#166 John Rhodes Regenerative Ranching: Burning Brightly toward Sustainability

Hey gang, welcome back. It's good to have you back with us for another episode of the podcast that reboots your thinking about farming, ranching, food systems, and the people that are operating. Ranching reboot. I'm your host, Brian Alexander. You can find me on social media as Red Hills Rancher on just about every platform, including YouTube, where you can also find video versions of this podcast. You can also watch that same video version on Spotify.

For those of you that have been listening since the first of the year, you'll know this season of Ranching Reboot is sponsored by Land Trust, the Outdoor Recreation Access Network. Spring turkey season is wrapping up across the plains in the Midwest, so it's time to start planning your fall and winter hunt.

And with Land Trust Plus and Draw Insurance, you can book with peace of mind that if you don't draw tags, you can get a refund on your trip. No matter what kind of hunting or outdoor recreation you're looking for, Land Trust has something for you. Check out everything at landtrust.com slash reboot or just click the link in the show notes.

For today's podcast, we're going to head down to Northeast Texas and visit a fairly new operator with a great vision for the future. We're going to talk about some of the challenges we're facing in agriculture today, lack of labor, land conversion, and some of the ways that we can navigate a path forward. Please welcome John Rhodes to the show. Hi John, how are you today, man? I'm doing well, Brian. Thanks for having me. How are you, sir?

I'm doing good. Thanks for being here. Um I'd be doing a lot better if I catch some more rain. Yeah, I wish we could share some with you, man. We've actually had the wettest spring that I've had since I've been here in the last six years. So almost a little too much. A good problem to have. Yeah, it is. So what where's your format? We are located in Quitman, Texas. It's kind of northeast east Texas where the post oak savanna meets the piney woods.

Um, I have a small little family farm that I'm very blessed to live on with my wife and my daughter. Well, my brother's your kind of typical 40 mama cow cow herd that my brother and I play around with and get a lot of enjoyment working together through that. I also have independent of that small sheep herd that I'm building and raise pigs out in the woods to feed my family and other neighbors that are in. And you got some bees too, don't you?

Yeah, I've got one hive. I I'm kind of playing around with that, you know. I started off with two last year. One of them didn't make it over the winter, so I can't really say it's an industry or anything, but maybe hoping to go that way with it at some point. OK Enough honey for you and your family.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm hoping so. We haven't actually harvested the honey. We were um, you know, making letting the hive get established last year and we're hoping to look at it here in a few weeks and see if we can take some out of it at the end of June. I I don't know a whole lot about beekeeping. Me either to me and my tendency is just to if I'm uh curious about something is to just dive in and make a bunch of mistakes along the way. I don't like getting stung. Yeah.

I I'm not allergic. I just don't like pain. I understand, man. I understand. There's some good medicine in it though, that venom therapy. I think it's kinda good for you in small doses if you aren't allergic. Yeah, like uh isn't there something like maybe bee stings can help with certain kinds of inflammation and joint pain? That's what I've heard. I don't have any experience with that yet, but it's certainly if I

Well, you know, you also hear that, you know, when you get shocked by an electric fence, it might suck first off, but you know, everything's all kind of nice and limber the next day or two. I mean I'm not saying I go like grabble my electric fences on purpose, but you know, we all get shocked every once in a while. I mean, I get shocked two or three times a day, it seems like. I'm moving the cows every day with the polywire.

You know, it's never fun. It's always mildly upsetting, but it is what it is. It's part of the process. I don't like it. Every once in a while I'll catch one of those big shocks. I was walking around with a cattle panel in my hand one day and accidentally bumped up to the fence. And I mean I felt it in my heart. I've had a couple of those. I don't know what to say what would happen if somebody had like heart issues or something and that happened to them. What kind of chargers do you use?

I'm stay fix out there and then I have like uh some tractor supplied solar stuff that I use as well. That's right. Um, I've got a couple of speed rights, but most of my energizers um are Taylor Cyclops, either two and a half or five dual. Those things a pack of punch, don't they? You know, there's there's different shocks. Like it feels way different getting shocked by a speed right than it does getting nailed by a cyclops. It's like butt pucker. Like what what's going on with it, man?

It's like I'd I'd say that like the speed ride is a softer Like a softer shock. The the shock that you get from the Cyclops, it's like sharper and angrier and more prickly. Like it makes you mad. Makes you cuss a little bit more. I cuss every time, man.

Well, yeah, we used to have these chargers that were called IntelliShocks, and they came out of Germany. Okay. And like you can't you haven't been able to get'em for probably twenty years. They were hot, real hot, and they clicked super fast. They're like way faster than a than a Taylor Cyclops. And I think what happened was. Like there's a frequency to the shock. Like they they ch I think the government said you can only shock so fast. That made a lot of'em change their design.

I remember getting hit by one of those old Intel shocks. I think it was a five joule charger. And I just tested it at thirteen two. I was working on the fence and I just shifted my weight a little bit and I felt the wire touch my hip. And when you have enough time to feel it touch you before you get a shock, sometimes you can get out of the way. Yeah. Not this time. How many pulses was that intelligence sending out a second, you think?

Uh I I don't know. I think That was probably a pulse between every quarter and every half second, and I think the Taylor Cyclops runs about two-thirds to three quarters of a second per pulse. So it's it's I feel like the Intel shocks were faster. I mean, don't have one to test and don't have the equipment. I'm not smart enough to know how to operate it, even if I did, but I've been shocked by enough. Like They're faster. The old ones were faster.

Gotcha. Um but anyway I felt that wire touch like just touch my hip and you have that split second in your head go, Oh, that's the electric fence wire that's touching me. This is not going to feel good. and felt like It felt like somebody hit me in the hip with a two by four. Not a two by four, a telephone pole. Like just hauled off, whacked me. That shock hit. You know, all your muscles contract and get weird. I think I lost about two seconds of time.'Cause I'm on the ground on my back. Like

Kind of little twitchy and dad and dad's coming over. It's like, Are you okay? Are you okay? I'm like, uh starting to get up. Like, yeah, yeah, I'm just That didn't feel great.

Were you standing like on moist ground or something to make that especially, you know, in that moment or is it just that's how they are? Dry sand is just how they are. I was probably twelve feet from the ground rod, if that helps. Okay. 13 2 is hot, man. I don't we don't ever have fences of Well I mean uh if I can't make a fence Eight thousand volts. That's my that's my cutoff. I mean if if I'm under eight thousand volts, I've got a wire problem. Generally between five and eight

It's gonna be a conductivity problem. Like I'll have a rusty spot that'll have to go patch out. Um 5,000 is usually a ground. Like between three and five is usually a ground for me. Uh just like running through running through some brush or something and you know the wires cut through the bark of the brush and it's going to ground that way or it's on like a fence post. Or we've had an insul you know, insulated tube, you know, get shorted out.

Um, but if it's 1000, which like that's a direct short to ground. It's it's definitely on a metal post. I don't have any trouble keeping my cattle in with like you know, ours running from about six to eight. We have an offset high tinsel that goes around the perimeter of the property. Um it's definitely got some issues. It should be a little bit hot hotter than that, but Cows are fine, but the sheep, they won't honor that at all. I have to use I also have a a solar set up for uh

run a two line setup for my cows and sheep because I run them together as a flirt. And I was having the ewes would uh the ewes would respect the line, but the Rams for whatever reason were going under and So I just put a a solar charger on one on the bottom line and kept that bottom line especially hot and then attached the the one that goes to the perimeter um offset. I attach the top one to the top line and it sits at about six, but that bottom one's at about ten and it it works.

Usually usually five and a half to six will turn a cow. For sure. Yeah. Anything under five, they just they don't care about it. And if it stays if it kind of stays in that five five to six thousand that just barely hot enough range for long enough, they'll learn that they can walk through it and it doesn't hurt that bad.

So why Red the red hills for you, man. I are you did you say you were receiving some cattle? Supposed to be having some Cattle land tomorrow as we record this. So it'd have been last Friday when most people hear it. Um Okay. Just trying to get the custom grace going.

Okay, I didn't know if you were gonna roll that way with the drought going on and you know, in previous episodes I had heard you and Tanya talking about traveling and doing some podcasts on the road and stuff like that, and you know, so I didn't know exactly where you were at. We're gonna try to get to that this fall. Uh it looks like based on the rain we've had, the climate we've got, um I pulled my stocking numbers down just a little bit and I told clients to expect expect to go home and off.

Okay. That that's all I'm promising right now is is about a ninety day deal. Um just simply we're in D three. We don't have the rain. I mean we've had like we've had an inch and a half of rain, maybe two inches total since the first of the year. Not a not a tremendous amount to grow grass on. Uh

Soil temps are just they're getting close to warm season grass where it's gonna start kicking off. Cool season is still going pretty good. We're getting good growth from the moisture we have, but it's thin, so Pardon? This what's the cool season stuff that you grow on your farm? Uh like a lot of cheats, like bromes, things like that.

All our ryegrass is heading up and seeding out over here. The Bermuda and the Bahia and stuff like that's turning on underneath. So we're in that kind of liminal space, you know. I think it's a good time for a cow though, for sure. They're out there getting fat. Everything's going really well. No, we're starting to.

You ended up selling your herd though, right? Like the your corrientes and stuff. Yes, I did. Um and for those out there in podcast land that might might be wondering about that. So Um couple fortunate things. Um I take Cattle for on my south end. He lives about an hour south of me down in Oklahoma. Uh he ended up buying a group of like nine party girl types. Like ha home raised heifers.

that were bred back to another that were exposed to another bull, not their dad, um, that caught at 14 months old. Okay. Well done. Yep. He managed to he got a hold of nine of those. And I'm gonna get those back either tomorrow or this weekend or maybe next week, whenever he can get'em get'em gathered up along with another probably a hundred and sixty of of his things. Um Buddy have a another buddy I've been running with that stocks my east side.

Um he bought he bought quite a few of my heifers. Uh he bought some of my steers to put into his beef program, so I know where they're at. But the bulk of'em Um well in in late twenty twenty I bought a bunch, uh I bought bought a load off of Josh and Gwen Hoy over in the Flint Hills, my good friends. And those are some really good cows. I think I got uh thirty two or thirty three from'em then.

