Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast Episode 100.
what's the most important skill of being a good grazing manager. I say to be a good observer
You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, helping grass farmers learn from grass farmer. And every episode features a grass farmer. their operation. and their regenerative practices. I'm your host, Cal Hardage
You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs. You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. The grazing management decisions you make today. impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you.
That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenerative Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy to follow techniques to quickly assess your forage production and infrastructure capacity. In order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts. Learn more on their website at noble. org slash grazing. It's n o b l e dot org forward slash grazing.
On today's episode we have Jim Gerrish you probably have heard of him from a few of his books which include Kick the Hay Habit and Management Intensive Grazing as well as a couple others. You may have heard him speak at a conference or a school you went to. We have him on for our 100th episode to share about his journey and why time is more important than space.
However, before we talk to Jim, 10 seconds about my farm and obviously with this being the 100th episode of the grazing grass podcast We're talking about the podcast first off. I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing Thank you for leaving reviews. Those things are the biggest factors to the podcast success And I appreciate it.
I started this podcast for an opportunity to talk to people who were doing what I wanted to do, what I was trying to do, what I was doing in some fashion. And along the journey, I've shared those episodes and I have learned tons. So, thank you. And again, share it. If you haven't left a review, please leave a review. Those help when people go searching for podcasts and they can read the reviews. 100 episodes. Thank you. With this being our 100th episode, we are doing a little bit of a change.
Wednesdays will continue to be our interview, our guests, grass farmers, our grass farmers using regenerative practices, coming on and sharing about their journeys. However, on Friday, we'll be dropping a new type of episode. So tune in this Friday for that episode and I'll talk more about it then. Enough of that, let's talk to Jim.
Jim, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited you're here today.
Hey Cal, I'm looking forward to the opportunity because the more we get the good word out and the more audiences we reach, the happier guy I am.
Very good. Hopefully we'll have a few listeners enjoy this episode, which I'm sure they will. To get started, can you just tell us about yourself and your operation?
Myself, I've been in grazing in the grass for, well over 40 years now as a researcher, an educator, a practitioner, a philosopher. I spent 22 years, three months on the University of Missouri faculty. That was from 1981 to 2003.
So most of those years in Missouri, we had our personal farm, in addition to working at the research station, and we started out on a small acreage just with sheep, and the place we bought, of course, had no fences, because it was a kind of farming country, and so we learned to use electric netting to move sheep, every few days around, and then over about a five year time period, we acquired the equipment. More land, and I think four or five different transactions.
We ended up with 260 acre farm there in Missouri. Most of it had been crop farmed and was degraded quite badly. So we started the process of returning it to grass and healing it up. We. Added cattle about four years into the process, the sheep phased out after about nine years. And so I worked for the university doing research and I worked on Maughan Farm doing research. Most of the good stuff I learned actually happened on my place and then we did it at the research center.
Oh, yes.
And then When I was in my mid forties and midlife crisis kicked in, I decided I needed to do something else in life. And so that's when I quit the university and went into the consulting and conference business. And that's the time we moved to Idaho. And on April 1st this year, we will have been 20 years in Idaho. And up until a year ago.
I was managing one unit of a larger ranch 450 acres of center pivots that we grazed, about 100 acres of flood ground, several hundred acres of desert rangeland, and so I didn't own a ranch out here. I just had recreational ranching, somebody else's dollars and I just moved cattle around and learned how to irrigate and did stuff like that. Now, we do have a small property that we cut flood irrigated, pasture that we custom grazed, replacement heifers for one of the neighbors on.
And so for, 22 years, 3 months, I was in academic research and education in the field of grazing and then I've been 20 over 20 years now in the private business side of it as working as a consultant and I still do lots of conferences and workshops and things of that nature so that's the background on me. Oh, I do want to say, I did not grow up, I did not grow up in the cattle business, and that's why I tended to be more successful in it than a lot of people have.
I grew up a crop and hog farmer in South Central Illinois. Getting into grazing was just a
actually, that's where my next question was going to go. If you grew up that way, what brought you to grazing?
There's two or three different things. We were, I said I grew up crops and hogs. We also did custom haying. And we sold a lot of hay to beef producers. We baled hay for a lot of beef producers. And, I'd be driving along in a nice hay field and, pretty good. crop growing on and then I'd look across the fence into their pasture and you know it's depending on what time of the year. It is. It's either completely overgrown, and you can't even see the cattle in it, or it's grazed down to bare dirt.
