Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 104.
the post it note is more, is mightier. than the grazing reel.
Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 103. You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass based livestock production utilizing 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 Clay Connery of the Working Cows Podcast. Very excited for him to come on, share his journey, talk about the podcast, and answer the famous four questions. And just as a teaser, I don't think you can guess what his favorite tool for the farm is. It's an excellent episode. It's a dime. It's a don't intentionally miss episode. Anyway, before we talk to Clay, 10 seconds about my farm, and we're going to talk about the grazing grass community.
By the time you listen to this, We will have a thousand members, if not really close, and if you're not a member, you might want to run over there and join because the thousandth member, boy that th was hard for me, the thousandth member will receive a prize. Once we get to a thousand, I'll announce it in the group, so we all know, but so excited that group is growing, so excited, excited for the discussion that's happening there, and we can support each other in our journeys.
Enough about me, about the grazing grass community. Let's talk to Clay.
Clay, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass Podcast. We're excited you're here today.
Cal, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.
To get started, Clay, can you tell us about yourself and your operation?
Yeah. Just I like the way that one guest put it one time. He said, I ranch on a postage stamp. And so we're, we got a half section of land, which, you know, maybe for a guy in Northeast Oklahoma or or Minnesota or Missouri. That sounds significant, but it'll run about nine cows for a year in our neighborhood is what we're looking at. And so my wife and I have been on this journey of managing our own place for about five years with our four kids ages 15, 13, 11, and nine.
It's easy here for about six months until the, Boys turn 16 and 14 this summer and then we've got two two evens and two odds again. But we've got two boys or three boys and a girl. Birth order goes boy, girl, boy. So she's well protected and feisty.
So.
But yeah, so We we run on, like I said, a half section of land. I look at the ranch as a side hustle because I don't think that we should try to ask it to do more than it can. And so the way that fleshes it out is we've got a resident sheep herd which I appreciated your your episode with Jared Luman because I am also accidentally lambing right now.
Oh
we are, we're recording here at the end of February and we're accidentally lambing just about done actually from the looks of it. And so anybody who I, as I said in a radio interview the other day anybody who runs sheep knows what that, knows what's that, what that's about accidentally lambing. So we have a resident sheep herd.
And then we also have we bring in custom grazing cattle through in the summer during the growing season May to August ish, sometimes end of May to end of August, sometimes beginning of May to beginning of August, just depends on what season you're in. What the customer wants and that's how we try to maximize or optimize, as you said. That's how we optimize our forage availability and quality throughout the year.
Oh, very good. When we jumped back, Clay, did you always knew you wanted to be here running sheep and cattle?
Absolutely not. I knew actually, I knew really well that I wanted n Very little, if nothing, to do with agriculture. I always say I grew up on a ranch west of Belfouche, South Dakota, my parents were heroes. They started a ranch from scratch in the eighties. That wasn't easy to do back then. But what that meant was they both. They both worked jobs, full time jobs in town. My dad worked for the phone company and my mom was a teacher, elementary school teacher.
And so that meant evenings, nights, and weekends were cows, and they were good. Looking back now and having my own kids those ages we were involved in things. We were involved in 4 H. We were involved in wrestling and baseball and they never missed any of those events, also, on top of starting ranch from nothing in the 80s. They were present for activities and had us involved in activities, but nights and weekends were cows for us outside of extracurricular activities.
And so I grew to resent the cows. I probably, or maybe definitely had a bit of a lazy streak and didn't enjoy the work outside. as much as somebody, as some other people. And so I didn't grow up with that story that I hear so often from other people of, Oh, I love this. I knew I wanted to do it from, from my earliest days, I was carpet farming, and always had a fascination with the tractors. That wasn't me. Agriculture in general, cows specifically didn't interest me.
And so I went away to Bible school for a couple of years. And In Milwaukee started to realize that, Western South Dakota wasn't as bad a place as I thought it was. And I never really didn't like it. It just, I was curious about other places. I got, as they say, a belly full of living in the city, got to find out what that was all about. and realized I do Western South Dakota.
And then, as I often say, I got selectively involved on my dad's ranch helping him calve heifers helping him brand some of the other big cow working days and then that involvement. Morphed over time into greater and greater involvement, and it started to get in my blood, so to speak, and started to get opened up through some continuing education courses to a whole different way of thinking about grass and cows and business in general.
And that was the start of the journey for me is getting introduced to some of these ideas. of regenerative agriculture.
So after Bible college you went back home.
Yeah, so I went back to I went back and started a job. I worked some blue collar jobs odd jobs flooring, did some flooring putting carpet and tile and hardwood in houses. I did I worked at a shop where we installed custom living quarters and horse trailers. So think of those people who are on the rodeo circuit living in their horse trailers, 250 days a year. Those are the kind of trailers we were working on. I did that for a while.
And then I worked at a bentonite plant, which is bentonites and everything from diapers to. toothpaste and candy bars. It's it's we use that. I worked in a plant where we put that in bags and shipped it all over the world. And so I did that for about 18 months after school. And then I got pitched a job working as a youth pastor in a local church. And so I did that. I was a youth pastor in a local church for about 12 years.
And like I said, I was selectively involved in the ranch during that whole time. But I, I wasn't, there as an employee or anything.
Yeah, I know when I left the farm originally and started teaching, my selectively involvement in dad's cattle was him calling me. We got work to do, but I don't know if I had much of an option to say, Hey, I can't, but, actually, I am one of those people that knew from an early age, livestock was something I wanted to do. My brother and sisters, I've mentioned, they got as far away as quickly as they could.
