is a million-dollar farm. Jan and I rode our horses on this farm for two years.
Couldn't buy it. We both drooled at the lit, it was 250 acres of beautiful grass and had water on it. The fertility was good. It hadn't been hagged to death. And make a long story short, we got a seven-year lease on it.
First two years were free. And after the first year, the doctor came back to me and he said, Greg, this is in the spring of the year, everything was green and where we weren't pasturing, the neighbors had this brown duff on it and brush growing up.
He said, he told me, he got right up and he said, you keep doing what you're doing. He said, I never want to sell this farm. And I want you to keep continuing to manage the farm. That's after one year.
So this is powerful stuff. I mean, the human relationships, you know, don't look at land as just a commodity. The owner, you've also got to work with them. That's how you harvest these farms. You know, that's what you're doing.
You're harvesting these farms. We've also started to work in our, you know, I told you earlier we started a grass genetic cow herd. We still feel like our cows are a little bit large for doing the grass finished feed.
We'd like to have them finished in 24 months. Or less. So we're going to downsize our cowherd a little bit and we're working on that. Smaller package, you know, I don't need to preach to the choir. Most of y'all know this.
But we want to try and harvest after that spring flush. That's when the grass is at its peak, you know, and it's got all the protein and the stalkers. They're approaching two years old. Boy, they're really, they're beasts.
I mean, they really rip and snort and they put on a lot of gain. So what we did is we changed our bowl size. You keep reading about people, well, they want to finish a steer to 900 pounds, but they're using a 2,000-pound bowl and so forth.
You can't do that. You've got to go with a smaller frame bowl. So that's what we did, is we purchased a 2.5-frame bowl. He's not very tall, but boy, he's wide. And I think he's really going to do us some good.
We're going to use the daughters out of this bull to try and build a more sustainable herd. That's a picture of him, two years old. That's all grass. He's a chunk. We had him in with, he was two years old, a little over two years.
He was 26 months, and we turned him in with about 70 cow. And we left him in there for six weeks and brought the old herd boy in to help him clean him up. But, meaning the bull never lost condition. The bull we had in there before was not adapted.
My God, he just fell on his face. So you've got to get the right adapted animal in there for him to perform. And he has performed. We're getting into seedstock sales some now. We're starting to sell our ewe lambs.
There's starting to be a market for those because there's not a lot of people that have parasite-resistant feedstock. So our biggest customer looks like it's going to be goat people. It's darn hard to build a parasite-resistant goat herd.
Goats are just, well, I've got two good friends. They both, one has about 300, and the other guy has about 800. And they're just sick to death of them. Because they've got to babysit them all the time when they're kidding.
They're not the best mothers. These ewes, they will fight you. They'll fight a dog. If you go up and try and take their lamb, I don't know if they'd fight me, they'd probably run off, but a dog, I've seen them knock our garden dogs clear over on their back.
They will. They'll fight to the death. And a dang goat, you know, they can kick after a kid, brand new, and they'll just run off like it's a cowpie. That's the difference between these hair sheep and goats has been our experience.
So, you know, if you can sell you lamb at seven to eight months, the cash flow is pretty good because you've got your return back in your pocket. Cattle, you know, you're a little further off. So, you know, $60 ewe lamb, that's what we bought our ewes for in Texas.
That was our original cost, our barbados, and now we're crossing them with these St. Croix rams. That's what we're shooting for. And our flock is rapidly turning white. And we found out that St. Croix is the best in our area.
I'm not saying it'd be the best in your area, but if you're concerned about parasite resistance, the St. Croix does have something going on in its stomach where the worm has a hard trouble, has a hard time making a living, so to speak.
And it just has a hard time making its life cycle down there. And I've heard, and I've read, there's research being done about what's going on in the St. Croix that maybe they can do something to pass, you know, make a widget they can put in cattle to get rid of parasites in cattle.
Anyway, we like them, and we've turned the weeds into cash. Instead of something that's a nuisance, it's not a nuisance anymore. You can see they're turning white there pretty quick. There's still some black ones.