And there didn't seem to be anything in between, and I thought, yeah, that's weird. But not being a cattle guy, I didn't know anything about, what they were doing and what they were thinking. And then in the summer of 1977 an Argentine rancher who was my sister's brother in law came up. And he spent a good part of that summer out on the farm working with my dad and I. And he was talking about grass finished beef.
Because, of course, that's all they did in Argentina at that time was grass finished beef. But he was talking about rotating cattle every day, using no fertilizer, grazing high legume content pastures, letting the animals do the work, letting nature work and all that. And I said, boy, that doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen around here. And so that kind of opened my eyes to something that was going on different in somewhere else in the world.
And at this point I'll say my, even though I grew up on a farm, I never considered going to school in agriculture. My first major was anthropology then I was interested in journalism, then I decided probably I wanted to be a park ranger, so I went, set out to get a degree in natural resource management, didn't end up being there. And part of the reason why is I'm a very lazy person. To get a degree in the liberal arts school, I needed 16 hours of foreign language.
To get a degree in the College of Agriculture, I had no foreign language requirement. That is the only reason that I ended up going into the College of Agriculture rather than Liberal Arts. And agronomy, I mean it's plants and soils, that's, I was interested in that. I met my future wife in introductory soils at the University of Illinois. And I was just intending to go back to the family farm in Illinois and, be a crop farmer. I had a property a couple hundred acres rented from my dad's cousin.
Of course, there was no contract because everybody's back in those days, every man's word was his bond. And so I was going to go, I had that as a base of operations. I was talking to some of the older neighbors about maybe taking over farming their place. We were going to make the big move from four row equipment to six row equipment. And,
oh, wow.
And cousin, cousin George sold the farm out from under me. And so I was six weeks away from graduating from U of I with a BS in agronomy, I was going to get married in seven weeks and I didn't have that base work. So what does a guy do? You go to graduate school and I went to grad school as a desperation measure because I didn't know what else to do. I actually got an assistantship to go to the University of Kentucky in plant breeding with the red clover breeder, Dr. Norman Taylor there.
I got down there, decided I had no interest in plant breeding. They had a new faculty member coming Chuck Docherty from New Zealand for the Pasture Ecology position. I didn't even know what Pasture Ecology meant, but I said, yeah I'll be his grad student. That'll be fine. And so that's how I got hooked up with a New Zealander who also had, the same crazy ideas about grazing management that my German brother in law from, or sister's brother in law from Argentina had. I said this is interesting.
Oh,
Two people from different sides of the world, and they're talking about this approach to grazing. And I had the good fortune to pull off the bookshelf at the University of Kentucky Library a book called Grass Productivity. By Andre Voisin, a Frenchman who worked from the about 1930 to 1961 until his death in grazing management, and he's really first wrote out the actual, plans and description of time controlled grazing. And that's why we have this topic of why is time more important than space.
Because almost all grazing management in the U. S. Is spatially based. What you, what we got taught, in college is just, it's stocking rate is the only thing that matters. You got this piece of land, you put this many animals out there, and you leave them out there. Now, supposedly, you leave them out there until it is grazed in an appropriate residual and you're. move them somewhere else. Almost everybody forgot that part of it and it became just you leave them out there till it's gone.
And that's how we got our grazing lands into the poor state that they were. So those are the three things that got me into time based grazing management. An Argentine rancher who was already doing it back in the 1970s, a major professor in graduate school from New Zealand, and then reading Andre Voisin's book in 1978. As they say, the rest is history.
It's always amazing how these little coincidences happen and they guide you on a path that really made all the difference. Without those, would you have been there? Just the fact of going to grad school and all that. It's always very interesting to me.
If I had gone back to the family farm in 1978 and become a crop farmer, buying more equipment and acquiring some land, 1984, I would have been just one more victim of the farm crisis. And, probably have nothing,
Oh,
never had, gone to work in a factory in town or something. I don't know what I would have done, but the fact that George sold that farm, and I had immediately switched directions, I ended up having a completely different life, and it's been a pretty good one.
Yeah, very interesting with that. And you finished grad school, you were going to grad school in Kentucky, and then you got a job at University of Missouri?
Yeah, yes, I did. I'm one of those few people around and say I only ever had one job interview I applied for one job. I had one job interview and I was in that position for 22 years three months So I'm not very good at doing job interviews
Yes do not come to you for advice for job interviews. On the other hand, your success rate at job interviews is just at the ceiling.
Yeah, I could be a consultant on how to nail a job,
there you go. You just have to frame it in the right framework. You get the job in Missouri and you move to Missouri. Did you immediately think you're going to start grazing animals? Or were you more focused on your university job at the time?