I was just going to say that's similar to me too. My brother has he spent some years in the oil field, but he's had cows of his own for, most of his post college years once he moved back from California.
Oh yeah. Now one thing that I think is interesting, you went a long ways from home for college. What was some contributing factors for that?
It was. affordable.
That's, always important.
So I went to New Tribes Bible Institute in Waukesha, Wisconsin, which is just outside of Milwaukee and all of the teachers there are retired or not retired, but missionaries who have returned home for the most part from the mission field. And so their salaries are paid as missionaries. So the student body doesn't have to pay their salaries and then and so it's just You end up just paying room and board, basically, is what you're paying for in your education there.
It's now called Ethnos 360, it's still there same Bible school, same curriculum, some of the same teachers as were there 20 years ago, but but it's now called Ethnos 360.
Goes by a different name, but anyways and then the other thing was all the credits would have transferred to Moody Bible Institute And I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a youth pastor at that point And so I was going there because Moody is similar in that it's affordable And so it ends up being hard to get into and so I wanted to go to New Tribes So that all my credits would transfer to Moody and then that's where I was gonna go into Chicago, actually, from Milwaukee to Chicago.
But yeah, that was just why I went there. I ended up getting connected. To New Tribes Bible Institute through a mission trip that I went on with a Christian boarding high school that I was attending. I attended my senior year of high school was at Sunshine Bible Academy in Miller, South Dakota. And we took a mission trip to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission. And most of the students there were, or most of the staff in the youth department there were New Tribes Bible Institute students.
And so that's how I got connected to New Tribes.
Oh, very interesting. One reason I went to NEO Junior College, one thing, it was close, it was fairly affordable, I could still come home and dairy, but all the credits transferred to Oklahoma State University where I was. Intended on being, so yeah, planning ahead. You talked about you got home, you were able to be selectively involved in your dad's ranch, and at some point through continuing education, you started being introduced to these paradigm shifting practices.
Tell us a little bit about that process and how you dove in deeper to learn more.
Sure. Yeah. So basically the, I needed to supplement my income. The church was not able to continue to pay a full time salary. And so I needed to supplement my income. My dad had retired early, I would say early, yeah, he retired early from the phone company to go ranch full time, basically. And he was getting to a place where he needed more help on the ranch. And so he said, I'll hire you a couple days a week. There's some lessons there that we can talk about.
But I'll hire you a couple days a week and and, pay you this much a month and and it would supplement my income at the church. And then he said, but before you come and work on the ranch you should go get some continuing education related to ranching and tri state livestock news is a big publication in our neighborhood. Agriculture, obviously, publication in our neighborhood. And they had an advertisement in there for the High Plains Ranch Practicum.
Was taught by Dallas Mount, now the CEO of Ranch Management Consultants. Aaron Berger, who's an extension agent in Southwest Nebraska. And then Blake Hopman, who was also an extension agent in Wyoming. So it was basically University of Wyoming, University of Nebraska going together to put on this business based ranching.
Ranching class and so the way it worked was it was two days a month on in four separate months So I think our classes were like June August September November maybe is when the classes
Oh yeah.
and so the first I don't know if I remember this quite, right But it seems to me the first Our or two of class was they showed us a clip from the movie Moneyball about thinking differently about how to draft players from that first kind of meeting where Billy Beans pitching a different way to draft players and choose players and then they showed us, a different way to peel a banana. That was the first hour of this ranching class and getting us to think differently, look at things differently.
The Don Campbell quote if you want to change the way you, if you want to change small things, change the way you do things. If you want to change big things, change the way things, they were trying to help us look at things from a different paradigm. And so that was my introduction to these ideas of let's look at ranching differently. And then it was all about economic analysis. It was all about, this is a business first, not.
A lifestyle first and grazing, high density, short duration grazing being the, what we're really shooting for as high a density as we can possibly get and for a shorter duration as we can possibly get. All practical factors being part of that decision making process. But yeah and those are some of the things, basically the four pillars of a ranching operation, land, animals, money, and people. We love to manage animals and land maybe second. As ranchers, right?
Money and people, we're not so much a fawn, a fan of doing those things. And so we spend a lot of time looking at animals and land, not much time thinking about money and people. And that nets us pretty poor results from a business perspective in our ranches. And so that was the way that the school was structured and just totally changed my paradigm. It did. It just totally changed the way I look at agriculture.
It, that was where the passion to be involved in agriculture for the rest of my life came from, because I could see that now cows are a tool to make what God has entrusted to us in the form of His creation better. And there, man, I was all in at that point.
Oh,
I wanted to be a part of it.
Yeah, the opportunity to leave things better off than we found them. It's a blessing to be here and being able to do this. How can we leave it in better shape? Excellent passion there to go with. When you started going to these classes, first off, I love that format. A couple days every few months. It gives you time to get information, go back, do some work, Reflect, do more research if you need to, and then come back for more. I love that format.
Of course, most things are more short intervals or, it's almost the high density, short interval. You go a conference for three days and you get slammed with everything, which there's benefits from that. But having that opportunity just a few days, every month, some logistics of getting there. But I really liked that model better than some of the other models I've seen.
Yeah, it's got, it's advantages and disadvantages both ways. I think there's no right answer, but it's definitely worth maybe doing both. Because I think that it's easier for, especially for people who are in an old paradigm of branching, it's easier for people to.
get away for a couple of days at a time than it is for eight days for something like ranching for profit or something, Where if you're in an, in a newer paradigm, hopefully you're building in vacation, you're building in time away from the ranch for your family. And so this is part of, that becomes an easier thing, but from an, in an older paradigm way of thinking where, I don't need a vacation. I love what I do, Why would I go anywhere else? This is God's country, which it is.
