Welcome to the Grazing Grass podcast, episode 46.
Every year that you delay, that is basically interest that you'll never be able to get back on your experience and education.
You're listening to the Grazing Grass podcast, helping grass farmers learn from grass farmers and every episode features a grass farmer and their operation. I'm your host, cal Hardage. On today's show. We have Ethon Pawlaczyk of Black Swamp Cattle in Ohio. Ethon is leading a change on his family farm from row crops to grass-based cattle and poultry. I think you'll enjoy hearing about his journey. You may have noticed that we've not released a episode for quite a while.
We are excited to get started again and have some great episodes lined up for you. Also stay tuned after our talk with Ethon. To hear about a new project for me. However, before we get to Ethon. I'm excited to share the news of a new podcast by August Horstmann called Grazed in America. August was a guest on episode 15 of our podcast. I encourage you go back and listen to it, if you have it. Also look for his podcast this week. The first episode of Grazed in America is dropping this week.
Should be available where you consume podcast. But give him a little bit of grace because sometimes getting podcasts to all the distribution channels takes a little bit, but it should be available. And if you can't find it, hop over to his Facebook page for Grazed in America and let him know. Let's talk to Ethon. Ethan Pawlaczyk, we wanna welcome you to the Grazing Grass Podcast. I think I said your last name better that time.
Yeah. That was good.
All right. Very good. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation?
So I am a third or fourth generation farmer, depending on how you want to define that. And I'm in northwest Ohio about 20 minutes outside the city of Toledo, and we focus on raising grass-finished beef and poultry raised out on pasture.
So you've been around agriculture for a long time.
Yep. Ever since my family came from Poland to the United States and like the early 19 hundreds, they've been farmers in the family ever since then. And I actually still live in the house that the original family came to and started here in Ohio.
Oh, that is very nice. Now you said grass fed, have they always did grass finish products?
No. In fact, I'm the first one to get back into animal agriculture. It's been row crop here for most of my family, ever since. We've started, back when they first came, they had some horses just for, doing the work and maybe had a milk cow. But ever since the mid 19 hundreds, things have moved towards grain and conventional, what you would consider conventional agriculture ever since then.
So growing up it was mainly a grain or crop farm.
Yep, yep. We would raise soybeans for about seven years, and then we would have one corn crop, and then we would raise soybeans again for about seven years and then have one corn crop until it got too expensive to plant corn when it was at like $500 an acre to plant it. And then we just quit doing corn and only grew soybeans for about 14 years until I took over most of the farming operation.
And at that time, did you continue with row crops or some row crops, or did you stop all of it?
I continued doing row crop for a little bit cuz it's the only thing that I knew. And I heard some stuff about cover cropping and I was interested in that, but didn't really do too much with it. And then eventually I came across a YouTube video talking about this guy who was raising cattle on 1600 acres with no tractor and no barn. I'm sure you've heard of him, Greg Judy, and I couldn't be, when I read the title, I couldn't believe it.
I didn't know you could grow or raise cattle without a barn or without a tractor. Didn't make any sense to me. So I was really interested in the video. And when I watched it, it changed the whole way that I looked at agriculture ever since then.
So how did you, or once you saw that video and you're like, wow, is this something I can do? How did you progress from there?
So the first thing that I did was just kept researching and trying to figure out, is this guy just full of it or is this a real thing? Is this even possible? I did a lot of researching when I was going to college and was up all night trying, supposed to be doing homework, and I would be watching YouTube videos about different types of farming and things like that.
And then once I got an understanding of, oh, I think this is a real thing, then I made the first, what was for us a big step, which was going to one year of cover cropping and then seeing what that did. And then eventually moving towards purchasing some cattle to bring back onto the farm and try to do management intensive grazing.
About what year was this that you did your cover crop experiment?
The cover crop experiment was in 2019 and it was pretty easy to convince my family to do it because it was a year where we had a lot of flooding and so nobody really planted anything at all. And I said, Hey, if I buy this, I pay for all the seed and do, pay for everything myself. How about we try this and see what happens? And then that's what I did and it was, we just didn't do anything with it. We just left it go fallow or I think that was in 20, 20 18 actually.
And then the year of 2019 we did another, there was our last soybean crop and they were actually some of the best. Soybeans that we had and since I had been involved. And so with very minimal fertilizer. And so I was like, oh man, this seems like there's really something going on here.
Oh yes. So you grew soybeans in 2019. Did you plant some cover crops after that or what was your next step?
the next step was yes, I was gonna do some cover crops in the row, crop fields, and then in the cover crop mix that I had behind our house, I mixed in some fescue and some red clover. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna try to get this ready and see if I can try to get calves. And if I can't, then we can always just disc it up and spray it. And who cares? It won't be a big deal.
But then eventually I was able to convince everybody that if we just try it on the small piece behind our house, it's about nine acres. And if we just tried having a couple ahead of cattle back there, then maybe we could see what what all that was. And if it was no good, then we could sell 'em and just go back to doing it the way we were doing it before.
And it sounds like to me that went fairly well.