Oh, the position I was hired for was at the University of Missouri's Forage Systems Research Center, which is an outlying research station up in north central Missouri. And basically, my job assignment was to make beef cattle competitive with soybeans on marginal, highly erodible land. That's what my assignment was. When I went there, no, I did not have the expectation that I was going to buy a farm there and become a grazer. cattle producer up there.
At the moment I took the job in the Missouri, that would have been absolutely the last thing on my mind. When we went there, we lived in a little town of Linnaeus, I think 325 people. I had never lived in town before, other than two years as a undergraduate at University of Illinois. But I'd never lived in town before, and the urban pressure in Linnaeus was just too much for me, and, we had to get out of town, otherwise I was gonna, kill a bunch of people or something.
And so Don found this small property out in the country, where we went to, 13 acres, and that's way too much lawn to mow, so that's why we got the sheep. And then it grew from
I was wondering why you went to sheep first, but it sounds like sheep fit your property there because working with small acreage.
Exactly, and we learned that early on, and people over the years who've, come to me for advice on small properties. The smaller the property, the smaller the animal better be. All the way down to if you only got a half acre lot, you better be rabbits and chickens. Because you're not going to grow a beef on that. Also we had small children. And it's a whole lot easier to get them.
Incorporated in doing the farm chores and working with animals if it's sheep, and we did have chickens also, if it's sheep and chickens, rather than, big old cattle.
And I hear that from a lot of sheep producers. One reason they go sheep, their kids are small and their kids are able to be out there and help them with them. Now, I know the hair sheep I have. They can be a little crazy. They can also mob you too. It's just crazy their Way they act, but I'm assuming you did not go with hair sheep back then.
No we definitely had wool sheep, and, hair sheep was not a thing in, really in the 1980s. There were a few around, but it wasn't the big enterprises that it is now. My wife, She did hand spinning and weaving, and so it's really hard to do that with hair sheep. And so we we had what we called the commercial flock. Which was white sheep, Fendorce at Rambouillet Cross, basically.
And then we had the spinning flock, which was Border Leicester, Cotswolds we had some Lincoln Coopworth Cross, but they were colored sheep and they were, long. Long wool breeds. Because She had a business of selling fleeces and spun fibers back in those days.
oh Interesting, yeah Very good, but When you brought those sheep onto your farm and you started with them, did you just kick them out there like you had seen everyone else do, or had your experiences from University of Kentucky you brought them in and immediately did what with them?
the 13 acres we bought was the house and yard and then an open field. No It had a crop of wheat on it when we moved in, and so there was no fences around it there's no grass there, and as I said, we started with electric netting because that's what made sense is, if you have ten sheep and you have two pieces of electric netting, you can start grazing management, you can start doing something, we of course had to seed the pasture down after the wheat crop.
Oh, yeah,
And so it was, I don't know, six or nine months before, from the time we moved on until we actually had animals on the place. And then the, after the original 13 acres A couple of years later we were able to buy an adjacent 40 acres that was in pasture and that's when we were able to, expand into getting cattle is after we got that 40 acres and then we bought 180 and then 20.
So yeah, it was four transactions in which we built the farm from the original just house in the country to the 260 acre grass farm. 200 acres of it was either being farmed or had been abandoned from farm because it was so badly eroded and grown up with blackberries and stuff like that. So we had about 200 acres of it that we had to bring back into productive pasture.
Oh, yes. As you expanded the farm, you went from sheep or you added cattle into the sheep operation. Did you manage them separately? Did you manage them similarly? Did you manage them together?
Good question. Most of the time we ran them separately. And some we did leader follower grazing and people always ask me do you put the cattle out first, the sheep out first? And the answer is it depends. It depends on what is the pasture condition and what are the needs of the, the different classes of animals. So sometimes cattle grazed ahead of the sheep.
And that would be if we were in a little bit of a weedy situation and we wanted the sheep to focus on weeds, so we'd let the cattle go through, take the good grass out, and then mostly have the sheep eat the remaining weeds that were out there. And then situations where we might have the sheep going in ahead of the cattle because we bred the cows in mid summer, and we bred the sheep in the fall, and we wanted to have better nutrition. In the sheep than the cows that we had weaned calves off.
And so the sheep could go through first and, it's basically the same effect as flushing them with grain to increase the breeding percentage. Depended and there were rare occasions when we actually just put them out there together. But when it comes to daily rotation and grazing management, I actually did that first with the sheep. We've, we started out in a twice a week. rotation. So every three or four days we'd been moving them.
