Chapter 1: How do grazing cultural biases hold you back from success?
Most of what we think we know are just other people’s thoughts and prejudices that we have internalized without much or any thought on our part. These internalized, unexamined thoughts and prejudices are called culture. Whenever we hear a thought or idea that clashes with our internalized bias, we tend to automatically reject it. This is called culture clash.
Consequently, most economic decisions people make in life are not really economic decisions, but cultural decisions. People tend to respond to an idea, not based upon its economic validity, but based upon whether or not most other people are doing it.
One of the hardest things people who seek to become wealthy have to learn is that 98% of the population is not our role model.
In wealth creation, the crowd is always wrong. People who seek to become wealthy have to go places where most people don’t feel comfortable and do things few have ever done before.
In other words, becoming wealthy is not the natural course of events. It is highly unnatural. And, as you have heard every successful grazer say, wealth starts in your mind. In your attitude. In your predisposition to see things others refuse to see.
Some of the greatest opportunities lie in those ideas that have been rejected because they didn’t fit the dominant culture’s ideas at that time.
I would like to share a few of those opportunities that I see with you.
One. Lack of respect for the high value of quality pasture
A cultural lack of respect for the extremely high value of quality pasture is the major stumbling block most North American graziers face.
For example, no North American farmer would attempt to raise a corn crop without fertilizer but unfertilized pasture is the North American cultural norm even in high value uses like dairying.
These cultural biases are the most difficult to change and therefore offer sophisticated graziers a good long lead-time over the “average” producer.
In areas of the country where pasture must compete with crops (humid climates), pasture must be fertilized and managed like a crop to be competitive.
When agronomic inputs are combined with grazing management and growing and/or high value product animals are used for harvesting, the financial net result is normally several times higher than that obtainable with common crops. This is particularly true when equipment depreciation costs are included.
The primary target element in a quality pasture sward is energy.
It is upon the presence or absence of energy in the grass sward that all meat finishing and dairy programs succeed or fail.
This is why most of the world has high energy perennial ryegrass as their centerpiece forage. While I am not yet willing to give up on perennial ryegrass, I think it will be more of a “specialist” grass than a centerpiece.
For example, non-irrigated graziers in Australia and Argentina are willing to defer all grazing during the hot weather months (above 90° F) to have a quality sward to fill their autumn “flatspot” while they are waiting for their winter annuals to get up to speed. They say total summer grazing deferral is necessary to keep a perennial ryegrass stand in hot weather climates.
Conversely, North America’s roller-coaster weather requires a perennial ryegrass that won’t break dormancy in mid-winter in the Northern USA and Canada. There are now deep-dormancy ryegrasses available from Eastern Europe and this should end most of our problems with winter-kill of perennial ryegrass.
Of course, these deep-dormancy ryegrasses are very slow to wake up in the spring and are best used in conjunction with annual cereal rye.
With the low-energy grasses commonly used in North America, maintaining a large percentage of legumes in the pasture sward is required in order to maximize daily gains.
Auburn University’s stocker research found that just adding a legume dropped the cost of gain on orchardgrass from 49 cents to 24 cents in one example and to 12 cents in another.
Energy is so valuable that we can profitably expend a relatively high agronomic cost to grow high energy, supplemental crops such as brassicas, annual ryegrass, oats and grazing maize as long as these are used to replace even more expensive purchased grain energy.
The practice of feeding a fixed amount of grain with no regard to the pre-existing energy level of the forage sward as is commonly done in North American dairying is insane. With this common practice we have all of the costs of pasture but have tremendously shorted the benefits.
The primary pasture fertilizer needed in humid North America is lime and the second is phosphate. Without these two fertilizer elements it is impossible to maintain a high legume percentage (30 to 40% by dry matter) in the pasture sward. Because energy is the primary limiting element in animal production, the pasture must be fertilized for the legume rather than the grass.
Another overlooked part of pasture fertilization is to use small amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to create a more even grass growth distribution throughout the grazing season.
Nitrogen fertilization is particularly valuable to boost early summer growth prior to the summer production slump and to build stockpiled reserves for winter and spring grazing.
