e130. Innovative Techniques in Modern Bison Ranching with Stewart Staudinger

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As an aeronautical engineer, and I ended up joining the Royal Air Force while I was there, so I was sponsored through my university degree by the British military, and I joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot, so I commissioned in I started officer training in 96, and got commissioned, earned my wings, and ended up in in tactical aviation in battlefield helicopters, so I flew helicopters through my military career. So I did that through until 2013 when I moved back to Canada.

I retired as a flight commander and came back to the, to Canada. I joined the Canadian Forces Air Reserve as a reserve pilot flying part time for three years. Did that 2014 and then in 2017 I left that completely and came back to the ranch full time and and I'll tell you in another 10 or 12 years whether that was a good idea or not.

We, we still get the odd phone call people asking him about, one bull or other. 'cause there's still semen floating around out there. But anyway he he's had a dispersal sale in 98 for his cattle and went a hundred percent bison. I think the biggest thing is he liked the bison and he was getting burnt out from the purebred industry. All the constant showing shows and sales and all that kind of stuff.

It's, for a one man band as he was, it was just it was whatever, 25 years of non stop rat race and and he just needed to have a change. So he went into plains bison and about that time I'd got commissioned and got my wings and, My first my first tour as a pilot was actually on a squadron where I worked 21 days on, 7 days off in Northern Ireland. And it was a great place to be and great experience. But anyway, with my 7 days off, I was a single, we call it SUPS, Single Officers Useless Purchases.

My, my SUPS consisted of airline tickets to fly across the Atlantic. So I ended up coming home 15 times in only 3 years. And I try and time it with things like weaning and, anything that we needed to do on the animals. So I was home for weaning for three years straight and helping out where I could. And and I really, as soon as I got exposed to the bison, even in like 99, when I was home in the summer, I just thought, man, I like these animals.

And so that's the, that was the hook, the thing that kind of brought me back to the ranch. Yep.

They're like, it's almost like they all react simultaneously there. it's really interesting. And you'll get the odd one that's a little bit more laid back. They'll just stand there and look at you. But most of them, they all just, they go into that natural thing. It's like, okay, something's changed. There's a potential threat here. So they all perk up, they all move together, they mob up, and then they look at you and decide whether you're actually going to cause them trouble or not.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. So yeah, so.

And I've had a bison bull, a 2000 pound bison bull plant his front hooves as he went past me, and he spun around 180 degrees in the air, hit the ground in front of me, and then hit the gate that was right in front of me with his head, and clanged it like literally inches from my face, and and then he just stood up, and then he just walked away, and my dad was laughing. He goes, he's just letting you know who's boss. But but the speed that he turned just, I couldn't believe how fast he turned.

And it was literally one, one movement. He bounced, and he bounced, and he spun in the air, and he landed with all four hooves, whomp, and,

The next thing you know, you'll have a whole herd of 90 or 100 animals. charging through the snowdrift, snow's flying, and they're just kicking their heels and dancing around and having fun. Calves, cows, everything, and and then, and the funny thing is then you see like a nine year old bull, he's standing there watching all this, and then he decides to get involved and he'll charge through the snowdrift and kick his heels and everything else.

So, they, they don't deliberately act as agile when they get older except when there's, when the whole herd starts to play, that even the older bulls will get involved. It's really neat to see. It's really neat to see. Most of the time, you don't notice it. If you just drive by on the road, you won't see it as a general rule but if you're watching them for a while, you'll see these moments where the whole herd just decides to play and away they go.

And and that's, that's a, that's a decent sort of outer barrier. And this is, I have to say here, we've learned a lot since then. And the whole industry has learned a lot about handling bison since then. And then he started building handling setup. The biggest thing was our wooden handling setup and alley to the chute and stuff like that wasn't up to handling bison. So dad had got a bunch of welded steel panels with boxes. with rolling doors and that kind of stuff.