But you know, these old black Barbados, they make pretty good mothers. I was going to call some of them last year. But, you know, when you sell, you know, we're marketing the lambs for $150 a piece, the meat, and you get one and a half out of an OU.
It's kind of hard to call them. You don't do anything to them but let them meet brush and grass. So what we found out is that, and Jan works on the university where I work, people don't own freezers.
A lot of people around don't have freezers. But they do have the freezer above their refrigerator. You can put a whole lamb in there. Our lambs are small carcasses. They're not these great big ones. These lambs, the carcass on them will only average probably, I don't know, a big one might be 30 to 35 pounds.
A small one's down to 20. And people, if that's their only complaint, we just tell them, buy two lambs. But people can afford to buy a whole lamb or a beef. Times are hard out there. You know, people can't afford $1,400 for a whole beef.
A lot of people can't. So, you know, there's a nice set of twin lambs. These are some of our sheep lessons. We started out, everybody said we'll just treat them like little cows. And kind of have done that a little bit.
Anything that does need worming, we cull it immediately. Don't ever allow it to breed and put its progeny back in your flock. No winter lambing, unassisted male lambing. Keep it simple. We switched to this two years ago, holistic plan grazing.
We're doing the high density type stuff. We used to be on a two-day graze period, and now we're on daily and half-day moves. We've increased our stock, our herd density where we've really got them tight.
And we go from, it ranges from 100,000 up to 500,000 pounds per acre. What we found out is areas and paddocks that we never could get cattle really a lot of impact on, you bunch them up like that, really neat, amazing things start to happen.
You get a lot more trampling effect. You get more litter deposited on the ground. And that's, you'll hear me talk about litter quite a bit today. Litter is something that I really missed the boat on before we just weren't getting the litter put on the ground.
We weren't getting a lot of litter. And now we're getting a lot. Don't increase your stocking rate. And get your density up first and work on that. Okay? Concentrate on animal performance. This is a mistake that I made.
I wasn't doing that and we are now. But don't, you know, I was in the lands, what they call the landscaping mode where I was concentrating more on the plants and the soils rather than the animal health.
And I got some pink eye this year. And that was a red flag. You know, I should have realized what I was doing, but I was concentrating more on animal perform on the soils and the trampling and the mob churning up the soils.
I was excited with what I've seen, but there's a period here, that last two months of pregnancy need to be concentrated on animal performance. So don't be in landscaping mode during that last two months.
We really, you know, this high density thing, I'm probably more excited about this than anything I've seen in grazing in a long time. And the reason I am, I see what fossil fuel is doing. I see what all the inputs are doing.
And I'm sitting out here in the country at Rucker, a little bitty town, and I'm looking at what we're doing on the farm with just a management change. We didn't buy any fancy inputs. We're just treating the cattle differently.
And I can see down the road, folks, this could be huge. We grew more grass this year than we did the first year we did it. We went from, I was severely understocked, I went from 60 cows on one farm to 140 this year and still didn't get over the farm twice.
And we grew more grass this year in a drought. We had a pasture lot about three weeks ago. We had over 200 people there from all the United States. And I was horrified three weeks before the walk. We hadn't had any rain.
I'm going to show them a desert it looked like, you know. And when it rained after all that herding effect that we'd put on that ground and the manure and the urinate, it's amazing what happened with basically, we had about an inch and a half of rain.
From June 28th to October 27th, an inch and a half of rain. Our farm just absolutely exploded. We had grass out there like this, you know, in lots of places. We have neighbors that have been feeding hay since August 1st.
Won't work. It won't work. That's what they tell us. It may work on your farm, but it won't work on ours, right across the fence. And so what we tell them is, you're right, it won't work. Because it's in their mind, it's not going to work, and by God, it won't.
Unless you're sold on it and you're convinced that this will work, it probably not going to work. Because you're going to make it not work. Okay? So we're seeing more grass, a higher quality of grass.
I can't get over this. We've got areas where we have dewberry vines, poison ivy, sprouts. The cattle never even went down in there. And after we put the mob on those areas, they may not have ate a lot of it, boy, they just beat that dog out of it.
