¶ Introduction to Today's Episode
On today's show, we're talking sheep and some of you may already be reaching for that skip button. I encourage you not to. It's a really good episode, and you get to find out the podcast name inspired by the Grazing Grass podcast. So we'll get started with the fast five.
¶ Meet Big Tom Perkins
To get started, what's your name
Big Tom Perkins.
and What's your farm's name
Big Tom's Con-o-creek farm.
and where are you? Where are you located?
We are in Western Pennsylvania. We're about 10 miles from the Ohio line. If you look at the top of Pennsylvania and the bottom of Pennsylvania, we are almost smack dab in the middle, but on the very western edge.
Oh, very good. And what year did you start grazing, animals? I,
I guess it would've been rotational grazing, probably 2012. I'll back up and say that in 1996 I started to rotationally graze animals and failed miserably. So I went back to the old way of grazing, which was pretty much continuously grazing three different pasture fields. Because I did rotate through, so, but we were always feeding hay by August.
in what livestock species do you graze?
lifestyle? Now I graze strictly sheep, but I started out grazing beef.
¶ The Grazing Grass Podcast Overview
Welcome to the grazing grass podcast. The podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of grass-based livestock producers, exploring regenerative practices that improve the land animals and our lives. I'm your host, Cal Hardage and each week we'll dive into the journeys, challenges, and successes of producers like you, learning from their experiences, and inspiring each other to grow, and graze better. Whether you're a seasoned grazier or just getting started. This is the place for you.
Calling all ranchers. If you're looking for a better way to optimize your grazing operation and rev up your bottom line, noble Research Institute can help. Noble's unique approach to education pairs their own field research with the experience of their ranch managers and advisors to find practical solutions to producers challenges.
Every noble educational course breaks down the science and principles to help ranchers like you build skills and confidence in regenerative land management, grazing practices, and business management. Noble Research Institute ensures that every insight they share has been tested in real world conditions. So ranchers get solutions that work, not just theories. Visit noble.org to learn more and browse Noble's educational resources.
For 10 seconds about the podcast. First off I mentioned about the podcast name inspired by the Grazing Grass. You know, we have a discussion a little bit later. I'm probably making that word too strong, but you have to listen to that. It's at the end. So if it's not your cup of tea, skip right over it. Um, Big Tom Perkins on today been wanting to have him on for a long time. I enjoy listening to the Grazing Sheep podcast and every time I hear his name Big Tom, I think Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean.
I guess to be more fitting, we should have a hog producer on, if I'm going to talk about Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean.
¶ Challenges and Innovations in Grazing
Oh, well, you'll notice as we go through this episode, there was a little bit of delay when we recorded this, and I've tried to fix it, but you may still see artifacts of that or hear artifacts. Speaking of seeing, I use a software that builds the video for me based upon the video inputs and they do cuts and stuff. I don't do much editing at all to that because I feel this is a audio program. The video I upload to Spotify and YouTube is just an added bonus.
However, AI, the company must change their AI in it because that's how it determines how to make the scenes and what layout to use. It's a little bit different today, so if you watch it, let me know what you think. And with that, let's get back to Big Tom.
¶ Tom's Farming Background
Tom, did you, growing up, did you grow up on a farm?
Yeah, this was a dairy farm. My parents bought this farm in 1956 and moved the dairy cows here on July 4th, 1956. I was born in 61 and all I remember is just milking, you know, just dairy cows. It was in the eighties that, so we sold those dairy cows and we bought just a few head of beef cows, mainly to keep the barnyard eaten down and to eat any hay that was, that got rained on or broken bales. Those kinds of things.
Did, Did, they do? the whole hard buyout in 85?
Nope. We sold in 86 when we missed the whole herd buyout. That's how, that's how good of managers we were of this farm.
My grandparents had been dairying for years. We joined them and started dairying in 85.
Okay. Right. The whole buyout deal.
Yeah, the, the buyout deal was the interesting thing. I, I haven't thought about it. in years. I wonder, looking back if they feel like that was a success or not.
I don't know. I do remember there was talks about there were gonna be milk quotas and you were gonna have to buy milk quotes from other farms if you wanted to expand. And I don't know that any of that ever came to fruition. I just know, you know, growing up almost, almost my whole adolescent life this farm was being stripped mines for coal. And the original contract on that strip money said they would tear up no more than four acres at a time.
And at one point, better than three quarters of our farmers tore up, and we were still trying to milk cows and we were buying in feed all the time. It was a, it was an extremely losing proposition. We didn't make much money at all on the coal. Any money that was made was spent, you know, buying in feeds for these cows.
And it wasn't until they had put the whole farm back and we realized the farm was in such bad shape, it was never gonna be able to grow corn or, or any of the stuff that we needed. You know, it wouldn't grow alfalfa from nothing. And we decided that was, it was just time to get rid of the dairy cows and it ruined our water. That was another issue. You know, we shipped grade A,
Oh.
water, the water was so bad. We'd wash all, you know, the bulk tank and all the, all the milking units and all that, and when it would dry, you could write your name in it because the water was that bad. And so then we
Oh, yes.
so we had to, ship cheese plant and there was no, there was no way to make a living doing that. So that's when they decided it was time to sell the cows.
Oh yeah. Yeah. So strip mining in your area. We have strip mining for coal in our area as well.
Mm-hmm. It's I'll bet you there's more of this county with strip mine than, than wasn't. It's I don't know. It's, it's extremely destructive that, that ground. We tried irrigating corn, we tried everything we could. In this valley. We were the last farm to be put back. And when they were all done, we ended up with
Oh yeah.
of, we ended up with about three inches of top soil and they just said, that's all the top soil there is. We, you know, I can remember my dad saying, we have way more top soil than that one. When you started. They said, there's nothing we can do about it. That's all there is. And being good farmers, the first thing we did was hooked into a plow and went and plowed that under and we lost all that three inches of top soil. I look back on that now and I said, what in the world were we
Oh yeah,
But we'd never heard the no-till or any of that kind of stuff. And. We just buried 8,000 feet of water line here on the farm, and we had the option of running it on top of the ground, but I wanted it buried because I grazed 365 days a year. I wanted to be able to have water in the dead of winter. You know, it
Oh yeah.
frost free hydrants. So I definitely wanted this buried, and it wasn't very long before we realized we were pulling rocks out that were half the size of my gator, just massive black rocks.
yes.
And the crazy part is these rocks are rusting because they're so full of iron ore, they're unbelievably
yes.
So we, we've managed to get this line buried, but I do wonder how long it's going to be before anything grows on top of those, of those ditches that we opened
Oh yeah.
Because it takes so long to get the,
How deep do you have to put your waterline?
We were supposed to go 36 inches, but there were a lot of places we went. 30, 32, We had to cross a gas line and it took us six months to get permission to cross this gas line. So it was the very yeah, it was the very last place that we, we excavated and put in. And we went to a specific spot because they said the gas line was six feet down and we would be able to go three feet to bury our wire line.
And when they came out and did it, we got down to about 22 inches and they said, Nope, that's it. You can't go any deeper. And I just said, I would've buried all my waterline at 22 inches if I'd have known. We could only go 22 inches here. And so it's been in, it's been in for a year. It did not freeze. It didn't freeze. We did have bitter, bitter cold temperatures and it didn't freeze. So I don't, I don't know.
Oh, well, good.
If that's gonna be deep enough in the future or not. But the plan is to pile dirt on top of that here this summer as we go through and kind of clean everything up and we'll make that even deeper. The, the gas line, the gas company says we can't do that, but my rule of that is hide and watch. So
Right. Yeah.
if they don't like it, they can
So you all agrees,
it back off.
right? They, they can fix it.