Yeah. The biggest thing was I remember that fall we were sitting around, it was like end of September, early October, and we were sitting around and we were just sitting at our bonfire and we were like, oh my gosh, we would we should be working on a combine right now. But we didn't have to because we didn't have any soybeans to pick. It was just cows out grazing. So then we were like, wow, this is. Actually really nice. You don't have to spend, three weeks trying to get a combine up and running.
While I have not done row crops, I can associate that with our haying machinery and when we used to be our own hay, Was always quite involved in, and we never had the best equipment, so it always required a lot of work on them.
Yep. Yep. And we're not a super big acreage farm. I guess I should have mentioned that in the beginning. But when you spend a month or so getting a combine ready to run it for two days nonstop, and then you're just like, all right, now I'm done with that. It really kicks your butt when you spend all that time getting everything
Oh yes.
and then you don't really even use it. You just have it for a little bit.
You mentioned there about the acreage. How many acres are you running.
When we were doing row crop, we had we started, it was like 200 acres. That was before I got involved. And then everybody starts selling land to build houses on and things like that. And when I took over, we had about 40 acres left and then some other folks started to sell off what we had for that. And then now that we have, what we have for grazing is about 20, about 25 acres. That's what we have for grazing right now.
Oh yes. Yeah, and that's the size that makes it difficult to keep all the machinery up and going.
Yeah, exactly. And. When I got started, when I took over the books and everything that, that first year where we were doing all the conventional stuff, I looked at what we were making per acre, and it was $140 loss per acre. And then that was also a nice kick to be like, okay, we need to figure out something else or another way to do this.
Yes. And when you're losing money per acre, that's when you're glad you don't have a lot of acreage
Yeah, . Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's, it hurts, but just not as bad.
You are right. Yes. Yeah. So you got, so you did your experiment with just a couple of head you said about nine acres. How many cows did you put on it?
We started out with one bull and one cow and her calf, so it was just, I guess two and a half animal units. And we, I got the bowl since I was, since Craig, Judy was the one that I had learned everything about. And the biggest thing that I had to sell everybody on was having tame cattle. Something that we weren't gonna have to worry about getting busting out of fences or coming after somebody when you got in the yard or into the pasture. And
Yes.
I was like, okay, if I'm gonna buy a bull it's gonna be from somebody where I trust that I can go into their herd and I'm not gonna have to worry about getting trampled or anything like that. So that's when I called up Greg Judy and I said, Hey, I'm, if I need to talk to you about getting a bull and and we did. And that was a really cool experience, going to talk to him and looking at his operation. And he gave a lot of pointers and really helped me and my brother along.
and telling us some stuff that, that maybe some people might have known, but we didn't know about before we got going. And gave us some ideas, challenged us on some things, and then sent us off with his bull and the reason that even with only one cow that I wanted to have a bull was I don't have any of the working facilities or handling facilities or anything like that. And so I didn't want to try to do any kind of AI. I didn't grow up around cattle.
A bull can tell when she's in heat a lot better than I can, that's for sure. And it, it costs more money to keep that bull and feed him and everything like that. But to be honest, one of the most amazing things that I saw was when we got the bull first, and when we had the cow out there when we brought her out there, that bull actually showed her, not to go through the electric wire.
Kept her from running through electric wire and then also showed to use the mineral feeder and all that kind of stuff and kind of took all the training work out of me. And he did all that, which was surprising and was cool to see. And yeah so that's why even with only starting out with just that one cow decided yeah, we're gonna get this bull and hopefully it's worth the investment.
Now, when you chose a cow, at that point were particular on what breed? Or do you just mainly look for something that's pretty docile?
I was hoping to get a South Poll cow, like everybody in the United States right now, but they're impossible to find and they're crazy expensive. And after I spent all that money on that bull I didn't have a lot of money left over to buy cows.
We actually talked to Greg about that when we were there and we were like, what do you think about getting some cheaper cows and trying to breed up with the bull that we were getting from him and we talked about, what to look for and all those kinds of things. So I actually just went for something that was more local, that I could get affordably and I got lucky. There was a guy, he was an older guy in his seventies and he was just trying to get out of beef.
He needed to have a shoulder replaced and stuff like that. And his wife didn't wanna take care of the cows while he was recovering. So he got rid of, he was getting rid of cow calf pairs that were bred and was getting rid of 'em pretty cheap. So that's what we ended up going with for the first cow. And that's why
Oh yes, very good. And yes, you highlight a issue. South Poll females are pretty expensive and in short supply, it seems.
Yeah. It costs almost to buy a cow or a heifer as it does to buy a bull from most places. And that doesn't make a lot of economical sense. If you're gonna buy, even if you're buying one, it doesn't make a lot of economical sense. But if you've got a mid-sized herd, I don't know how anybody could switch over to full South Poll like that.
Yeah, it does make it, or I would think it'd make it difficult for those cows to be profitable real fast. But course everyone has a different situation, so they're doing a better job than me probably.
and Me Too.
So you got that bull out there and you mentioned that he was used to your electric fence and your mineral feeder.
Mm-hmm. Tell us
about your infrastructure that you had in place for the, for your cow and bull.