We had a bad drought in 1988 and that's when I started moving the sheep on a daily basis. Now by that time we had built some permanent electrified high tensile fence for structure and then I did, still did, controlled grazing with the electric netting within that framework of high tensile fence. But we started moving sheep on a daily basis.
Because mostly we were having them eat weeds because that was the only thing that was out there in that drought and it worked so well, I just kept doing that and then the cattle that winter on, with stockpiled pasture rather than, giving them three or four days worth at a time, I stripped grazed them every day to ration out that feed to stretch it out further and we got so many more grazing days per acre.
All. By doing that, that's when it just opened my eyes that in my view, for me, it was silly to do anything less than daily rotation. So you just become habituated to, what you do for chores on a daily basis. And I look at neighbors in the winter, going out and feeding hay every day. Shoot, I'll just go out and move an electric fence every day.
And after we moved out west, and where the herds are bigger here, on the unit we managed, we usually had 300 to 500 pairs here, or dry cows, and then, neighbors around have convinced, have similar herd size. And I always told them they thought I was crazy going out in the cold moving electric fence. And I told them, I can feed 400 cows in the time it takes you to get your tractor started. And that's simply, the way it is.
I know that going to daily moves just considering my situation here my dad has a farm, which I help him with, and I have my own operation, dad, for years, dad, and he'll probably, he's apt to still tell me this but in his mind, Daily moves are too much work. I'm like, it doesn't take me that long. It takes me so long because I have different herds to move. If we had them all together, it wouldn't take me hardly any time. And I know that's a big thing a lot of people get hung up on.
They're like, it's just going to take so much time. What would you tell someone if they're saying it's just too much?
I might start by saying, what else are you going to be doing with your time? Oh, farming, bailing expensive hay, working on equipment that's broke down. Yeah, there's things you can do with your time.
If you design the grazing cell appropriately, so if your permanent fence and stock water infrastructure is set up appropriately, and all you're doing is running fairly short stretches temporary fence, in the case of cattle, it's a single poly wire the sheep, I did the electric netting to the end, with hair sheep, I know plenty of people who, use one and sometimes two wires to manage their hair sheep wool sheep, they were a little more difficult to contain, so we used the netting, but if you
design it Grazing cell appropriately. You're right. It doesn't take much time. I mean I had a 8 to 5 job, 5 days a week with the university. And so that's what a lot of people in, out on the farms have. They've got a town job 8 to 5, which of course actually means about 7. By the time you drive to work or whatever. And so I did all of those moves. around having that job. And of course, as the kids got older, I could have them do some of it.
And usually I would have at least three herds to move when we had sheep, there were the sheep, and then we'd have a cow herd and a yearling herd. And sometimes I would have replacement heifers separate from either one of those. We did custom grazing. Also, and when we were custom grazing pears for someone else, I did not co-mingle our herd with the outside herd. That was two herds to move. So most of the time I was moving three or four herds every day.
And probably an hour and a half is what my chore time was on a daily basis. And one of the cool things about grazing is 50 cows or 500 cows. It takes the same amount of time. And so the labor, once you understand how to set the grazing cell up, what are the best tools to use for making your moves and get a technique down to where you do it smoothly? It doesn't take much time at all.
And that's been my experience for the most part. I do use electric netting with some goats I have, and I have some thorn trees that make electric netting just awful. Haven't figured out how I'm going to do that. I'm thinking I'm going to try and get those goats to respect the polybreed, but we'll see how that goes this year.
There is that and then virtual fencing is going to get affordable one of these days and Goats and brush management is one of the great opportunities for virtual fencing.
I have looked at virtual fencing some. It's just a little bit. More than I want to spend, but it seems to be coming down quickly. I find it very fascinating and I'm a technology person, so I'm like, Oh, I really want to do that.
It's it's you. Yeah, you're exactly right that today a lot of these systems are more cost than you can afford to pay It, particularly if you're just selling commodity livestock and if it's a pretty small scale operation but the higher the value of the product that you're selling, like if you are in, direct market, grass fed, go to grass fed lamb and you're getting a premium price for it you can afford to, use some technologies that you can't in the commodity business.
But, what we've seen you and me through our lifetime everything computerized, everything that's high tech starts out expensive and then it comes down. And VirtualFence is in the process of doing that right now.
Oh, yes. Just a rabbit trail. But, technology the things we can do now with technology just over my life. And if I consider my dad's life, it's even more amazing. I don't even know where technology is going to be in 20, 40 more years.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons that I'm glad I'm the age I am and I'm going to be dead before, the humanity actually gets destroyed by technology, but I have to
Oh, yes. Yeah. I've worked in education for a number of years. In fact, when I went to the Essentials of Regenerative Grazing in Miami, I was still working.