Started off smaller, modified his he had one of those half, half moon cattle tubs. So, he modified, had that modified with extra piping built up higher to give it a bit more height. Cause I've seen a, I've seen a two year old heifer with her front legs over a seven foot fence. So, they'll, if they're in a panic they'll jump pretty high. And so we've got seven and a half foot panels in our handling system.

And so there was a bunch of that kind of shift was how do you adapt what you've got for cattle to be able to handle a few bison. And of course initially he bought a bunch of heifer calves and then he had a bunch of yearlings to handle. And then he got a bull when they were two year olds and so he was stepping things up as he went. He can't do it all at once.

But then when he totally got out of bison he had to, Sorry, out of beef, he had to he had to put a fair amount of time and money investment into making sure he had a setup that could handle the bison. And we've been, well, we've been modifying it ever since. But he went and visited a bunch of other ranchers that were handling bison and got their advice on what worked and what didn't. And some guys built some.

really elaborate setups based on what Parks Canada has, which are probably complete overkill. But you learn through experience over time. And so we've got to the stage where we know what we need. And when we built a new loadout system, whatever it was three years ago or four years ago, we had a much better idea of what we were looking for. And when we got the panels welded up, we got them welded to the right shape and size and everything else to get exactly what we wanted.

And it works really well now. So. And so we now got, we get new guys coming into the industry now that come and they'll be on a tour, they'll be going around looking at people's handling setups because they, they bought themselves 40 cows. And it's July and they're looking off into the fall, Christmas time and thinking about weaning and they have no idea how to catch their cows because they're just out in the pasture.

They've maybe added an electric wire on the top of the posts on their cattle fences, which is probably good enough to hold the bison, but now they've got to figure out how to catch them and handle them and wean the calves and whatever. So you get guys, you get the odd, young guy or young gal driving around to a few ranches saying oh how do you handle them and taking pictures of the handling setup and finding out what works and what doesn't so

But there were a couple of what they think were subspecies of those, which there was a subpopulation that, that was in the mountains both in Alberta and then down through Montana and into Colorado and stuff that, that generally tended to be a resident herd that lived in the mountain valleys and threw into Oregon and other places like that.

Now whether those were actually a subspecies or not we're not really sure but there's people who think that they possibly were slightly different but they would have been effectively plains bison but a little, perhaps maybe slightly adapted to that environment. And then there's a group of bison that we call the parkland bison now that are effectively a blend of plains and woods.

The natural ranges of the two herds overlapped in the, what we call the parkland region, which is effectively skirting the boreal. So we live in park, we live in parkland here. So it's like aspen, aspen forest and open grasses, in its natural state. And and there was what they call the resident parkland herd back in the, pre settlement.

And and that herd as we've discovered were a bunch of animals that just from looking at the way the two different subspecies act and how the offspring act with regard to open spaces versus more, bush country it looks as though the ones that are crosses are less comfortable out in the open without having any cover. Whereas, Like the wood bison, you expect that.

And so there's a, it's a speculation, but it's probably a fairly well educated guess that the resident herd, as they called them, the parkland resident herd would have been made up of hybrids between the two subspecies and the northern plains herd would move in to the parkland in the winter and that would go back out onto the plains in the summer, but there was a smaller subpopulation that stayed in the parkland year round.

And those ones were probably ones that were, 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation offspring of crosses between wood bulls and plains cows or vice versa, so anyway So that's where we are with what we understand about the two subspecies We've done a bunch of research on it in Canada the Canadian bison Association and a couple other organizations, but led by the CBA Did a bunch of genomics research on bison and we developed a new snip test a single nucleotide polymorphism test You to work out subspecies

differentiation, cattle integration parentage and stuff like that. So that test is now up and running. It's run through Neogen. It's available for both, both American and Canadian producers. And and so we've, in Canada, we've come up with a a, an idea of where we're going to go in terms of herd registry management and how we classify the animals based on what their genetics looks like. So that's where we're at,

And we found when we went to the high, this higher fidelity test that's got about 10, 000 polymorphisms determining cattle integration. We found that we've, that we had, off of thinking about it, probably around about, I think, 30 percent showed a small amount of cattle integration. But if you look at the percentages, the amount of integration that's actually in the bison herd, it's incredibly small.