Yeah.
¶ Transition to Rotational Grazing
You went to beef cows for a while and you mentioned, I think you said you started rotational rotational grazing in about 2012. What brought you to that point to try rotational grazing?
So I had I had a pretty good hay business going. We were selling a lot of grass hay all small squares. Making right under 13,000 small square bales a year. And you know, we put hay in the barns all winter and then, or all summer and then take hay out all winter. And I had a real good supply of young kids around that would come and, and help.
And those kids started getting older and they started getting real jobs and they started getting families and they would come down and help out of kind of a sense of obligation really. But slowly, you know, I could see this isn't, this isn't gonna be sustainable anymore. And so I went back into beef cattle. We just kept a really small, just a handful of cows around, and they really were to eat hay that got rained on or broken bales, just a hay shaft.
We had to, you know, find things to do with that. That's really why they were here. And as it got harder and harder and harder to find these, you know, kids to come help, I started to expand the beef herd and. I was just watching a video on YouTube, Joel Saladon talking about his salad bar beef and just the things he talked about made a heck of a lot of sense to me. I had played music and toured, and traveled for quite a few years and came home in 96.
I had three months to kill and I had a contract signed to play a cruise ship, and I was just came home to kill time until it was time to go play, you know, go work at the cruise ship. In the meantime, my mom got diagnosed with cancer and talked to the guy that I had signed the contract with and he said, you only have one mom. You probably ought to stay home. And so that's what I did.
I ended up growing roots, but in that winter of 96, I went to my very first grazing conference and listened to these guys talk, and man, I came home. I was gonna try that in the spring, but I had that really junky. We call it bumblebee wire, that yellow and black wire that you would buy from tractor supply. Yeah.
Oh, yes.
And we didn't have an electric fence all the way around the farm. So I outlined our farm with this bumblebee wire and tried to run electric through it and tried to rotationally graze clear at the other end of the farm using this bumblebee wire that just basically had no electricity in it. And I couldn't keep cows in. They would just walk right through it. And I was, I was definitely at that point I was rotationally over grazing because I had in my head that it should look like a golf course.
So they should take everything off there. And
Oh,
in my mind that when the cow put her head down, if you could still see her nostrils. There was, there was still grass in there. And so she should graze that off before I moved her on. And it was just impossible. We couldn't keep cows in. It was a total mess. Get up in the morning and the cows weren't anywhere near where they were supposed to be. They'd be over on the neighbor's farms.
And so I gave it up pretty quick and like I said, it was in 2012, in the winter of 2012 that I stumbled on to some of these Joel s videos and that man could sell, you know, ice to Eskimos. And
Yeah, you
so I, so I really scoured and started looking at some of the newer reels and so on that were out there. I, I went to an auction that spring and there was a guy that it was a farm that was selling out and he had done some rotational grazing and he had some Pell reels. Have you ever heard of the Pell reel? PELL reels?
I haven't.
They were some of the first that I'd ever seen. They came I think from New Zealand. And,
Oh yes.
they were sitting in a pile with some other stuff and I got that all bought pretty cheap and brought that home and said, okay, I'm ready to try this again. And and started out and all of a sudden it made a little more sense to me and I read an article the first two weeks that I grazed I was gonna move cows once a day, but every time I would go out and check 'em, they were outta the grass, so I'd have to move 'em again. I was just making my paddocks way too small.
And it took me about three, took me about three days to get the cows to the point where when I walked through the corner and called them, they all came and I could just open that wire up and they'd walk right through the next bag, put their heads down and eat. And and just it, I was reading an article in stock Mcgras Farmer about leaving those solar panels behind. And suddenly I realized I'm doing this all wrong. I'm taking way too much grass off.
And so just started moving cows, started making the paddocks bigger and still continued on with the move cows in the evening, move cows in the morning. And I did that up until 20, I guess, 20, 21, maybe 2022, and decided it was time to get rid of the cows and just concentrate on the sheep. I could graze cows 365 days a year, but our ground doesn't freeze enough to hold those cows up and so they would just pug my fields
Oh yes.
something, horrible. And yet my sheep, they could be out there. They were fine. As long as I'd move 'em every day, they'd be fine. They wouldn't tear things up. And I made that decision. The cattle prices were coming up. And I thought, this is probably when I'm gonna get the most money I possibly could ever get for these cows. Had I held 'em a year longer, I probably would've got even more money for them. But I was pretty happy with the price. I pretty, pretty happy with the price I got for
Oh yeah.
And and they were doing well and they, they worked well in my grass system and, and I'd put an ad in the paper and got two calls. One guy from Indiana and one guy from Virginia and the guy from Indiana came out with a big stock trailer and he looked at 'em and he said I'll take 'em. How are we gonna get 'em loaded? And I said, well, I'll just call 'em and they'll just walk with me and we'll walk right into the barn and close the gate behind them. And that's what we did.
And managed to get 'em loaded. The last cow was a bit of a pain to put on. They weren't used to being. Penned up at all. They got a little wild once we pinned them up and but we loaded them up and they went down the road and it was, it was, kind of a sad day. I'm still a cow guy at heart. We, when our sheep lamb got my right hand, man, he'll, he'll climb in jugs and he'll make sure that each ke is open. And just a couple of weeks ago I said, he said she's got milk.
And I said, in all four quarters. And he said, well, and two of them, you know, because I'm still that cow guy.
Right. Yeah.
¶ Adding Sheep to the Operation
So why'd you add sheep to your operation when you were grazing beef cattle? And you mentioned a little bit with the plugging.
Yeah. The, as I had bought some cows in and started to sell some calves from those cows sitting down doing the math. I. I'm thinking, man, I'm gonna have to have, you know, 50 or 60 cows here if I'm going to attempt to make any kind of a living. And there wasn't enough grass here for 50 or 60 cows. And in probably three different mag beef magazines, there was an article in there about adding sheep. And I thought, my first thought was this, this is nuts.
Why are they putting sheep in beef magazines? And I truly wonder if I could go back and look at those magazines if there really was an article in there, or if the good Lord was just planting this seed in my head saying, this is what you need to be doing.
Oh yeah.
they talked about the kain breed as being like the, being like herford cattle, you know, just good mamas easy care. You just don't usually have a lot of problems with 'em. And so I started looking for registered ka and sheep and I found them up in dried in New York. Which is about six hours away from me. And I drove up there and looked at him, and that gal had a father who was very sick, and he lived in North Carolina and she knew she was gonna have to spend a lot of time with him.
And so she was selling her, her adults, and she was keeping her lambs. And if I recall correctly, he, he, her father didn't have long to live, but she wouldn't spend as much time with him as she could. So I bought her, I, I went up there to buy 10, she had 11 in a pen. So I ended up coming home with 11 bread use, and I
Why'd you decide to go with registered animals?
I just, I knew that I always wanted to sell breeding stock. And growing up a dairy guy, if you were gonna sell dairy cows, you wanted to sell registered dairy cows, you didn't wanna just sell great dairy cows.
Right,
everybody has that. That notion or that preceded notion, I guess it is that that register just means better. And, and we both know that doesn't, that doesn't mean anything, you know, I've been on some pretty big commercial flocks and walked through those sheep and said, man, there's not a u here. I wouldn't mind having to know. You know, it's a really, really nice sheep and there's not a registered paper anywhere to be found on any of them. So it, it really is, it really is, in your breathing.
And so I did know that. Yeah, I, I did wanna be able to sell seed stock at some point, you know, down the road.