In education, but since then, I have resigned from education to focus on the farm and I did do that with some apprehension because I still have bills to pay, but I'm pretty excited about that opportunity, but in education, we can see the see the negative effects of technology amplified on some behaviors and stuff in education, which is, which, like you said, how's it in? I'm not sure. Not sure. I want to know. With,
we don't need to go down that path any further.
right, yeah, we'll stop there. Now you had the sheep, you brought on cattle, and at a certain point you got out of the sheep. Did you get out of the sheep just to focus on cattle, or was there another reason to make that transition?
Okay. We all have our reasons that things happen. Our fourth kid arrived. My wife had started an electric fence business, Greenhills Grazing Systems. It was growing leaps and bounds. I was beginning to travel more and more. Speaking at field days, workshops, stuff like that.
So I wasn't, around that much, the kids were coming to an age where they were getting involved with things at school, activities, and something had to give, and, I, it was 1993 1993 was when we liquidated the sheep operation, and I would have to look back to see, maybe we were in a market depression at that time or something, but yeah. Yeah. It was all those different
but not enough hours in the day.
Not enough hours in the day. I still, every time I do a financial analysis looking at sheep versus cattle, especially on smaller farms, for profitability sheep are hands down a much better choice.
We started hair sheep in 2015 and we have just been expanding the hair sheep and we've actually decreased the cow herd just
Huh.
financials on the two species. Now right now cattle is really good, but this market, I don't know how long that lasts.
Two to three more years. Almost any idiot should be able to make a profit in the cattle business over the next two or three years. And then it's going to get challenging again. Very challenging.
And that's my fear these people who own land that live in towns going to see there's money available. And those properties are not going to be available for lease anymore because they've decided they can make money in cattle now. Potentially.
Yeah that is definitely true. And I want to just pursue that line a little bit. So besides me doing the educational stuff, we have a family business, American Grazing Land Services, and my wife and son run that. We sell electric fencing, stock water supplies, forage, seed, livestock, weighing equipment. And when COVID rolled around, and People saw empty shelves in the store and started thinking about their own food security.
The jump in business and retail sales that we had, particularly on electric fencing, but also in the stock order supplies, from little homesteader outfits. urban refugees, people going out and buying 20 acres so that they could produce their own food. They need to defense those places, get water, seed them down. And that, that pace of fleeing the cities and getting a place in the country, I think it's slowed down. Just a little bit.
And part of the reason is because the price of land has, in response to, that demand has gone up and some people who thought they could afford it have decided they couldn't afford it. But things that happen in our broader society and broader community are becoming more and more impactful.
on the way we need to look at our day to day farming and ranching operations because the market and the community that we're interact living in and interacting with it is not the same market and community that it was. Even 20 years ago and certainly not what it was 40, 50 years ago. And so we cannot continue to operate in business models that basically expired 40 years ago. But because of the average age of the American farmer and rancher, that's exactly where most of them are.
Economically, they're operating 40 years out of sync with the current economy.
very true. I see it happening all over here. Pickle my there's a, I won't say who they are. I know there's a farm up the road from me and it's been managed the same way forever and a son is taking it over and they've gone from they were having a calving season, but That's too much work.
So they're just putting the bulls out there and they'll just wean whenever they get whenever the calf gets big enough just that thought just that step backwards now I that there's lots of management stuff they could do and I've had discussions and they tell me cattle rotate They're grazing enough by themselves. It's not a problem. I disagree but Just that step back there from the calving season. I'm like why they didn't ask me for my opinion
Yeah, year round calving. For some people it's good for cash flow, but it's terrible for the bottom line at the end. It's terrible for the bottom line at the end of the year, though.
Yeah and I think they're coming from it that, oh, this gives them cash flow whenever they need to need cash, they can go pull some calves to wean and take them to market. I know when we went to calving seasons, just the better management we got from calving seasons was well worth it. We could do a better job.
I would definitely agree with you on that.
So you're in Missouri, you've gotten, you're running cattle, and then you decide to go across the country to Idaho. Why Idaho? Why then?
Okay. See, I gotta go back to my childhood again. I grew up a flatland crop farmer in Illinois, right? When I was 15, two of my older brothers and I went to Colorado and camped in the Rocky Mountains. And from that day on, I wanted to live in the mountains. And what I wanted to do in the mountains actually was besides hiking around and hunting and living there, was write stories.