During a tour of Ireland, a paddock with an annual application of 350 units of nitrogen a year, revealed gobs of earthworms in one spade full of soil. The secret the Irish graziers said was to never put out more than 40 units of nitrogen at any one time. Little and often is Nature’s way of fertilization.
Also in Ireland, clover varieties had been bred to compete with heavily nitrated grass and to stay at the top of the sward horizon and compete for sunlight even when the grass was six inches high. We have just barely scratched the surface of world plant material that can be used in North America!
Grazing management should focus on ways to provide a variable stocking rate so that the pasture is not over or undergrazed. The purpose of this is to maintain an immature plant sward and a consequent high level of animal performance.
The other major use of grazing management is to build pasture surpluses and then ration them out as standing hay crops during pasture growth deficits or winter. This part of grazing management is valid with all species and classes of ruminant livestock and is where cow-calf operators should concentrate their initial grazing management efforts.
Two. Grass silage
North America is virtually the last holdout of hay production in the humid climate regions of the world. This has resulted in low-quality farm-produced stored forages that require expensive supplemental protein.
This low quality forage is a major reason dairy producers in the Eastern half of the United States are uncompetitive with the semi-arid areas of the country where high quality alfalfa hay can reliably be made.
In contrast, Ireland with a shorter grazing season than much of North America uses pasture silage and pasture to finish beef animals for 40% less than the North American average and to make milk for one-third of our average Eastern cost.
Low cost grass silage offers the pasture-based grazer an “unfair advantage” over cropping and hay based systems.
Not only is pasture silage cheaper in machinery costs and more reliable due to its short harvest time, it can be produced as a byproduct of maintaining a quality pasture sward. This is a win-win-win crop.
Early-bird contractors who learn how to make quality pasture silage stand to make a lot of money before the competition wakes up and figures this one out.
Hopefully, the silage machinery companies will take responsibility for teaching a few farmers in each area of the country how to do this and get this desperately needed ball rolling.
Three. Inter-regional production sharing
All successful ruminant livestock production systems in the world are based upon transhumance or the moving of livestock from one climatic region to another. This is because no area of the world that grows good winter pasture also grows good summer pasture and vice-versa.
Every region has its “unfair advantage” and every region has its “flatspot.” Profits are maximized when regions specialize in their areas of “unfair advantage.”
While “integration” is currently a fashionable topic in mainstream beef circles, they are talking about integration on one ranch in one region.
Such an approach ignores regional specialization and usually results in the flatspot in one phase of production canceling out the advantage in another.
What is needed are regionally-specialized ranches through which the cattle move (and grow) under one ownership.
For example, a calf might be born in the Florida prairie, spend the first winter of his life on annual ryegrass in south Alabama, move to eastern Kansas in early May and on into a feedlot in Nebraska in late summer.
Note, the calf is gaining in weight and price as it moves toward its final destination. This sequencing exploits both production and marketing advantages and is the way to structure an inter-regional production system.
It is not necessary, nor even desirable, for these ranches to be under a common ownership.
The advantage accrues by having the cattle under a common ownership.
The decision to forward integrate allows costs to be cut all along the line because no one segment tries to maximize its production segment at the expense of another.
For example, a high weaning weight is a negative rather than a positive with forward integration due to the higher body maintenance cost of the heavier calf through its first winter.
Four. Maximizing summer and winter range resources
Here’s another inter-regional opportunity. The western United States has a huge supply of winter range resources but far too little good summer range. Alberta, Canada, on the other hand has a huge imbalance of summer range resources to winter range, cheaper grain than the United States and plentiful slaughter plants.
Can you figure a successful production and marketing arbitrage scenario for this area of North America?
Sure you can.
Just erase that border, integrate the two regions’ production resources and you have a much more viable whole that the two countries working alone. NAFTA should make this possible.
Five. Development of a grass-finished whole
The average North American steer is now genetically too growthy to finish before the second winter of his life on pasture.
As dairymen found out when they tried to go seasonal with high production North American genetics, you can’t change the feed resource and the production system without changing the cattle genetically.
Each production system and market is a separate “whole” that includes cattle genetics.