¶ National Sheep Improvement Program
We got involved in the National Sheep Improvement Program pretty early on, and and that just, it's it's a program that lets you monitor the traits that you can't see. You know, you can't see the weight gain you can't see parasite resistance. You can't necessarily see it. It's hard to measure how much milk that, that you is producing without going through massive calculations that are hard to do on your own.
And the National Sheep Improvement Program lets, lets you do all that, doesn't tell you whether that sheep's got good feet, whether the sheep has a good other whether that sheep sheds out. Well, it doesn't tell you any of that. You know, you still have to do all your own, you know, phenotypical work. But it does allow you to, to measure these things. And I knew running the grazing operation that parasite resistance was going to be very important.
So we started early on bringing in rams that would increase our parasite resistance.
With the National Sheep Improvement Program. What kind of data do you have to provide to them?
you can provide as little or as much as you as you want. They're gonna charge you the same either way. So I'm going to provide as much data as I possibly can. We start out as soon as those lambs are born, we want to get within 24 hours of birth, we want to get a birth weight on that lamb. This is something you can, you just, like with cattle, you know, you can breathe for smaller birth weights, heavier birth weights, whatever you like to do. We like to just keep track of it.
Early on we had really light birth weights and we had quite a bit of death loss. And it wasn't until I read an article that, you know, your birth weight is a direct correlation to that, that we decided we needed to do something to bring our birth weights up. And and so it, it, so I think it's a very important trait. Then we're looking at about a 60 to a 90 day weight that we're gonna take. And they call that the early, or it's called a weaning weight.
Even though you may not have weaned your lambs yet, it's just a term that they use. And then there is a post weaning weight. They're gonna go back another 30 to 60 days after that, weigh those lambs again, and they do a massive calculation to figure this, this stuff out. And we're also, when that lamb is born, we're going to mark down whether that lamb was born a single, a twin, or a triplet.
We're gonna mark down whether that land was raised as a single, a twin, or a triplet, you know, 'cause you, you can have triplets, one dies now it's being raised as a twin, not necessarily a triplet anymore. But this program takes into calculation how long that one triplet was alive. And so it was only getting one third of the milk that was available for a certain period of time. Then it suddenly can not get half of the milk that's available.
And it, this program takes into, it takes all this into consideration and does this massive calculations. And these, these supercomputers are in Australia where they raise lots of sheep and they know how to put all these calculations together. And the other main thing that we're measuring specifically is we're gonna do a peak weight count on those lambs.
When those lambs are just, just as we're getting ready to wean those lambs, we're gonna take the Es and the lambs, we're gonna put them in a paddock and we're gonna overgraze that paddock. And it's really a matter of time. 'cause we know that's what overgrazing is. So we're gonna leave those Es and those lambs in that paddock for maybe a day and a half, maybe two days.
And then we're gonna move them on in the RO rotation as we normally do over the next 30 days, we're gonna wean those lambs and then we're gonna bring those lambs back to that same paddock and we're gonna have them overgraze again. And we want those lambs to become infected with the, the parasites that are there, that MCUs cat totos,
Oh
barber pole. The barber pole worm. And we want those lambs to get infected. We're gonna wait three to four weeks after that and we're gonna pull fecal samples on those. And we send those fecal samples off to usually Virginia Tech and we get those fecal numbers back and then we plug that into that program that all gets sent off to Australia and it comes back and it measures the parasite resistance in those lambs.
And we wanna have a bare minimum average of 500 eggs per gram, per, I guess, per animal. So we'll have some that literally
Oh yeah.
six or seven. We'll have some that might have 26,000. And, but we know because we have those kind of numbers, we know everybody got infected. It's just how good are they at, Fighting those off? And that's really what we're measuring for that. And we know that with parasite resistance, with the, with the work that's going on in North Carolina University and West Virginia University, WVU, that parasite resistance in sheep is not just about parasite resistance, it's about their immune response.
And those sheep just have a massive. Immune response. The ones that are, are highly parasite resistance. And we're believing that that parasite resistance not only equates to the, you know, actual being able to slough off those parasites, but it's just overall healthy sheep, healthier sheep just 'cause they've got such an immune response.
Oh yeah.
The milk in those ewes are so much higher in IgG, the immunoglobins. And so it's just it's a much better colostrum for those lambs when they're first born. It's, it's amazing the work that they've done and the stuff that they're figuring out. And so we feel like even if
Oh yeah.
raising sheep in confinement, we'd still be using parasite resistant rams for a replacement. A replacement U lambs.
Yes. Have you seen, how long have you been doing the, the improvement program?
Been. So we started Sheep in 2017, and I think it was 2020 that we started into the National Sheep Improvement Program. We had some records before they were able to, you know, upload that they call it historical data. So we were able to upload some of that data. But as soon as we got the, as soon as we got the first fecal results back, we had used two different rams. One RAM we bought that was an NSAP ram, and we knew that he had parasite resistance.
The other was a RAM that we had bought out of Aho Flock that I had some views with, some just. Not legs that I liked. You think of cows with really crooked
Oh yeah.
you know, as they get old, you know, the pastures start to fall apart. They have trouble getting up and down. I couldn't find any information on that about sheep, but I figured if it doesn't, if it's bad for cows, it had to be bad for sheep too. So I, I was talking to a cousin of mine and, and he said, well, you're the one that has to look at 'em every day. So if you don't like the legs that are on them and you wanna improve 'em, go right ahead.
So we bought this show Sheep, they had really nice straight legs and all my sheep now have really good legs because of that show. Sheep. We named that, that Ram Tim and the the ram that was parasite resistance. We had named that Ram. Brad and I got that information back and there was a night and day difference between those two rams.
You could tell that Tim had no parasite resistance and Brad had lots, but being in Aho flock, they didn't need parasite resistance 'cause they were feeding them show feeds all the time. They didn't have 'em out on grass
Right.
So it wasn't an, for them, it wasn't an economic trait that they needed to be concerned with. And that it just proved to me right there that this NSIP is well worth the investment because we knew we wanted to have parasite resistant sheep. We knew we were gonna be on grass as much as possible, and we were gonna need parasite resistance. And as soon as I started to pay attention to that and and improved my grazing, you know, when we first had sheep, they were standing in a pen.
This was February, they were due to lamb at the end of March. And I leaned against these pen and I looked at these sheep and I thought, I don't even have an intelligent question to ask about sheep. That's how little I know about them. And I had read an article that said the parasite lifecycle was 30 days. I thought that meant the parasite hatched. 30 days later, the parasite was dead. And so I set myself up a rotation with these sheep at 35 days.
And what I didn't realize was it meant that the egg would hatch would be then in an L three larvae at the end of 30 days and it was ready to infect your sheep. And so we had major parasite issues right from the get go with that, with that rotation. And by doing some studying and and some reading up on it, I came to the realization that the longer the rest period for the grass, the better it would be for the sheep.
And you know, we, we were gonna lose some of those, some of those parasites were gonna die off. It didn't take me very long to figure out too that suddenly with that grasp being so much taller, it was a whole lot easier to keep those sheep from grazing down into that parasite zone. 'cause we know those parasites are typically gonna be in that bottom four inches of grass. And if we can keep 'em outta that bottom four inches, they're not gonna be infected.
And I've only, I've wormed one u in the last five years. I'm hoping by the end of this summer, I could say I've wormed one U
Oh wow.
the last six, years. It has a and, and some of these U are terrible. It, as far as parasite resistance goes, they don't have any. It's really because of the grazing that we do that we're able to keep 'em out of that zone and keep 'em in pretty good shape.