So we have three wire high tensile electric fence. Used a Stafix battery energizer with a 50 watt solar panel on it with a deep cell marine battery. With 50 watt, that's enough to keep it running all the time. Even during the winter when you have those a lot less sunny days. We tried 30 watts, cuz that's what they tell you on the website or whatever, but it's not enough not enough juice to keep it going during the wintertime. And so we have a three wire round.
We use the timeless fence fence posts for the perimeter and then for the, we do the temporary fencing, O'Brien step-in posts, the powerflex poly braid. And then we have some Taragate reels, and then we have some old the Leord rolls because Taragate reels are not cheap.
No they aren't. They're pretty nice, but they're not cheap.
Yeah, they are really nice. But for the price of one terra reel, you could get 10 leord reels. I had, I only had two Taragate reels, and then that was like my Christmas present, every year I'd get another reel. And then since I've started having my brother help me for when I'm going for my day job he spends a lot more time moving them. And so he was a lot happier with having those Taragate reels than he was with the Lee cord reels. So since I'm asking him to go and do all that while I'm gone.
I thought I better pony up and get a couple more of those, so then a lot easier for him.
Now the timeless fence or timeless posts, they look really nice. In fact, signed up and got a sample, so they sent me a, just a few inches of T post so I could see it. And I know Greg Judy really promotes him on his channel. Are you pretty happy with the timeless post?
Oh yeah. I mean they're great. They're super easy to install. They're super light. You can carry around a whole box of 'em and not feel like you're gonna be dead by the end of the day. They hold up really well. They don't break. They're better than the fiberglass posts. They're just the fiberglass dowels cuz they don't break in the sun. You don't have to paint 'em, you don't have to drill 'em. Cuz we have a couple of those and those are a pain.
And as far as compared to metal t-posts you just don't, you don't have the risk associated with grounding out your system. With those metal t-posts just because it's timeless, they're fully insulated. And for the price, when you figure in buying a T post and then all, if you're gonna put in a three or five wires, all the insulators on a T post, it doesn't come out to be all that much more expensive on a timeless. So I've been pretty happy with them.
We had a tree fall down on one and they didn't break, just bent right over and then got the tree off and came right back up just like they talk about. So yeah, I've been very happy timeless Fence posts
What kind of spacing did you use for your timeless.
We did about 50 feet where we could. . We have some like little ditches and some little rises and things like that where we had to use a little bit more. We actually have a, I don't know what we call a pretty good sized hill behind our house. And so then you had, you gotta do every two or three feet or so, like when it's really on that incline. But yeah, we did about 50 feet we could get away with, and we're pretty flat compared to most places.
It's not South Dakota, but it's a lot flatter than Nebraska or any place like that when you look out.
Oh yes. You also mentioned your mineral feeder, and we hadn't talked about this. I don't think I saw it. So I'm curious, are you using the individual minerals and feeding them or do you have a different type of mineral feeder?
Yeah. We do the cafeteria style 18,
there's the word cafeteria style. I knew it was out there.
Yep. And that works really nice and you would think that it is just goofy, like how are the cattle gonna know what's what and pick, what they want. But it's pretty amazing, I had some soil soil sampling done before we got the cows on, and when you look at what's missing in the soil and then you look at what they're eating out of that mineral feeder it's literally exactly what we're low on our soil sampling test.
Phosphorus grow soybeans, that's the number one thing that they suck out of the ground, and that's the number one thing that they go after in that feeder. And with all the tillage and roundup and fertilizer that we've used, it makes the makes the soil really acidic. And so the acid neutralizer is another thing that they hammer all the time. They've never touched the the basic neutralizer and they've they're not a big fan of manganese either for some reason.
But sodium and phosphorus and that acid neutralizer man, they put the hammer on it. And when they, once it gets wet, then they go after the copper, to help with the parasites and worms and things like that. So it's pretty amazing. When you look at based off the different times of the year and different conditions, what it is that they're going after it it's pretty surprising and really opens your eyes on. What you might be missing when you're using a pre-made mineral mix.
that's on my, I don't know if I'd call it my short list, but it is something for me to try the cafeteria style minerals, because right now I'm using a pre-mixed Mineral. One thing that's caused me to shy away from the cafeteria style is either I have to buy a mineral feeder that can do that, and those are expensive and I don't know of any local, so I've gotta ship it in or I've gotta build one, which it doesn't look to be terrible to build.
like you had mentioned ago with your off the farm job, you got a, some give and take there and probably if I just get in gear and do it, I'd have it done, but I haven't.
Yep. No, they are expensive. There's no doubt about that. And that's why I made my own and I got lucky. Had a bunch of scrap wood laying around and a bunch of old screws from some previous projects. And so I was able to throw it together. Just looking at how they look and figuring, okay, I've got this much wood, this is how big a cow's nose is so I should be able to get in this size of a bay. And I just made it that way and got lucky.
But the one thing if you do make your own the one thing I'll say is you still have to spend the money to get the what is it? The conveyor lid. The conveyor belt lid
wondering what you had put on top.