Before I ever became a grazing authority and, wrote books on management intensive grazing, kicked the hay habit for quality pasture, before I wrote any of that stuff I was a fiction writer, and so I wanted to live in the Rocky Mountains and write stories, and I said midlife crisis is what we, made me move is when I was about 44, 45, I realized that what I really wanted to do in the world was live in the Rocky Mountains and write stories, and so we made the decision that, we set a date that is
whether I had anything else to do or not. That's the day I quit at the university. We would sell our farm in Missouri, and we would move west. Why it ended up being in Idaho in 1997, I started coming to Idaho on a regular basis to help University of Idaho Extension teach their Lost Rivers Grazing Academy. And so we were coming to Idaho a couple times a year to do those programs and about 2002 we just decided, we ought to just move out here.
And so that's what started the process of actually leaving the university, selling our Missouri property and coming out here.
Very interesting. I know for me when I was, I want to say 16, we took a trip to Colorado, to the mountains. For me, the mountains were nice. I enjoyed visiting them, but. My brother and sister they just love them. Now, they were younger they still live close to me, but they go out there more often than I do, and my brother loves the ocean. He goes to the ocean all the time. The ocean doesn't fascinate me either, because I can't graze livestock, I got a real quick story.
So first time I went to Hawaii, my wife is from Hawaii. So she went over ahead of me and she was over there about a week. And I'm like, send me some pictures. I just want to, I want to see, I've never been there. And she's we haven't gone anywhere. I'll take some pictures. Tomorrow we're going to go to the mall or something. I'll take pictures. Be like, okay, did you go? She said we just ran to the mall. There was nothing to see. I didn't take any pictures.
This goes on for a week, and I fly over there, and her dad picks me up at the airport, and we go to her parents house. parents house is about, I don't know, 20 minutes from the airport, so not too far, so we had to drive by the ocean, then up a hill into a residential area and find their house. But on the driveway of her parents house, if you look to the east, you saw the ocean. If you look to the west, there was a mountain behind her house.
And if you looked across the driveway, there was a palm tree in her neighbor's yard. I'm like, all of this would have been great for a picture for me. I would have enjoyed a picture she's didn't even think about any of that. So you get out to Idaho. One thing you all have is the American grazing land. Did you all start that about the time you went out to Idaho or was that a later addition?
It was, oh, four or five months after we moved here, decided we really needed to get back into the fence business because they're just, at the local farm store level, there's just so little choice and most of it's not very good stuff, unless they're selling, Gallagher or Stafix or something. If it's the really cheap farm at home stuff, it's not quality material. And largely got into the business just to service my consulting clientele.
And then, word of mouth advertising from them expanded the business. In 2014, when our son joined the business, he's the one who set up our online store and everything that a modern supply business needs to be doing.
Oh,
In the first 10 years that we had the business, it grew probably from 100, 000 annual sales to 400, 000. And then in the 10 years he's been in the business, we've gone from 400, 000 to about 2. 6 million sales a year.
Oh,
And so that's really been the power of having online availability. And again, in the COVID years, if you didn't have that online availability, you went out of business. And so we were well set for. When COVID hit and that boom from, all those homesteaders needing to fence and take care of their new properties.
And then also as another thing that's really helped business is the no till farmers, the regenerative no till farmers who have all realized that they have to have livestock incorporated back into their cropping. businesses to really bring soil health back. Portable fence on farmland is a huge market for us.
Oh, yes. Yeah. I wouldn't take that tangent just to ask a little bit about it. I know I've ordered a few times from there, and it's always worked out really good for me. I haven't got any special discounts, but otherwise it's worked out well. It is time for us to transition to our overgrazing section. And we mentioned it earlier, but let's go a little bit deeper into that why time matters. More than space.
Okay as we've talked about a little bit earlier, some people say, oh, moving them every day, that's way too much work, and you should just turn them out. And so the best explanation, the easiest thing that I can come up with to explain why it's important to make grazing periods shorter, and extend recovery periods, is if we think about the. interaction of the animals with plants and soils during the actual grazing period. So we have this pasture here. The livestock are in it here right now.
Mostly negative things are happening to the plants and the soil. The tastiest part of the plant, the most nutritious part of the plant is the leaves. Leaves are where photosynthesis takes off. So animals preferentially are grazing leaves. As they remove leaves, photosynthesis is going down. As the amount of energy being harvested by the plant is reduced, energy flow to the root system has to be reduced, which causes the root system to contract.
Now, in the long term, there's a positive aspect to that, but in the short term, it's a negative to the plant. And then, the soil science of the last 15 to 20 years has really developed into the relationship between living plants and living organisms and all of those different symbiotic relationships that are taking place. The current science says that 30 to 60 percent of the energy from today's photosynthesis will move through the plant and be fed to microbes within 48 hours.