And there's this thing called genetic clustering involved, where you might have an animal that tests out at, say, 6 percent bovine, and then its offspring will test pure. Because that, that 6 percent of genes are in what they call a genetic cluster. So the parent will pass on that whole cluster as a, in one chunk or maybe two chunks or not at all, depending on which side of its own genome gets passed on to the offspring.

And so we've had a bunch of discussions within our conservation committee about how this effect works. And I've got a, one of a friend of mine who works in Saskatchewan. He's a genetic. He's involved in genetics at in Saskatoon. His family have bison as well, so he's got bison, plus he's a geneticist ish. And and we've worked with Neogen.

And so we think that a lot of the genetics that appear, like Custer, I think Custer State Park has got the largest, the highest level of cattle integration that we know of so far, at the moment. But that cattle integration is slowly dropping out of the herd because it's because of this genetic clustering effect.

And now that we have a tool that we can manage the genetics I think there's less of an issue in terms of worrying about cattle integration because now you can, let's just say you've got 10 heifers you want to choose as heifers to hold back. You can hold back the 10 that have a lower level of cattle integration and over a period of generation, not very many generations you end up with pure animals. And so it's interesting that we now have a tool to do that.

So. The the people panicking about the number of cattle or bison with cattle integration, I think is well, I can understand it going, if you went back to what people understood of the science 20 years ago, but now I think it's a bit less of an issue because we have a much better tool, that's much better toolbox for dealing with it, and I think over a period of of the next 20 years or so there'll be a much larger population of bison, even in private hands that, that test 100 percent pure

genetically just because guys will be able to manage the herds that way.

and what is there is manageable and we can generally work away from it. So, as long as people don't panic and do something rash in the short term we should be able to preserve the bison genome without, without having to retain the cattle genetics over time.

But when I look at it, I came back to the ranch and I. I came out of the military, I was a military helicopter pilot, flight commander. I I was a rancher just by proxy, showing up and helping out when I could. But I didn't really understand the business side of it and and it took me longer than I'd, than probably should have to figure that out. And I actually went away to business school to figure this out.

But we the industry as a whole is based around the meat market and predominantly, probably about 60 percent of the business well, this pre COVID, it might be less now, but certainly pre COVID, 60 percent of the bison industry was food service. So we're talking hotels, restaurants bars, that kind of stuff. And and so we market, the majority of our animals get mark, marketed into the meat market.

Our. Our yearling bulls, so just when they're one year, we keep back the ones that are going to be bull prospects and the rest they get sold into guys who are going to feed them out and put them into that market. The rest of the animals on the ranch we keep until we market them ourselves. So our heifers we keep until they're two years old and they either go into the breeding herd as bred heifers, either as replacements or to sell. Or they go into our feed group.

which get fed out and we market them. We market most of them locally. I say some of the meat goes further away because a couple of the local marketers market it to Europe and stuff. But we sell them in smaller groups to a couple of the local marketers. And some of it's going out to Quebec. Some of them, a smaller percentage of them end up getting shipped south to be processed in the States for your market. Of the ones we have, obviously the vast majority of Canadian bison end up going south.

But we have a bunch that end up going to Europe and Quebec just because of the guys that we're marketing to. And so they're processed in Alberta and then the meat is shipped from here. And then we also, on the side, we have a small butcher shop and pantry market in a town about 50 miles away from here. My sister manages that, that butcher shop and it's like a European style artisan butcher shop and we do all local sourcing there.