At first I tried to use a horse stall mat, which worked pretty good for about two or three months. And then after that, two or three months, then it just started to fall apart. And then there would be water leaking in there, and then you got, it fills a whole mineral thing and then the cows won't eat it because it gets gross. So then you gotta clean all that out and it's costing you all that mineral. So that's when I contacted the Free Choice Enterprises and got the conveyor belt from them.
And that's what I ended up having to put on the top. And since I've done that, then it's been sealed up, doesn't get wet, and works really well. But yeah, you still have to put the money in on that, and it's still not cheap, but it's better than if you have to throw away two bays worth of mineral twice, then you've paid for it already.
Oh yes. And that brings me to my next question, just going on this mineral tangent, purchasing those minerals, and you're working with a small number of head. So you're purchasing quite a bit and storing it. How do you store it to keep it in good shape?
Yeah. We have my dad and my uncle have a landscape company, and so we have a big barn for all the mowers and equipment that they use. And I just made a box outta wood, and that's where I throw those minerals in when I get 'em. It used to be from free choice. If you bought 500 pounds of mineral, then the shipping would be free. The last time I talked to 'em though, they haven't been able to get their drivers back on the road, and so they don't offer the same deals.
They help with shipping, but they, it's not the same. It's not free. . I still try to buy about 500 pounds worth and I just look and I like, I know I'm gonna need phosphorus, so then I buy a hundred pounds worth of phosphorus cause I know I'm gonna use it and then I'll buy a hundred pounds worth of sodium cause I know I'll use that. And then I'll just look at whatever's low and get one bag of that and fill out whatever's missing. So that, that's how I manage it.
And it's pretty easy to store 'em as long as you're keeping 'em dry. And the reason I put 'em in a box is because I had 'em on a pallet and when they were just sitting on a pallet mice were able to get into 'em and mice will get into anything and just make a mess out of it. So after we that, that's when I started putting them in the box. So then just keep the mice out, make it a little bit harder for 'em to get it.
About how often have you had to order mineral I that's really. As we talk about that for listeners, that's really subjective to what your cows are eating and how many cows you have going to it, but just to get a feel for it.
Yeah, I've in two years, I've bought about three loads, so about 1500 pounds. But I haven't used 1500 pounds. I guess it, I have a lot of the onesie twosies that are still sitting there waiting to get used. But the phosphorus and things like that, that I run through all the time I've used a couple hundred pounds of that.
And I will say when your animals are grazing is when they'll eat the most amount of mineral, is what I've found anyhow, is that when they're grazing, they really will hit those minerals because it's whatever's deficient in your soil. they need to get after whatever it is that they're missing to fill in their nutritional gaps.
And so if you're buying hay from somebody who either puts down phosphorus or potash or whatever on their hayfield, then they're not gonna need as much cuz it's gonna be there in the actual forage. But when they go back to grazing in the spring, when things are a little more moist and then the mineral content and the grass is lower anyhow, then they really start to put the hammer on on those minerals.
Oh yes. Yeah. So you, so let's jump back to your journey a little bit. I appreciate you humoring me and going down and talking about those minerals. That's something, it's on one of my short lists to get there at some point. I haven't, I don't have a timeframe yet, but I can see how it would be beneficial. just a lot of money, so it's always a toss up in my head. You got your bull and you got your cow and getting started. What did you, how did you go from there?
We took, I ended up getting the bull and cow the bowl. I got Labor Day of 2020, so May 31st. And then I got the cow about five days later, the cow calf pair and then I grazed them on what I had and which wasn't a lot because we had very poor, very dead soils. We have a lot of Sandhills where we have very low moisture content. Most of the topsoil that was on those, and they're not really even hills, they're just higher points in the field and all that topsoil has gone down into the low spots.
And so we were grazing through hardly anything when we were up there. And then just trying to rush into those low spots where we could get some grass again. And then supplemented hay for them throughout the winter. And when we came back around that following year in, in May I was going to need to take the bull off of the cow. And I don't have a pen or a corral or anything like that where I could lock him up in for a couple months or whatever.
I ended up buying a buddy animal a jersey steer from eastern Ohio cuz that was the only place was selling 'em at the time. Cuz it's really hard to find cheap steers in the springtime . It's very hard to do not the time to buy cattle. But I needed them. So I went to eastern Ohio to a dairy and was able to get that jersey steer and bring him back. And initially the plan was to leave the cow and her heifer calf back at my place.
And then I'd take the jersey and the bull to this other property that I was able to get was about five acres so I could have 'em over there for a couple months. But the heifer calf out of that cow calf pair was so rank and nasty and just uncooperative. She is, she had a lot of Brahmin in them in her, and I know a lot of people like
Oh yes.
And I'm not saying that anything bad about 'em, I'm just saying they're not for me, that's for sure.
Oh yes. Yo.
so she wasn't very cooperative and she actually jumped the fence when we were trying to get her in a trailer.
And so what we ended up doing was taking the steer in the cow together and we had already determined that we were gonna harvest that heifer for beef just because we didn't want to breed her back just cuz she was so flighty And rank the bull and that heifer stayed back home and then the cow and that steer went over to the other property for a couple months until we could bring 'em back together again. Get her bred . So that was in May throughout the summer.