They ended up buying back um thirty-four cows from me and they got seventeen of their cows back that that I bought from in twenty twenty. Yeah. So Keep it in the family up there, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Josh and I were just joking, we'll just trade these cows back and forth every three or four years, you know, no big deal. You know, we'll it's it and I guess the joke is

It it's kind of like, you know, the two guys could get stranded on a desert island or get rich selling coconuts to each other using sand as currency. That that's kind of what it feels like, Josh and I, trading these cows back together. All right.

That's cool. I mean, I love that uh custom grazing business model, but it seems you need to be kind of networked and have a little bit of a name. I just don't know many people, at least I wouldn't. that would send like just, you know, all their cows to somebody they didn't know or didn't really have any, you know, reputation of sorts. So Yeah, I can see that. Um But it's also it's a little bit more than a little bit.

I I don't know how to feel about that, John. Um It seems like that, you know, anytime eat a piece of piece of ground changes hands around here. Before the ink is dry on the sales contract. Everybody that owns cows around here that doesn't have enough grass is calling that guy and like, hey, can I rent your grass? Can I rent your grass? It it's not necessarily I I don't think there's that much of a problem, at least in my area, if you have grass, finding somebody to put cows on.

I don't think that's too much of a problem. But like you said, having that reputation and those contacts. helps you find the right people. I got fortunate because my dad was already in the custom grazing business and he just turned a bunch of his contacts over to me and that really helped me get started. Right. And I also had all that institutional knowledge of

How do we work with people, you know, in in this kind of client customer relate or you know, in this kind of client relationship? How do we work with these people in order to keep them happy and coming back year after year after year and paying premium?

Yeah, here for me I've been y all that rings true and I'm making assumptions here. I've never really gone out and tried to sell some grass'cause I never really had any to sell until recently. I just signed a lease yesterday. on a a hundred and twenty acres that I'm figuring out what to do with. Of course I Enter into a relationship without having like a foundation to work with what I think I'm going to do over there. But I look forward to talking to that to you.

Well sure, man. It's 120 acres. It's about 10 minutes from my farm, which is great. It's got really good. Let me rephrase that. It's got uh capable enough of perimeter fins. Um ponds and quite a few cross fences. Um some stock takes in each pond, and then there's some piped water too up by the house and around the barn and stuff. Not everywhere. I'm very blessed on my current farm where I live that it was

lug and play when I moved here. Um my dad bought it in two thousand twelve and wanted to, you know, do something in his early retirement and totally set this place up. It was pretty set up to begin with when he purchased it, but then he really put his own mark on the place. And so we have, you know.

water troughs in every little field and woven wire fence around with an offset electric and it's just really dialed in. So this new place is gonna give me an opportunity to develop some skills on I kind of put some water in, possibly do things like that, kind of develop. bit more, which I need to cultivate those skills'cause it's not something I've really ever done.

Over design your water system. I uh that would be that would be like the number one thing I would say is Water system, over design it. Like whatever you think your maximum carrying capacity on that property would be for livestock. Figure out the water demand for that and then double it. Okay. Then build that and that's what you build. Because

You know, I I've got my water systems are all all all over twenty years old by now. And when dad designed'em, he designed'em twice as big as he thought he needed. And now they're just barely big enough, now that we've got the ranch cleaned up. Got grass productivity coming back up. We barely have half the water that we need. So I'm having to get I'm trying to figure out how to get my water systems upgraded and add some more capacity.

So I can run run more head. Because I'm kind of I'm kinda almost at a limit watered out. Well, I would be watered out if I had a normal year. I mean normal rainfall year, I can run more cattle than I can water on my grass. Hasn't really been that much of a problem during this drought.

So do you have like big water troughs and piped water throughout the farm or in just little parts and some stock ponds or what? Um we have Between the three different grazing cells there are fourteen Pits and ponds that dad built through the late eighties and nineties. Um I've got a major creek that runs down the east side of the ranch. It that starts on the south side, it runs down the east side. Um and that's the one that's got is full of beavers. Two major beaver colonies on that.

D3 drought, I can go down to that creek and there's more water in it now than there was a year ago. And there's more water a year ago than there was two. They just they just keep adding like they'll add six inches to all of their dams. over a winter. Like, okay, six inches isn't much. Well, if they're there four years, that's two feet. That's two more feet of extra water. You've got in that canyon and you can't buy that.

Are there any negatives besides them chewing down trees or whatever that you've seen in your context of having those beavers, man? Just positives as far as the other. As far as I see it, it's all positives. What are the negatives to when beavers dam up a creek? They make it wider, they make it harder to get across. So th this this creek I call it Stewards Creek. It runs for

Let's just call it two and a half miles. It starts on the ranch about a half mile south of the highway and kind of runs straight north and and goes off the property onto the neighbor.

It I forgot where I was going with that. Beavers and the positives and negatives of the beavers. So the the only negative that I can see to the beavers. Is they've dammed up the creek and I can't get across that creek anymore. Because two of the places they dammed it up were two of the places that 10 years ago I was using as a crossing. Now I can't cross the creek. But that's okay. Right. Because the state built a fantastic culvert over that creek.

And I can use that. It's a public highway. So that's how I get across that creek. I don't worry about crossing it anywhere else on the two miles. Is that inconvenient as hell when I gotta go all the way to the north end to check to work on a water gap? Yeah. It's worth it when when I look at the water that's impounded on that creek, when I look at the habitat, when I go down there and I see I see fish that are eighteen inches long in a dang beaver pond.

What kind of fish are floating instead of swimming around in there? I've I've caught bass and hybrid bluegill in my beaver plant. Uh just a little over a year ago, I think it was last July, uh Chip Flory from Agri-Talk came out. Okay. As uh came out with Land Trust to uh to make some content and we stopped down there at my Middle Crossing Beaver Pond. Now I'm not a fisherman.

I used to like to fish when I before I quit drinking because then fishing was an excuse to go sit in a boat with your buddies and drink beer. Like that's what fishing was. It it wasn't actually going fishing. It was just I'm gonna go sit in a boat with my buddies and drink beer for three hours. I think that's a lot of deer camp for people. Well when I quit drinking I remember going fishing and like you know Cast and reel in for an hour and nothing happened.

That's okay when you're drinking with your buddies, but when you're not drinking or you're kind of by yourself, it's boring as shit. It's old.

I kinda I don't fish very much. So when these guys were out we were down there and I forget who it was. I think it was Tom handed me a fishing pole and was like, I'll go over there and just throw it in and see what happens. So I took this fishing pole, this tiny little spinnerbait over there, and just tossed it into the beaver pond. Within two seconds I had a fish on.

Hold it out, took the fish off, put it back in the water, cast out again. Less than two, like the lure hit the water and I had a fish on it. Hold him out, let him go, cast again. Soon as the lure hit the water, third fish hit it. Three in a row. Like probably uh no. Well I think all three of them are bass. That that kind of makes fishing fun. Yeah, for sure. I love small pond fishing when it's like

Okay, so back to back to water. Uh we got those fourteen ponds, got the Great Creek on the east side, two beaver complexes, the creeks on the west side. We're still working on trying to restore them. Uh might be able to put a project together this year to get some put together a couple of different money sources and and be able to go in there and finish rehabilitating that creek and get the rest of the trees off of it. Um so water systems Gosh, let's see. I've got seven seven wells.

Five of'em are solar. Two of'em are grid tide three. No, I've got eight. Five solars and three grid tide wells. Um and one of my solar wells uh is kind of a hybrid. It's also tied into the grid grid tide pump. So during the day My solar panels should be pumping most of the water. And then at night, if I still gotta pump water, we're still tied onto the grid. Or if you know it doesn't

Or if we have enough days where it's not sunny, I can still pump water on a grid. Um I've got two well I've got three systems that are solar pumped storage. So uh one of'em, the tank is just kind of sitting there by the well, so it doesn't generate a whole lot of pressure, had to pump anywhere else, but it is storage, ten thousand gallons.

I've got another one uh on my east side. Well actually both of them are on on the east side. I've got two twenty thousand gallon storage facilities for water on my east side. One of them we're pumping one of them were pumping almost 190 feet uphill, and the other one we're pumping about 130 feet up. Mention scale that's hard for me to imagine out here on my little two hundred acre piece, yeah.

having water tanks that and a ranch that big to drive around and saw We uh lost we had a what I call Snow Mageddon, an an apocalyptic snow event for our area a couple of years ago and lost power, you know, and didn't have any power. I mean, water for our animals. Luckily I c have a a valve I can turn and tap into the city water, you know, and use that when I have to. Um, but I just couldn't believe the water bill that I got after that. These cows drink a lot of water, man. Yeah, rural water.

There isn't rule of water where I'm at, where the ranch is. I have it here at my house, but we're seven miles away and almost two hundred foot downhill from the ranch where I live. And um Let me let me think for a second. Let me let me think for a second. Because my dad helped put helped put the system in. in the early eighties, a rural water system. And my his cousin is actually the operator and has been the operator since it was put in.

In the eighties, I mean, Mace knows where all the valves are. He knows where all the lines are because he was there when most of them were put in the ground. Yeah, Mace is also one of the guys that taught me how to witch. So he'll he'll get out there with his witchin' sticks and he he'll just go follow the lines and get'em all marked with his witchin' sticks. It's it's pretty cool to watch if you

What's his success rate on that? To be a good one, you have to be like 90 and above or something, 90% and above.

I don't know. That's hard that's How would you define success? Is that something that I mean I've I've witnessed this once? We had a family ranch in Graham, Texas that my grandparents owned and much drier out there and stuff. And we dug a well and they brought a witcher out. And I'm curious.

As, you know, somebody who's up a lot of meditation and things like that, you know, when they're using those Witcher sticks, is it all in the, you know, the willow stick or are they bringing some sort of energy to it or what? Have you ever dove deep with any of those guys and ask them how they do it? How I do it, so I made two copper rods. Okay. I've got copper rods are about

They're too long. I need to shorten because they're kind of heavy in the hands. Uh I can use e I can do it with a coat hanger. I can pick up two sticks on the ground and and and kinda do it. It's I don't know how it works. I can't explain it. I hear you. It's very interesting stuff, man. I mean you you you pick up this I pick up my sticks and I just kinda like focus in my head of what I'm looking for. Like I want to find buried lines. I want to find and follow a buried line in the ground.