Just, I mean, it did. It looked like you took a diss through some of these areas. And you give that 80 to 90, 100 days rest. It's just amazing what happened. We haven't put down any seed. We used to put down red clover seed.
We don't do that anymore. We still got plenty of legumes in our pastures. I don't think we have to put down any seed. I'm with Joel. There's millions of seeds in that seed bank. We just got to graze the ground correctly.
Okay? I already talked about, you know, everything is either eaten or is trampled. That's extremely important to get it trampled. Feed those microbes. Ian's favorite quote is we shouldn't call ourselves grass farmers.
We should call ourselves microbe farmers. There's billions of them living down in that soil. And I saw a really good presentation by Dr. Richardson of Texas, she's in Texas University down there. She had a microscope, I think a 60-power microscope.
And she took a sieve and poured water down through it. It was like a manure pile. And all these bugs, or maybe it was just dirt, that's what it was. It was an active microbial dirt. And she poured water down through it, and all these little bugs.
You couldn't see them with the naked eye. But she had a 60x microscope down there, and the livestock in that bottom of that bucket, my God, there was ants and things looked like giraffes. I mean, huge bugs, big old centipeders, and they were jumping on each other, eating each other up.
I mean, it was amazing. If you ever get a chance to see that tape, I think it's available on the international, or on Alan Sabre's website on the International Holistic Gathering. It was just this last month.
That tape is for sale. You ought to try and get it. It's amazing. I didn't realize there was that much livestock down there. There was a lot in active microbial earth. So we talked about this litter thing.
Get that litter on the ground. And the drought, my gosh, that's the first thing people ask us when we talk about this high-density grazing. What are you going to do when you get in a drought and you got all those stinking animals?
You got them all mobbed up. What are you going to do? I said, I'm going to be better off than you are. Because they're not grazing that great big area. They're all right here. I know where they're at, and I can calculate out what I've got out here because the animals aren't eating on it.
And I've got this nice rested sword, fully regrown. By the time the dung beetles and the earthworms get done with that and the birds, you're not going to find a cow pie apple. Why would I want to drive?
It just wasted your fuel and your time. We use a lot of portable lanes to move the cattle to the water. They work good, and we move the lanes around. We have cattle that walk as far as probably three-eighths of a mile is the furthest we go, maybe half a mile at the most.
And I know y'all out west are going, heck, that's just a jaunt. In Missouri, that's a long way. But we just used temporary lens. It works good to get them back. Here's a farm that we had leased. I had to tell a landowner about this one.
We had them stocked at about 500,000 pounds, and it rained three inches that night. Look what it did. I was aghast when I drove up on top of that hill and saw that. There's the same paddock about 90 days later.
There's that cedar tree over there in the background. You know, it's amazing what happened. We didn't have any lagoons. That was a cedar ridge. And I cleared all the cedars off of it. Now we call it Cedarless Ridge.
There was just tons of lagoons coming up in there, and those darn things were there. We didn't plant them. The cattle planted them. And I felt bad about all those pug marks in there. Ian was out at the farm here before the pasture walk.
He was gracious enough to tour our farms with us the day before our conference. And I'm saying, Ian, can you feel those big old rough spots under your feet? I said, that's where I pugged it this spring.
You know, there's little round holes all over the pasture. And he goes, great, you did good. And, you know, I four inches tall on top. He said, all those little mini ponds. He said, that water couldn't run off if it wanted to.
And, you know, I thought, yeah, I guess that is all right. So I did something silly, I thought, and it turned out all right. So, you know, if you, that's kind of what we're doing. We're trying to build the numbers, and what we're finding out is we're growing more grass.
We are in the grass-selling business. If we can grow more grass just as a result of management, I look at it as, you know, in years, I'm not going to do it next year, but I'm going to start incrementally increasing our stocking rate as our grasses get better.
I don't know where this thing could end, but I think we can easily double our stocking rates, which to me, that's the same as owning two farms. We're all talking about this land being expensive. My God, you don't have to develop two water systems.