¶ Grazing Management and Fencing Solutions
Yeah, let, let's talk a little bit more about your grazing and how you're managing to keep 'em where they need to go. Because I'll be honest, with our sheep, that's probably the biggest negative I have is our fencing. The way I'm fencing them, I don't have as much control over them as I would like to have.
So we started off with netting. We did have a five wire high tensile fence that went all the way around the farm, but only the middle wire was hot. And those sheep would walk right through that. They would walk right through it because they were below that wire, they weren't gonna get shocked.
So we started out with netting and I literally took Popsicle sticks and set them on my floor and tried to figure out how I could move this netting and with a minimum amount of nets to be able to get this sheep, you know, moved to fresh grass. And so I came up with, we had to have at least seven. So that was almost a thousand dollars investment in these nets. And that's what we did. The first three years we moved sheep every day, moving nets.
Every day we would move three nets and and connect into the, you know, the square that we'd already have. And that was how we moved sheep for the longest time. We finally got to a point where our nets were really getting beat up. It was really hard to push electricity through the nets. And they had a bunch of Es that figured out that they put their head on the bottom of that net, they could pick it up and not get shocked and walked underneath it. And so I got irritated
Oh yes.
and I ran a single hot wire, a poly wire, about six or eight inches off the ground and about six or eight inches inside that net. And so that if they wanted to lift that net up, they were gonna have to touch that poly wire first. And so I didn't put any electric in the net, adjust that poly wire. And it took about three days before I noticed as I was moving sheep, that they didn't graze under that polywire. And I knew at that point, I think I got these sheep trained to poly
Oh,
And now we could take our nets. We could take our nets and run them just in two parallel straight lines, and we could now use polywire to subdivide those nets. And suddenly that was a game changer. It was a whole lot easier to take these nets and run 'em, run 'em off in straight lines, and then just use our poly wire to subdivide. And two years ago we, we had grazed this farm long enough that I knew where I wanted to put permanent interior fencing.
And everywhere where we would've run two two rows of netting. That's just where we put our interior fencing. And so it's now five wire, five wire high tenile fence. We're using the wooden H braces on the ends and then put timeless fence post in every 25 feet. And I've got my wire spaced. My bottom wire is a neutral wire. It's six inches off the ground, and then we go, the rest of 'em are hot. And after that first six inches is six inches, six inches, six inches, and then nine inches.
And that puts my wire height. I think if my math is ready, it puts me at 33 inches. And that's just low enough that I can throw a leg up over that and, and get in without having to squeeze all this big body through nine inches of wire
Oh yeah.
it works out really, really well. Now we always shut our fences off when we go to move sheep because I don't like getting shocked. And the too many times I've tried working fence hot and you know, you actually touch something, you accidentally touch something you're not supposed to, and it just lights me up and I hate it. So I, I just shut the fence off and then go move sheep. And my sheep are still well-trained more than once I go over to shut, I walk in a building to shut my fencer off.
And it was still off from yesterday. And my sheep are still where they're supposed to
Oh yeah.
Yeah. Because they, they don't want to touch the fence and they're not o they're not overly hungry either. 'cause we, you know, we're moving sheep every day.
right. How many so you're moving them each day and you're using poly wire to make those daily breaks. How many strands of poly wire are you running across?
I'm still running two. I could probably ru run one, but I start, it's a one fence and I hook my handle into that fence and I take 10 or 12 steps and put a, a I I use pigtail posts too. That's the crazy part that have I use Gallagher Orange top. I use the Gallagher Orange top Pigtail post because to me that's the best post on the market. I, they don't bend the, the step in part is never broken and Gallagher actually makes an insulator that will fit on the shaft of that orange top post.
It is the best insulator on the market. You tighten that down, just snug. It's still plastic so you can overtighten it and strip it, but you tighten that down snug and you cannot slide that, that insulator up or down that post. It wedges in there that
Oh yes,
It's amazing. And so I have two of those insulators on each one of those posts. So I, like I say, I hook that wire into the fence, start out, walk out so many steps, put a post in so many steps, put a post in. Then I get to the other side. Now I have to walk back. So I figure I already have the reel in my hand. I'm might as well just bring another strand back with me. So I always split up two strands when they get to that other set that other side.
I have two metal carabiners that I hook that I hook it around the poly wire and then onto the high tensile. And then I move up two strands and hook the second carabiner around the poly wire onto that strand of high tensile. And then just walk my way back. I could, I think I could do it with with one wire. I just, I don't know, I just feel like I gotta walk back. Anyhow, wanna just put two strands up? And your top Isn't any higher than my knee. They could easily jump over it. They just don't.
Oh yeah. Yeah. So you're not using the pigtail portion of that post,
No, if I end up with some sheep that decide, they realize, Hey, this is only this high. We could just easily jump over this, then, then I will use that pigtail part. And I usually only have to do it for a day or two. And all my reels are Gallagher reels. Pretty much everything we're using is Gallagher. I love that Gallagher geared reel. I think it is the best reel on the market.
I've got some that I've bought clear back in 2012, and the only way you know the difference in them is the orange is a little more faded than the newer ones. There's, I've dropped them, I haven't ran over one, but I've had cows run through the fence and get a foot caught and drag that reel halfway across the farm. And the, the reels never broke, so I'm really happy with those. And so yeah, we use those Gallaghers. I take that when I come back with that reel.
I'll pull that up tight and I'll give a couple wraps on that poly wire around that hook that hooks on then to your high tensile fence. And it has a nice lock you can lock on, and I've never had one of them fall off. So it, it's worked really, really well. And the sheep really respect that. That wire, I have a Gallagher fault finder and we're typically somewhere between eight and 11,000 volts in the, in our fence. It, it stays super hot
Oh yeah.
and we're only running the three Juul fencer. And I thought, I thought we were really a big deal when we got our three Joel Fencer. And now I, now I know producers that have a 64 Juul fencer.
Oh, yes.
and I asked the gal, I said, she, she runs sheep and they run a single wire just about to put off the ground. That's how they keep all theirs in. And I asked her, do you have to put your name and address on the lamb? And she said, why? And I said, because if that lamb touches that fence, it's gonna get blown into the next county. So how are you gonna get 'em back? And they're from South Africa. They're from South Africa, and she has this beautiful accent.
And she says, no, no, no. They go straight up. They come straight down. So.
Oh, that's good. Having a, a energizer big enough to give you that many votes going through makes the worlds of difference. You know, you mentioned earlier, you first four a voyage into rotational grazing. You had trouble with your electric fencing and cattle. Same thing here. When we first tried it, we tried to do it with some cheap energizers, didn't work. Finally, when we spent the money and got a good energizer it made all the difference in the world.
And doing the, the grounding rods like you're supposed to.
yep. We have we have way more grounding rods than probably anybody else in the county. 'cause we figured that out right away was the grounding. Rods were really, really important as a kid. Our cows never stayed in, When I decided to redo our grounding system, I went out to the pipe that my dad had pounded into the ground, and that was always our ground rod. And I grabbed a hold of this pipe thinking, I'm never gonna pull this outta the ground. It was literally six inches into the ground.
That was all the deeper it was. And when I pulled this pipe out, I'm like, no wonder our cows never stayed in. This is not even close to being a ground rod. I thought it was gonna be at least three feet in the ground. No, it was literally six inches in the ground and it was galvanized. It was a piece of copper or wire that had a a hose clamp on it. I'm like, this, I, I can't believe anybody ever got shocked on this fence.
You know, I, I do remember getting shocked on that fence, but I was like, the water cows
Oh yeah.
We used to have those weed whacker fencers that supposedly you never had to trim your fence up. It would always just, you know, whack the weeds off. Our neighbors had one, they never had any weeds on their fences. We did, but we only had a ground rod that was six inches in the ground.