And everybody who, wherever you live should be that for you, honestly. But anyways, that, I think it is easier from that perspective and the ability to take things in, ruminate on them for a while, decompress, think about them, look at your own operation, think, how do I implement that? And then go back and get that. another and ask questions, honestly,
Oh, yeah.
we were thinking about implementing this, but how would that work here? So I think that's a, it is a really great format.
That opportunity to think about questions. My best questions occur about 2 a. m. the day or two after whatever I'm at. So having that opportunity to write those down and go back and ask questions, I think is great. You mentioned about vacations. I'm currently trying to convince my wife that we need to take a vacation to the National Grazing Lands Conference. And I don't know how that's going to be honest.
I know it's a hard sell because she says so many of our vacations involve something about ag. So we'll see how that goes. She said we can go, but not so much that it counts as a vacation.
Yes. Yes. It's going to be a business expense for the grazing grass podcast. Is that right?
it is. Yes. Yeah. And she'll make sure that everything's paid for from grazing grass. It will not be coming out of any other budget. Yeah, so you start going to these classes. Did you go home and tell your dad about it? Was he receptive to these ideas?
Yeah. I think that part of my dad being, starting the ranch from nothing in the eighties and my parents doing that is that they were always pretty receptive to it. There's some practical things, the, what my dad's operation, my parents operation ended up becoming was just a small piece of owned land, or two small pieces of owned land, and then all leased land. And in our neighborhood, the leased land is most often leased either from the National Forest.
A forest service grazing permit, or it's leased from a retired rancher who's actually willing to give you full care of your animals. You wouldn't necessarily have to show up. You could drop them off and in six months later, go pick them up and you would know that they're going to be fine. So that happens quite a bit in our neighborhood. And so there were some limitations there as far as the forest service and the ranch lease as to what.
He was able to implement, from a grazing perspective and from a calving date perspective and some of those things. And so I think he was always receptive. And actually I remember. Long time ago, he probably went to what has now more morphed into The South Dakota grassland coalition's grazing school before it was called that before it was probably even called the grassland coalition he went to a course a long time ago and he came home with a book by Stan Parsons.
If you want to be a cowboy, get a job and so that, he hit, he had that kind of introduction to it a long time ago. And so I think he was always open to it, but there was some limitations just based on what we had for resources available to us and what we were actually able to change with our management, and he was always an April calver anyways. From what I remember, We calved heifers earlier.
And most of those actually were heifers that we would buy, calve out and then sell as pears in the spring when people were getting ready to go to grass. And that actually worked out pretty well for us. Aside from the. Challenges of calving in February and March in Western South Dakota, but, It worked out financially. And so I think he was always receptive, but limited in what we could implement.
And now as his business has changed a little bit, he's implementing some of, more and more of those things all the time, actually.
Very good. I'm not familiar at all with grazing public lands, so I don't know what parameters are put on you through that, but I do get the private leases and that's it's almost. Every person has a different idea how it should be done and one property. I don't have a formal lease for it. I brought it up on the podcast.
I do get to graze it a little bit each year, but it's because there's multiple people involved and they're very concerned about overgrazing and they're just, they're so apprehensive about it, but they're letting me graze it a little bit each year.
Far as the public land is concerned they set your turnout date. And they set your come home date, basically. And infrastructure is pretty hard to develop because you've got all kinds of competing interests. And you have to do, you have to do archaeological surveys to decide if there's, any Indian burial grounds there, or anything like that.
Oh, yeah.
so all these kinds of challenges become part of what we do. The problem, or you have to get over those hurdles before you can do any infrastructure and those kinds of things, especially permanent infrastructure. And then the other thing is they don't care what size of calf you're running.
So I know a lot of guys in our neighborhood that calve in February and March, because you can come home in November from the forest service leaf lease with a 750 pound calf, and so you basically get to run a yearling. In the hills at the same AUMs as a pair. And so if you calve in April or you calve in, in February, they don't really care how big that calf is when you come home.
So it ends up being a one of the unfair regional advantages that we have, that some people take advantage of in that way. And then the other thing is going up there with baby calves, I think turn out to sometime late May, early June going up there with baby calves. They're more susceptible to predators. And so there's, there are mountain lions there aren't wolves, but there are really big coyotes, In the black Hills, if you know what I'm saying.
And there aren't bears but there are gigantic trash raccoons in the Black Hills. And so, there's a There's those kinds of things that you're thinking about too with small baby calves going up there if they were born in May and June. And not the least of which is calving up there would be a challenge too. So I think that's, those are some of the things that come into play when you start to think about changing calving date drastically before turning out into the hills.
Yeah those would all be important factors there. When you were going home and able to help your parents, what were some, or how did that work out for you? Because we know so many people are working with their families and going in. And I know I've gone through that experience. I still am in that experience. In fact, if I wasn't recording this right now, I'd be outside helping dad with some fence that he wants done. So how has that worked? Working with your parents.
What would you suggest to others working with their parents?
I think it's important to understand who's, who's place is this, just to be really blunt.
Oh, I think I'm sorry to jump in. I think that is a huge point and that's real easy to forget But you've got to remember that. Okay, go ahead.
yeah, no, I think that's important. I think from the older generation the generation that's currently in, in ownership, it's important for them to tell everybody who might be the next generation, what is, what's the next step. Where are we going from here? Who has an interest going forward and figure out a way to decide that, I really think that the, that it comes down to clear communication of what is your role here? Are you a co decision maker? Are you a co owner or are you an employee?
