Okay. Okay. I'm with Jim Garrish, who's one of our columnists. He writes Grassroots of Grazing. And we're going to talk today about pasture, as always. Let's give us a little bit of your background, Jim.
Okay. Hi, Carolyn. My background, and if you want to go a long ways back, I grew up on a small family farm in Southern Illinois, basically crops and hogs. We didn't have pasture. We didn't have cattle.
And, you know, how I ended up going down this path, you know, that's kind of a story in itself. But yeah, I pretty well always lived in the country, grew up on a farm. And so when I got my own farm with, you know, Don and the family, I had finished graduate school, gone to be on the University of Missouri staff.
And we lived in a small town, the small town of Linneus, about 300-some people for 20 months, I guess. And I couldn't stand the urban pressure. So Dawn found us a little place out in the country, and we moved out there kind of late in 1982.
Just had 13 acres to begin with. And so the first livestock we had were sheep. The year that we bought the property, it had actually had wheat on it. And so we had to get that seeded down, turned into pasture.
And, you know, we did that in a couple of years. And then we had, it's kind of an unusual good fortune that, well, we ended up with 260 acres, but we bought it in pieces, all from the same man. You know, he does just selling off bits.
So after the original 13 acres, we got another 40. And then a few years later, we were able to buy 180 some from him. And then finally in 1989, we bought 20 acres. And so that made the 260 acres we had.
There was only about 30 acres of it that was actually an existing pasture. The rest of it was cropland that had been conventionally farmed for years and was in various degrees of soil and land degradation.
Some of it was so bad that he had just abandoned it from farming and it was growing up in briars and sumac and weedy grasses. And so that's what we had to work with. Now, I had a day job at the time also at the University of Missouri Ford Systems Research Center.
And so I was doing pasture and grazing research at the research station. But also, you know, I would consider that we were doing pasture and grazing research on our own place. And very often I say, most of the fun stuff and interesting stuff, I actually learned at home, not from being an actual researcher.
So that's kind of my background. And as we talk, we can move into the more recent times. So you. Well, let's talk about that worn-out pasture, how people who are faced with that can bring it back. What were the steps that you would take?
Okay, before I get into exactly what we did, I want to say that today, we would go, if we were actually converting from cropland to pasture, we would use a sequence of cover crops to help transition from bare cropland to perennial pasture.
Back in the day, so we started this conversion in 1985. So that's exactly 40 years ago now. And yes, people sometimes use winter annual forages or summer annual forages, but I don't think we really started pulling them cover crops until more recent years.
I mean, the term cover crops has been around for, I suspect, 100 years or more, but it wasn't in real common usage. So what we did, and we couldn't afford to do, because we had, let's see, roughly 180 acres that we needed to get either from bare ground or this stuff that was growing up in weeds and brush.
We had 180 acres that we needed to get into real pasture. And we couldn't do it all at once. So we were doing 30, 40 acres a year and allowing the neighbor to crop farm the pieces that we weren't ready to convert.
Now, in the eastern half of the U.S., if we have farmland that has not been taken care of, over-tilled, very often we have low soil pH. And so one of the first steps in the eastern half of the U.S. typically is liming the soil.
And some of our soils were as low as 4.2 in terms of pH. Most of it was in the lower 5 range. There was nothing on the place that would have been above a pH 6, where typically in the Midwest, we would have wanted soil to be.
So we started getting some lime on the place. We had some phosphorus soil tests. And of course, then back in the mid-1980s, we were looking strictly at the standard chemical soil tests. There were no Haney tests then.
We weren't looking at biologicals. And from the conventional phosphorus test, we had almost everything we had was in the very low category. Or we may have, well, actually, we had a few fields that were, because the fellow we bought the place from, he was a long-term confinement hog feeder.
And so he had a lot of hog manure. And if it was within a quarter mile of the hog facilities, we actually had pretty decent phosphorus and micromineral levels because that's where he repeatedly spread manure.
If it was over a quarter mile and definitely if it was beyond a half a mile from the hog facilities, you know, he never took manure out there. So we had very, very low phosphorus and micromineral fertility at distances away from the hob facilities.
And again, because this is the 1980s and we haven't really been enlightened into regenerative practices yet, we started fertilizing with phosphate, potash, sulfur, and boron. Those were the primary things that we did.
Now, we did not use nitrogen fertilizer from the onset. We were focused. The reason we did the phosphor, potassium, boron, sulfur, that's largely what it takes to grow legumes in the pasture. And rather than using nitrogen fertilizer from the very beginning of our farming, we were using legumes.
