Farms with already regenerating pastures can benefit even further by merging herds
Starting in the spring of 2009, we made the decision to grass-finish our coming 2-year-old steers in our cow mob. We had started with 22 cow/calf South Poll pairs in 2003. South Polls are a four-way cross consisting of Red Angus, Hereford, Barzona and Senepol. They are extremely grass efficient, heat tolerant, docile, red hided and fertile. We have built the herd to around 350 head.
From the very start, we have been focused on culling any animal that could not thrive on grass alone. We calve in May and winter the calves on the cows. The best heifers are kept and put in the cow herd, and the steers are finished on grass. Our past management practice with finishing the coming 2-year-old steers was to take them out of the herd right when the spring flush started. This was done on April 1, at the age of 22 months. They would usually be finished and ready to butcher by 24 to 30 months old.
We would give the steers large paddocks that were mixed with a diversity of grass and clover. The steers never grazed anything but the top portion of the plants. They grazed the very best, and then we moved them. They gained very well with this practice, but it did require extra management. It gave us two herds to manage — the cow herd and the finishing herd. Two water tanks to check, two mineral feeders to move, two herds to move, two herds to walk down the road to the next set of farms.
The most troubling thing was that we were grazing two different pastures on our operation at the same time. We typically followed the finishing herd with the cow mob. In 2008, Ian Mitchell Innes made the comment at our fall mob grazing school that we should be finishing the beeves in the mob. I immediately commented that this would never work. The steers would be too limited on selection and their weight gain would suffer. His reply was that if we focused on the performance of the steers as the animals with the highest nutrient requirement in the mob, they would finish fine.
I basically let Ian’s comments go in one ear and out the other. He said that in nature, the yearling animals do not go graze as a separate herd — they would get eaten by predators. It all comes down to focusing on selection for the highest nutrient requirement animal. Ian went on to say that in South Africa he was finishing his beeves in the mob and had been for years. He also said that our herd density would be increased with the extra grass finishers in the mob. We would not have them eating at two separate spots on our farm at the same time.
Now he was getting to me, and I’ll be honest — it bothered the heck out of me having two herds. Ian commented that our forages were now good enough that we should have no problem doing the same as he was in South Africa.
Over the winter it kept eating at me. So, in the spring of 2009, we left the grass finishers in the cow mob. We had yearlings, coming 2-year-old grass finishers, and cow/calf pairs all in one mob.
A group of holistic Mexican ranchers came for an eight-hour farm tour of our operations that summer. These ranchers were some of the best cattlemen I have ever met. They were very well educated in Holistic Management and all aspects of ranching in general. All of them were ready in investigate what was going on with this mob grazing that they had been reading about.
At one of the stopping points of the farm tour, we walked out to the mob to give them their twice-daily move. The mob moved into the fresh grass paddock and started grazing the lush, freshly recovered sward of forage. As we started walking through the cattle, the ranchers said they could hardly believe their eyes, “You are finishing those beeves in the mob, and man, they look good.”
The tail head on the steers had fat forming, the briskets were filling out, and the steers had a swagger in their butt when they walked away from you. There were baby calves grazing next to their mothers and yearlings mixed in along with the grass finishers. The 2-year-old steers were fat and gaining very well. We had been concentrating on making sure they got maximum selection with every mob move, focusing on animal performance.
The mob had moved into the new paddock as one unit; nothing was left in the shade of the trees. In the mob environment, it seems that the cows teach their baby calves how to graze at a very young age. Not an animal was bawling. All you could hear was forage being ripped off by their tongues. There’s no better music in the world than that.
We felt this was a major breakthrough — to be able to finish cattle in the mob. No annuals, no tillage, no machinery, no seed, no bare soil ripped open — just mother nature at her best! Folks, it doesn’t get any better than that. Good grazing management trumps all inputs. What we are doing is actually “beyond sustainable” — it is regenerative. We are building soil every day with our grazing practices.
We choose to focus on good perennial pastures that do not need to be seeded every year like annual plant pastures. Our animals are finishing with no outside inputs and no second finishing herd to deal with. It’s much more efficient for your labor when you can combine two herds into one. Nothing has been seeded onto the pastures for five years. The plant seeds were waiting in the soil seed bank for the right conditions to express themselves.
We are actually building new topsoil every day using just livestock and sunlight. We are now growing more nutritious grass for free. Every day we leave a smorgasbord of litter for the worms and microbes to turn into new soil. Our pastures are now 100 percent covered with earthworm castings.
The Mexican ranchers and I pulled back the pasture litter that had been grazed 20 days earlier. Their eyes about fell out of their head. There were earthworms crawling all over the surface of the ground in August. I dug my fingers down into the moist topsoil and pulled up a whole handful of worms. The Mexican ranchers all dropped to their knees to get a closer look. They were so excited that they stopped speaking English and started speaking Spanish! There were dozens of different species of life crawling around on the ground surface. It was nature at work, and man, was she doing a good job of it. I am 100 percent convinced that if you make a home for these soil animals, they will come.
My conclusion: do not attempt to grass-finish your beeves in the mob until you have used high-density grazing for a minimum of three years. I believe it takes this period of time to get the microbial activity at a peak. The more carbon that you can place on the ground surface and trampled by the mob, the quicker your soils will respond. Every time you move your mob, get down on your knees and examine the soil surface for signs of life. Look at the previously grazed area and the new area that you just moved the mob onto.
We have more moles now than I can ever remember. They have been drawn in by the increased food in the soil (worms, etc.). I do not mind moles at all — they are just aerating the soil. If you want to hold every drop of water on your farm where it falls, mole activity will definitely do that. Just look at moles as giant dung beetles; they are trapping water for you!
The one thing we can control on our farms is our input costs. If we focus on working with nature and letting her work, your pocketbook will be hard to stick in your back pocket! I believe the day is coming that we will look in our rearview mirror and pray for $150 per barrel oil again. Fossil fuel is going higher; it is only a matter of time. We must learn to raise beef with minimal fossil fuel to prosper on our farms.
Thanks to regenerative grazing practices, our farms are getting better every year, without spending money on inputs. Folks, we can do it!
Greg Judy runs a successful grazing operation in Rucker, Missouri. He is the author of No Risk Ranching, available at bookstore.acresusa.com. This article originally appeared on Greg’s blog at greenpasturesfarm.net.
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