But I was wrong.

Corn will raise on average about 80/bu. average an acre on the ground we have. Clay hillsides and silted bottom ground. Marginal land. What Missouri (and the rest of the country) grows most of it’s cattle on.

Now, if you take 30 acres and raise corn/soybeans alternating years, you end up making some profit.

Corn: 80 bu./acre @ 3.50/bu. = $8400.

Now, take off the spraying and fertilizer: -$2000

And take off hiring someone to do it (their fuel, repairs, labor, and seed): -$1000

So you might make $5400. Last two years we had crop failure on corn planted anywhere.

Beans: 40bu./acre @$8.00 = $9600.

Same inputs: -$3000

So you might make $5600

Cattle: 2.5 acre per head (conventional grazing in Missouri) = 12 head.

Say you raise half of these to full size. 6 cows and their 6 calves being brought up to full weight at about 1000 lbs. We get about $.80/lb. live weight at the auctions.  = $4800

And take off the cost of hay during the winter (about $200 per finished calf for two winters) and you’re pulling down $3600 for profit.

So it’s a no-brainer to raise row crops, right? Not so fast…

On grass-fed beef cattle, you can further cut inputs and raise value-added premiums.

1. You only grass feed them and start doing ultra-high-density stocking or intensive managed grazing. Means you feed hay about one week a year on average, which is about 2-4 bales. (At $40 each, this cost is then down to $160 – or $320 for two years for the whole herd.)

2. UHD managed grazing will increase herd size, sometimes as much as 4x – to it’s now possible that the original 30 acres will now hold 30 head. Let’s keep 15 momma cows and 15 calves to full weight.

3. Now, you take it to a USDA-inspected locker and start selling the individual pieces of those cattle directly to your clientele instead of taking them to auction. While the possible total sale can be about $3000, you take off processing and marketing costs, which might run $500. $2500 per animal sold.

15 x $2500 – $320 = $37,340 annual profit

Can you do that same leverage by value-adding to corn or soybeans? Much less, you are spending around7-10 hours a week raising this crop, and almost nothing of that is in the tractor seat – most of it is walking around and moving fences.

In a word, No. Not that I’ve been able to find, anyway.

UHD managed grazing (also called Mob Grazing) cuts overhead from $400 per animal to $320 per herd. All while multiplying herd size by at least double and sometimes up to 4X. (Because you have to keep increasing herd size to keep up with the grass and it’s increased yield.)

But even with conventional grazing and a grass-fed product, if you part it out and direct market you can increase the premium to $2100 per animal compared to $600 profit.

Increase herd size by more than double, increase profit per animal by over triple – 6x your after-input income. In the above case, it is nearly 8x.

While you don’t spend the time in the field, you are now direct-marketing your beef, which is a different skillset. Not as dangerous or physically demanding. And if you are a real people-person, it’s probably more rewarding than exhausting.

Now, this is saying that your other on-farm overhead costs are the same for both scenarios.

But you can also see why row-crop farmers have to be big in order to pay for all their equipment and chemicals.

The kicker is, if they went to selling all-natural beef instead – and had their kids grow up to be marketers and stay around the farm – those same thousands of acres would be able to support several families instead of barely one.

Now, your mileage will certainly vary.

But crunch the numbers for yourself and find out that grass fed beef cattle beats row-cropping hands down.

(And we didn’t get into how grass fed beef don’t create but a fraction of “greenhouse gases”, since you only burn fuel to take them to the processing plant, plus ultra-high-density managed grazing actually sequesters more carbon than these cows can emit…)

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Do we do this on our own farm currently? No, we are in the middle of phasing over. Right now, our 20 cows will bring us the most at auction prices by selling only 1/4 of them as finished beef and the rest as stockers (yearlings). But we aren’t switched over to UHD managed grazing (mob grazing) yet.

Getting there, though…

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(For part one, part two – visit those links. Meanwhile, we join our author after he just explained how he figured out how to make more money doing less on his grass fed beef farm…)

Now, this all doesn’t look like much money for having to go out and check our beef cattle twice a day, every day. Certainly wouldn’t pay your expenses if you think you have to make $50K per year to make a living. Practically, the Feds say you are below “poverty level” if you make less than $24K for a family of four (which is something like $16K if you are an individual – but they still take taxes out of almost every paycheck and hold it for you until the end of the year. Such nice folks we have in government.)

Means that most rural families are “poor” according to the government and are so eligible for massive handouts from the rest of the country which are comparatively “rich” and can afford to pay for everything we “need.”

But when you look at a lifestyle where you can raise everything you eat and if you don’t buy the hype that you have to have a color TV and a boat to take to the lake on summer weekends – or a 3,000 square foot house and all the latest gizmo’s which make life easier. When you look at life as a very simple operation (if you leave Madison Avenue and the Government out of the equation), then your actual cost of living is very small.

Once I got my credit card bills paid off and started working as a contracted laborer (freelance web design), I found out that I didn’t have the commuting expense to work and back so many times a week. I quit watching TV and suddenly didn’t feel “compelled” to buy this or that – or even see the latest movies which were coming out.