So we're in transition from the cropland, turning it into pasture. And it took us four or five years to go through that process. Now, there was one area of about 18 acres that I did nothing to. We didn't put lime, we didn't put fertilizer, we didn't overseed any clover until about 10 years into the process because we did want to see would the land just naturally heal itself and go back to being healthy,
productive grasslands without making the purchased inputs that we had on the rest of the farm. And what was the answer on that? The answer was it took 10 years from when the last crop was grown on it until I could go out there and say, hey, this is pasture.
And I think the degraded state of the land is why it took so long. Because I have talked with other farmers, grazers, farmers who became grazers in other parts of the country, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, where their transition from cropland to pasture did not take near as long.
And one of the advantages that some of those folks had, their soils were much more loamy, silt loams, sandy loams. Ours was a clay loam for the most part. And the erosion over the years had really taken it down to clay subsoil.
And when you take all the topsoil off of a clay-based soil, there's just not much there to work with. Now, what about people who are faced with the same situation, but they have noxious weeds? What should they do for that situation?
Okay, so we were on the farm in Missouri for 22 years. The 22 years that we were there, I never sprayed an herbicide to control any sort of weed. Part of our transition from cropland to pasture was just whatever crop residue was out there at the end of the season and weeds that had grown up.
We just commenced grazing it with our cow herd. And yeah, I started doing daily moves, you know, at high stock density in 1988. And we found there was a drought in 1988. And we had sheep at that time.
We didn't actually get into cattle until the following year. But we, in that drought situation, we did daily rotation with sheep on fields that were just essentially entirely weeds. And the sheep performed wonderfully.
We got a lot of those weeds under control. And so we used the animals as a tool for controlling weeds as we went along. Once we did get cattle, and then when I moved west working with cattle and dealing with various weeds, there are very few weeds that cattle won't eat if you present the weeds to them at an appropriate growth stage.
Our cattle on the ranch here in Idaho, they very effectively ate musk thistles. And until the seed actually started to set on Canada thistles, they would eat Canada thistles. They ate gnappweed, toad flax, just a wide, wide array of weeds they would eat.
Sometimes people ask me about leafy spurge, because some parts of the country have a lot of leafy spurge. And that is one that sheep and goats can readily eat, but it is moderately toxic to cattle. Cattle don't usually die from eating leafy spurge, but they'll go off feed, lose condition, and do very poorly.
So there are some weeds that you can't control just with cattle grazing. People in that situation, I generally recommend, you know, get someone who has goats for hire to come in and, you know, graze the leafy spurge with goats to get it under control.
And the other thing that we do now for weed control is the cover crops, because we can use annual forages, whether that be in the cool season or in the warm season. But aggressive growing annuals will outcompete most weeds if you plant them at the right time at an appropriate seeding rate.
If we have a lot of weeds that we're trying to, that we need to get under control as we're transitioning from cropland to pasture, we might go at a higher than normal seeding rate just so we put more competition out there in the field.
So by and large, you can make most of these transitions chemical free. Okay, and now you're in Idaho. So what were the differences of moving from a high rainfall area and now your irrigated area? Okay, the differences between being in a high rainfall environment like Missouri and moving to irrigated pasture in Idaho was actually very, very small.
By and large, most of the irrigated pastures here in Idaho, and I would say Montana, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, Washington, all of this northern Rockies, northern plains region, species-wise, it's pretty well the same stuff we grew in Missouri, with the exception that our Missouri pastures always tended to have a warm season component in them.
And that may have been true native grass prairie coming back. It may have been something like crabgrass, but we had a warm season component because in Idaho, we don't actually have a warm season. We don't grow anymore season grasses.
But I, you know, shortly after we moved here, you know, I told Dawn, if I was just out standing in the irrigated pasture looking down, it could have been Missouri. But then you look up and look at the surrounding scenery and you know it's not.
The big difference, of course, is when you go to an extremely dry, more of a, but a very dry rangeland environment. And we have rangeland on the mountains and we have rangeland down here in the desert.
And they are, to an extent, two different deals. But the thing is, with water, either in the high rainfall environment or in irrigation, things happen very fast. Plants grow fast. They recover fast. And if you make a grazing mistake, like you've grazed it too severely, it's very forgiving.
Maybe you just allow, you know, an extra three weeks of recovery and on the next grazing cycle, it's back in good shape again. On this high desert rangeland, you make a grazing mistake and it might be two or three years before you're recovered from it.
So it's the management of time is very, very different in the rangeland setting than in the pasture setting. But the tools are the same for management intensive grazing. That doesn't change. Yes. The principles, and I will say this, whether we're out under a center pivot at 35 to 40 inches total water or in Missouri at 35, 40 inches total water or out here on the desert where our annual precipitation is only seven to eight inches.