Yeah. The ground rods will make the roads of difference there.
Oh yeah. yeah. And like I said, we, we thought we were a big deal when we went to a three Juul fencer and to found out, you know, we're still just the little peons. We don't have a big fencer at all. One of the other things too is my, my whole farm is set up. I've got I guess there are 38 I think, pastures and I only run electric to the pasture that I want electric in. I set this all up so that I didn't, I didn't have to have everything all lit up at the same time.
The bad news is the other pastures that you're not in, the grass is growing up into those and you end up having to go out and either spray all those fence lines or weed whack them. And in my future, I will have a much bigger fencer and probably keep most of those electrified at the same time just to keep the weeds, you know, knocked back on them
Oh yeah.
because they tell me with these 64 Juul fencers, if you've got weeds on it, just hook it up and come back tomorrow, they'll be gone.
Oh,
don't know, I don't know if they're pulling my leg or not, but we're gonna find out.
yeah. I, I suspect it can do it
do it. Yep. I think it will. We'll find out.
with,
¶ Marketing and Breeding Strategies
yeah. With your sheep, are you selling a majority? Is breeding stock or you sell some for meat market? How are you marketing your sheep?
So our top 10 to 15% of our ram lambs will be sold as breeding stock. Probably 50 to 60% of the used could be sold for breeding stock. I have a hard time parting with used because every lamb crop is better than the previous crop. You know, the way we're breeding, we're
¶ Selling Older Sheep and Meat Market Plans
always trying to
good thing. yeah,
yeah, we're always trying to make a better lamb than the u it came out of. And it's hard for me to let those go. I would rather sell my oldest sheep on the farm right now was born in 2021. I would rather sell those, those older proven used at a discounted rate because I. can keep, I, I, I'd like to keep as many of this young stock as I can. The sheep that aren't gonna make breeding stock, those lambs are gonna go into some kind of a meat market mostly.
So at, at this point, my bottom third of my flock, which they're still pretty good sheep, but they're not gonna make my top 10% ram lambs. Those get bred.
¶ Breeding Strategies and Hybrid Vigor
And these are all cat and sheep by the way. They get bred to a Suffolk Ram. And the main reason for that is because I want that hybrid vigor. And two, I don't want to have a a half Suffolk u on my farm, so I'm not tempted to keep her. And we will, we will, sell those into the light lamb market, the ethnic market, and those lambs will be anywhere from 55 to 65 pounds. And that's right at weaning. We get, we end up with a few that are over that, but that's, that's right at that weaning.
And and we're getting a pretty good price for those lambs. We take most of our lambs out to m Hope Ohio. It's a two hour ride. And it's well worth it.
Oh, yes.
¶ Lambing Seasons and Management
Now I think I read somewhere you have multiple lambing seasons per year.
yeah. We typically lamb 'em at least three times a year. I'm looking to increase that. I'm flirting with the idea of lambing every month just for cash flow.
Oh, yes. And you, you're just glutten for punishment?
I am the but I'll tell you another thing. I go out and check sheep before I go to bed. And then they're, they're gonna be lambing. And I don't, I don't get up in the middle of the night and go look at 'em.
¶ Mothering Ability and Culling Decisions
If they can't keep a lamb alive till morning, then they don't need to be here. They've gotta have the mothering ability to take care of them. You know, I had a lamb or had a u that had a lamb. It was her first. And I went out and she was just beating a snot outta that lamb. That port lamb hadn't eaten at all. And she's gonna go on a coal truck. She's in a head gate now feeding that lamb. And if she has to stay in a head gate for 60 days, she will.
But she's gonna feed that lamb and we're not gonna keep that lamb. And it's a little ram lamb anyhow, so we're not gonna keep that one. And and she's gonna go on the coal truck because you, you gotta take care. I'm way too lazy to be sitting out there bottle feeding lambs and all that. I'm not doing that. So these sheep, these sheep, need to work for me. I'm not working for them. So it's and I, I don't know, it, it's, I think all farmers are optimists to begin with.
¶ The Excitement of Lambing Season
And so if you're a crop farmer, you're all excited for spring and then you're all excited for the harvest. And the land farmer or sheep farmer, if you're only lamb once a year, you only get the excitement once a year. So this is like Christmas, you know, more times per year.
Yeah. I love lambing season or Kevin season. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm kind of excited about it. It's I know too, the sheep that are in NSIP I'm really excited to see, you know, to take those measurements and see how, what that data comes back. You know, did I make a, a good choice in the, in the Rams that I used and, and and that kind of a thing. But the so like I say it, it's very few. A u lambs they'll ever sell. My podcast partner cam, he was here two summers ago and he's a pretty good shepherd and he is much younger than I am.
And right away he picked out two uams that he really liked. He wanted those in the worst kind of way. And, and I'm thinking, those are my best two u lambs. I don't wanna sell those. And he kept telling me, put a price on 'em. Put a price on 'em. So I told him I wanted $1,500 a piece, and he said $1,500 a piece. He said, that's crazy. I said, it's only crazy if you'll pay it. You know, if you won't pay it, it's perfect. That's my do not, that's my do not wanna sell price. You know?
And, And, I, I've told that story many times and I think, man, if he'd have bought this, I'd have been really upset. I'd have been disappointed 'cause I really didn't wanna sell 'em, but.
yeah.
So it, it, it worked out. Those have produced some really nice ram lambs for me over the last couple years, so pretty happy he didn't buy them.
¶ National Sheep Improvement Program (NSIP) Insights
With the National Sheep Improvement Program, is that something you would say a commercial producer ought to do, or is it something more for the registered industry?
I don't think a commercial producer needs to do it by any stretch of imagination because most commercial producers are not raising sheep to sell to someone else. As far as like breeding stock, and
Right.
in the, they're in the meat business. They're in a, well, we're all in the meat business. The reality of it is, but that's their bread and butter. They, they want, they want lambs that are able to hit the ground, you know, take off running, do well, grow fast, get 'em on a truck, get 'em down the road. That's pretty much their business model. I don't see a reason for them to be out collecting that kind of data.
You might wanna collect some of that data if you're gonna be retaining X amount of use per year, but you probably have enough data and, and enough observations and you know who, who your good use are and who your bad views are, and you're gonna wanna keep, you know, lambs outta those good use. But I would say that as a commercial producer, you should, if you, when you're looking to bring Rams in, you should really be looking at NSIP Rams.
If parasite resistance is important to you, then that's how you know whether a ram is parasite resistance or not. You can't just go to a guy's flock who says, Hey, I've never, I haven't wormed anybody in the last five years. If they're doing a really good job grazing, they won't need to worm anybody. It doesn't mean that they've, they're parasite resistant, they just haven't been affected.
Oh yeah.
So. You know, with us, you know, those, those lambs, they, they're after they've been infected and we pull the fecal samples, we're gonna worm 'em. 'cause I can't wait two or three weeks to get that information back. I could have dead lambs by then, so that, that is the only time they're gonna get wormed. cause we know they're infected, so we're gonna worm 'em whether they need it or not. Then they shouldn't need worm the rest of their life 'cause we're gonna do a good job grazing 'em.
If you, if you're looking for fast growth, you can find those numbers in NSIP through the the weaning waste and the opposed to weaning waste. And so, you know, if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for more prolifics in your flock, you can look at number of lambs born. If you're having used, if you're having trouble getting your lambs all up to market weight or even weaning weight alive. You start looking at number lambs weaned, that's a, a trait that's in there.