And you feel that in your finger, it kind of like toggles on the end or something like that? Where how does it work? Or the what how does the copper rod one work? I I've only seen willow sticks that work. I don't think I feel anything inside. It's just I I feel I I I feel the rods moving and twisting in my hands. And depending on how they cross and which way they swing, right, would tell me I'm either left or I'm too far right and I need to turn. Does that make any sense? Absolutely.

So if I can find a line and I start following it, they'll stay crossed. And if you start to veer off one side or the other, the sticks will start to tell you. Okay. If I remember correctly and I I couldn't be remembering this strong'cause I was a little kid but I I remember them having like uh

a willow stick in the w the end they would kinda pull it pull it apart a little kind of bit and then and the end would pop down whenever there was water they're getting close to water underground. So does that sound about right? Or have you not seen that ice? I've never tried that approach. The only thing I've ever tried is is two sticks. And that and that Anybody that I ever remember seeing when I was younger. That was good. They'd use two two metal rods or two s two metal rods generally.

I mean, you can take a piece of fourteen gauge fence I've done it with a piece of fourteen gauge fence wire. Just made some real quick with my plot. That's cool stuff now. How accurate is it? Okay. Did you get some verification? I mean, did you know you were following a water line and your sticks were indicating that? Or have you ever like gone out and looked for like, you know, some actual water and then dug down and found and verified what your sticks were telling you?

I g I mean if you know the water line is there, like I know there's a water line here somewhere. I know it generally runs north south. That's one That's kind of an easy thing. Cause then you kind of walk a grid east-west until you go over it and you find it. And once you find it, you know, you mark where that spot was. To me what I've found works for me. When they come in and cross and they make They both come in at a forty five and they meet at a ninety degrees. Where my toes are.

That's gonna be where the thing is. Not where my heels, where my toes are, that's gonna be where it's at.

It's cool as man. It's just I love intuitive stuff like that that there's really not any explanation. Well I was just I was just sitting here thinking like Maybe that might be something to make some video of. Definitely. But then, you know, okay, what are you gonna video? You walking around with a couple sticks. Well, then you got to put in like, okay, we're actually gonna dig a hole here and prove that what I said is here is here.

Yeah, or you could go where you just display the water line thing and kinda show you like know there's a water line there and like kind of show the action of the rods over that. You know, I think that'd be good content. I think you should do It's also kind of fun like to walk around in town, in a yard in town. And be like, oh, there's something here.

And you put a little flag down on the ground where that was. And you just kinda walk a grid and you go back and look at your flags and you're like, okay, well there's a line here. Let's follow that. And then you get on that line, you follow it, and you come up to the gas meter at the house. You're like, oh crap, I was just following a gas line. Then you go find another one and it's like That's a fiber optic cable I was just following. Well that's interesting.

So that thing's finding all kinds of different line. I mean, is it's not keying in on the water? You think it's like I mean, if it's finding a gas line, that's you know, and pressurized gas running through there. So I wonder what I wonder what signals it to kind of make it, you know, respond. I I always thought it was like the water, but maybe it's something else.

The things that I the things that I feel competent to find and trace are generally pipes and underground things. Like pipes and cables underground. I I feel pretty comfortable tracing those out with my witch and stick. Find a water well, find an oil well. Yeah. I don't know. I've never tried. I mean Yeah. I d I guess I don't have like ten or fifteen thousand dollars worth of trust in my skills to say there's water here, go dig a well.

Did somebody coach you up on the sticks or did you just watch other people and dive in and try it yourself? I've just watched uh I just watched other people and one day I was just like, do this. That looks like bullshit. I'm gonna try that. But then you know, when you're just walking and I try to tell people like, just fix in your mind what you're looking for. And then just look straight ahead. Don't look at the ground. Just look straight ahead.

Don't look at where I mean, you obviously have to look at where you're walking, but pay just look straight ahead. Concentrate on what you're trying to find. Yeah. Maybe visualize a pipe. Bye. Bye. A pipe of fluid throwing through it going through it or a cable. That that's that's what I try to do. And then I just I just walk, try to walk straight lines and Feel it and you feel you feel it in the hands. You'll feel those rods twist and and start to come together.

Is there any uh any other weird, subtle, uh sensory things when like the rods come together or anything like that that you're feeling? I don't think so. Yeah. There is I think it's like a a it's a very subtle thing. that's below our perception. like below our conscious perception, but our our subconscious is still able to pick up like signals and interpret things. And what those things are, I have no idea. But I I I think that's how. Yeah.

And that kind of like makes me think about, you know, the difference between holistic thinking and reductionist thinking. So those of us that are that are in regenerative agriculture that think holistically.

A lot of those people just heard me talk about witch and sticks for the last, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes. And they're like, okay, maybe I'll give that a shot. The people that are on the other side, on the reductionist science side, They can't understand it because they don't have faith that it works. We've got to reduce this part of the we've got to reduce this down. We've got to take all these variables out and we've got to figure out how this works so we can replicate it. Good luck. Yeah.

So man, I'm trying to think about different business models on this lease. And I have no idea what a custom day rate goes for. You know, the m research that I've done is like two dollars, two twenty five a head, something like that, in the Mar area. Is that what about over where you're at? This is a question I really don't like to answer. Okay. Well I won't uh hold you to it, man. I'm just curious. I'm trying to get a an idea what it looks like Yeah, and I I get that. Um

I've told people for quite a while to look for two dollars a day per standard animal unit. You're probably not gonna get. Buck and a half per s per day per standard animal unit. I think it's very robust. And you know, of course that scales down. Um, you know, like for yearlands you might charge a little bit extra. On the SAU basis because of consumption, because they're a pain in the ass to deal with, because they're always on highway.

You know, like a fall calving herd that's gonna be easier to take care of. Maybe you'll maybe you'll cut that rate down a little bit a little lower because they're less workload, not as much of a pain in the ass. But I think I think that's I think that's a place to start. And then you negotiate mineral and like, you know, medicine and all that sort of stuff, I guess, on the who pays for all that, right?

Yeah, I mean if you're getting two dollars a day But but minerals coming out of your pocket medicines coming out of your pocket. all the day help, you know, anything's coming out of your pocket, two dollars a day might not be enough. Right. If you're getting a dollar a day,

And they're sending somebody up twice a week with feed and mineral to put it out for the cows and all you have to do is just make sure the water's there and the fence is hot and open a gate every couple of days. Maybe a dollar a day is a little more worth.

Yes, I think it's a great model, man, to get into. But it's just such a complicated thing. It's like, well, what do you get a day for custom grazing? Uh well let's talk about what your operation is first. Like what's your structure? Do you own the land? Or are you leasing the land and really having to maximize your cash flow? Bye.

You know, what are what kind of arrangement are you gonna be doing? What class of critter are we talking about? You know, if you've got a calve out heifers and they're expecting a hundred percent of their calf calf crop and you're gonna get you know, gonna get Docked for every calf that's not there? Is that worth two dollars a day? I don't know. Yeah, I don't think that's...

The cost entry looks, you know, is great and everything on that, but just me being relatively new to this industry, I've only been doing this since Two thousand nineteen. And so I'm kinda in this little intermediate stage. My passion and the love that I've cultivated for this kind of drives me. Um but I still have a lot to learn, you know. Absolutely. But um I just don't I'm also a bit of a hermit, so not really networked, you know, I'm not

going to Sunday school and seeing all the the old timers there every week and all that sort of stuff, which is, you know, kind of important in my little area in order to make those relationships and stuff. Um So just kinda we're figuring it out as I go. I wanna kinda use that place to I want to be a good steward to it. I don't want to rotate it backwards in any form or fashion. That's important to me.

So but I would like to kind of get my hands on my own hay, nothing crazy, but just have control of that. And so I was thinking about haying it and putting all our hay in the barn. And then I was gonna wanted to talk to you or see if you knew somebody that I could talk to about natural hay production. Like would I be able to feasibly bring in my cows behind that hay cutting and do lock do right by the land, you know, as far as like fertilization needs.

Just say I maybe I did one cutting a year. Could I get my fertilization needs and take care of the land properly with the cow herd just rotating behind that? Have you had any experience with that?

Um no I don't because and I'll tell you why. Sure. The reason my ranch is native ranch. Is cause it was too steep and too rough to farm. And anything out here that was flat enough to be farmed, they farmed it. Including a lot of the hilltops. Uh I would say that From the time this ranch was settled, like in the late eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, is when this was opened up for for homesteading. Mm-hmm. Um, until m my family started to acquire it about a hundred and ten years ago.

Let's say there was probably six hundred acres of farm ground on this whole property at Peak. And by the fifties that was cut in half. And then my dad got rid of the last of it in the late eighties. But I can still go to where places where it was farmed, like before the thirties, before they said everybody's gotta put terraces in everywhere and and see a lot of erosion.

So I I don't have any experience with that, but I would think that I would I think that you would get quite a bit of fertility back. Grazing after a hay crop. So of course, you know, it's making sure the grass has enough rest and it's ready to be regrazed. And then having the appropriate stocking rate to get across to In the right amount of time. thorough, you know, get that thorough fertilization. Have to kind of keep them dense.

Okay. So this question came up, um, I think it was it was in a Facebook group a couple of days ago, about has anybody done any study about fertility? Well the the question was How much fertility are your cows really bringing? Okay. Thank you. Th this is a question that keeps coming up every once in a while. So I think it was like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty.

I did some math. Now I'm not good at math. Uh, but what I came up with and I found I found three studies that talked about what the the fertilizer value in bovine manure was. Now, I gotta say that all three of these studies were basically done in a confinement type operation. where the manure and urine are getting kind of mixed together in a pit. Okay. So for starters, that's the first problem because there's a big difference between manure and urine that are mixed together in a pit.