The basic plant-soil-animal relationship, it's the same. It's just the rate at which things happen in the desert versus the high moisture situation. You have to have more patience in implementing the principles of management.
In the desert, you just have to be more patient. But the response ultimately is going to be there. Okay. Well, now you will be doing a school at Polyphase Farms for Stockman Grass Farmer, and you're going to be doing lectures in the field.
What kind of things will you be doing in the field? You know, I just mentioned the plant-soil-animal interface. That's really what we look at in the field. You know, I can talk about that in the classroom.
I can show pictures. And we've effectively done that for years. But being in the field, actually standing in the grass, digging in the dirt, looking at the animals right there, actually seeing in the moment, what are those animals eating?
What are they selecting to do? What is the consistency of the manure? Those things just really come home to people much more effectively when you're out there in the elements observing. Okay. And the dates on that are August 18th and 19th, 2025.
And aside from that, we have the grassroots of grazing column in the Stockman Grass Farmer every month. So lots of information that. And years and travels that you can share. Yep. There's a lot there.
And sometimes I think about how our readership has changed over the 27 years, whatever it is that I've been doing that. And there's some people who've only been readers for two or three years, and they've only seen a little snippet of what actually is in that whole library of, you know, I'm approaching 300 columns that I've written for SGF.
And so the people who've been readers for two or three years, they've only seen 10% of what is there. And, you know, you and I have talked and sometimes say, well, tell them something that you told them 20 years ago, just, you know, little different words and update it to the way we talk about things today.
But yeah, been doing this a long time. Thank you, Jim. You're welcome. All right, we're going to pause now, and I think Douglas can separate it for two different topics. Okay. And before we go on, what is the, have we had any pickup in the registration for those schools?
It's a little bit. The second one's not doing too well at all, but we have had some more. Glenda keeps up with it more than I do. So we'll see. Still giving it some time. What will be the date by which you have to have extra number of registrations to make it?
She's going to give it a month out. So July 15th, basically. Yeah, right. Which is very fastly approaching. I know. I know. Three weeks. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. So let's start. Also on another subject, but completely unrelated is I am going blind.
I've got cataracts and stigmatisms in both eyes. And I'm having surgery next month that will be, you know, they're like, they say 98% successful that, you know, they take those problems away. And so I'm doing those on the 16th and the 23rd of July.
Yeah. You know, they say you're mostly over it in a week, but it's really a month before you actually know what your eyes have done. And so the I ought to be fine to travel and I should be able to see things down in the pasture.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. I've never had something like that before, so it'll be an adventure, I guess. Okay. All right. Let's start the second one. Okay. And what are we trying to do in the second one? Let's talk about what your second school would be, all those advanced tools.
Okay. Okay. Advanced tools. Okay. Let me start. Okay. We're with Jim Garrish, and he's going to talk about advanced tools for producers to use in the field. So you want to start with the mapping? Okay, we can start there.
The progress that's been made in what they call GIS geographic information systems type programs, the Google Earth, the AgriWeb, PassPro, all of these things where we're using satellite imagery to be able to zoom into really close detail and map out our farms or look at vegetative cover, look at soil types within the Webb Soil Survey.
So we'll be doing a block on those kind of tools in this advanced school. And, you know, it's kind of, it's almost like fun and games. When you first get started, you know, make the discovery of what you can do.
Like with Google Earth in the mapping for, you know, where your fences are, where your stock water is located, where does it make sense to create more stock water availability? Where might it make sense to not have a fence on that quarter section line, but have it following pieces of the landscape?
It's actually when I was doing actively a lot of consultation work, that was actually one of the most fun parts of my job was developing people's ranch maps. And it might seem a fairly daunting task when you first sit down and you're going to take on using a piece of technology that you've never used.
And you wonder if you can do it. Or do you have to have some professional expert come in and do a map for you? And almost everyone learns that, oh, I can do this. And it's actually fun to do that. So we'll go through the basic steps of how do you create your map?
What are different layers of information that you can put on that map? We will do a session specifically on the web soil survey. And what does that tell you? Okay, that's what tells you the soil types on your property, spatially, where they are distributed, how much of each soil type you have, but then the library of information for infiltration rate, water storage capacity, the soil health aspects,
potential soil health aspects of your soil, the productivity that you might expect from crops, from pasture, from irrigated, from non-irrigated, in a rangeland situation. It gives you estimates for normal year, but also exceptionally favorable growth years and unfavorable growth years.
So you can kind of look at what is the window of expected productivity based on the amount of rainfall that we're doing. Most states have a good database and I mostly believe the numbers. There's a few states that, you know, someone's just dropped the ball and the information isn't there.