So beef, bison, yak, pork, chicken, turkey, whatever, a whole bunch of stuff, eggs, a little bit of dairy. And and so we, we move a bunch of our, odds and ends and what have you through the store. We market quarters and halves from our feeder heifers. We market those through the store. Some of them are marketed directly through the store, some of them are marketed through a partnership with a grass fed beef marketing group.

they've got customers that want bison as well, so we so we market, I don't know, it's not huge numbers, but through the winter we were probably averaging I'm guessing two animals a month in quarters and halves going through that market. So, so we've got our fingers in a bunch of pies and sometimes it feels like there's too many pies and we need a couple of bigger pies rather than a whole bunch of small ones. But anyway that's where we're at right now.

So, what we do is we feed them a mixed ration. Bison won't eat as much grain as cattle. They don't like it. They're not as healthy on it. And

So that'll be mostly wheat. We've recently used a malt sprout pellet as well. And and a couple other blends. But they're mostly pelleted. We don't, we're not feeding any straight barley or straight corn or anything like that. It's a pellet blend and it generally tends to be something like a screening pellet or a mill run. And that's where we're at. And there, just so people have an idea in terms of grain fed, I've got a local beef guy who's a pale a chop by the fence type beef guy.

But he's still feeding a pretty high ration. He gets up to between 16 and 22 pounds of grain a day when he's finishing his steers. So the, they're eating a lot as a beef animal and some guys are up to 26 to 30 pounds a day. So it's a really high grain ration. Whereas the bison, even our bigger bison bulls, when we're finishing them out, we've got like nine that we're going to market in the next couple of weeks. Those guys are still only eating maybe four and a half pounds a day, maybe five.

So there's a big, there's a big difference there. In the consumption of grain or pellets versus green forage with bison. And and like we say, we're just free choice, and that's generally when they settle out at. And the heifers, they're a bit smaller, they might only be eating three pounds a day when they're finished. So, most of what they're eating is green forage.

So in the springtime we could graze through five paddocks but come, mid to late June when the water started drying up, then we were down to three paddocks and it's quite sandy soil which doesn't do well under, under heavy, late continuous or heavy continuous grazing, which is effective, but what you're doing, even if you're rotating just through three paddocks, let's say you're doing 10 days here, two weeks there, two weeks there, and then back again your rest periods aren't long enough Your

exposure times are too long. So you've, overgrazing is going to happen. There's nothing you can do about it. And then our bigger herd we had originally split into two, but just because of bull genetics and and those were on in pat, basically in a pat, a complex was just two pastures each. So it was just a two way rotation for two herds. And so that's where we were when I got, when I came back to the ranch in 2017.

And in the meantime though, cause I was here part time up in for three or four years before that we had started looking at more regenerative stuff and soil health. So our hay land that was that was not in particularly good shape. We, we switched it over to polyculture. And and made silage bales off of 12 species polyculture, cover crop mix in. And we've done that on various parts of the land. Just making sure we increase the biodiversity in the stand.

Putting in stuff that's going to over the long term and then replacing it with perennials that's got a much more diverse blend. So that we've got the. We've got the biodiversity to then move on to the next stage. So we started that in 2016. So a bit before I came back full time and then and then but we didn't really do much about the grazing until I was back and I tried and figured out exactly what we were going to do to try and, deal with the over grazing issue.

And and so in 2018 I went and down, I went down and did the holistic bit management stuff with Roland and those guys down there which was a, which was good because I'd done a bunch of reading on regenerative ag and I started understanding the whole grass growth cycle overgrazing issue. Because I'm a science guy. So I immediately turned around, my engineering brain went to work. I had to figure this stuff out. And so, I went down and did that.

But what it didn't do was give me the, I would highly recommend holistic management to anyone who's thinking about it. Go do that. But what it didn't teach me was in sufficient depth or yeah, sufficient depth, is the business side of it. Because matter what you do, you have to pay the bills. And and so in 2021, I went to ranching for profit with RMC. It was in the middle of COVID, so I had to fly all the way to Pennsylvania and I'll go through all the nonsense. But anyway, what a disaster.