And so if we diminish photosynthesis, reduce energy flow to the roots, that also reduces or stops the energy flow to the microorganisms. And then all those beneficial acts that the microorganisms are performing of mineral transfer into the plant, protection from soil bacteria, fungi, insect pathogens, that defense system starts breaking down. And if soil compaction is going to occur in a pasture, the physical force causing the compaction is animal hooves hitting the ground.
And that only happens during the grazing period. So we have four negative things happening during the grazing period. Reduction of photosynthesis, Restriction of nutrition to the roots, reduction or ending of direct carbohydrate flow to the soil microorganisms, and soil compaction. Positive thing that happens during the grazing period is dung and urine. That is our fertilization program, and that does happen during the grazing period.
Alright, so if we think about the recovery period, mostly positive things are happening for the plants and soil. Leaves are growing again, so we have photosynthesis kicking in again. That's more energy to the root, so the root system can expand, and also the root system can feed the microbes.
The growth of the root system, the feeding of the microbes, and accelerating those activities breaks up the compaction that may have occurred during the grazing period, and then also the decomposition of the done to release minerals or transfer, transfer minerals to the plant or release them into the soil is taking place. So it just makes sense that the fewer days of the active growing season that the animals are actually negatively impacting the plants.
That's important, and every time, as we make grazing periods shorter, for that little increment of land, the potential recovery period becomes greater. So we reduce the number of days that negative things are happening, and increase the number of days that positive things are happening. The traditional Spatial, stocking rate based management. Every day we have the negativity of the animal impact taking place and the absence of recovery limits the positive outcomes.
And that is why understanding that you need to manage time more than just space is the key piece of making grazing successful and ranching profitable.
As you minimize that time and you do faster rotations, is there a range we should be looking at? How short and how long should that range be for the optimal or best management?
Okay, in a productive environment, so a high natural rainfall environment or irrigation, three days is about the maximum I want to be on one pasture, because if you've got moisture and the temperature's right, within three or four days, that's trying to regrow. And the animals, because they're programmed to look for the best bite of feed possible, if there's new, higher quality growth coming, then, older, more mature stuff out there, they're going to start grazing that.
So in that productive, fast growth environment, three days is about the maximum that we want it to be. Now, semi arid rangeland. When I moved west, where we live in Idaho, our natural rainfall is between 7 and 8 inches a year. And in that semi arid environment I used to think a month is fine to be on that pasture because things grow so slowly. And I thought that mostly because that's what all the conventional range scientists said. And then after being out here, I said, man, that's too long.
And we better cut that down to two weeks and then to 10 days. And so where I am now is seven to 10 days. It's the maximum that I want to be. On a particular unit of rangeland. I'd rather it be 3 to 5 days, but we can live with 7, 7 to 10. So that's the ranges in grazing periods that we look at. And then the recovery period, most people want me to tell them, it's some number of days. It isn't some number of days. Recovery of a plant isn't based on calendar days past.
It's based on how many new leaves. it has been able to grow. And to avoid overgrazing, and I'm a little hesitant with you using that term, Cal, for your kind of wrap up. Let's talk about anything in grazing, because over, because overgrazing is a very specific happening in grazing management, and overgrazing is a function of failure to effectively manage So on most cool season grasses, we need at least three new leaves per tiller for that plant to be in a positive carbohydrate state.
After a grazing event, we need to grow back three new leaves. On most of our native warm seasons that numbers four or five. And cool season grasses, I prefer to graze at four to five leaf stage. Big blue stem Indian grass side oats, things like that. I like grazing them at six to eight leaf stage. And if you do that, you're going to have very healthy root systems and very strong and vigorous plants. Now, overgrazing is, happens two ways.
Either you stay on that pasture too long and the animals are grazing off the new regrowth before the plant is fully recovered. very much. Or, we took the animals off of this pasture, we've allowed it to recover some, but not enough. And we come back and graze it again before it's in a car positive carbohydrate state. Overgrazing is a function of failure to effectively manage time. And once again, that's why time matters more than space.
Wonderful information right there. Just you could just take notes on everything you said there. Excellent. Not that you need me to say that. I realize
Thank you. Thank you.
Our last section, we'll go ahead and transition to our famous four questions. Same four questions we asked of all of our guests. The very first question, what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? Very
I would of course have to say, Jim Gersh's books, Management Intensive Grazing, Kick the Hay Habit, Quality Pasture. But, what I consider the most important book on grazing management written in the last, hundred plus years. Andre Zen's grass productivity. 'cause that's the foundation. A Alan Savory and holistic plant grazing and, all of his thoughts on time-based management really go back to Andre Vean, myself, any almost every other grazing guru that I've met from any other country.