And honestly, if those things are communicated clearly it, it relieves a lot of that stress of. Junior coming home to the ranch and trying to implement all the crazy things he learned at whatever conference he just went to, And it helps everybody make decisions for the future. Is this a place that I want to invest 15, 20, 30 years waiting for my opportunity to manage it?
Or is it Going to be better for everybody our Christmas dinner is going to be more pleasant if I go somewhere else and come home and visit occasionally rather than trying to work here. So I think that clarity of what the future is probably the most important thing in those deals. And that just takes. Admittedly uncomfortable conversations. You just have to be willing to sit down and say, Where are we headed? What's the vision? What's the mission? Who's next, in terms of management authority?
And, the bigger the family, the harder those conversations get. As I, I would expect that to be the case. But, doesn't mean that we should be scared of them or run from them. We actually, I think, Would have a lot better relationships in ranching if we ran towards those conversations and approached them a place of curiosity rather than a place of trying to impose our will on the situation And so I think that's where I would go as far as Lessons learned is we just need to be real clear.
And once we know those things, then we can make decisions and we can understand I'm here to put staples in fence posts and sign the back of the check rather than the front of the check. And. I am okay with that or I'm not, and I'm going to make my plans for the future accordingly.
And I think that's, those are all really good points. That clarity for me just speaking about my dad, my parents and my relationship. It's always progressing, getting better or getting worse. My relationship with my parents have just always gotten better. But granted, some of that is wisdom on my side. I'm not the guy I was when I was 23 and thought I knew everything. And that clarity on where you fall into that's so important, and what the succession plan is in the future.
I did some things based upon what I thought the plan was, and that wasn't the plan, which is not my parents fault. That's my fault for not having that conversation, and that's caused me to do some things differently. And had I had those conversations, I would have started doing things differently earlier, and so those conversations while anxiety causing they need to be had.
Yeah, I've, man, a couple of things on that. First of all, there's a really helpful graphic that goes around social media every once in a while, about when I was 18, or, you can go back as far as you want. When I was five, my dad was my hero. When I was 15, I kind of. Whatever. My dad didn't know as much as I thought he did when I was 18. I thought my dad knew nothing, and I'm 25. It's I'm going to really going to teach the old man what's going on.
And then you'll, the older you get, you start to realize, he's a pretty smart guy and I should learn from him more, And so I, I think that is an important thing to recognize is that Posture of humility and learning from the previous generation. So I think that's an important thing. And then your last name doesn't entitle you to anything, the only thing your parents owe you is clarity about what the plan is, really, I think. Is the way we should look at that.
I agree. I'm here because I'm here. Dad's able to do some things he couldn't do otherwise. And I've came it's, it hasn't been just a straight line here, but. It's my honor to be here and help my dad get that enjoyment out of it as long as he wants to do it. But like I said, that wasn't me. I hate to count up the years now, two or three decades ago.
I'm with ya. There's more gray in the beard and on the side of my head now than there was a while ago for sure.
Yes, and I'm finding mine's increasing. I trimmed this just today because I can't pull off the Brian Alexander and
Me neither.
It was getting a little bit long and my daughter goes, there's a lot of gray in that. I'm not talking to her right now, but maybe later on I will.
Yeah, the Bible says it's a crown of glory, so we'll go with that.
There we go. Yes. Now you talked a little bit about your operation. So transitioning to your operation and what you're doing, you have sheep and you're doing custom grazing cattle. And do you own some cattle as well?
Just a couple of milk cows. That's it. I live I live 35 miles at my house from the nearest gas station. And I live a 70 something miles from the nearest Walmart. And so just tell you where my, how, where my house sits in the world. So yeah we try to keep something that gives milk around because we like drinking milk and we'd rather not have to buy eight gallons of it at a time when we go to the grocery store every week. Two weeks to one month.
When I hear that, I think, Oh, wow, that sounds perfect. My wife would be going, No, you're crazy.
I think the sparsity of the population is related to the productivity of the land in a lot of cases, the more productive the land, the closer the places get together. And so it comes with its own unique set of challenges, but whenever we turn off the pavement onto the gravel road, and when we turn onto the gravel road, we're.
At the closest, we're 13 miles from our house when we turn onto the gravel road and my wife breathes a sigh of relief and she's happy that she's in her happy place now where the cows outnumber the people and that's good. But
Very good, yeah. On your sheep are you running hair sheep, I'm assuming?
wool sheep, So
I'm sorry. I made the wrong assumption
oh, you're good. You're good. We I, everybody who comes from a place with high parasite load makes that assumption because we, and
I have a little bit more rainfall.
And we, so we don't have the parasite issues and we also live in a place where we don't have to burn our wool. The wool is very marketable here. It's not lucrative, but it is easy to market. And there are still people here who know how to shear sheep. There are still crews that'll show up at your house and shear 800 sheep in one day, there, that's still a possibility in our neighborhood. And so It makes sense for us to run wool sheep here.
I think there are advantages to hair sheep as I understand it. They're easier to keep in from what I understand and maybe a little bit broader palette than a wool sheep. So definitely. They're interesting to me, hair sheep are interesting to me, but we haven't, we just started with wool sheep because one of the larger wool, or one of the larger sheep markets in the world is 20, 35 miles from my house, same place where the gas station is.