But anyway so I, it was really good. I was at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, did that. So I had a really diverse group of people who had goats and sheep and potato farmers and, Like I say, a really diverse group of people. So it was it was great to, to learn with and from them. And and that, that opened my eyes up to the business side of it. And I really did the deep dive on it. And then I realized, nearly had a heart attack once I ran the numbers of where we were at.

Cause I was was one of those things where I couldn't see how the business model worked. And when I went through it, I thought, you know what? So many farms and ranches are in this position in North America where people are in it because their families were in it and they've got the land but almost none of them are profitable.

and and so I, I did RMC and then when I got back from RMC I started working on the plan and I was a little bit slower getting going than I maybe should have been because it was like a, it was such a culture shock particularly for my dad who's, looking at this and thinking all these ideas are a little bit crazy that I wanted to jump off a cliff and take him with me. But I just worked out that there was no way we were going to survive if we didn't change.

And and so, I started last year in earnest on a major infrastructure development program. And so that half section I was mentioning that had five paddocks, that only three had water, That, that half section is now divided into 19 paddocks, all of which have water.

And within that 19 paddocks, I have the option, I, and I don't have the time to do it right now because I'm still in the middle of this project on the home section here, but we've got the option to be able to further subdivide using temporary electric. And so I can, I, I can get to 38, 40, 50 paddocks. fairly quickly if I need to now. I've got the water, I've got the main fencing infrastructure and the water infrastructure in to be able to do that. So, so that's what I'm doing there.

And so that herd from about the beginning of August last year 10th of August, I think I managed, I was up and running. That herd has been we're in adaptive management and I've actually got to go and move them today after we talk here. Into the next paddock. So, so that's where we're at with that herd. The bigger herd here at home we got into it last fall. The finding, finding the money to be able to do this was very tight because we're, COVID actually hammered us.

It shut down the food service industry across North America and completely destroyed our market. So cash flow went out the window. So our, we probably lost 300, 000 in revenue over three years which is really hard to stomach.

Fortunately, I've, fortunately I've got a small military pension, otherwise I wouldn't even be here, but, anyway we we got involved in a government program which supports investment in regenerative agriculture, so, polyculture cropping adaptive grazing, and various other programs, so you can get some financial support for infrastructure investment.

And and so I got involved in that and so as of late, later last year, we started a, the phase two of our program, which was to get our home place ranch cross fenced. And so we're getting towards the latter stages of that now, so it's not 100 percent there, it's not perfect yet, but by the end of the year I'll have the home section will have about 40, the main herd will be running through about I think it's 41 or 42 paddocks, all with water.

And the intent isn't to maintain them as one herd in the longer term because we are still in the breeding stock business. But what I will have is I'll have one herd running through 18 and the other herd running through the rest next year probably. And that way I can take the bowls of one bloodline in one set of paddocks and the others.

And then I can temporary, I can use temporary electric to subdivide further as the situation demands to further manage the, the grasses because we've got a mixture of tame grass and native parkland. And so, the bison naturally prefer the native parkland. So if you put them in a paddock that's half smooth brome and half native rough fescue.

They'll go sit on the fescue, and destroy it, and leave the brome and so, I've got to start using next year, I've got to start using temporary electric to minimize their impact on the native species and make sure that they're utilizing the tame species. And there's just, it's not all of our paddocks, but there are there's probably five of those forty two that have got an issue where I have to put a bit of effort into managing those in a little bit more fine detail.

And then of course, with anything adaptive, over time you discover that that there are more issues will pop up you'll start noticing different things with different plant recoveries etc. So there's no doubt that my temporary electric fencing will will continue to expand over the coming years.