It all comes back to what is sustainable. I like this. I think there's more profit in this type of grazing than anything I've seen. We do keep a back fence in, and here's why. If you look up here on top, that was yesterday.
This is what they're on today. When you start putting these cattle in at that high a density, that grass starts regrowing faster. That's all I can tell you. Do you think if I hadn't had that back density in those cattle wouldn't have gone back over there?
The most vulnerable time of a new plant being snipped off is right when it's starting to regrow and it gets bit off again. Low roots are just getting ready to send up this new top again, and there's a cow snip.
Took off that fresh one inch of grass. That's not a good thing. There's our lagoons. You know, we've got that particular pasture is probably, I don't know, 70% red clover. We didn't seed it. It just came in.
We do. We've got a few tamwors, grazing hogs and chickens. This is a... I was going to build a pond on this farm, and this is a doctor's farm. That's a doctor's pond right there. That's a doctor's dam on a pond.
He put in a $30,000 dam for us, folks. That's a heck of a lake. To me, that was a commitment from him saying, thank you, Greg, for a job well done. We didn't have any water on that whole side of the farm.
I paid for the plumbing. We ran a four-inch line through the base of that dam. We ran it clear up to those cedar trees. There's a tank up there, and there's one back here behind the dam. All gravity flow, tremendous recharge.
We've got a big valve on it. There's a little multi-species. Got the chickens picking around on the hogs, probably picking flies or something off the hogs. Dung beetle castles. We're starting to see a lot of dung beetles.
Don't saw very, well I just didn't see any dung beetles at all, Harvey. There's something about the dung beetles in this mob, where you have a heavy concentration of ammonia. The dung beetles fly in the air and sense that smell.
They can smell it. And that's the food source, and they hone in on it. If you have a really active population of dung beetles, they can incorporate up to a ton of green manure per acre per day into the soil.
This was in the spring of the year. I mean, every time I came by, these dung beers are pushing this earth up out of the ground and there's holes going down there. I'm like, wow. Never seen anything like that.
There's a, you asked about tugging. That's the spring of the year. We had about 11 inches of rain in the month of April, 1st of May. It didn't stop raining for that whole month. It rained every day almost, it seemed like.
The water just set on top of the ground. And the cattle owner just delivered the cattle, and what are you supposed to do? Didn't have any hay to feed them. Had to continue to graze. And we did. We shot these cattle down this lane, and we just sacrificed that lane and gave them strips.
And back there on the last day, this was probably 10 days earlier. That's how fast it's growing back in the spring. It may be 15 days, I don't know. But the point is, we didn't have to call the cattle owner and say, oh, come and get your cattle.
We don't have any place to put them. We sacrificed that one. I'll show you a picture of it in a little while. It doesn't look like that today. We were out there walking on it the other day. It looks great.
This is the litter that you get. You see the fresh little union seedlings coming up everywhere? This is some of our grass-fed beef. That's a spear that we raised off of grass. This is kind of a neat picture.
This is my dad. He's 87 years old. He's still self-sufficient on his own. Walks up every day to get his meals. Got him living in town. Now he had to sell the farm because he couldn't take care of that.
But he can't believe... He grew up in this area his whole life pretty much. And he can't, he farmed it unconventionally the wrong way, ran a few cows and some horses. And really, he just can't hardly understand how we can grow this kind of forage.
And it all comes back to management. He makes the comparison. He just wishes his dad was alive to see this farm being grazed like this. And his uncle Scott was, my uncle Scott, his brother, owned some of these farms, and he got killed.
And he was a true agricultural. He was always interested in new things. I don't know. I feel like that's kind of where I got some of that is from Uncle Scott. He was always pushing the outside envelope kind of.
Young people on the land, you know, they're not accustomed to farm. They think everything comes in a package. And, you know, Jan's pretty intimate about this, wanting to get more young people on our farms.
And so we volunteered our services to the local high schools. We're going to start giving tours of our farm. But before they come out, we're going to give a talk. And we've got a judge now, a retired judge that's going to get together high schoolers, as many as he can get.