We don't necessarily, we're not, we're not necessarily collecting that data, but if a lamb dies, you know, before weaning, it's gonna show up in that data, you know, we're gonna mark in that that's gonna be a data entry that, that lamb died on such and such a day. We know what that lamb died from. We can put that in there as well. That all gets loaded into that information and becomes part of the, the data set that you get back. So you can, you can increase the, the.
You can increase your, your economics and your flock if you know what traits you're looking for. And so if you go to an NSIP flock, you can pull out that data, you can find those rams that you're looking for. You still have to do the phenotypical analysis. You still have to look at a ram and know, know, is that the, is that what you're looking for? Is that not what you're looking for?
You know, if you, I see sheep all the time that are registered and for sale on Facebook, and I'm thinking what that thing just needs hitting the head and, you know, send it off to the sale. Send it off to the sale. You're not gonna get much for it. It's pretty ugly looking. Don't be selling that for a breeder. That's not what that should be at all. And and I, I'll give you a prime example of that.
We were putting the breeding groups together, and I, these were all, these were all mature es that I was breeding. And I had two young ram lambs that I was going to be used to breed to breed them. And we know that a young ram lamb's not gonna be able to cover as many ES as a mature ram will. And suddenly I realized, huh, I need one more ram to put in here. And I had a a pen of ram lambs that I was selling. And I thought, well, idiots, you've got lambs here. Go pick something out.
So I knew I wanted some growth. I wanted the moderate growth, and I wanted parasite resistance. So I went back through my numbers, first identified two rams that I really liked, their numbers. And then I went out to the barn and I looked at 'em. And as I was eyeing up these two rams, I suddenly realized this one ram shouldn't be in this breeding pen at all. This thing needs to go to freezer camp. 'cause he has, as he grew it as a, as a lamb, he didn't look bad at all.
But as he grew, he was kind of falling apart. And so. We picked the other ram. So I tend to look at numbers first and get all excited about that and then go look at the phenotype and see whether, and see is that, do I want to continue that on in my flock or anybody else's flock and I won't sell you an animal that I wouldn't, you know, breed with on my own.
You know, obviously, you know, my is going to, the Rams that I retain are gonna be, you know, gonna have some relatedness to some of my other ewes that's kind of pay attention to where I'm breeding and who I'm breeding those to. But it's you know, another thing about NSIP that people don't realize too is that if that LAMB has any relatives in any other flock that's involved in NSIP, when that data is all run together, they take that into account, what's that sheep doing in this other flock?
Oh yes.
So you can take a flock that is strictly grass-based and you can take a flock that's completely confinement. And the lamb that grows best in the completely confinement is gonna be the lamb that grows best in the grass fed part of it as well. It's, See, you, you aren't comparing apples to apples, I mean apples to oranges. You, you really are comparing apples to apples and the way they are compared.
That's the other part of this, I think I should say, is when this group of lambs that are all born within 42 days of each other, make up a contemporary group, and all those lambs have to be raised the exact same way. You cannot take some out and hand feed them and, and, you know, and, and underfeed the others. They all need to be raised the same exact way. And what they're competing against is each other. And that's where their calculation comes from, is, is all those lambs in that group.
It will take into consideration, what those, what other lands, what other relatives are doing in other flocks. But their main thing is they're competing against each other. And you keep a land a couple used till they're eight, 10 years old, they're still competing against each other in that, in that same flock. 'cause they're in that same contemporary group. And it's, it's important to, you know, let people know that.
But you know, your best growing lambs in a group, you know, on some other farm should be the best growing lambs on your farm too. And so it's always important to look at that. Parasite resistance is the same, it's the same, way if you, if you've infected them, it doesn't matter where they're at, what farm they're at, they should still end up with the same amount of parasite resistance.
It's just so if I have a single that weighs 60 pounds and I have a set of triplets that only weighs 40 pounds and they're all the same age. The, you would think, well, the single's gonna win every time 'cause it's bigger. But they take into consideration that the, the triplets were born triplets and raised triplets. So it's all put on an even playing field.
Oh, yeah,
So, and that is, that kind of math gets very complicated to do and that's why it's, it's so much easier to send it off to Australia and let them figure it all out because they just plug it into the supercomputer and it
yeah. Let them calculate it.
Yep.
Yeah. Very good information.
¶ Starting the Grazing Sheep Podcast
Let's shift gears just a little bit for our overgrazing topic and talk about your podcast, the Grazing Sheep Podcast. When do you get started and why?
we started that in, I guess, what is it? This is 25, so I guess we would've started it in, I think February of 23. When I brought my sheep home. Yeah. When I brought my sheep home. I didn't know anybody to talk to about sheep. Everybody that I did talk to about sheep said I couldn't raise sheep the way I wanted to raise them. They said, if you're gonna put 'em on grass, you have to worm 'em once a month. And I said, no, we don't want to do that.
And they said, well, then you're gonna have dead sheep. I would talk to state colleges, you know, at Penn State University, they pretty much told me the same thing. If you're gonna put sheep on grass, you're gonna have parasite issues. You got to set up a good, you have to set up a good worming program. And so I felt like for the first three years I was really on an island. I just didn't, I couldn't find anybody else that was raising sheep the way I raised sheep.
I saw on some Facebook posts here and there. It seemed like people were raising sheep the way I wanted to, but I would kind of try to reach out to some of these people. But they all lived far away. And so I had gone to a, a, Penn State, Meeting that was about worms. They were gonna teach you all about, you know, worms and, and for monster scoring. And we were doing for scoring, but we were never trained. So we didn't know if we were doing it right or not.
And so I, I went to one of these meetings and I ran into this guy named Cameron Meyer and got to talking to him about, you know, how I wanted to raise sheep, what I was trying to do. And he was a newly hired Penn State extension agent. And he was in a different county. And when I grew up, if whatever county an extension agent was hired in, he only worked that county. He didn't go to any other county. And I begged him to come to my place. It was two counties away.
I said, it's only like an hour, but I'd love to have you come down. And he came down and the first thing he said was. I've never seen so much grass. You've got so much grass here. And it was in, uh, it was in October. We would walk through my stockpiled forage and I would reach down and pick it up and it would come up to my hip. And he's like, my God, I've never seen so much grass. And I explained to him, this grass has to last me all winter.
You know, it can't just, you know, I could bring in a thousand sheep on my farm and graze 'em for one day and then I'd be outta grass, you know? So this has to last all winter cam. And that just turned into a great friendship. And he was more than willing to spend literally hours talking on the phone with me. And there was so much information and I had all these observations that I had made. And from those observations, I came up with these theories and I didn't know if they were right or not.
It was just what I was seeing. And so Cam and I would have these long discussions and I said to him one day, I said, you know. I should be recording these so that I could go back and listen to 'em and remember them. And he jokingly said, yeah, we should make a podcast out of 'em. And I thought, Hey, that's a great idea. Maybe we should make a podcast out of this, because I have been dying to find somebody to talk to about this stuff. There has to be other people that are in the same boat.
And so he didn't know anything about making a podcast. I knew very little about making a podcast, but from being a musician and traveling all those years, I had worked in a bunch of different recording studios. I have a recording studio here on my farm. It's a separate building. That's was all I built it just to record in. And I thought if I could figure out how to capture this information, I could take it into the studio and I can make it sound decent.
¶ Podcast Production and Listener Growth
And we all know there are podcasts out there that sound horrible. They might have great information, but you can't stand listening to it. So you have to shut it off and go find something else to listen to. And so we started fooling around and recording some of this stuff. We used Zoom because that was the easiest way for us to do it.