That's probably a little bit of overkill if I'm running electric, which I am, but but but 48's just a little bit short, if that makes sense. So I want to be over 50, anyway, 52, 54, at least. And so I got a hold of a bunch of sucker rod out of the oil industry just and started cutting posts and figuring out how do I insulate a sucker rod, at a price point. And so I developed a system where I use two pieces of poly pipe.

I have a about a two inch long chunk of three quarter poly pipe and a two inch chunk of one inch poly with a slit down the side. Yeah. and they just go on like over top of each other. And then I use an easy twist tie which is a fencing tie system used developed for page wire. Not for page wire, for a chain link. and the one that fits an inch and three quarter chain link post works just fine if I've got a 7 8 sucker rod with those two bits of plastic around it.

And and so the first, that first section where we did, I forget, it's about four, four and a bit kilometers of fence, we did three wire electrics, so I did two, two hot wires on the top and then a ground wire running along the bottom, all insulated but then I went back as an alumni to Ranching for Profit again in February here, and talking to a couple of the bison guys that are doing similar stuff and they've, a lot of them have been experimenting with two wire fences and so for the fencing

we're doing now we've gone down to two wires. So I've got one at, one at 56, 57 inches at the top, another one at about hip height at the bottom, both hot, and and that's it. Leave them. And it works quite well because the deer will go the does, we've got both muley and whitetail here, they'll go under the bottom wire without touching it.

And we get the odd pronghorn, we're not really in pronghorn country, but we get the odd one here and there, and they go under the wire as well, and so, the wildlife can move the moose will go over the top, and the deer go underneath, and it seems to work, so, obviously, I'll let you know in a couple of years how well it works, but But so that so right now that's what we're doing.

And so if I'm doing an alley where they're gonna be a bit more crowded I'm still putting the three wire on but if I'm just doing cross fencing for Separating paddocks and I'm using a two wire fence two wire electric Yeah, and using a steel sucker rod post and I'm still using wood for the braces. I Experimented with some sucker rod braces, but they're just too flexible.

They the You can use steel pipe if it's bigger, but using a small 1 inch sucker rod is too flexible if you build a brace out of it. It just can't hold the tension. And and I, I figured out how to stop them pulling out of the ground. I just weld some barbs on the bottom, some nails as barbs, so I can get them to not pull out, but they're still too flexible. So I, we went back to wood, and so we're using a standard wood brace at the ends with steel sucker rod posts in between.

There's a, there's guys building them for bison and they're a little bit higher and I can't remember what the top of that is. I think that's at about 42 inches.

But there's a company down, a company down in the States, and I'm gonna try, I'm trying to find a Canadian supplier who can get them in, that's building a 60 inch step in post, the plastic step in with the multi hooks down the side that 60 inch when you step it in gives you a 50, the top wire is at 51 or 52 inches so I'd like to get a few of those and it's, maybe it's just for my own psychology, To have that one wire a little bit higher, but but two wires on electric seems to work.

we've had guys experimenting with a single wire, and where they're not crowded it works, when they've got lots of space, but if you're trying to graze them a bit more intently the bison don't seem to, they'll blow through a single wire fence, whereas a two wire fence with the top wire at the right height seems to be, and with, a decent electric fence seems to work.

I can just use my twist ties and tie them on. But I've been experimenting with just using temporary around one of the boxes and it seems to work. I'm using the standard step in posts, so the top wire is at say 40 inches, something like that. And there's enough juice on the wire and the animals have got enough feed. It seems they're not pushing it. So, I don't know whether I could use that on a longer run across a foal.

a field where, animals are likely to, run into it in the dark or something like that. But around that watering point where the animals have got a very defined box that they know where everything is, it seems to work at the moment. So watch this space. It's working right now. I'm not saying it's going to work in, I don't know, a day's time, so we're still experimenting. Yeah.

They'll go up they'll go up close, they'll graze up to the bottom of it, but they don't push it at all. There's no pressure on it. And whereas, beef will pressure even an electric fence if they want to, some of them will depending on how much, what sort of energizer you got. But the bison don't seem to, and we've actually had, generally what happens is bison tend to, they learn their pasture boundary very quickly, and then even in the dark, if they're startled, they won't go through a fence.