And we're going to give a talk to these high schoolers. We're going to get them out on the land. And we're going to start doing some biological monitoring, showing them what we're doing with some mob density type stuff.
Show them what's out there. They don't know any of this stuff. I gave a talk to some here about two weeks ago, and it was a real eye-awakening experience. These kids are anxious for this stuff. They don't know there's any opportunities out there.
They hadn't heard any of this stuff. And they were just, it was almost like they were awestruck when I started talking. So we've got a huge, we've got some real possibilities here. I'd love to get more young people out here.
Show them the opportunities that are out here. This is an Earth moving tire, all gravity flow. We do put some money in our watering system. You see, I don't mind spending money on something like this.
This is the, we put the pipe across the top to keep the cattle out. That's all PVC, Schedule 80. These are a brass valve, they're inch and a half low, so we have a fast recharge. We can put that tire in pretty darn cheap.
This is a pressurized system. These are just pasture tanks. That 40-gallon tank ran that 140 cows until about July. Then we had to go to a 100-gallon tank. The thing about keeping them in a mob where they're tight, it's never a group.
Never. The most you'll ever see at the tank is probably three head. And we learned, always keep a hot wire around it. If for some reason four or five would come in and stick their head in, if they get that tank light enough and pull on it, it's easy.
Just put a hot water over it. We say we make our cows be ladies while they're drinking. We're starting to see, we're supposed to be done at three, right? The warm seasons. We never saw any warm season grasses.
And now we're starting to see big bluestem, Indian grass, and gamma grass coming up. And these are all one season perennials. They were there, but they were never given the chance to grow because, you know, just weren't grazing it right.
So that's kind of exciting. There's this thing of big blue tree. And we didn't do anything, just started grazing it differently. Hit it hard and get off of it. This was a gamma grass. I tried to kill that darn stuff.
I hated the gamma grass bottom because every year it grew up and the fescue was taking it over each year and time I got the cattle in there, they just wouldn't eat it. And the gamma grass is getting thinner and weaker every year and such a thatch stuff, I couldn't get any cover to grow in it.
So I'm going to kill it. So I grazed it real hard in October, which you're not supposed to do. And I grazed it real hard again in May before it took off. And that's what happened. So an experiment went bad.
Look down in that canopy. That's all Lesbadiza. That was down in that canopy. And before, all it was is the nastiest little statue you ever saw. Now, that's one of our favorite fields. Temporary corner post.
You know, people really get a misconcern about this moving them half a day or every day. And I was the same way when I heard it. I thought, oh my God, man, that sounds like a pain. I ain't going to do all that.
Folks, it's so darn easy. It's like falling off of a post. But this is the key, I think, is these. The pigtail posts, and of course the three-to-one reels, but these temporary corner posts, this is a big deal.
That's how they work them. You just stick them in the ground. They're a little bitty shorter post. And I was talking to Dave Crider about it and his associate. I forgot his name. I'm sorry. Steve. And they said you can use the Gallagher's, which are the tall ones, and just poke them in at an angle.
And you can do that, I guess. I haven't done it, but we use these little ones. These are the 28-inchers. And we can make a right angle. We can make a lane. You don't need to pack a driver. You don't need to pack any kind of post.
Just walk up and stick the darn thing in. And boom, you're controlling 140 head in five minutes. We use them for cornering. We've pulled as much as a half a mile of wire with one of these little red pigtails as a corner post.
You stick it at the far end of the field and you just take off with it. It's amazing. They're short enough that the cantilevers, it just has a hard time pulling that post up out of the ground. So our biggest investments, probably the change of thinking.
We all get caught in a rut. Boy, I was really bad about that. With this type of grazing, you don't want to get caught in a rut. You've got to be constantly aware. And about the time you think you've got it figured out, Mother Nature throws you a curve.
So, you know, you've got to plan. Bud, where's Bud? There he is. Prepare, whatever. Prepare, monitor, and then prepare again. But seriously, you've got to observe the results that you're getting out there.
Be willing to change. Health problems in your herd, if you start seeing health problems, move them faster. Give them higher selectivity. Don't leave them on that paddock so long.