And occasionally on the crop yield and pasture yield estimates, there's a few states where I could question the accuracy of their or reliability of their estimates. But yeah, the combination of Google Earth, Web Soil Survey, and then we also, of course, will have to talk about smartphone apps.
Because when I start for mapping pastures for measuring areas, distances, things like that, when I first got into the consulting business, none of these apps really existed or they were much more cumbersome than they are today.
And if we step back to grazing management and using what we call a flexible grazing cell, so that's where you're using a lot of polywire to create subdivisions within some existing pastures. When we first started doing this, and I first started working with Polywire and making temporary subdivisions, you know, all the way back in 1987, 88.
And either you just paste things off, if you wanted to be really technical, you'd get a measuring wheel and actually measure what you were doing with the measuring wheel. And now with a mapping app in my pocket, you can just get on your side by side, your horse, or walk it and just go around an area.
And you've got an accurate acreage measurement there. So these temporary paddocks that we create and the allocation of feed, we can do that so much more quickly and accurately with these digital tools that we have.
It's pretty cool. I'm an old dog and I learned new tricks. Tell me about Maya Grazing. Okay, Maya Grazing is a software package that it will do, keep your grazing records for you. But one of the things that it does, as long as you're feeding your preferably from the rain gauges on your farm or ranch into the system, it will actually build a production model specific to your pasture range situation based on your grazing practices and the amount of precipitation received so that it can project out into the future what your expectation of feed supply should be.
And you can do a pasture inventory and have that information going in there also. And so these things working together just give you a tighter and tighter estimate on your farm or ranch of what your production, your forage production for the year is typically looking like.
And that makes it much easier to then match your stocking rate. And in a program like Maya Grazing, it's doing that on an ongoing basis. It's showing you where your feed supply line is, what your animal stocking rate is looking like, and it'll project that into the future for three months or so.
And if you see that those lines are going to cross to where your animal demand is going to exceed what your forage supply is looking like, you can proactively make decisions about destocking livestock.
Maybe you're planning on shipping yearlings off September 1st, but the Maya projection says, hey, those cattle are going to be running short on feed by August 10th. And so it allows you to make your arrangements to sell and ship those cattle in advance.
So it's a very, very good tool for people who really want to manage that balance of feed supply and stocking rate. Because one of the worst things that can happen to you in a grazing situation is that you run out of feed before you realize that you're running out of feed.
And you are either faced with buying in additional feed to support the herd until they leave on some day, or you're finding yourself in a kind of a fire sale situation where you got to dump these livestock because I can't afford to keep them here anymore.
And some people make those mistakes and then it takes them a long, long time financially to recover from those mistakes. And if you're using, and Maya Grazing is the tool that I use, PastureMap, AgriWeb, and there's several others now that are similar types of programs.
But Maya is still my preference. What is OnX Hunt Maps? On X Hunt Maps. Okay. So that is, it's one of these, you can use it to map area. And there's, you know, a lot of graziers I work with who use ONX.
But what it's really made for is, so it's one thing, one layer in it. It's a plat book. So it shows you the ownership of properties and where we live in public land state and you have free access as an American citizen.
You have the right to go out and hunt on public land. You got all the boundaries of where is public land, where is private ownership, so you don't make a mistake of being on trespassing on somebody's property when you thought you were on private land.
And so that's, it's made for hunters and outdoors people. But it's just convenient that it also measures distances, maps areas, keeps track of those areas. So it's a multi-purpose tool. It's just like that leatherman on your belt.
You can do a lot of stuff with it. Okay. And one thing. So I, you know, and some of the readers know, I hike a lot. It is the app that I use to track, to map all of my hiking and identify, you know, where I picked up a big set of, you know, elk antlers or a moose paddle or something.
So it's a lot, most of my use for it is unrelated to grazing, but I did use it for mapping areas for, you know, temporary grazing paddocks. What about GPS tracker? Is that on the smartphone or something?
Yeah, yeah. And on access, what I use as the GPS tracker. So if I'm setting up a temporary area for grazing, again, you know, I can walk around that or I can ride around it on, you know, side by side for ATV.
And just by following my fence lines, when I complete the circle or the square, the rectangle, the triangle, whatever, when I get around that grazing allocation, it's going to give me an accurate measure of the acreage within that area.
Is there anything else you want to share about all these smart tools? Not on the mapping side of it, but in this advanced school, we also take a deep dive into the economics of grazing. And so accounting software, spreadsheets, if you're a spreadsheet geek, you know, we will also get into decision support tools that really apply to the financial side of the grazing.
Okay, and the dates on that are August 20th and 21st, 2025. And that again is at polyface. So thank you, Jim. You bet. Thank you, Carol. It's always good talking with you. Yes, it is. Okay. I am going to stop the recording.
Okay.