And And, it's and I would say 90 percent of the sheep that run through there are wool sheep. I've been there for a few sales and never seen a hair sheep run through. So that's just what I'm basing it on. I'm sure there I know there are hair sheep in the neighborhood. A lot of those actually though get direct marketed.
They're marketed as lamb to the end consumer, and so I'm not sure how many of them even run through the sale barn on a regular basis, but I know some friends of mine who are experimenting with the hair sheep, and yeah, they're, that's definitely intriguing to me.
just to show the contrast when we sell sheep through the sale barn, we sell them in Diamond, Missouri, which is an hour and a half from us to the east. So as you go east, you're getting more rain. I've been to a sale a number of times, and I'm trying to remember if I've seen any wool sheep go through the sale. I'm sure there's been some, but Hare Sheep has just taken over the sheep industry in this area, outside of show lambs.
Yeah, and and most of those show lambs would probably be a Suffolk or Suffolk cross, yeah. Yeah,
Yeah.
and we're all, almost all rambla here. Somebody told me one time there's an invisible wall. Between Montana and North Dakota that, that keeps the Targheese from getting in. But but it's almost all Rambouillet Rambouillet Cross. Some SAM, South African Meat Marinos have been making their way in here, but mostly Rambouillet. Whiteface, wool sheep.
Are you able to, you've talked about the market for wool is available there. Is this through local crafters or is there a bigger market there?
No, there's, again, one of the largest wool marketing places also in the world is in, in Belfouche, South Dakota, which is 70 miles from me. Same place where the nearest stoplight is. Same place where the, almost the same place as the nearest Walmart. That's 10 miles south in Spearfish. But anyways so we're, So they sell they group wool into pools and sell it by the container ship load out of there.
I don't know if they fill a container ship with wool, but they have a massive warehouse and they just built onto it. So Yeah. so I can actually market wool, like just. I can take, as my kids call it, I can take wool to town in my hippie van and sell it there. I've got a big conversion van. My kids call it the hippie van. But anyways, I can take wool to town in that and sell it there. And that's the, that's the way our marketing works here.
I remember going through OSU, working on my animal science degree, and I get towards the end and I've got to have another elective. And, so my friend and I, he was in the same boat, we were trying to figure out what we were going to take. We decided to take sheep science. And, the professor of it, he was very adamant, quarter of land, which, I think it's always funny when they say quarter of a land, 160 acres. In my area, no one calls it a quarter.
You go west of me, I don't know, two hours, then you start getting this terminology change. I've got a quarter of land, or half, or section. So it's interesting that change in verbiage there. But he was all about, he's Quarter of land, you can pay for that land with sheep. Of course, obviously, this is in the 90s. Wool subsidy was there, and that played a huge role in it. But it caused me to always have sheep on the back of my mind, thinking, how's this work?
Because no one ran sheep in my area, outside show sheep. And then, of course, that paradigm's been shifting with hair sheep, and it's been coming in much greater.
Yep. And my dad always told me, he said, there isn't a place north or west of Belfouche that wasn't paid for with sheep. And as I moved out north and east of Belfouche, I come to realize that's the same here. All of these, all this land was paid for with sheep. Everybody, they call them the mortgage lifters, right? And so I think that they are an incredibly profitable animal.
I think that the reason they're incredibly profitable, especially in this neighborhood, When you start to talk about running cows the way that we talk about running cows in regenerative agriculture and calving in May and June and not feeding any hay or feeding less than 30 days of hay every year to maintain profitability and all these things that we start to talk about as part of running cows, invariably somebody is going to say to you, Why are you trying to run deer?
A sheep is basically a deer, right? It's a smaller ruminant and it's about the same weight as a deer and the deer survive. The deer don't just survive here. They thrive here. So why don't we run an animal that's about the size of the animals that do thrive here? And why don't we run them in the same way that the animals that do thrive here, Do run and lamb in May and June like the deer in our neighborhood lamb or have their young. And so I think that it does make a lot of sense here.
And I think the main reason it makes a lot of sense here is because this environment is well adapted to those critters. And we should probably entertain more of them rather than fewer of them. As has been the case, the trend over the last probably 40, 30 or 40
Oh yeah.
Slowly reduce the sheep population,
Yeah for us, when we figure numbers, the sheep come out ahead than the cattle do. Now granted, we're in a really uptick market in cattle, and that, if you figure at this point, the cattle might be a little bit better, but we all know that's not going to last forever, and it'll be coming back down.
You said a mouthful there though, right? The cows In record prices like the highest prices we've ever had
Oh, yeah,
Are, they might beat the sheep.
Yes. Yeah, and that's when so when you just look at the income possibility from them it's really neck and neck Cattle may be a little bit higher, but then you go on the other end start looking at their expenses The amount of hay we have to feed, we'd love to feed none, but we're not there yet. The amount of hay that the sheep eat is just crazy when you compare it to, if you convert it to animal units and compared it to what the cattle eat.
It's just crazy to me how little they get by on and yet they're, We've covered a few things, Clay, your journey, just a little bit about your operation, not very much, but we're already to the time we need to transition to the overgrazing section. And this happens a lot of times because I'm too long winded and I'm working on that. But the overgrazing section today, we're going to take a deeper dive into something about your operation.
Actually, we're going to off your operation a little bit and we're going to talk about the Working Cows podcast. Thank you. I assume for a lot of people that may be an introduction. It was an introduction to Ag podcasts for me and I'm getting started. So first off, why did you start the Working Cows podcast? Oh
Dallas Mount. So he was, as I said, he was an instructor of the High Plains Ranch Practicum. He was still working for Extension at that time. I think it might've been maybe, it was probably less than a year after I finished the High Plains Ranch Practicum that he announced that he was going to take over Ranch Management Consultants from Dave and Kathy Pratt.