And then I was in talks with somebody with the metro parks in our area, and they wanted to, they were talking about wanting to try and do a patch burn grazing trial. And the acres that they were saying they're wanting to do it on about 10 acres. And so I was like, I'm gonna need a couple more cows if I'm gonna, or a couple more head if I was gonna try and do that on top of what I had. So then the November of 2021, I got another cow calf pair and then took them through the winter.
And now coming up here in about mid-May, hopefully we will be taking the cows and the steer calf. Over to this patch burn grazing property when we have to pull the bull off of the cows. And then we'll run them there for a little while and then bring the bull and that jersey steer back in with them and try to get as much grass as we can out of that new property and manage the growth for them.
And then bring them back here, back to our home place and the couple, or the other property that I have up the road.
Oh, very good. Tell us a little bit more about that patch burn grazing.
Okay. In our area, I don't know if it's like this, where you're from, but we have a pretty big metro parks program in the Toledo area. And it's a pretty big entity and they have quite a bit of property and they focus on giving places for recreation for people, but then they also focus on bringing more natural areas that are either in cities or if they're further out in the country they're more of just a native prairie places for ground nesting birds and things like that is their goal.
They want to do this trial of burning the native warm season grasses and then having grazers like what the bison would've done. And we're gonna use my cattle to simulate that those bison and having them come in and graze all of the native, warm season grasses down. Because as of right now they don't have anything other than burning that they use, which means they burn it in the spring. and then all that grass goes to senescence in July. If you're lucky.
And then it just turns into a bunch of brown twigs and sticks out there. And so there it's of started to take over the whole area. And then you have this monoculture of Indian grass or switch grass or whatever it may be in that particular area. And so they want to prevent the monoculture. They want to have more diversity, they want to increase the bird populations, both ground nesting and any other kind of bird.
And they've found this area that would be fairly easy to fence and it's actually on a birding trail. And so they wanted to see, okay, if we bring in these grazers, what is that gonna do for not only the grass and forge species that are out there, but what is that gonna mean for the birds and the wildlife and everything like that? We're gonna try it. We're gonna see what happens.
I'm thinking that it's definitely gonna increase the bird population cuz that was the number one thing that we saw back at our place when we moved from row crop and brought in the cattle is one, you have a lot more bugs and two, you get a lot more birds because of all those bugs.
And so if we can keep all those native warm seasons in the growth part of their growth curve and not getting to senescence and dying out, then we'll be able to keep everything palatable for all the bugs and bunny rabbits and everything like that. And keep the cattle in good condition and bring in a lot more wildlife for them and just make everybody happy. That's the plan.
I hope it goes really well. It sounds good. One question on it. You said they found a area that's fairly easy to fence. How are you all fencing that and did you say it's on a trail also? So there'll be some human contact.
Yeah. I pretty much told him to just mimic what I'm doing at my house. So high tensile electric timeless fence posts. Instead of three wires, we're gonna do five because it's not behind my house, so I can't watch 'em all the time and make sure that the cows are in and yeah, there are people that are going to be in contact. There's a, there's well in contact there's a birding trail that's, it's they're gonna have an easement, the front of the fence and the road.
And then the birding trail is on the other side of the road. So people will be going down the road and down that trail and be able to take a look
yes.
At the animals that are out there. But it's not that they're gonna be moving through the actual pasture or anything like that. Maybe later if we can convince them to fence in those bigger areas and possibly work out a way to fence in the trails and everything so we can use the cattle in more areas then maybe that's something that we could try. But right now we're just trying to keep it simple and easy and just prove out the
Oh yes.
crazy spending all kinds of money fencing everything off, yeah.
Very good. I'm excited to see how that goes for you. I hope it goes well.
Thank you. Yeah, me too.
in addition to beef cattle, you all also have poultry.
Yep, that's right. We do pasture poultry. We follow the kind of the Joel Saladin style. We have the that little low to the ground chicken structure and we move 'em every day sometimes twice a day when they get really big. Cuz if you got 80 birds in 120 square feet, they'll tear up some pasture. Especially on some of our spots that are a little weaker in the sandier spots they'll do quite a number on 'em if you leave 'em there for 24 hours.
So we'll move twice a day once they get to be about five weeks or older. And we started out in doing the non GMO grain. We kinda went in whole hog with all that. And then we raised some for ourself, and then we sold what we had left. Or we sold excess to anybody who we could wanted to try 'em and wanted to move to a pasture based diet. Things like that.
Very good. And is this going to be how many years of doing the Pastor Poultry?
Pastured poultry last year was the first time that we had tried it. I had been grow, or I had been raising chickens since I was probably, I wanna say eight years old maybe. That was the livestock, if you wanna call 'em that species that I was able to get into, just cuz they're not as much of an investment. And if something goes wrong and you lose six chickens that cost you, $5 a piece, it's a lot easier to handle than, losing one cow that's $1,500 or $2,000 or whatever.