That has been the seminal book, in their philosophy.
I'm embarrassed to say I have the book, but I haven't read it yet, so I need to remedy that.
Yes, you should.
Our second question, what is your favorite tool for the farm?
My favorite tool for the farm. My eyes and my brain. Still the best computer that I can run for farm management software.
Is there anything you've done to make your eyes and brain more effective?
Being a good observer. All right. When people ask me what's the most important skill of being a good grazing manager. I say to be a good observer. Now, I used to keep almost, from our personal farm in Missouri, almost everything I kept in my head. That does not work anymore. And I've got to write and record things. I am known as being an Excel geek. I have Excel files for almost every question that comes up and situations.
And so just keeping my mind sharp by continuing to develop those kinds of analytical and planning tools. But be an observer, keep your eyes and mind open all the time and record what and that can be a photograph. It can be an audio recording. It can be, the written word, but record it some way. Don't count on your brain to keep all of that stuff safely stored for all of your days.
Very good. And that's the part I have to work on is recording it. I love these new smartphones in that I can take pictures and then I can go back and see when I took the picture and it's really nice. Dad and I was talking about some lambs we had sold and I went to my phone and said it happened this date because here's the pictures from all that activity.
And something else, and not all phones and camera functions will do this, but if you have the setting on yours where you can also tag the GPS coordinates of every picture you take, that's pretty
Oh, yes.
Because
yes, that would be, especially if you're looking over time.
yeah, because sometimes you think you saw something over. I know it was here. I saw this plant here. I saw this hole in the soil here, but you can't find it. If you've got a GPS function for your camera, you will find that spot.
Oh, yes. Yeah. That's excellent advice there. Yeah. Our third question. What would you tell someone just getting started?
Don't believe half of what they told you.
Can you expand upon that a little bit?
I spent a lot of years unlearning many things that I learned in school. That In the real world, it sure doesn't seem to be true and accurate information. It really comes back to what I already said about be a good observer. Analytical thinking. I love playing mind games where you gotta figure something out. Figure out what is this person trying to convince me to do or convince me not to do? Why are they telling me this?
I used to, grew up in conventional agriculture, went through the land grant system. I believed everything that I was told, was true. And I have found that it is not, if you look at the world around you and in the light of your own experiences, if something that someone is telling you just doesn't make sense, think long and hard about what's their motivation for telling you this. And in, in the case of ag, in the case of, in the case of agriculture, a whole lot of it is.
They want to sell you something and you got to figure out whether you should buy it or not. Does it make sense? What they are saying that this product will do this and it will return you this many dollars. It's in the cow calf business all the different inputs, injections, things you can do to You know that cow calf pair if they all gave us the percent performance boost You know that's claimed and you're doing all those things.
Everybody ought to be weaning eight and nine hundred pound calves and we don't do it.
yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent advice. And lastly, Jim, where can others find out more about you?
Best place to go is our website, which is americangrazinglands. com. You can just search Jim Garris grazing and it'll take you there. We have a lot of information available there. And now that I know you, Cal under grazing media resources. We have podcasts from our friends, and so we'll put a link to grazing grass podcasts there so that people can, find all the other episodes that you've done and the other people that you've talked with.
Because I've never gotten around to it, we don't actually produce our own YouTube videos on different things, but there's 40 to 50 YouTube videos from various conferences. interviews and stuff up there. So you can get a lot of the presentations that I do at conferences and workshops. Again, it's under that grazing media resources tab. And then there's, all of our product sales, our store, our online store is up there. Uh, so that's where you can find, and you can buy books.
We've I've written four books and they're available. from our website, but there's other people, that I respect and trust what they're doing that we sell some other people's. Books as well.
Oh, yes, and we'll put a link in our show notes as well. So
I appreciate that.
Jim. I really appreciate you coming on This is our hundredth episode Which is just crazy that we've made a hundred episodes that even people care to listen because it's been downloaded more Than what my mom has time to download. So It's really been impressive and I Really appreciate you coming on and sharing
You're more than welcome, and as I said at the start, I just appreciate the opportunity to get the word out that there's a better way of farming and ranching. One of our slogans on our website on my business card too, is making the world a better place one pasture at a time.
and that's a great philosophy there I tell people a lot of times with the grazing grass We just want people to take that next step whatever that next step may be for them Yeah, and thank you. I appreciate Jim