Keep in mind that to finish cattle on pasture, you must have two things - a phenotypically mature animal that has stopped growing and a high energy pasture.
I have already discussed the lack of high energy pastures, but most graziers have totally overlooked the problem of coming up with a phenotypically mature animal. Let’s take a look at this.
The point I am trying to make here is that an animal that will genetically finish on grass at 18 months of age is not an animal that will “fit the box.” It is a vastly different genetic package than the mainstream feeder animal.
When you think grass-finished beef genetics you need to think 1960 Angus “shorts.” If you want Argentine- style grass-finished beef you will have to use Argentine-style genetics.
Six. Organic, grass-finished beef
Organic foods are hot. However, what is glaringly in limited supply at the store is Certified Organic animal protein. This is primarily due to the very high cost of organic grain. This “problem” for conventional producers is a major “opportunity” for graziers.
As a specialty, slaughter market and organic beef could use the smaller carcasses of grass finished beef with few problems. It also is a premium-priced market and more amenable to “passionate pioneers” than large-scale commodity-priced feeder cattle. All of this can be bundled into a coherent “whole.” Consequently, the organic market is an excellent market for wannabe grass finishers to study.
I will go way out on a limb here and predict that a special breed of cattle will eventually be developed for this high value niche market. It will contain enough Jersey genetics to guarantee the production of yellow fat, as yellow fat will be promoted as a sign of healthy, high-keratin grass-finished beef. In the organic market yellow fat will be seen as good and white fat will be seen as bad.
Remember, the first rule of niche marketing is to make your product as different from the dominant market as possible.
If you need the approval of your neighbor for your inner peace, forget niche marketing. You cannot be conventional and succeed as a niche marketer.
Seven. Argentine style pasture-crop rotations
An integrated crop/grazing farm in the United States is now about as rare as a four-masted clipper ship. While this change was originally brought about by government grain subsidies, it has now been internalized into a cultural change. More’s the pity.
The number one determiner of crop yield is soil organic matter. The number one builder of soil organic matter is rotationally grazed cool-season pasture.
Research in Uruguay has found that a rotation of three years in pasture, three years in corn, grows more corn than six years in corn.
Virtually every weed in crop farming is a premier forage. Virtually every weed in pasture is easily removed with tillage.
Research in Georgia found that 100 bushels of corn could be grown following the plowdown of fescue pasture with no nitrogen input. The Argentineans do this as a routine matter and are the world’s least cost grain producers as a result.
As the world’s residual grain supplier, our grain prices are going to roller-coaster from the ridiculously high to the ridiculously low. No longer is the United States government going to store grain to cover for the world’s shortfalls.
What will be needed in such a free market system is an equally free market, flexible, acreage reserve that can be added and subtracted from production quickly and easily.
An Argentine-style system of crop and grass swaps could accomplish this while increasing grain yields and lowering herbicide costs.
I foresee an ownership split similar to Argentina whereby the grass farmer is the land owner who opportunistically takes advantage of periodic grain price run- ups on a portion of his farm or ranch by short-term cash renting for crop production.
Eight. Re-integration of fire, grazing and yellow pine timber production
Yellow pine is a fire-adapted species that grows in the Southeast and Mountain West. Thanks to its thick bark it is unfazed by ground fires and, in fact, some yellow pine species refuse to grow in the absence of fire. Frequent small fires greatly reduce large fire potential, produce a beautiful grassy, park-like appearance under the trees and a habitat that is abundant in quail and deer. However, a major problem with controlled burning in today’s litigious world is smoke liability. If your plume of smoke blows across a highway and 10 cars pile up because of it, you are liable. This smoke liability has caused a reduction in burning frequencies and woods are now choked with woody undergrowth. In fact, many yellow pine forests are so overgrown they can’t be controlled burned due to excessive fuel load. Now, when these high fuel woods accidentally catch fire, the whole forest - including the yellow pine - goes up in a spectacular conflagration known as a crown fire. These crown fires can become fast-moving firestorms that burn everything and everyone in their path and are the fear of every forester and timberland owner. Unfortunately, we have now raised a generation with no cultural memory of beneficial, controlled fire. This is a growing problem for yellow pine timber producers. People don’t want fire, but yellow pine needs fire. A problem. An opportunity. Research at LSU’s Hill Farm Station in Homer, Louisiana, showed that yellow pine timber could be produced better in conjunction with grazing than without it. Grazing greatly reduced vegetation competition for the trees and allowed for wider tree spacings and much less burning. Woods that might need to be burned every other year without grazing could be burned only every five years with grazing. The Hill Farm Station even researched a very management-intensive form of forestry known as agroforestry. This was a planned integration of cattle and timber production and it showed great promise.