So yeah, I had done a lot of work with poultry, but all in the conventional style. I'd raised broilers before, conventionally and everything like that. But the first, this was the, this past year was the first year that we did it in the pasture based model.
what did you find the most challenging about it?
The most challenging thing was probably moving the water and food to them in our pasture. We probably could have made it easier on ourselves if we kept them of in the front part, but the area that needed it the most was almost at the back. So we, had 'em, we had 'em back there and 80 cornish cross chickens eat a lot of grain and if you're moving,
yes, they do.
so unless you keep a grain feed source with them all the time. If you're walking, a thousand feet or 800 feet every day carrying a couple of five gallon buckets that can be a real pain. And they go through a lot of water every day too. If you're in July they'll drink 8, 8, 10 gallons of water. You gotta fill their water twice a day. And unless you have a way that you can easily get water to 'em that can be a real pain.
And we used our cattle watering system to fill their waters, but we still had to bucket it from the cattle system and then take it over to where the little shelter was for them. So there's still a lot of handling. But yeah, they made a lot better than bringing the water all the way from back up at her house, that would've been not fun. . That's one thing I don't like doing. I don't like moving water.
I really do not like moving water from all those years of even doing poultry and constantly filling five gallon buckets and taking 'em out when we had all kinds of laying hands and everything like that. I don't like doing that. So that's the number one thing that could really beat you up if you got super involved with a pastured poultry. If you don't have a easy way of watering them, that can really wear you out after a little while.
Did you direct market very many of the birds last year?
Yeah, we did about somewhere between three quarters, two thirds, something like that that we sold. Various people, some people that just came to the website that I have and wanted to buy some chickens, some people saw on Instagram that we had chickens and for asking if they could get some some friends and family that had bought some. We didn't sell all of 'em to people, but we sold a handful of them. And actually that is by far the hardest part of it I would say. Direct marketing it to people.
That is the most difficult part of the any kind of pasture model because you gotta convince people to not buy it in the fancy package. You gotta convince 'em to buy a whole bird unless you take the time to part 'em out. But it, man, it takes a long time and it can cost you a lot of labor if you have somebody helping you.
And then you gotta convince 'em that they have to pay more than what they're getting with all those amenities and the fancy packaging and everything like that, because you're giving 'em non GMO grain and they're raised on pasture and it, so when you gotta convince 'em of all that stuff and then you gotta get 'em to come to your place to buy it. So that's by far the hardest part out of all of it.
Are you expanding chicken numbers this year or continuing about the same?
We're gonna try doing the same amount of Cornish cross and then we're gonna do about half of a shelter's worth of the, what are they, the Freedom Rangers or the Red Rangers, and then having some. , yeah. Freedom Rangers and having some ducks with those freedom rangers and just mixing it up and seeing if people would be interested in trying those other types of fowl as well.
But we're gonna keep that same amount of the Cornish cross just because say what you will about a Cornish cross chicken, but they grow really fast. They take less feed than any other animal or any other chicken and they're a lot easier to pluck and all that kind of stuff than your more quote unquote heritage breeds. And people like 'em, they like how they look. They look like a nice juicy chicken. They have a nice big double breast on 'em and, that's what people are used to.
And so that's what they want. So you it's one less thing that you gotta convince somebody try . Yeah. Yep.
And you're right. People's used to seeing that form factor in the stores and it's amazing how fast those Cornish crosses grow.
Oh yeah. Yep. They, that's just, they're race cars, , they go off of jet fuel they just go fast fast.
Well, Ethon before we get to our famous four questions tell us a little bit about the future for your farm. Where do you see and it going?
The hope is that we're gonna continue to grow. That's the idea. It's definitely a lot easier to scale up with the poultry side of things just because you need a lot less land to run the chickens on. But my goal is to increase the amount of land that we can run the cattle on, because that's, I really like doing the cattle. I love grazing, I love watching them graze and moving 'em through all the grass and everything.
We're gonna try to get more cattle so we can raise more grass-finished beef for people and just try to increase our herd numbers if we can. And that's all dependent on what we can do with the land base and try to grow, hopefully the this Park Patch Burn and Grazing program so that we can have a lot more access to land and move forward with growing that herd.
Yeah, the access to land is a tough one for everyone its seems
I was just gonna say there's no doubt that it's tough to get a lot of access to land around us. It's all row crop. Unless you have a pig, a confinement pig house everything around us is corn and soybeans and sometimes wheat. You just don't see cattle grazing. And trying to convince people that having cows grazing is not the same as having them in a lot behind the barn is another thing to try and get 'em on their property.
And instead they just say, the tractor's here in the spring and then they're here in the fall, and then that's it. And I don't have to worry about anything and don't have to worry about cows getting out and getting on my front porch or whatever. So it's just a lot easier to sell people on just staying the same with all the row crop.
And it's definitely a lot more to try and convince 'em for their idea of what cattle are and try to convince 'em that, no, that's not how, it's not what you think, but yeah it's just tough to move people in that direction.
yes it is. Anytime you're doing something that's not the same as everyone else or a little bit different than what people's been exposed to it takes a while. Yeah. Ethan, it is time for our famous four questions. Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Yes, I did steal that off The Bigger Pockets podcast, so don't tell them. Okay. Our first question, what's your favorite Grazing Grass book or resource?