And that was, He was my introduction to this kind of thinking, and he continued to say throughout the course of that class, that somebody in this room should start a podcast for ranchers. And I was like I grew up on a ranch. I can ask a reasonably intelligent question about cows. I understand the recording side of it and the publishing side of it because I've been publishing a podcast of our sermons from the church for at that point, probably five or six years. And so I knew that side of it.
And I'd been a podcast addict. Actually the app I use to download podcasts at that time was called podcast addict For a number of years. And I had all those things. in, in my back pocket and just never really knew what my podcast would be about if I was to start one. And Dallas gave me that, that push over the ledge. And that was how I ended up getting started in November of 2017.
oh wow. So you know your age of your podcast just dwarfs the age of mine. Mine started in May of 2020 and I had some big breaks in there for reasons. But getting started on that, I knew nothing. And, wait, let me clarify. I like to say I know nothing. I'm fairly good with technology. I'd been doing a few YouTube videos, so I knew the process there. Podcasting was a little bit different, but it was easier because it was just audio versus video with the audio.
But I jumped in and thought, I'll figure it out. It sounds like you had a better base going in. You already knew a little bit about the world.
Yep, for sure. And it was it was a little different. Because I didn't do any editing. There was no intro, no outro, no, no theme music, nothing like that for the church podcast. It was just basically it would start with Let's Pray and that's how the podcast, the episode or
a good way to start.
That's how usually the, first words you would hear on the podcast. It was a little different in that regard. But the actual. Going through and cutting out the, anything that didn't need to be part of the actual sermon podcast and exporting it and uploading it, all those things were similar. And so I, I learned through, some of the continuing education courses that I did take, like the free podcast course from John Lee Dumas.
Some of those things just about the importance of editing and making things. concise and consumable and some of those things. And, so I, I did learn some things in that regard, but as far as managing the website and uploading sermons and, or uploading episodes and those kinds of things, I had those kinds of things in my back pocket.
So getting started with the podcast, how did it go at first? Did you find it was well received? Did you, getting guests was easy? How was it received at the beginning?
Yeah. Actually as things have progressed, I can now say that I've never had anybody finally, or ultimately turned me down to be a guest on the podcast. Everybody's Always eventually said yes. Sometimes it took
Oh, okay. Actually, just on that, I got an email just the other day from someone saying, I don't know if you're still looking for guests, but I'm interested, and it's someone I had emailed last June.
Yep. It took a introduction from somebody in their industry to get them to say yes, but I had emailed them probably after episode two and, And so it took years for them to come on. But that's all right. I, I don't begrudge anybody for saying no. But so guests hasn't necessarily been a struggle it took some convincing for a couple of different individuals but that, like I said, that's fine. I don't begrudge anybody for not being willing to do it.
Probably the biggest challenge for me has always just been managing time trying to figure out when I was going to sit down to actually put the episode together managing schedules and calendars and getting our time synced up with somebody else's to sit down and record, those things are maybe the bigger challenge. I think that as far as feedback and reception, I think we work in an industry where somebody will think you're stupid way before they'll tell you're stupid.
And they'll probably listen once and say, this is ridiculous. this person has no idea what they're talking about. And they would be right. But they'll shut it off, never listen again, and never tell you. And I think that's just the everybody thinks Canada's nice. All the people on the coast think people in Canada are really nice because they've never been to the middle of the country and they don't realize that we're all nice too.
And so we're not going to tell you we think you're an idiot, but we will think privately that you're an idiot and then not. pay attention anymore. So I think that's probably happened way more than people have reached out to me and said, you don't know what you're talking about.
Here's who you should listen to, or here's who you should talk to, or here's the question you should have asked, so I haven't had a lot of negative feedback, but that's probably, that's definitely not because I didn't deserve it.
You remind me of an early feedback I got on one of my, I couldn't say, maybe teens or twenties on episodes. I wish I could remember it better. I hadn't thought about this in a long time, but you saying that brought it up. They're like you're doing okay with your podcast, and if you listen to early versions of Working Cows podcast. You can see how much growth Clay has had. You'll get there. Oh, I paraphrase that some. But the meeting was there. I was like, Oh yeah, I, okay.
Thanks. I think you should have
Yeah. Yeah. Leash it was okay.
you would have set the bar higher than Clay's podcast, but.
Oh Yeah, I remember getting that. One thing I find in this area of content creation, wherever. Whatever media you're going through, sometimes getting that feedback it turns into a one way conversation and I would love for more two way conversation, and you don't get that feedback and you're hoping you're hitting, you're hoping people it renaissance I can't even say that word. I don't know why I try and say that word.
You hope it connects with people and helps them Take that next step or when I think about the grazing grass that next step whatever that next step may be for you But you're not getting that feedback back and I come from education as well and education is very similar In that you go there every day. You're trying to make the best you're trying to make a difference and It's very rarely you hear back that feedback saying,
I think that's the same impulse, right? That where they say they're not willing to send you something telling you're an idiot, they also don't give the positive feedback of you're doing a great job, so it becomes, it can become lonely, and so I, I think that's I'll take that, honestly. Cause
Yeah.
I would handle, I handled no feedback better than I handled negative feedback. And so I'm good with, I'm good with no feedback if if I don't have to have negative feedback.