That undergoes what's called anaerobic decomposition, decomposition without air. And that's going to lead to different decomposition products. in that liquid manure than if you had urine landing on rangeland two feet away from where manure was landing on rangeland. Okay. They're gonna break down different. So I'm not gonna pretend like these numbers Are good. These numbers are a great are would be a good starting point for somebody a lot smarter than me to start doing this research.

So based on based on the obviously flawed data set that I had available to me, because let's face it, how are we going to get a data set of what's coming out of a cow that would be falling on rangeland and how are we going to quantify the NPK in that? Right. Well, okay, reductionist thinking. We've got to collect all of that stuff.

Okay, so let's just collect all of it and then measure all of it and divide it by the number of cows and we'll figure that out that way. Okay, well when you're collecting all of it in a pit, you're changing like you're changing the rules that the butt that that biology is operating. Okay, so moving on.

And I uh probably could go find the folder where all this math is at. But what I figured was If you're grazing at fifty thousand pounds per acre stock density. I've got you. 50 cows on an acre for a day. It's not that bad. It's not not real crazy. It's nothing like what Hobbes is doing. You know, fifty fifty thousand pounds an acre is I think it's a is a stocking rate that almost everybody can work with.

From from the plains east. Right. Mountains, mountains, western plains, like look at 25,000. That's the better place to start. Anyway, fifty thousand pounds an egg. Just breaking down the NPK that's in the manure, not counting, not even looking at the carbon. You know, the bypass carbon, the bypass protein, none of that. Just look at the NPK and the volume of NPK that comes out of the back of a cow. Fifty to fifty five dollars an acre and that was twenty twenty.

And that's what it was worth to put that that amount of NP and K on your soil was about fifty to fifty five dollars an acre. So when you're faced with a choice, like, okay, I have 120 acres I need to fertilize. Do I do that with cows? Over twenty one days. Right. Or do I just call the spray man and have him come do it in one day? That's that's the equation. And I get that it takes some creativity.

to plan a twenty one high f twenty one day high impact graze cycle. And if we're talking about like I'm just gonna throw some dates out, like first cutting be mid June. Late May, mid June. Just depends on the weather conditions here, but yeah. Late May, mid-June, probably gonna need fourteen to twenty-one days of that of rest on that grass before it's ready to be regrazed. So now we're looking at third week of June or first part of July.

Bring the cow on. Yep. Bring your cows on, plan that for twenty one days. Then they leave, and maybe another 20 days later, sometime in late August, beginning of September, maybe try to pull a second cutting off.

I guess the only thing that I can do is experiment and, you know, do some soil tests I guess and see what happens. I am obligated and just I I I can't run land backwards, man. I just I don't care. Uh it just doesn't feel good to me. I'm in this to uh improve land. It's important to me to get out there and do a good job and I'm just trying to shop around, see what makes sense and how to I'll also say this. You know, when you when you

That can be no that can be pretty bad. That can be pretty detrimental to the soil health because you're taking a lot of biomass off. If it's a hay field that's been hayed every year for the last 40 years, yeah, that could be a problem. Or it's already kind of like in an equilibrium of crappy health that it's just not going to get a whole lot worse the more, you know, with successive hangings. There is um there's a couple spots on on the ranch that I had some prairie hay.

swathed and and failed four years ago. Okay. Never had it tested because that wasn't the point. The point was If we're covered up with snow, I've got these cows. I can haul'em protein, but they're gonna need some bulk. Ensure it's followed. And what's the best bulk that I can have? The bulk of the the stockpile that I already have. Well take an area where I can't graze it?

will hay it and then I can take that biomass and I can move it where I need it to. And if I end up not feeding that hay, it'll already be there at the quarry when we need to go reclaim ground, which Probably get to do some of that this year. Um Probably gonna do some. Do a little bit of hang each year or whenever it makes sense. Um that was the first and last time that I've cut any hay on the ranch.

it before. You know, I've always like I said, I'm relatively new to this and you know it's just a no-no in the regenerative kind of model for the most part is you know you want to import people other people's fertility to your land. So I just Hadn't done it. I think my place here could use it, could take it. You know, I've got some really nice pastures here in my home farm, not talking about the lease right.

I figure I could probably do twenty acres of hay and then like do a different twenty next year and do that over the course of ten years and get the whole place done, you know, at some point and it not go backwards, but I've just never experimented with it. I just never had. I just anecdotally from my observations, I It did take quite a while to recover. Yep. It it took quite a while to recover. But now four years later, I can't go there and I can't find an edge.

where they swapped, other than where maybe where he went through a little bit of brush and like cut through a cut through a brush thicket and there's just still a line through there. Other than that, I really can't tell a difference between what was hayed and what hasn't. That hasn't had any fire, any grazing other than maybe a few stray head here and there that wander, you know, that just wander into the quarry. But It's not a It took a while to recover. Did the land look as healthy?

The next year after his hate in twenty one? No, it didn't. We've also been in a horrible drought, so it's taken longer to recover. Now where we're at four years, you know, three three full growing seasons after that, like I said, I can't tell a difference.

The lease that I have where I am planning on doing the hay has been hayed twice a year for the last two years, and I don't think they did anything behind it. So I have a little bit of concerns. It looks really good over there. I just went over there and like rode the quad around, making sure all the fences were exactly where I need it needed them to be, and it looked pretty good over there.

I'm excited about having some more options. It just opens up a whole bunch more options having this extra 120 acres because we've almost reached our capacity here on the home farm. Got like probably seventy animal units out here with everything combined with the netches and cattle, you know, and the sheep and everything else too. So I like to let things rest at least forty-five days at the very least. This is gonna open up some options I'm excited about. Yeah.

I need to go recycle some uh some coffee. Sir, go for it, man. I'll see you shortly. One of these days I'll figure out how to sit through uh sit down for two hours and have to take a bathroom break. Today's not that day. I'm with you, man. I consciously made an effort not to drink a bunch of coffee or water, so I wouldn't be sitting here shaking or needing to pee after during our conversation. I used to do that like the first probably year, year and a half.

I used to do that and then one day I heard Joe Rogan take a pea break in the middle of a podcast. I'm like, Well, if Joe can do it, I can do it. I hear you man. It makes sense to me. Makes sense to me. What's your prep for these? Do you like eat a bunch of nootropics and get really caffeinated and what Uh uh ten minutes before I go to the bathroom. I don't really have much of a routine. I don't I mean, do sound check, make sure things are going right. But as far as like a personal care routine.

I mean, when I kind of realize that it's okay to stop in the middle and go take a pee if you're sitting here for two hours. Yeah. So I was asking, we were talking about c you know, organizations. And I was asking if there's an organization that I should belong to that makes sense for a producer like me. I think RCAF. I think RCAF is is a great organization.

Um, that that really wants to keep the small producers in the game, that really wants to keep the small producers in the game, you know, the independent cow calf guy, small feedlot operators, farmer feeders. Are they just lobbying for us in Washington or what what uh services do they provide?

Uh, that's a good question. Um, and maybe I should do an episode with with the RCAF folks. A lot of advocate advocacy in Washington, talking to policymakers, um I think they're pr they're also kind of active in some in some states at the state level.

But mostly, you know, they fight against things like this recent EID mandate. That this this EID rule that it just got pushed through, which you know, I kinda has some notes. So You you and I could probably fly under the radar and not have to put AID tags in. The idea of it horrifies me. Being like mandated at least. Yes. Oh well we'll help you. you pay for it. We'll help you buy the tags. Okay, great. We're real we're still paying for it. Doesn't matter. I mean

Taxation is theft and producers pay the pay all the taxes. Like if you're in the service sector, if you're a consumer, It like you you're still not paying all the taxes. Producers pay way more tax Than than almost anybody else. Like Lost my train of thought. We're talking about EID. So I uh I think EID are a great thing as long as it's not mandated. Yeah. Because but my use case was it helped me keep it helps me keep records so much cleaner, so much easier.

I remember the days of working cattle when you would have to have somebody who was called a scribe. And the scribe was was one of the most important people when you're working cattle. Because the scribe has to keep all the notes. Yeah. What animal what tag number is bred, what tag number calved, which one didn't, which ones go to the sale. Like these kind of our model for sure. I mean these things are important, so records must be kept.

Well, if I've got a scale head and EID reader, I don't need a scribe. Just logs it all for ya. It'd be really cool. I could see that being very And I don't have to decipher what the scribe wrote. Is that a three or an eight? What is this number here? What does this word say? What is this note? And you don't have, you know, a whole bunch of legal pads that are caked with cow shit and dust and mud. Right. Yeah. The way they're selling it to us. Is traceability.

Okay. We need it for disease traceability. Fine. What about all the imported meat? Right. Are they doing that for them? No. For those records? No, and that's what tells me it's a scam. Because if you really care about disease traceability, you won't make the people that have the safest, most secure, healthiest beef system in the world. World.

You're gonna track our cattle, but we're not gonna track the ones that are being imported from places like Nigeria, Brazil, and Argentina. We're not gonna track them for hell. We're not gonna have traceability on them. We barely have inspection on them. But you American producer, we're gonna inspect the hell out of your small plants. You move a cow across state lines, it's gotta have this electronic tag number in it, and you gotta tell us that she went across state lines.

Get fucked. I'm not doing it. Like if I still had my cows, I would I would already cut all the EID tags out of'em and thrown'em away. Like that that's how strongly I feel about it because You look at what they're doing over in Europe. Like you go back and listen listen to the episodes I did with Alex Jones. When they have a birth, that animal has to be tagged within 36 hours in both years, and that number gets reported to the government. Of what species, description, where it was born.

I don't want that reality. Yeah, me either. Me either. It's just insane. It's just and then when they die, d over there in Europe, don't they come and collect the animal or you or there's some like real regulations of how you get rid of it and all that and you gotta log it again?

Yeah, if I have a cow die in the pasture, I'll probably just leave it there if it's especially if you can't see it from the road. For sure. Complete that cycle, man. But over there, I mean, coyotes gotta eat too. Vultures gotta eat too. What's up? They've got a valuable place in the ecosystem. But when the government tells me you have to do this And they give a reason and we say, what about imports? They're not inspected.