So it's very hard for me to decide because I want to say any book written by Greg Judy and his YouTube page, but a lot of people suggest his book. I was thinking about this and I think if from the lens of cattle, a really good book is Before You Have a Cow. It's written by Teddy Gentry and Dr. Allen Williams. And it does focus on South Poll since Teddy Gentry's the one who started it.
But the main focus is showing you that the smaller framed easier keeping cow is what's gonna make you money and then showing you how and showing you if you're gonna be breeding animals, this is what you wanna look for. These are the kind of things to expect.
And so if you're somebody who's into into cattle already and are of thinking about moving towards the more regenerative path before you have a cow is a really good book to convince you that, yeah, I think this is a good idea with a lot of the statistics and the dollar values that they lay out for you. And then I have another book if you're interested in doing the pastured poultry, whether that's egg layers or meat birds.
There's a book called Polyface Designs, and that book is worth its weight in gold. They lay out exactly how they make all of their, or not all of their structures, but their well known structures. I tried making a portable pasture poultry thing on my own, just knowing what they looked like and just using what I had and trying to do that. And it was impossible to move. It's just a huge pain. And was it would never work.
I, there's no way I could have done it for eight weeks moving those birds around. But in about two evenings, I was able to put together a Salatin style chicken structure because they just lay it all out there for you and you don't have to think, you just buy what they tell you to buy and you just cut exactly how they tell you to cut and you throw it all together and it works really well. Yeah if you're interested in moving towards pasture poultry, that book is really good.
Yeah, they've taken care of all that trial and error and to a workable structure. That is one of the books, I don't have the, I've thought about getting this hadn't, I don't know if it'd be super beneficial, but I may have to get it now. The other book you mentioned Before You Have a Cow by Teddy Gentry, and did you say Alan Williams? Is he in that, on that book?
Yeah. Yep. Dr. Allen Williams.
Yeah I've seen that book. But for me, being around cattle all the time and growing up with them and running numerous cattle, not enough to pay the bills, but, I run on some cattle. I wasn't sure if that book would be of value to me. So based upon what you've told me, it may be an interesting.
Yeah, I think even if you are familiar with cattle especially, if you grew up in a more conventional model of things, it's just a good way of convincing you yeah, this is a way to move forward. They have a lot, they have some, a lot of tables and a lot of just good little tidbits on showing the dollar value of different forage intakes and stuff for animals. If you run a 1000 pound cow versus a 1500 pound cow, everybody tells you that you're gonna make more money on their calves or whatever.
But then they show you based off of what it's gonna cost to bring that that cow to calf. And then once it's calved to bring that calve to market weight and they just lay all that out and show you yes, definitively doing it this way per animal, you're gonna be able to make more money. And on top of that, you're gonna be able to run more animals.
It solidifies all those things that you hear people say, and you may not have all the facts and you're just like, oh yeah, people like to run their mouth. But when you go through they really lay it out for you on exactly how you can make more money and how you can run more animals on all the using smaller cows and, and things like that.
Very good. What tool could you not live without on your farm?
Again, I'm gonna cheat and say two different tools. One is buried polyethylene waterline. Like I said, I hate moving water around. And on top of that, you can control where your animals are so effectively if you can move your water easily. And having a pressurized water line that doesn't freeze in the wintertime, just makes it so that you can put those animals basically wherever you want and you don't have to worry about things freezing up on you.
You don't have to worry about building a lane back to a water point in the wintertime, or even in the summertime you can put that water exactly where you want it, you can control your animal impact and and you don't have to carry it around even if you're doing chickens and things like that. Buried polyethylene waterline for sure. And then the second one is YouTube.
There's so many things where I've been even out in the pasture and I'm like I don't know if I'm doing this right, or maybe this isn't the right idea. And then you can look it up immediately and then not just have somebody write it down and tell you, but show you exactly as they're doing it. And you can just learn everything so fast. The University of YouTube is invaluable.
Oh, and it's just, and it's such craziness of the things you can search for and find video demonstrating it too. It, I, I don't know if you can find something that there's not a video on , but that's my go-to. If I need to figure out something, I go watch a video on YouTube about it.
Yeah. That's how I learned how to put up an H brace was a YouTube video. I knew what it looked, I knew what it looked like, but then I didn't know exactly how to put it together. I'd never built one. And then it just looked up making an H brace for fencing, and then bam, you got 10 videos that show you maybe three different ways of doing it. And you can say, all right, this way's the best for me. And then you can do it, and you can just keep playing it over and over.
If there's a part where you're stuck, you just bring out your phone again and you watch 'em, and then you're like, okay, yeah. Now I know how to do it. Yeah it's crazy.
That's so true. Yes. Ethon, what do you now that you wish you knew a few years ago when you were starting on this journey?
I wish I had known to just start earlier and if you have an inkling that you want move in a certain direction to just go for it if you can.
And even if it's not going for it all the way and I think still the way that I started starting small was good, but I think every year that you delay trying something because you're not sure about it, or maybe you're thinking if I do it right now, then I'm not gonna be able to, if it's going to grazing cattle, I'm not gonna be able to get the cow that I want.