I'm there with you. I will agree. Now I will say I feel like, and not to spend too much time talking about me because this isn't about me, but I feel like I'm on the right track because just whenever I'm talking to my wife. I just don't know. I just, I get some kind of feedback that encourages me. I get an email. I get something that pushes me to take that next step.
And I think that's the Lord seeing, Hey, he needs a little bit of encouragement here, beyond what I'm giving him, beyond what his wife's giving him. Here's you a little bit. Keep going. You'll get there.
Yep, no doubt. I have the same experience and I would chalk it up to the same source that a lot of times negative feedback, when it does come, and it's very rare, but when it does come, it is paired with positive feedback from some other source, and most times, two or three instances of positive feedback. Over against the one sort, one, one instance of negative feedback. So yeah, thank God for that. Yeah.
What would you say some of the biggest takeaways you've had from doing the podcast for almost seven years?
I think that early on it was all about grazing. It was all about just the fun things, right? The things that we really love to talk about Back to the same reason we're in the situation we are in ranching we love the animals probably like the land the money and the people we don't really know what to do with that as much And so that's always going to be my tendency to write.
I want to talk about the money I want to talk about the animals in the land and for me as a At this point now I want to talk about the land and the animals like the soil life You know that all that stuff is way more interesting to me. The animals are just a tool to make that better At this point for me, they're not they're definitely not the primary attraction personally, and so So I think that was probably early on the things that I wanted to really really talk about.
And I've come to realize the importance of business and the importance of understanding this as a business and focusing on the business side of it. One way that, It synthesized in my mind very recently is to say it this way, it's easier to out business a bad grazing plan than it is to out graze a bad business plan.
And I think that's something that I would have probably, in my early career as a podcaster and regenerative agriculturalist, I probably would have wanted to burn that person at a stake outside of the convention center, if they would have said that. Because that's the way that I think it goes, right? We're very zealous.
We become zealots for whatever whatever it is that we are becoming newly introduced to, and then we temper that zealotry a little bit, and start to realize there's more here than just this one individual. And so I think that these, this business side of the thing of things and leadership and how to have conversations, uncomfortable conversations, how to make sure everybody's on the same page is a really important really important piece.
Very important. As you Think about your podcast, and you've been doing this almost seven years. Where do you think the future holds for that and for the media in general? Because I'm asking this Tim Ferriss on his, I think the latest episode, he was talking about the future of podcasts and why he thinks will happen.
Yeah, I think maybe I'm, my head's down too much to really pop up and think about that very much. For me right now, the most attractive direction to go is YouTube. To put this up in a video format rather than just right now what you have up on my YouTube channel is the audio with a little squiggly line to let you know something's going on. And so I'm intrigued by making the video. More of a part of it.
I think it's silly not to be on YouTube on some level because YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. And so if somebody is searching for a cow related business practice, I want them to be able to find my episodes there too, and hopefully it's a front door or a gateway at this point. That's all it is for me, but maybe someday it will become more of a focus for the working cows podcast.
As far as the career is concerned, I think that I would like to parlay it into into some more speaking speaking out in, in, at conferences and those kinds of things that's something I'm still trying to figure out how to do well. I've spent 17 years as a public speaker on a weekly basis, at least once a week. A lot of times. Two or three times a week. And so it sounds weird for me to say that I don't know how to speak.
Publicly, but whenever I get up to speak on a Sunday morning, I've got an outline and my authority comes from the word of God. And I know what I'm supposed to be talking about there. When it's, when I'm trying to be the one speaking from that position of authority the imposter syndrome. is strong with this one. And so I struggle a little bit with the, with finding my voice in the public speaking arena.
And the only comfort I have in that is that I asked Nicole Masters one time if she struggles with the imposter syndrome and she said, without hesitation, cut me off in the middle of my sentence. She said, absolutely. And I'm like, okay if Nicole Masters struggles with the imposter syndrome, it must not mean that I don't have anything to say.
It's just I'm trying to figure out what, how I should approach those things and how I should speak and how I can stand up in front of a room full of people who've been through natural disasters and blizzards and market downturns and all these things and deliver anything to them. of value. So I, that's where, that's what I'm still trying to hone those those skills.
Yeah I agree on all that front there. YouTube, I think, we try and get out there on YouTube, but it's very small. I'm trying to get in that space. The imposter syndrome is huge. Who am I for anyone to listen to me? But I feel this passion for this, and this drive to, to share what I can. So yeah. Clay, I have really enjoyed the conversation thus far. So appreciative of you coming on here, but it's time for us to shift gears just a little bit.
And we shift to 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?
I think it's probably Ray Markster's Cowboy in a Corporate World because it documents his process of change. It does a really good job of giving very practical advice about how to select cows that fit your environment. It does a very good job of talking about land stewardship and connecting that to our corporate or our, or not our corporate, but our city neighbors and cousins. So yeah, I think that's probably one of my favorites.
Yeah, I think everybody, you've probably gotten, maybe you haven't gotten a similar answer to that question a lot of times, but I think that's a newer one that probably should be read by more people. And I don't know how many people have read it yet, but that's More people should read it
It's a new book to me, so it's getting added to my to read list I'll have to get to it. I was not familiar with it at all. Which is always, I always think it's so exciting when someone tells me a book that I don't know. Not that I know everything, but I usually come across them and I have my to read list, to be read list, is way too long and I'm trying to work through it, but not as fast as I'm adding books to it.
And I think that along those lines like I have really important responsibilities At the church that demand me to be reading certain things to make sure that I'm able to give good answers in some of these different really. And so that's where most of my reading happens. My reading relating to, related to ranching is fairly sparse.