Are we gonna trace these imports back to their point of origin for health verification for the same reason you're telling us we have to? No? Oh, why do they get a pass? Why do they get it? Business big deals have already been made, you know. I'm really conflicted. So that But what people I think what I would like people to understand is there are some ways I think to to get away to get around the CID mandate.

If you're set up to where all your animals are going direct to consumer, I don't think you have to. Makes sense, yeah. And if your cows never cross state lines? I don't think they have to. I think like mandated like in coming for us in the new farm bill? Is it like already passed or are they just talking about it and like trying to I think this is what's coming down the line. Yeah. And it's sexually intact cattle that cross state lines. So there's a carver out there already for steers.

Okay, so all the steers that go to the feedlots in the middle, you know, out here in the plains, they're not sexually intact. So they're not they're not gonna be EID mandated. Are heifers that go if they're not spayed, they would probably need to be EID'd. So that might cause a little bit of price disparity. might cause some interesting market fluctuations between heifer price and steer price. I got you, I got you. I and I just thought about that. There

It's not hard and fast that every bovine in the United States is going to have EID. That's not what this rule is saying. Says sexually intact cattle that across state lines must have an EID. And direct to slaughter cattle are exempt. Strange. I think if they're trying to trace for like diseases, if that's really their main impetus for doing that, that they would have them mandated for steers and like feedlots, because that's where the majority of your diseases are gonna be, right?

That would make sense. Why they would not do sexually only sexually intact animals. Can you explain that to me? You have any thoughts on that? They're lying to us. They're lying to us. Like the the the only thing that makes sense is this is they're selling it to us saying it's got to be done for traceability and health. But we're not gonna trace the steers that are going to the feedlots because they're not sexually intact and therefore can't pass on I It it doesn't make any sense. Okay.

Absolutely makes no sense. What does make sense about this EID mandate? Is it's just another control? h how however they're eventually going to to get it done. This is just another way for the government to exert control on the beef endish. In Texas, probably, like probably some sort of a methane tax or some bullshit like that. The day they want to try to put carbon tax on cows grazing on gr on rangeland, gonna be an interesting day. I mean, I'm not sure.

That's that's that makes me think about a whole giant ass can of worms. But but I'm probably not very qual I'm not very qualified to talk about that. I mean... We're talking about carbon cycling and, you know, trying to pull emissions out of the atmosphere. Um

Gosh, I read this article this morning just after I got up. That there's a uh carbon capture plant going online and their cost per ton of carbon is like six or eight hundred dollars a ton. They're turning into rock, which okay, that's cool. A, there's no sense in hitting bullseyes if you're aiming at the wrong target. Right, for sure. Why are we investing billions in a technology with a cost of six to eight hundred dollars a ton?

when we already have a technology that sync can sequester a lot of carbon. Like properly grazing ruminant animals. We can sequester a hell of a lot of carbon in our soil. But here's the problem with soil carbon sequestration, John. Here's the problem. It pays guys like you and me. It doesn't pay a big corporation that has minimum wage employees that lawmakers and legislators can buy stock in. It doesn't make companies like that wealthy. And when it does.

When they figure out which companies to invest in in the carbon market, then they figure out how to write the legislation to benefit those companies, that's when we'll see carbon markets development.

Something to look forward to. I just hope they leave enough scraps and loopholes to where, you know, guys like us could still make a few bucks off of it and corporate investors aren't vacuuming it all up. You are in the carbon capture business though, right? Are you working with the carbon capture company right now? Yes, yes. Uh grassroots carbon, actually.

I tried to reach out with them and I think you have to have a certain amount of acreage under your control. I'm getting close to that, but I think it was five hundred acres or something like that. And didn't have to be contiguous, I don't think, but you had to have at least five hundred acres. Does that make sense to you? Is that sound right? Yeah. And yeah that's something that

And it's not that they're trying to exclude small producers. It's just there's got to be enough put storage potential there to pay for the sampling. Yeah, yeah. There's gotta be enough there's gotta be enough area there to pay for the sampling. And honestly, the sampling and verification part of it has been the hang up for probably twenty years. So are they doing all that through soil sampling? They're not doing remote sensing? I thought it was more of a remote sensing thing.

I don't trust remote sensing for carbon. I don't I haven't seen It it's if it's really hard for me to believe that you're gonna take data from a satellite Just looking at the surface. of the ground and you're gonna be able to have a meaningful inference of how many tons per acre of carbon that land is sequestering. That's really hard for me to believe. Okay, we can measure some things like moisture quantity, moisture in the soil. We can measure that from a satellite.

And we know that soil organic matter and water holding capacity of the soil have a direct relationship. But what's that how much different is that relationship between Van Horn, Texas, and Des Moines, Iowa? It seems like they could probably remotely uh remote sense uh carbon release like when you till up a a field or something pretty easily. But I hear I see your point on like measuring what's in the ground from there.

There's there's several other carbon companies out there that are not doing actual ground measurements. Those are the companies I would not want to work with. I would want to work with a company that actually measures what's in the ground and isn't just doing some magic wizard high tech. thing with a satellite and a computer algorithm. Except for the um. Get your ass out there, pull soil course, and tell me what's really there.

Because if you're not going to be able to do a farm and you all pulled soil samples and they'll do that every year and just kind of compare and contrast, is that it? So with grassroots, the way it works is You go through the process. Um, you start at grassrootscarbon.com/slash reboot.

And you start the process. Um, if you're a good fit, like you said, you know, you do have to have some acres put together. And that's just, you know, they c they can't waste their time going out and trying to put together an eighty acre project. That's storing a ton of half a carbon at an acre. That's just not that's just not worth it for them to go do'em. Not saying that, you know, there aren't people out there doing great work on very small acreages. With time. Right.

I think last year the the twenty twenty four carbon contract price was twenty four dollars. It's going to be higher for 2025. It's going to be higher for 2026. It's going to be higher for 2027. It's only going up. I mean, if if you've got the government willing to pay eight hundred dollars a ton to turn carbon dioxide into rocks. Surely they'd pay sixty dollars a ton for cows to turn grass into carbon in the soil. You'd think. I mean, our day's coming. It's gotta come. I believe that.

I believe the carbon price will be significantly higher than$25 a ton for these grassland storage contracts in the few years to come. Like it's Have you heard me say Carbon Gold Rush? I mean it's it's still there. Yes. I just haven't really talked about it in a while'cause it's other important shit going on.

I look forward to them figuring it out and getting a a model dialed in that works for hopefully everybody to some degree,'cause it'd be nice to have that out there s you know, ironing the fire and other revenue stream. I don't know how significant it would be, but everything helps at this point. I don't wanna talk numbers, but yes. But the carbon when the carbon check shows up, it's Have a good day. It's a good day. It's a good day. Yeah it's good.

I'm putting in this effort, you know, pulling up doing the polywire every day and all the things, you know, it'd be nice to get another another little check for that, certainly, or a big check for that.

Yeah. Um so you you said you've only been there about five years. What did you do before you uh you came to the I mean I've been a jack of all trades. I'm master of none. Prior to this, I was in Paris, Texas, which is where I grew up, and my stepfather and I had a coffee roasting business. And we had a little listening room concert, a little kind of space downtown. And just did that for a while. And unfortunately he uh

ended up getting brain cancer and passing on. But just during it the timing of it was very interesting, you know, right as that happened and that door was shutting, then my parents decided that they had had enough of that Texas heat and wanted to go uh somewhere a little drier for a little while and move to New Mexico and asked if I would like to come and fill this vacancy over here. And

Sure, absolutely. Had no designs on being a cow a cattle person, you know, or anything like that. Came out here and my dad had left like I think I had five cows and a really nice bull that were just left here to kind of learn how to take care of and then, you know, through that process of working with them and I started watching Greg Judy.

And you know, as it it's I think Greg Judy is a wonderful stepping stone into this industry if you're looking to kind of get some basic information, see somebody that's very inspiring and inspired with what they do. You know, I just love hearing him talk about forage.

And stuff like that. He just gets excited about it, you know, and um So through YouTube universities starting with Greg Judy and then moving on, um kind of caught fire, decided that we wanted to put some you know, put some real effort and some animals out here and went and bought it bought a conventional cowherd. Um kinda went through those genetics a little bit.

started rotating them and doing all those sorts of things, so saw some benefits to the land. Then we took away all their crutches, you know, decided to take away the wormers, take away the vaccines, except for you know, the vag the tetanus when we ban something, we'll give something a tetanus vaccine. And that was a little bit of a you know, I mean we didn't have a wreck doing that, but we definitely had some heavy culling and that

We did that for a couple of years. And then the last couple of years, we've kind of starting to get our program pretty dialed in. Got some good genetics to work with and I'm feeling good what I'm doing out here. So the be the dung beetles return. We've got dung beetles. everywhere now. You know, it's just really cool to kind of see some management choices have these really nice um you know exponential type effects.

Let's let's talk about when you took away the inputs from your herd. You said you said you had to cull heavy. Yeah. And I think that's I think that's kind of everybody's experience. And what I'm curious about is Like how heavy. in terms of percentage was your cult of, you know, what couldn't what wasn't going to perform on under your new program, under a new low input program. It wasn't insane, man. It wasn't crazy.

I think what I'm getting at is Like let's just say the bottom ten or fifteen percent of the herd that require inputs to perform where the rest of them are, they're the ones that are costing you the money. Yep, yep, and they're gone now. And and once you get rid of that twenty percent, once you call that bottom twenty percent out that requires all those crutches, the remaining few can We'll do a lot better without the correction.

That's been our experience out here, man. I have never once looked back. I've seen nothing but you know, uh benefits to removing those crutches. We did have to call, you know, but like I said, it we didn't like lose half a hurt or come up open fifty percent, you know, or anything like that through that transition. But a little more heavy than we have to do now. Um But uh it's been it's just been great. It's been really cool to

build that faith knowing we don't need those pharmaceuticals, that these animals and everything are designed to be able to do this on their own. And it's just our culture over the last 50 years that have been telling us that that we have to have these things to be successful.