We used the free Zoom account and that is the number one reason why all of our podcasts are under 40 minutes because the free Zoom account only goes to 40 minutes, so we can only record 40 minutes. And the other part of this too was when I sit down to do the editing, I'm always like, thank God this is only a half hour long and not any longer 'cause that's that much more editing I have to do. And Cam was, he was adamant about, he loved to listen to podcasts on his way to work.
And Cam has a PhD, so we, some of us think that means you're really smart. Other of us think that PhD stands for piled high and deep. And so he convinced me that your average commute was about a half an hour to work and said, this would be great to listen to a podcast half hour long podcast. So it all kind of stacked up. We decided, okay, that's kind of the format we would go with.
So in February, well I say 2023, I think it was, we started recording and we would record once a week and we decided that we weren't gonna tell anybody that we were putting these podcasts out until we had at least 10 episodes because him and I both, we discover a new podcast. We wanna go in and listen to a bunch of the episodes. We like to binge listen.
Oh
so we thought, well, if we wait till there's 10, then they can go in and binge listen and, then maybe we can get 'em hooked and they'll keep listening. So it was funny
Oh
podcast, first podcast, we went out, we, we put out, after a couple of days, I told Cam where it was. He went and found it and after a couple of days we looked and we had two plays. Because I listened to it and he listened to it. And then we recorded the next one and it had two plays because he listened to it and I listened to it and then all of a sudden we had three plays. And then we started Wonder who listened to
Oh,
And it was, it was kind of a fun
right.
And we found out that his wife had listened to it. So that's who that was. That was the third one. But I just remember those days. It was, it was kind of fun trying to figure out, like wonder who's listening to these. And Cam's dad was telling him something and he said, I think maybe we ought to try to wean lambs the way Tom weans em. And he says, I don't remember telling you how Tom Weed something. He goes, oh, I heard it on the podcast.
Cam calls me up and says, I knew who the fourth listener was. You know, so it was, it was kind of fun back in those days trying to figure out who it was that was listening to us.
Oh yes.
And somebody asked a question on Facebook, I can't remember what the question was, and I'm like, we have a podcast on that. So I stuck the link in in one of the replies and it just started, it just started to blow up. And it was kind of funny 'cause a lot of our friends got ahold of us, said, I didn't know you guys were doing a podcast. And you know, to me it was kinda like when you quit smoking, you don't tell anybody that way. If you start up again, you don't have to be embarrassed by it.
Oh
of the, this was kind of the opposite of that. If it's a complete failure, we just won't tell anybody, and then nobody will know that it was a complete failure kind of a deal. But it's, it's been a lot of fun. We've got to meet a lot of cool people through it. I like going to a grazing conference and somebody hearing me talk to someone else, or even when I'm up, you know, you know, giving a presentation or something, you know, people come up afterwards, you know, like.
You have that Grazing Sheet podcast, we listen to you. He said, I recognize the voice. You know, I always hear, I recognize the laugh. And, uh, so it's it's, that's been kind of fun too. you know, you get a little bit of notoriety. I've been big Tom Perkins for a long time and people already think that there's some special reason I'm called Bing Tom Perkins. And that just came from, I was working with a youth group and I'm not that tall, but I'm pretty wide.
And there was another guy named Tom that worked there or that was helping out with youth. And he didn't like being called we Tom, so they, they stopped calling him we Tom, started calling me Big Tom. And that just, it
Yeah. Most of your episodes. Is that you and Cam just talking about your operations, what's you're doing? Do you bring guests on there?
Yeah, there's an awful lot of us just talking about, you know, our theories and, you know, what's going on on our farms and how we're doing things. But we do bring in different people from different universities that, that specialize in different things. As it stands now, next week's episode is Dr. Scott Baldridge. He's one of the country's leading parasitologists. So he or immunologist maybe both. These are a lot of big words that I'm not really sure what they mean.
I just hear 'em and then try to then try to emulate what I thought I heard. And so, so we, you know, we've kind of become on first name basis with some of these people and, you know, we get questions from listeners and we think, man, I have no idea how to answer this question. Well wonder if we could find somebody that could, you know, so we start looking around and, cam now, he, he no longer works for Penn State. He works for a SI as a oh, I can't think of the name, what the term is.
It's oh, director of sustainability, I guess is what it is. And so he spends a lot of time looking at solar sites and how to grade solar sites and those kinds of things. So he's real involved in that.
Oh
uh, so he's out and he's meeting new people all the time, and he keeps finding interesting people that we get on the podcast. But it, it is really to try to provide as much information probably for New Shepherds more than experienced shepherds. Although we have quite a few, you know, experienced shepherds who like to listen to us and then, you know, get an email once in a while and say, that's just plain wrong. And then like, okay, well explain to me how it's right and we'll correct it.
And then sometimes that is, that, sometimes that's exactly what happens, you know, we find out, yeah, we were wrong and we need to go back and fix that. But and then a bit of fun too, you know, we, I like to crack my jokes and and so people get a big kick outta some of that. And so it's been, it has been a lot of fun doing it. It's kind of a labor of love 'cause we don't have any sponsors unlike you. And so we are strictly a shoestring budget.
You know, I, I was hoping to become, you know, filthy rich and take over the world and everybody said, nah, you're setting your sights too high. So I'm just working on getting, trying to get filthy rich just like you
One day. One
One day.
It is a tremendous resource you all are putting out with the Grazing Sheep Podcast, and I enjoy listening to it.
¶ Favorite Resources and Tools for Grazing
It's time for our famous four questions. Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our first question, what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? And I know immediately you're, you're going to say The Grazing Sheep podcast, and then I'm gonna say pick something else. And I know you're gonna say the Grazing Grass Podcast, so you're gonna have to go to number three on your list.
I'll tell you the book that really brought it all together for me, and I got this book out so I wouldn't mess up the title. It's The Drought Resilient Farm by oh, Dale Strickler. Yep. And I don't know, I don't know that there was any new information in there that I didn't know before, but the way he puts it together suddenly made all the sense in the world. And that book is a, just a really nice book too. It's made really nice. It's got fantastic pictures in it.
The quality of the book is, is, is Unreal. And I think that book was like $35. It wasn't crazy expensive. I don't know what it is now, but I really, that whole entire book really put it together for me. He talks in there about if you're gonna see the new pastor. Boy, now is the time to go in. If you wanna make it smooth, then plow it. You know, is that wrong? Maybe, but we're only gonna do this once.
If you wanna use you know, herbicides on it, you wanna go in and spray it off, kill everything off as round up, go ahead and do it. You're you. We know that's bad for the soil, bad for the environment, bad for everything, but we're only gonna do it once. And this just made so much sense to me. And there was just a massive amount of information in there. Suddenly I understood the ma the difference between warm season grasses and cool season grasses.
And I think it was all, I had tidbits of all this information before, but for some reason that book really made it all come together for me.
Two things with that big Tom. His books are almost like a coffee book, coffee table book, you know, they're just nicely done and.
Yeah, they are
And the other thing is I have to hear things multiple. times before it sinks in.
Yep.
you know, most things I've heard, but going through the book, getting a look at the pictures really helps me out,
Yeah, I, I would agree. It's that's why I said I don't know if there was any, I'm sure there was information there I didn't know from before, but there was a whole lot of it that I did know. And for whatever reason, just the way he laid it out, it all came together. It just all made so much sense where before I, I don't know what the difference was. Maybe it was just, that was enough times that I heard it, it finally made sense.
But I really feel just the way he writes, the way the pictures were laid out, all of a sudden it, it just came together. So that was, that's been a, a major help for me.
Tremendous resource. Our, our second question, what's your favorite tool for the farm?
When I first heard your podcast and you asked this question to someone, I thought, how would you ever pick your favorite? Because there are so many.