And so I could tell you all kinds of books that were read by people who I respect a lot in ranching, Books by Alan Nation and those kinds of things that are really important knowledge, rich ranching and all those kinds of things, but as far as books that I've recently read related to ranching Ray Markster's book, Cowboy in a Corporate World is really good.
No, very good. Our second question. What's your favorite tool for the farm?
I think this right here, it's a post it note. I think that's my favorite tool for the farm. If you've been through ranching for profit, or if you've been through a vision, a mission and vision setting workshop, a lot of times it is, starts out on a post it note.
And I think that if we can get everybody who is a stakeholder in the ranch In a room and get them to write down some of their priorities on a post it note and put them on a wall and arrange them into topics and categories and then develop that into a sentence that everybody memorizes and knows and It actually influences our decisions on a day to day basis, and it keeps us from doing certain things, and it helps us to stay motivated in doing certain things, right?
What we don't do is oftentimes as important, if not more important, than what we do. And then why we do what we do is often less important. More important than what we do and will keep us motivated to do it more. And so I think that the post it note is probably my favorite ranging tool.
almost a hundred episodes in and that's the first time we've gotten the post it note, but I think it's a great Reasons behind that to do that and that's something I need to do more of So we're all on the same page because having that mission statement keeps you from chasing Everything that sparkles,
Yep. And we do too. Our family needs that too. And the last few months have revealed that we need to do it and need to make sure that we're all on the same page because is it, are we going to stick with the sheep? Or are we going to go solely to custom grazing? What are we going to do? We need to decide why we're doing it first, and then we can decide whether or not we're going to stick with it. And so this is just something that we're still working through as well.
But I think that the post it note is more, is mightier. than the grazing reel. If we're gonna, the pen is mightier than the sword, right? The post it note is mightier than the grazing reel if we are going to if we're gonna be, I think if we're gonna think and write about these things.
yeah that's excellent. Yes, our third question. What would you tell someone just getting started?
Back at my career in Bible school and I, can't tell you how many people came and spoke to us and told us, don't waste. your years in Bible school. You're never going to have another opportunity like this, where you get to devote yourself to two years of just studying the Bible. And I don't know how many people didn't waste it, but I know that the people who didn't waste that time are probably the exception to the rule.
And I think that it's hard to give people advice that they heed without, looking back and saying, man, I wish I would have heeded that advice. But I think temper, the zealotry would be something that I would say to young people try to learn from multiple channels of learning. One of my favorite quotes, I don't know if it was original to Tim Keller, but he said if you read one author, you're a clone. If you read two authors, you're confused. If you read a thousand authors, you're wise.
And so I think that, Pursue wisdom rather than knowledge and do it from many different sources and even sources outside of ranching read books that aren't necessarily just ranching books read, like you mentioned, listening to Tim Ferriss's podcast, go get outside of the agricultural silo, no pun intended, but get outside of the agricultural silo and try and gain wisdom from other places and don't, Just assume that because somebody got somebody to publish a book for them, that you have to believe
everything that was in the book. Just take the good parts, apply it to your scenario, and forget the stuff that doesn't apply or doesn't apply right now and maybe come back to it and read it again later when maybe it will apply.
I don't know that I've ever read a book a second time and didn't take something different from it. Because we're all in a different place, context is so much. Yeah, but overall just excellent advice there. Wisdom rather than knowledge and don't get narrowed focus so that it's only ag related. Really develop the whole person, whole business. Yeah. And lastly, Clay, where can others find out more about you?
Ranchingpodcast. com is the best place to go. You'll find a library of every single episode. I think yesterday, episode 352 released. And if you go to ranchingpodcast. com, they're all there. And I, what I like to do when I go to a place like that, rather than trying to, rather than trying to consume them all, I just hit in my web browser, I hit control F or whatever your browser is. And then I search for the things that are interesting to me. And if one if something comes up, I start there.
And then if maybe they mentioned another episode in the course of that episode, I go to that one or whatever. So I think that's why I've got that. That page set up the way I do is because that's the way that I like to go to podcasts and figure out what I'm going to listen to. Ranchingpodcast. com.
Oh, very good. And I just pulled it up. I was not familiar with your episode list here. That's really nice to have an episode list so you can quickly go through it. I know for me and my podcast consumption, there's only two or three podcasts I listen as soon as it comes out on. Most of the others, it's in spurts or I binge listen to a few episodes and sometimes it's all of them. Sometimes I pick and choose.
Every good idea I've had in podcasting, I've stolen from somebody else that My podcast, the original format of it, and still the format of it, is borrowed heavily from Tom Woods, who is a libertarian podcaster. I've when I became a man, I put away childish things, so I've progressed beyond full blown anarcho capitalist libertarianism. But anyways. I still do listen to a few episodes of Tom's podcast here and there, but he's got a webpage called Tom's podcast and it forwards to his episode list.
And every one of his 2, 500 plus episodes is on that list. And you can go through and search for the topic you're looking for. And so that's, like I said, every good idea I've had in podcasting, I stole from somebody else. And that's how I, that's why I did that.
To be honest, I'm probably gonna steal that idea as well.
Do it. You can tell, I can see it on my on my stats for my website when somebody will find that page and there's just, it'll be one person, probably, I'm assuming, one person visiting a hundred different pages on the site in one
Very good. Clay, I really appreciate you taking time out of your day and coming on and sharing about your journey, about the podcast, letting us know more about what's going on there.
Cal, I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much.