So I got a little story. I'm all ears. You know you know I love having haters more than I love having fans. Ha ha. Yeah. Well, those some of those haters will follow you around and you get a living your head rent free. Like they're Because they follow you around on social media, they make, you know, they're trying to troll me on social media. Bring it on, please. That just increases my engagement. Like please control me on social media. I'm a big kid. I can take it.

Not gonna name any names. Don't know if he listens, but there's a gentleman I've known for all probably 10 or 15 years. He sells feed for perimeter. Well, I went down to uh listen to gosh, it was I think it was Steve Campbell. speak and then just a couple of days later I got to listen to Alejandro Carrillo. And that was in your Oklahoma, Texas tour, huh?

Yeah. Yeah. So I post a couple pictures on on Instagram. Like I think one of the slides Steve had was talking about how feeding grain affects genetic and epigenetic fertility in cattle. Posted that slide on Instagram. Probably didn't even put much of a caption up there. Jumped all over it, did he?

He said, Well what we've got research that shows the exact opposite. I got a meeting there's a producer meeting that you should come to and we'll show research that says the exact opposite of what you're saying. And then he goes on to post that Like this regenerative crap doesn't work because he had a client uh that two years ago took his conventional herd just all natural and they had a huge wreck.

So I he said, that crap doesn't work. So we went back to we went back to what we were doing and everything's fine. I said, Well That makes perfect sense. I can tell you why you had a wreck when you took that high input herd that's been bred for high input. High energy feed and lots of inputs and lots of drugs for the last 20 years. You pull the rug out from under them, yeah, you're gonna have a wreck. Sure. Sure. It takes perseverance to stick with it though.

Yeah, it's not pretty, man. It can be a little hard, but it wasn't too of a ugly experience for us. Um, nothing that was shocking. We were primed and ready and kinda expected some fallout. Like I say, man, I'm not looking back. It just makes so much more sense to not be propping all these animals up and adding all these pharmaceuticals and then seeing the feedback watching the dung beetles come back and forth like we stopped worming three years ago.

Took a year for before I saw my first dung beetle. And then they were very intermittent. Then last year we started seeing quite a few, man. Like I was they were pretty, I wouldn't say ubiquitous, but very common. But now when I go out there this year, I'm talking seventy percent of my cow patties, if they're three days or older, have like, you know evidence of excavations and all that and it's just really cool to see. It's such an integral part of what we're doing out here, you know.

Sometimes it was a l it was a little bit of a transition for me initially when uh'cause when I first started we were using the fly meds and the herd would be covered in flies, you know, and you go dump some fly meds on it and then for our what, four or five days they look good and fly free and stuff like that, but then they just come back, you know, and so after getting some experience of seeing that that was just a very minor temporary fix, you know, took all that stuff away and

Okay, so we have some flies now, but it doesn't bother me at all to see some flies on a cow. That's part of being a cow. Yeah. I mean there's a big difference between a cow being covered with flies and getting fly strike on the eyes and ears and you know and and suffering. And having fifteen flies on their horns and around their eyes. Like I don't need my cows to have zero flies on.

I need them to be below the threshold where they are bothered by the flies and it's hurting animal performance. If they can't eat because they're swatting flies, that's when the problem starts. If the flies are sucking blood and hurting gains, that's a problem. Twenty or thirty flies on an animal, I'm not gonna get concerned.

We have probably more than that in the summer in the heat of summer out here. Like I say, man, I when we took the fly medicine away, you know, I'm of forced I'm not weighing my animals daily. We don't have a scale out here or anything like that, but I just didn't see Um, any sort of significant backtracking as a result of it. I'm sure they'd probably be a little fatter if we put dumped fly medicine on'em once a month, like they say to do or whatever, but it's just not worth it to me.

You know, kind of back to the discussion we had about manure, okay? Where the game studies about flies, where are they coming from? Are they coming out of feedlot or are they coming out of pasture? Mm-hmm. I mean... We can't we gotta stop looking at these things like you know okay we're gonna study how a corn seed grows in a in sterile growing medium that we put all the nutrients in.

Okay, that's great. Show me where that sterile environment exists in nature. It doesn't. You show me where that where the conditions in that feedlot pin exist in nature for the fly.

Does it? And in those in those papers you were reading and going back to manure, did they ever um associate a value to NPK on like uh Just a regular range cow patty as opposed to one that's handled, you know, in confinement and stuff. Like are the values differently? Um I would assume they would be. The three uh uh granted this was years ago and I haven't looked at this data in a while, but from what I remember, they completely ignored. Bye.

ignored anything about like manure falling on the ground or urine falling on the ground. It was all like confinement pit type studies because, you know, then they're quantifying it. Because reduction is science. Gotta break everything down so we can quantify it. And what we've quantified doesn't work in the real world, even though we think it does. Right.

I would assume that the NPK would be different if those animals eating grain as opposed to forage only. It seems I don't know what they would be and what you know, if the N or the P or the K or all three would be different, but it seems like it would be different. I I mean, I would definitely agree with that, that, you know, the the output is going to be different based on different input. Um, but it almost seemed like there should be a range.

There there should be some kind of a range that, you know, nitrogen is this many pounds from the low end to the high end and you know, say fifteen to fifty, but most of the time you're gonna find around twenty. Yeah. Well and like I said, you know, the data that I use Imperfect, flawed, but is the best I could find. Cause I don't think anybody's actually done. actually been able to do the research of what what the NPK value is of the manure in the pasture because you can't collect it.

And it's not just that, it's also You know, that the manure feeds dung beetles, right? So it's not just NPK and carbon in the manure. It's not just, you know, nitrogen and whatever else in the in the urine. You know, there's also bypass microbes, there's bacteria, there's all sorts of things that have a wonderful synergistic effect with the soil microbiome and soil life that we have zero understanding.

That NPK is a reflection of like reductionist science, you know, you gotta have something you can measure and but yeah, it doesn't tell probably a very, very small amount of the story. But I think it's illustrative that, you know, like, okay, the difference is I can go put fifty dollars an acre of cost.

into this property to increase the fertility, or I can get somebody with cows to come in and they'll pay me fifty dollars an acre per month to graze their cows here and I'll have the same r I'll have roughly the same volume of NP and K, but it's natural and it's bioavailable.

I mean,'cause look, neither one of us has any control over how much money we make. I mean we can only control what we spend. And if I can spend zero To get that fertility benefit, or if I can spend negative money, I mean somebody's giving me money to get that fertility. Why wouldn't you do that versus writing a huge check to the sprayer man and the chemical company? How much yeah?

So my kind of main thing that turns me on about all this is the grazing side of things. Is that where you're at? Or do you like the animal husbandry or the combination of the both or I like the grazing. I like the peace. Um And stockmanship. The grazing that you the grazing that you do on your place, which is from what I understand after listening, is mostly natives, correct? Big blue. Yeah.

Those sorts of things. Is it totally different than I mean isn't Bermuda considered a turf grass? Isn't that what it's considered? I would consider Bermuda a lawn grass. So I Some rain and thirty days pass, you can grow some more Bermuda. Out in your context though with those natives, what's your approach when you're grazing them? Do you like to take half and leave half or do you what what do you like what's your what do you like to do out? I like to take a little bit less than half.

Okay. Um I like to take a little bit less than half and leave a little bit of extra stockpile. Okay. Um for a couple of reasons. Some of that is, you know, continual, you know, building fuel load in places so we can carry a fire. So it would be, you know, like my grazing strategy for the last four years has been different because I've won I've had to leave stockpile because I've overwintered a cow herd. Not overwintering anything, winter twenty four, twenty five.

So I could push a more aggressive I could push a more aggressive grazing schedule and not plan to leave near as much stockpile for next year, other than where I want to burn and put more bucks back in my bill fold, you know, for this grazing.

I think the way I want to answer your question is like grass growth. So like with Bermuda grass? You can keep grazing as long as you get rain. It's just gonna keep growing. A lot like if a lot like the fescue guys, you know, further east of me. I'll grow grass whenever I get moisture. And then it just quits. So how much grass am I gonna have this year? I'm probably gonna be at least I'm I'm probably gonna be looking at sub two thousand pounds an acre average across the ramp.

I'm envisioning a big thunderstorm coming your way just like last year, man. You growing lots of grass. I'm in the process. Of course we have mostly uh varieties of Bermuda out here, coastal. Um we got a little bit of hay sprig Tifton eighty five out here. We have some Alicia. But I'm real inspired by uh warm season natives down here, like um some gamma grass and some big blue stem and Indian grass, and I'm in the process.

of building what I call my native grass nursery in my yard in the hopes that I can like spread the seed or whatever, you know, whenever the seed ads come up, see if it just kinda spreads through osmosis being around it or something, but I think I'm gonna have to adjust how I grace things. I think I'm gonna have to like give those natives a long rest after they've been impacted and just might be a little bit different.

Um, so a couple of the grasses you mentioned, like big blue and Indian grass. I can I'm pretty good at growing those. Uh tell me about'em'cause I've never even seen'em and that I'm aware of. I am not great at growing eastern gamma grass. My dad has a patch behind his house, but I there isn't any on the road. And I don't know if it really won't grow here or if I just haven't figured out like the magic management formula to encourage it to grow. Right. So Indian grass and big blue.

I really noticed like In twenty fifteen, I s I had I had plenty of grass in big blue after the wildfire. Those are like seven and eight foot grasses too, right? They get really tall, right? Yeah, so after the wildfire My my Indian grass and big blue stem has has increased dramatically. Um And in my experience, a forty-five to sixty day Rest in late season is very critical for big blue stem and Indian grass. They're not Taking more than half. We're taking forty percent, thirty percent, something.

They're very intolerant of overgrazing. Okay. Like if you if you overgraze one year, it might be two or you might set your big blue and your Indian grass back two or three years. But once it heads out. You can you can graze it to dirt once it heads out. How does it stockpile? Does it get real rank? Like Bermuda you cannot stockpile swarmsea. I mean you can, but you know, you gotta really

G offer some protein supplement or something for them to get do okay on it. What about the big blue and stuff? Is that stockpile pretty good?