The pine trees responded well to an increase in understory vegetation management and soil fertility and the pines in turn protected the grass from frost and provided a longer “green season.” Unfortunately, the long time-frame of timber production did not fit the mindset of the typical grazer and the management intensity of cattle production did not fit the laid- back, part-time culture of private tree farmers. Like a lot of good research ideas, agroforestry died still-born for the lack of a constituency.
In large-acreage government and corporate timber ownerships, grazing ran aground on the rock of narrowly trained specialists. College educated foresters could not relate to graziers and vice-versa. Yellow pine and wildlife production respond exceptionally well to an occasional fire and time-limited grazing. What neither side was trained to see was the “whole.” And therein lies today’s opportunity. Grazing and timber production didn’t end because of economic factors. It ended because of culture clash. Today, there are people who can teach a holistic view of the inter- relatedness of Nature. Today, there are professional graziers who can relate to professional foresters as peers. The foresters can see the poor results of total grazing exclusion. The graziers can see the woods as an “opportunistic” resource to be used in conjunction with open pastures. For example, woods are a good place to “put” cattle short-term in a “put and take” flexible stocking rate system or used occasionally as a drought reserve. They can be used for wintergrazing (with protein supplementation) or for summergrazing. As with any grazing resource, the cattle eat all of the “ice cream” first and are best when used only on an occasional basis.
There are over 250 million acres of this grazable resource in the USA. That’s a pretty big opportunity for someone.
Nine. Re-conquest of the semi-arid West by sheep
Yeah, I can hear the groans and catcalls all the way down here in Mississippi. However, sheep didn’t leave the West because of economic reasons. They left because of cultural prejudice. Yes, cattle are sexy, don’t need shearing and are more resistant to predator attack, but they don’t fit the forage resources of the West nearly as well as sheep. Western sheep graziers are finding that when sheep are kept closely bunched at high stock densities predator losses are virtually non- existent. Due to the huge variation in forage production from year to year, cattle in semi-arid regions need to be seen as “opportunistic grazers.” Depending upon rainfall, some years you can have a lot of them, some years you can’t have any. You can’t build a sustainable income on such an “iffy” proposition. I predict that as more and more cattle ranchers make the circuit from continuous grazing, to subdivision, to herding, more and more will start to see that sheep are easier to herd than cattle and will pay a herder’s wages 10 years in 10. Many graziers have discovered that by keeping sheep bunched at high stock densities, predator losses are virtually nil. The only predator that will enter a tight herd of animals is man. World sheep numbers are at an all time low. The Australian wool stockpile is dwindling away and wool prices are only a couple of years from recovery. Now is the time to at least take a look at sheep production. I know even considering sheep is a stretch for many, but that’s the way opportunities are. Once they are obvious to everyone, the period of greatest opportunity has passed.
Ten. Using sheep and goats as tools
In all areas of the country sheep, and often times goats, are being paid to graze to clear firebreaks, prep land for housing developments, keep power-line right-of-ways clean and accessible. One urban dairy goat grazier living in an urban area takes her goats for a walk every day along the river. It’s good for the goats who love browse, and it’s good for the city, which loves the no-cost method of beautifying the riverbanks. All it takes is a little imagination to turn problems into opportunities.
In conclusion, In graziering, the opportunities are always tied to the forage resource. Look at the resources that most people refuse to examine because of cultural blinders and prejudices. Learn to judge them from an economic basis rather than a cultural basis. If you can learn to do that, you will have a decided “unfair advantage” over most people.