They know exactly where they are all the time. And if they stampede in the dark. They'll get towards the fence line and they'll turn left or right, they'll avoid it, even if they can't see it in the dark because they know it's there.

The issue we have is if you put new animals into a paddock, and if you put them in late in the day and they haven't had a chance to explore the boundaries before dark, and then they get startled by a moose or whatever during the night, then they can then end up going through a fence. So I think that temporary electric The key is not so much that the animals understand what it is, but that you put it in at the time of day where they have a chance to explore it.

And once, if you let them in, let's say I'm moving the animals at say 2 in the afternoon, let them into a paddock that's got a temporary electric boundary on it at 2 in the afternoon they've got plenty of time, they'll go and explore, they'll do a bit of grazing and then they'll go explore the whole perimeter. They'll find it where all the fences are and then you don't have a problem.

But if I let them in there in the evening when it's just about to get dark and they haven't had time to figure out where everything is, that's when you have a problem. So that's what I've discovered so far.

And then if the wind starts blowing, they'll all drift into wind, bison on the other hand, you let them out into a pasture and, you put a herd of, 90 into a pasture and they'll all be in two or three acres. And even if the pasture is 100 acres, the bison will all still be in a cluster. They'll spread out a bit. They're, if they're, they might be down to only, they might go down to only 10, 10 animals per acre. Maybe 10 to 12 is where they're comfortable at.

As soon as someone comes out there and disturbs them, they cluster up to 20 or 30 animals for the acre. But they don't spread out beyond about 10. I, I'm thinking maybe 10, guessing 10 animals for the acre is where they're comfortable. Except, once we do, we wean the animals, I have noticed, if you wean the animals wean the head calves, and then the cows are back out in the pasture on their own, they'll spread out a little bit more when they haven't got a calf by their side.

And I think that's just a instinctive thing. And so you'll occasionally get them spread out. The bulls wander off on their own on a regular basis outside of the breeding season, so that's, but that's You know, there'll be four or five of the old bulls will be off on their own or maybe six of them Doing their own thing, but even then they're not spread out. They'll be in a small cluster somewhere They're just separate from the rest of the herd

If the cows are in good condition and gaining condition, then then we should be comfortably in the mid nineties for breed back.

If I'm, if I've got the option, if I've got the option of moving them when the grass, when the plants are at full growth, mid, midday or just after midday, then that's when I'll move them. And and then, I'll figure it out from there. But right now I'm still, So, neck deep in infrastructure that that take a little bit of time to settle down and figure out the rest.

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But yeah, that's, if someone's just thinking about getting into it don't just dive in. Call up RMC and go, at the very least, go do ranching for profit. You'll never regret it. Even if you decide that it teaches you not to do something, you'll still never, you'll still never regret it.

And then go do then once you've done that and you've figured out what the direction you want to go in, then go do a, then go to a holistic management with either Savory Global or HMI, either one they're both great. They're both great organizations.

It's a separate business, but it's where we market a bunch of our animals through. And there's a little website there my sister maintains and and so if you're ever in central Alberta, stop by there for some of the world's best bacon and some excellent bison jerky. And and we carry our own products in that store. And I've got Savory's book for sale in that store and Voisin's book and some of Joel Salatin's books are for sale. So, you can start your reading whilst eating some good bison jerky.

You can also support our show by buying our merch. We get a little bit back from that. Another way to support the show is by becoming a grazing grass insider. Grazing Grass Insiders enjoy bonus content, monthly zooms and discounts. You can visit the website grazing grass.com. Click on support and they'll have the links there. Also, if you haven't left us a review, please do. It really helps us as people are searching for podcasts.

And I was just checking them and we do not have very many reviews for 2024. So if you haven't left us a review, please do. And until next time, keep on grazing grass.