But the same same story. I none of the none of the prairie grasses are really gonna cure and store protein well. um as as standing stockpile. No we're gonna do it. A lot more dependent on Forbes. Okay, weeds for OU farm types. We're more dependent on Forbes for protein than grass. I it blows my mind when I see somebody going like I'm gonna go spray my pasture so I can grow more grass because I wanna get rid of that pigweed and kosher. Like

You go right ahead. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in the last six hours because pigweeds and kosher are excellent, excellent cow feed. Absolutely. And you're gonna go spend and you're gonna go spend thirty or forty dollars an acre to kill to get rid of the best feed that you have in that pasture because you want more grass. Right, right. That makes sense. Makes sense. So it's like it's it's like my friend Tim.

That like he uh he had a neighbor with a bunch of failed wheat last year. It was full of crabgrass, pigweeds, and kosher, and the wheat was adjusted to make twenty. He found a chopper, silage chopper, and he put up like 7,000 tons of it for nothing and it tested at 13.5% protein. That's good. Cal feed manner right. I can't he laughed all winter when he was feeding that ration. All winter. And I would too. Pretty sure. And then I have another neighbor that had the same exact problem.

In in a wheat field and an oat field. They're separated by less than a quarter mile. They're right on my south fence line. Well, crab grass, pigweeds, and coat. What does he do? He called the airplane. Airplane came out and sprayed his fields, and then he cut and bailed him and sold the hay. And I just can't help but think about how many thousands of acres in northwest Oklahoma and South Central and Southwest Kansas.

that got sprayed last year because they were full of pigweeds, crabgrass, and kosher. And then we get down into fall and everybody's screaming about the price of hay that it's so high. Like, oh God, hay's three hundred dollars a ton.

How much good cow feed did you go spray out of your wheat field? because you wanted the insurance check that you'd get from cutting twenty bushel wheat. When you say your cows eat their pigweed, do they eat the actual uh foliage of it or do they wait for that seed head in like August and September and then munch on those grains? Because that's what mine do. Generally what I see them do uh from about First to mid June and all. is first pass, they'll come through and strip the foliage off.

And then second pass, they come back and eat the stock and the branches. But generally like I'll watch'em, you know, you you move the cows, you go watch what that first group is going to run to go eat. Uh they're going to eat crab gr they're going to eat kosher and pig weeds and they're stripping the leaves and the berries right off of it and are running to the next one. The cows that are last through the gate, what are they like?

Slowly walking over to eat. Sometimes they'll go right to that pigweed and eat the stem of that pigweed after somebody else has already gotten all the good stuff off. There's times I'll I'll turn'em to a pastor, John, and I'll watch'em not eat grass. for a day and a half. They'll just run around and go eat weeds. They'll go eat all the you know they'll go eat all the little buttercup flowers and the clovers and the skirpies and everything else and the crabgrass or pigweeds and the kosha and

Go eat the yucca flowers. And then they're like, oh, well now all the good's gone. We'll go eat some of this big blue stem. Yeah. They're not running towards the big blue.

I love the gamma. I have a friend who has transitioned her farm seventy acres or so back into natives. She She nuked it with glycophate because she wanted to see it as she were she's a little bit older than me and she wanted to in her lifetime see this restorative prayer and in her mind that included glycophate, you know, that's what the NRCS was trying to say.

And everything, but um sure enough, she's created a really nice little prairie after about six or seven years, man, and she's got gamma grass out there, a big huge Five foot tufts, you know, they're five foot wide. And her approach with them is to let the cows, you know, eat almost half of them, kind of like you, and then move them.

It's pretty cool to see her cattle, how fat they are with her diversity. You know, she got a native prairie mix, so she's got all the maximilian sunflowers, the gamma grass, the ragweed, all the forbes, you know, and stuff, and uh her cows are very fat.

Yeah. So we're um One of the things that that keeps coming up and one of the things I want to talk about, yeah Not enough bodies, not enough people. Okay. And been I've had a couple of conversations, you know, with some of my friends in the last week about this. And I think you and I were talking about it a little bit, you know, before I mashed the record button. Um So the last two days have been burning.

My Burn Association, they're actually off doing one today that, you know, we had this scheduled. So needed to get this done so I have content for next week. Went did one yesterday. And um we're a little light on crew. And I think uh three of us had to run our pickups single-handedly. And I mean that's a good thing. One hand on the wheel, one hand with a slump out the window.

One hand on the wheel, one hand on the gear lever, one foot on the clutch, one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas, and one hand out the window with the sprayer. I mean And you're one guy. You know, having to drive, navigate, you know, rough rough, uneven ground. You gotta watch in front of you. You gotta watch behind you. You gotta watch right beside you. You gotta pay attention to where the other units are on the line. You got two frickin' radios that are screaming at you all the time.

Sounds very high energy, man. It is. It can be. It's also one of those things that, you know, when you've been doing it For thirty seven years. It's just kind of like, all right, it's just another day. So we're shorthanded trying to get burns done. And I was thinking... I was I had I had it was an hour down there to the Merrill Ranch yesterday for the burn and it was an hour back, so you need a little bit of time to think.

And then think about how many times we've come up shorthanded at a branding, how many times we come up shorthanded working cap. And it's not because people don't show up when you call. There just aren't enough people to call anymore.

I I think I think it all goes back to Earl But's get bigger, get out. Get big or get out. That's that's the way agriculture's going. Okay, great. So we're replace all human we replace as much human labor as we can with machines because machines are more efficient and machines are cheaper. Machines don't take sick days. They don't need to go to court. They don't have baby mama drama. Right? They're reliable.

Okay, we'll replace all the men with machines. Well, first we'll let's replace all the mules and the horses and the oxen. We'll replace them with tractors. I'm gonna replace all the tractors with bigger tractors because each tractor needs a guy to operate it. And if you have five one hundred horsepower tractors, you need five guys. If you have one five hundred horsepower tractor, you need one guy. Pretty simple. Let's just buy a bigger tractor.

The problem is, as we get bigger, Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn because they are making more land. So one thing we're not making more of on this plant is we're not making more land. Okay, yeah, there's there's some here and there, but by and large The human population's need to occupy land is far outstripping the planet's ability to create more land. That's the moral of the story.

We're getting more and more crowded. We have to keep We have to keep producing more and Unless we With less, that cost less, with less labor in order to satisf satisfy demand. And I think we've passed a breaking point. Where we've depopulated agriculture too much. I think we've I think we reached that point in this country and have gone screaming past it. And they're like, well, we're trying to get these burns done. Did we have enough people?

Uh, we had everybody that showed up. How many was enough? We got it done safely and it didn't get away, so we had enough. How much equipment was enough? Exactly what we had. Because if we had less, it might not have worked, right? So it's like, what's the least amount of equipment we can get by? What's the least amount of manpower we can do one of these burns with? I don't want to find out. I want to find out.

How many people I can get excited to come out and help and help do range burning? And you know, I've had uh I get offers of people that that they say they wanna come help. And Sorry, I just I don't know how to tell somebody that lives two or three hours away, hey, there may or may not be a burn in three days. I won't know until that morning. It's hard to take the bird on the calendar with weather and all that other stuff, I imagine.

Yeah, a lot have been you know, several have been called off because of the last minute weather change, last minute forecast change. I don't know how to let people know of where our group's going to be burning. And how to get that word out so we can get more people to help. Yeah, we've got to do that.

All these, you know, government and and and NGOs like uh the Nature Conservancy, Wild Turkey Federation, Chickadee Chekhov, Vesper Coil Forever, these organizations. They're like, We wanna help, we wanna help, what do you need? What do you need? What do you need? And we're like We need bodies. And like, well, we can't give you any. What else do you need? Um radios, I guess. It's like, you know, why can't you just have a crew of twenty people?

that when it's burn season at Red Hills, we move them to the Red Hills. So when it's burn season in Texas, they go down to Texas and they just kind of rotate through the country and and help people do prescribed burns. Because that's a lot of times what the biggest holdup is lack of burn culture, lack of knowledge, and lack of health. Yeah. If we had trained if we had trained groups that would go around and do that simply to assist, that could go a long way. I mean

I would I I would love it. It would be pretty cool to have a full time job to where I could go around and help people burn their pasture, help them write burn plans and do that advice. I can't take that job because I already got my own thing, but I don't want to give up. It's pretty easy, gig, right? Like it's heavy on it seems like the potential for something to go wrong is Very much there, you know, it seems like it's heavy on needs on equipment.

heavy needs on uh information and just wisdom and knowing how to do it and not enough bodies, it's hard to kind of combat with all that. Plus everybody's so damn busy, man. You know, everybody's working and doing everything. It's hard to

you know, when you're spending forty, forty five hours a week working or something and then you have a day on the weekend or something, if you're not super passionate about doing that, you know, you kinda wanna compress or something. It you just have a lot of hurdles jump over to make this happen. Sounds like

But yeah, man, I think if we could just have some more exposure and um education onto the benefits of it, I'm very much in intimidated by it, man. Um for whatever I've just never seen it, you know, the idea of like A wildfire getting away from me personally and impacting my neighbors is just Terrifying for me, Ben. I would love. I think my pre I think my fan pastures would benefit greatly from it. I've told you about the thatch on one of them.

I'd be very curious to see what would happen just to burn that, see what happens for a year. I love that thatchet it it gives me some drought insurance and stuff, but what happens if you burn it? I don't know till I do it, you know? So Everything's experimental, John. Absolutely. I'm down. I've got a I've got a tolerance risk and for for risk for tolerance more than most people, but the fire thing I just still haven't taken the lead.

But maybe you could come down to Texas and show us how to do it, man, or if you were able to schedule get with God and determine the weather and schedule a fire, let me know and I'll come up there and be an extra body and try not to get in the way. If I could mail order the weather, I would. For sure. It generally I would say the third week of March to the second week of April is If somebody can be here in the Red Hills at the end of March, like the third week of March on Altyazı M.K.