And every year that you wait, the possible pasture benefits or the establishment of the pasture or the learning that you're gonna get from running those cows, if you've never ran cows. Every year that you delay, that is basically interest that you'll never be able to get back on your experience and education.
So it's one of those things that just, even if you're not able to do it exactly the way you wanted to do it, if you can just get started and try it out and what's the worst that happens, that you don't do it. Oh, okay. Who cares . That's the biggest thing is just I think starting early, even can't do it exactly how you want. Yeah, for sure.
Very good. Lastly, Ethan where can others find out more about you?
So I have a website that's blackswampcattle.com. I have an Instagram that's Black Swamp cattle. I post a lot of photos and videos on Instagram. I try to make 'em educational and show how I'm doing it, why I'm doing it. Sometimes it is just a good looking picture of a cow. But I do try to make it educational. And then I do have a Facebook page. It's Black Swamp Cattle as well.
Very good. Now, one thing I find interesting when I think about swamp, I don't think about Ohio.
Oh
where did the name Black Swamp Cattle Company come from?
So where I'm from in Ohio, northwest Ohio, right in the Toledo area that is historically the black swamp. So back when Ohio was just becoming a state it was a really big swamp that kind of took over the whole greater Toledo area. And it's an easy branding thing of showing, this is a local, this is where we're operating, is in this
Oh, yes.
And so that's where the name came from.
Oh, very good. Because I saw the name and then I was like, where's this? Ohio? So yeah, they in Oklahoma history, we didn't talk about the Black Swamp in Ohio. Very much
yeah. A lot of people, when they think of Ohio, they think of the Eastern Edge and it's like the Appalachian Mountains. But yeah, once you get kind of the Western side, that's where it's all, a lot more grain and that type of thing.
Oh yeah. Ethon, we appreciate you coming on and sharing about your journey and what you're doing. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Thank you for having me. It's great talk.
It was great to hear about Ethon's transition from row crop farmer to grass farmer. And I'm excited to watch his progress. I mentioned before our interview with Ethon about a new project for me. Actually there's two new projects. But they're related. We have started two more podcasts. Yes, that's true. I'm crazy. We have started two more podcasts called Grazing News and the Grass Farmer Book Club. Both are the result of me not finding what I wanted out there.
Just like this podcast, a Grazing Grass podcast came about because I wanted to hear from grass farmers, doing the work and how they were doing it. And I couldn't find a podcast providing that. Grazing News is a short 10 to 15 minute podcast that is released each Monday. The goal of the Grazing News podcast is to provide relevant news for grass farmers. For example, we'll have upcoming events that may be of use to grass, farmers. As well as essential resources for grass, farmers.
Also, we have a Podcast Roundup on there, so you can know what's being released in the world of podcast. I for one, I want to listen to all the podcast I can. But, I am limited by my time available to listen. So what I'm hoping the Podcast Roundup does is to let you know what episodes are. We're just released or getting released so you can make an educated decision about what you want to listen to. Now, if you've got time, listen to them all. I encourage that.
But I realize, you have limited time, like I have limited time. So I hope the Podcast Roundup will be a. Beneficial segment for you. And to be honest, I don't know where this Grazing News podcast will go. I have a few things in mind as I've mentioned, but if you have something you think would make it better a suggestion to make it better. Go over to the Grazing Grass Community. And let me know. If we have a segment on there and you're like, that's a waste of time.
Let me know, so we can make this be something useful for us. There's one caveat there. The joke of the week is not getting axed because those are some good jokes. Any who. I encourage you to give a listen. And help me on this journey to develop a resource for all of us. The Grass Farmer Book Club is another podcast to fill a need I have. I'm an avid reader, but I would like others to discuss the books I read. Thus the Grass Farmer Book Club.
The podcast is organized into seasons with each season covering a single book. For season one, we are reading Quality pasture second edition by Allan nation, revised by Jim garish. The first episode of each season will introduce the book for that season. As well as the reading plan with weekly episode release to discuss that week's readings. The reading plan is built around reading 10 pages a day. While 10 pages isn't a lot. It is enough for us to grow our knowledge.
In addition to the podcast, you can go over to the Grazing Grass Community. Click on grass farmer book club and start a discussion there as well. Hopefully it will become a useful resource as we are building our knowledge. I encourage you to subscribe to a grass farmer book club. If you're interested in reading or if you just want to hear the discussions. And also subscribe to the Grazing News podcast. And let me know how it goes for you.
You're listening to the grazing grass podcast, helping grass farmers learn from grass farmers, and every episode features a grass farmer and their operation. You can find the grazing grass podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And we encourage you to share our posts with others. We appreciate you sharing about our podcast. Are you a grass farmer? Do you want to come on and share about your journey? Go to. grazinggrass.com and click on Be Our Guest. Fill out the form and I will get in touch.
For those grass farmers who have filled out the form, and I haven't got back to you. I'm going through those now. And I will be sending you an email over the next few days. Until next time. Keep on grazing grass.