That, that's the beauty of the question.
I know. I know. I would have to say probably my side by side because it has made the biggest difference I used. So I, I, I've, because, you know, I'm wider than I am tall. It's always hard for me to walk. And so I would go out to the pasture and the first thing I used to go out to the pasture was a rising lawnmower. It was with no deck on
yes.
and it was bumpy. It was slow, but at least I didn't have to walk that far. And then I graduated to a 35 horsepower tractor that would go faster. And, but it was crazy bumpy and it was, I was just beating my back up. I'd beat my knees up just riding on the tractor and I suddenly got a side by side and I would be out in the field and I'd be like, oh man, I forgot it. I need an extra post.
And I just jump in the gator and run down and grab that post and ride back up and put that post in anywhere before. It's like, I have to remember to bring that up tomorrow because I'm not making this trip again.
right.
So, This winter mine's a diesel. This winter the fuel jelled up in it and I didn't have it for three
Oh, no.
in some of the coldest weather we had, and I had to get that little 35 horsepower tractor back out. And of course the sheep were clear at the other end of the farm, and so I had to ride out there. Yeah, I had a ride out there, you know, three different days and I thought, oh my lord, I forgot how miserable this really was though. I was cold. I'm being bounced around.
And I was so happy when we were able to get the gator, bring it back down, get it in a heated building, get that fuel thaw out, and then could run it again. So I'd have to say that would be
It is a, A side by side can be so handy. Yes.
Very expensive
Oh, yes, I agree. In fact, I look at prices on them and I'm, I have sticker shock.
It, yeah, it, they're insane. They're insane. I would never buy a new one.
Yeah. Our third question, what would you tell someone? Just getting started.
¶ Advice for New Shepherds
Get out and do it. I spent. I don't know, countless hours trying to figure out how to do it absolutely perfect before I went out and did it. And I was at a grazing meeting, this was probably in 2012, and somebody said, just, just go do it. You're gonna screw it all up. It doesn't matter. Just go do it. And now I tell people the same thing. Are you gonna overgraze it? Probably. Are you gonna under graze places? Probably. But it's not gonna mess up your whole farm. It's just one little spot.
And you just use that to learn. And that's how you go from there. You learn by doing things. You know, if you sit around and wait till it's gonna be absolutely perfect, you're never gonna be able to do it. 'cause I don't know that I've ever had a paddock move that was absolutely perfect. You know, some are closer than others. Yeah, some are closer than others. And if you, like I say, if you, if you mess it up, you mess it up. But it's only one spot. It's not your entire farm.
It's just one spot, and if you have to skip that spot for the rest of the summer, you just skip that spot. It's not a big deal. So just get out and get started doing it. Just learn from what doesn't go well. That's it.
You know, I've, I've heard it said numerous times that good is the enemy of great because if it's good enough, you, you don't strive to get to that great point. But I think you can make the argument, perfection is the enemy of being great as well. Because I get hung up because I think, oh, I gotta design the perfect system, or, or it's gotta be perfect. And then you, you don't get anything done. So I think that's great advice. Just do it.
Yeah, I can, I can give you a prime example. We had a door to a grainery that's on the side of our barn. Nobody ever knew it was there because the guy who built it originally. It just made it, it just blended in so well that it looked like boards just came all the way down the side of the barn. You didn't notice that there were two hinges and this little tiny gap that went all the way around that he really built it well. And we had a big windstorm come up and it just broke our door.
And so my dad said, oh, we'll, we'll just, you know, throw some boards together and make a another door. And I said, no, no, no. It has to, it has to look perfect, it has to look just like it did before. And I came home one day and he had fixed it and it looked terrible. It, you, now you look at, you could tell there's a door there. It took me two years to realize that if it was up to me, that door still wouldn't be on there because it had to be perfect before it went on.
he he just put a door together that serves the purpose. It works. So you can't wait. You cannot wait for perfection. You just have to go out and do it.
Yeah. So true. And lastly, where can others find out more about you and the podcast?
¶ Where to Find More Information
You can find the podcast pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts. We upload to Spotify that uploads to, you know, a lot of the others. Apple used to be Google, but I guess now you can't do Google anymore. We think most of ours come from all of our, most of our listens come from Spotify or Apple. There's a cast box that I didn't even even know there was such a thing as Cast Box, but they pretty much any platform that carries them.
If you want to, you know, reach out to me, you could do that at Big tomPerkins@gmail.com. I get quite a few emails a day. I don't give them answers every day, but usually I'll sit down at least once a week and dedicate some time to try to answer some of these, but definitely go listen, go Because we're trying to outdo the Grazing Grass podcast.
Yeah. Well, I, I hope you do. well. I hope we, we'll just tie all the way. There we go. I tell people. On finding my podcast. I'm like, it's everywhere. You listen to a podcast and if you go somewhere to listen to a podcast and the Grazing Grass podcast is not there, let me know. I'll get it there.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Or just quit listening to that platform. 'cause clearly they don't carry quality material. Yeah.
exactly. Yeah.
¶ Final Thoughts and Outro
One last question, big Tom that we added in just a few episodes ago, and it's a question you asking me, so you have a question for me.
Huh. Let me think.
I, I, I didn't, I sprung that on you so that you'd give me an easy question.
Yeah. I. I guess because it's called the Grazing Grass Podcast, and ours is called the Grazing Sheep Podcast? How often do you rotate your grass? Because we have to rotate sheep every day. And so how do you move your grass from one paddock to another?
I, I don't move the grass that often, but then again, I move it quite often, the blades of grass that's already been eaten by an animal are inside the animals as I move them each day.
Yeah, I had a feeling that would be the director you would go with that. I really did. So, yeah, it was just, it was just kind of a pun. It's funny. After you got ahold of me, I started thinking we, we had come up with a bunch of different names for our podcast and we didn't like any of 'em. And I woke up one morning just thinking about the Grazing Sheet podcast and maybe a month later. I ran into your podcast again, and I thought, Ooh, I wonder if I got the name from him.
Wonder if that's where that came into my head,
well, I'll, I'll start taking credit for that.
you you, you that Yeah. I might owe you credit for that. That might be where it came from, because I think you started, I think you started your podcast a good six months before we did ours, I believe, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was out even longer than that.
it was even longer than that, but I took a break in there. My, we, we had a health scare. My wife had breast cancer. She, she's doing great now, but during that time of the breast cancer, we stopped producing any episodes. So I started, in fact, we are coming up next month. It'll be five years of the podcast, but there was a certain period of time I was releasing monthly, and then I took, I don't know, a year off.
Because there was about a year in there that that was just focused upon fighting that breast cancer.
Yeah, I've, I've often wondered if I have ever had an original idea, if it wasn't just an idea that was inspired by another idea that I had heard before and then made it my own. But yeah, there was, there was more, you know, that I, I, I woke up and I thought, why don't we just call it the Grazing Sheep Podcast? 'cause that's what we do. And sometime later I ran into yours again and I thought, oh, wonder if I stole that from there. Wonder. That's what, how that happened. I hope not. But,
oh. I think it's a great title. So
thank you.
it it works out.
The other beauty of this whole thing is that I've got to work through this whole podcast and I've never thought once about how I'm going to edit it.
Oh yes. Yeah,
I have thought quite a bit about how you're going to edit it, but not how I have to edit it.
Yeah, There, there's been a few, actually it has crossed my mind on editing because there's been a slight delay and it's caused me to talk over you a couple times. So, yeah. this, it's gonna cause me a little bit extra work there, but I bet I can get, get it figured out. But I Appreciate you coming on and, and joining me today.
me today. Well, I thank you for having me.
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