Are you burning stockpile at that point? Seems like everything I mean here, I don't know what's going on at your context, but here we're getting rain and it's green grass coming up and everything at that. Is that kind of the type time of year if you want to do it? A little moist out and

Well, okay. So we're gonna be looking at like there's obviously there's multiple different reasons to burn and because and why you would want to burn can also determine when you So a lot of the burning that's going on here is we're still doing reclamation. We're still trying to get the trees knocked back to a point where they're they're in maintenance phase. So it's Cedars. Yes, eastern red cedar. So it's a combination of doing a lot of mechanical clearing.

And doing fire. And once you get'em kind of knocked back to a point, you get your cannons cleaned off. And you get your reclamation fires done, then you can switch to then you can switch up a different management program. I'm not saying fire completely comes out of the management toolbox. I'm just saying that the purpose of fire in the management toolbox

goes from reclamation to maintenance eventually. That's the goal. Because when you're when you're in the reclamation phase, you're grazing the build stockpile, you're cutting trees, and you're trying to keep you're trying to get that thing burned three times in 10 years. Right. Get rid of your get rid of your seed source. Get rid of get rid of those ones that are gonna come back immediately. Get those burn off and keep pressing.

And then you can move in to where you're getting into maintenance, where you're getting into this deep cannons and you're going after the original seed sources and you're really cleaning out things that haven't been cleaned in two or three hundred years. And then you're getting back to like once every seven, once every 10 years fire return frequency. And that's that's what I think is a little more historic.

For here. Um So if you what what they're learning over in the Flint Hills of Kansas. They have a totally different burnt culture. I don't want to say anything bad about it, especially because you know I have a platform and those guys don't. They could definitely use some more organization, but I think that there's going to have to be some guys that quote age out of the program before they can have any changes with how they burn in Flint Hill.

They also have some issues with smoke management because if you burn two million acres pretty much every year. with kind of the same weather, the smoke's going to go one place, and you're also going to start promoting different kinds of plant community. Yeah, makes sense. So the success of burning in basically the first two weeks of April that they do it that they've done in the Flint Hills for close to a hundred years now. So have you ever heard of something called Cerecia lespedeisia?

Of course. Yep, goats love it. Great. Nitrogen fixing thing, right? Great goat food, tremendous nitrogen fixer. Cows don't eat it. When you burn in the spring? And burn in the spring and burn in the spring and do that every year and every year and double stock your pastures for 90 to 100 days and get the cows out. It encourages a lot of ceresiolus but easy to grow.

If you burn in August and September, you can kill Ceresia Lespidesia. But if you burn in April, you make it mad and you stimulate it. Similarly, uh like elm trees. We have a lot of elm trees, a lot of people call'em piss elm trees. You burn those right now, nothing happens. You make it mad, it'll grow more. You burn it in August, September, and it's gone. Yeah, that makes total sense, man. I can see that. So

The reason back to the reason why we're burning in late March and early April. Our date to exit winter dormancy is generally April fifteenth. I've seen it happen in March. I've seen it happen in May. Generally April fifteenth is where soil temperatures and moisture levels get, and we'll start growing cool season grass. The best day to burn is the day before that happened. That's the best day to burn because It's the in winter draft.

You get a lot more you get better kill on cedar trees. Mm-hmm. And it's also kind of has to do with timing of being able to graze cattle. Because we want to turn out here in this country now, first of May. Right. We want to be turning out going to grass. So you back up thirty days. And that's the last day you should be burning. So that's gonna be the it that's gonna be the end of April.

Mm-hmm. What's our burn window? Second week of March to the end of April. Generally, there's guys burning today, we're burning yesterday. But you know, they have a stocking plan that takes that into account. There's that. It's much it's more difficult from a forage chain management perspective and a and an and a cattle production perspective to figure out how you're going to burn in July, August, or September. That sounds terrifying around here, it's so dry. But it's not. But it's not.

And maybe where you're at's a little bit different. So if you you talked about Paris and you said northeast Texas, I get the feeling that you are east of Dow. Yes, sir. About ninety miles to Dallas for ship. Near north of Interstate forty, But you're south of the Red River. I'm below I'm in between and I twenty. I and uh I'm just north of I twenty. So what you're thinking about is your precipitation. In July, August, September. You're not thinking about the atmospheric humidity.

during that time of year. So how humid is it where you are in June, July, August? Very humid typically, man. Pretty humid. Very sticky. Okay. So... There's uh do you know what a red flag warning is for weather? What the conditions are for a red flag warning. Wind and dryness, right? Typically. So it's going to be temperature over 80 degrees and relative humidity below 20%. Okay. And there's often a high wind component to it too. There's there's several other things that go into it. There's

Um, there's the Hain Haynes index goes into it. There's also uh wildland fuel moisture index that goes into it with different fuel loads, you know, different between fine, coarse, and heavy fuel loads.

Right. What their moisture window is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. What people need to know about a red flag day. is eighty degrees, twenty percent humidity. You're above eighty degrees and below twenty percent humidity, your spot fire risk goes up dramatically. And the distance goes up dramatically with the wind. I've had a 750-yard jump. Seven hundred and fifty yards with twelve miles an hour of wind.

Holy cow man. That's Terrible. Twelve mile an hour wind, ten percent relative humidity. Just embers from what's burning, ble got up in the air and blew and traveled seven fifty. Is that the way that works typically, I guess? Yeah, and that day was fifty five degrees. So it was the dryness. It's the dryness. If you're burning on a day where it's ninety and you've got eighty percent humidity, your spot fire risk is almost nothing. Okay, interesting.

And another good reason to burn during quote growing season, late summer, is A cedar tree has to hit 140 degrees before it's going to combust. You get the you get the needles to 140 degrees, the oil volatilizes, it burns. Okay? How hard is it to get that tree to 140 degrees when it's night when the air temperature is 90? As a high during the day versus coming out of winter when the air temperature is maybe fifty. Right.

I mean it's the difference between trying to raise it forty degrees and raising it ninety degrees. Right. You're close you're already closer to the ign to the ignition temperature of the material when you're burning summer. Yep. You're farther away from a humidity danger point. And generally, like the wind here. February, March, April? Some of the windiest months. But if we look at June, July, August We start looking at if we start looking at that like a a good weather window to burn.

And that's going to be humidity first, wind second, temperature third. I want my humidity to be fairly high in relation to my fuel load moisture. Your fuel's dry, high humidity, you're okay. It's counterintuitive for me. I would have thought it would be like uh I just I was always thinking about the dryness of the fuel load, you know? I didn't but that makes sense.

I mean, the heat and the dryness of the fuel load that helps the fire carry, but the humidity is kind of what's gonna dampen the beast. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And the wind I I would much rather burn on a day when it's 90 degrees with 50% humidity and 10 mile an hour wind in July. Then a fifty five degree day with eighteen miles an hour wind and twenty one percent humidity. Like that's that's a spicy day. That's a spicy day. So what you're telling me is it's very multifaceted. Yeah. Yes.

That's cool, man. I'd love to participate. Do you know any firebugs that I need to be paying attention to or anything like that to kind of, you know, get some more information on her? Well if you're farther west, like out towards Edwards Plateau or over in Hill Country or in the Panhandle.

Probably could come up with a resource for you pretty quick. Um I'll see what I can do after we get off here about about finding a resource or a prescribed burn association close by. Um Texas Grazing Land Coalition. You know them? Oh yeah. great folks. Um and I I don't know for a fact, but I would guess that Texas has Texas Prescribed Burn Association, some kind of a statewide organization to help coordinate, you know, member associations.

Um, one of the first prescribed burning associations that I'm aware of that was in the United States was Edwards Plateau um Prescribed Burn Association. And that was Dr. Butch Taylor put that one together. I and I don't know how long they were operating, but they were operating for years as of two thousand and eight when we heard'em talk and it's that's why we did our our PBAs,'cause, oh, well they can do it in Texas. I guess it worked down there. Let's do it here too. Um but yeah

some government resources for this, man, but you're telling me it's like a totally volunteer type thing? I mean, I'm sure some companies and stuff might donate stuff to you, but you don't get any sort of And any sort of support from the government or anything around these things, right?

There's there's programs coming that'll pay people to defer grazing so they can burn. Uh And o I've got it I've gotta get moving out of here'cause I do have another another appointment. I'm with you. Uh breakfast. They'll wait. Um so for a long time, like you go into NRCS. And you say, I want to get in this prairie chicken program to help cut trees. I'm like, Okay, great. You write up the contract, you sign it, and like you gotta burn twice in ten years. You say, Cool.

You go do your tree work and you come back and say, All right, I'm ready to go burn. They're like, well, get that done and and we'll pay you. Like, oh, you're gonna make me burn, but you've got no resources to help me plan it, to help me pull it off. But you're gonna make me do it. And My dad has been screaming about that for 10 years. And every chance we get that we get in front of, you know, any of these government folks, like,

And I don't want to say anything bad about any of the any of the any of the government folks that I work with or have worked with because they're all fantastic. It's just their employers suck. Um, you know, they get it, but they're like, hey, my hands are tied. If I want to come help you burn, I have to take a personal vacation day. And that's a big ask. So like you've got to

And it it it also puts them in an interesting position at at NRCS because you've got your district conservationist telling you, yeah, if you want this money to do this practice, you got to burn. But we can't help you burn. You're on your own. And then for him his boss to say, yeah, well, if you want to go do that, you got to take a personal day off.

And, you know, to some extent, it's also like why you don't see a lot of producers at meetings and and seminars and conferences. Because we got to pay to be there. Okay. We're not getting paid time off. It's not a vacation for us. We're paying for it out of our own box. For sure. And then paying somebody to take care of the farm.

I I gotta get going. Um Yeah, man, I enjoyed it, Brian. Thanks for the time today and the opportunity. And you made it easy for me, so thank you. Oh, you made it easy for me too. Uh you're John Rhodes. Where can people find you if they'd like to contact you, get to know you more, or follow you on social media? Sure, man. I'm just on the socials for now. If you want to follow me on uh Instagram, we are Broken Oak Farm. And um on Facebook, it's John Rhodes.

Hit me up. I'm always interested in finding some like-minded community and talking grazing or whatever. I'm down. Great stuff, John. Appreciate your time today, bud. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. It was good talking to you, Ron. Good to meet you. You too. Bye, gang. Have a great week.

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