I started having more time to myself, and felt more at ease and secure and healthier.

No, I don’t “make” anywhere near the $50K slot. But I don’t have to work for someone else except every now and then – and I don’t have to leave home to do it. The quality of my food is completely under my own control. What vegetables and beef and fruit I eat are how industrious and efficient I am with my time and the resources around me.

True, my parents bought and paid for this farm with their own jobs and I am simply reaping this harvest based on their work. But I also keep the farm running and my Mother live a comfortable retired life, not having to fix things or simply rent out the farm because she can’t manage it.

My income is also taken out in non-taxable ways – such as barter and payment in other “currencies” than money. Working for my room and board is one example.

I then spend the bulk of my time on stuff I want to do, and am not taxed for thinking or writing or blogging. I give tons of stuff away that is really useful.

So I don’t really feel I need a lot to live on. My health is excellent and I don’t carry insurance. Don’t really need to. Isn’t insurance something a little counter-productive, since you are hedging a bet against yourself?  The taxes I do pay whenever I buy something or license something – all these go toward supporting the schools and hospitals and roads. Even though I mostly don’t use them.

I don’t need a lot of income, so don’t need to pay tax on it.

The result is that I can say that a farm which makes $16,000 a year from raising beef cattle is sustainable and outrageously profitable. At that rate, I could buy a used tractor every year. Or get a loan for more land and pay it off in a decade or so.  Or simply stockpile some savings instead of giving it away to insurance companies – so if I did have to get medical treatment, I could simply pay the bill that way. (Like I do with my dentist – I was paying more for insurance and the deductible than I was in just paying for the treatment when I needed it.)

That’s the Kool-Aid I make. Look at the incredible prosperity you are already surrounded with. And quit listening to people who say you have to buy this and that. Quit figuring that you need approval from others, or inflated ideas of security, or that you need to be controlled or control others. These three points – approval, control, security – Levenson’s Sedona Method says are the base for all the chronic thinking we have floating around our heads. Get rid of those base considerations and the thought can simply be let go, released. Keep doing that consistently or intensively, and your mind quiets right down. You aren’t habitually thinking so much – and can actually quit having to “think your way” through life.

And you can come up with ideas about how you don’t need to “make a lot of money” to be abundantly prosperous and fulfilled.

There’s also the benefits of going through the pasture, checking your cows, scratching them where they seem to like it – and getting the satisfaction from those simple actions. Raising calves and watching them grow – like any crop, but more mobile.

The point is that all your “pay” for living in this universe isn’t coming to you in a check or through an electronic account somewhere. And it doesn’t need some government approval or license. Take a walk in the early morning or at sunset and see if you are getting paid very amply for the little time you invest.

That’s the meal I cook, the Kool-Aid I drink . Join me.

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More great Missouri cattle by Julie Brown

Ok, call it ultra-high-density stocking to achieve maximal lignified carbon sequestration fertilization. Yes, that’s very close to Joel Salatin’s work – and I just left out the “herbivorous solar conversion” part.

When you mob stock your grass fed beef cattle, they convert natural grasses, legumes, and forbs (plus everything else they can eat) into fertilizer – some of the best stuff you can put on a field. We call them four-legged self-reproducing combines with on-site storage. They take whatever is out there and turn it into meat, plus produce another of themselves every year. Since they last about 12-14 years, they will produce on average about 10 of themselves, which is a nice profit for a farmer.

Now Greg Judy doesn’t tell you one interesting fact about where he farms: if we didn’t farm this particular area of country and it wouldn’t turn to desert. In fact, our particular part of Missouri would turn into rather thick woods within about 40 – 100 years. And it would over-populate with deer, with cougars making a comeback.

Of course no humans would be around, because there’s no money in it – no real way to make a living. Trees grow too slowly, and our government doesn’t like us hunting and logging for a living. Now, there are some radical activists who would love that concept – but they are basically suicidal, anyway. (I took a college course on Geography a few years ago and discovered that this exact point is being taught in their government-approved textbooks. Humans are basically at fault for everything, particularly the white male minorities – so much for their touted diversity and tolerance campaigns.)

Back to the real world.

Now, most people in my “neck of the woods” are into high-overhead row crops. Those farmers that raise cattle on land they can’t “farm” use conventional grazing, which is leaving cattle on a fenced-in section until they mostly eat everything down. Then you move them over to another section and repeat. In July or August, you sell off what won’t make it through the “slump” where it’s too hot and dry to raise grass. Meanwhile, you save a couple of spots to make hay out of – which keeps that herd through the winter. And you again sell off in the fall (at reduced prices) everything you can’t feed.

The weird part is that cows were meant to graze all year round. Even through snow. And mob stocking will set the land up to produce enough to make that happen. It’s just your management has to change.

Now, I’m no expert, but I have a tendency to write too much, so I’m blogging our efforts so others can use what they can out of them.

1. Get out everyday for some excuse and move some fences. Actually walk out in and around your cattle regardless of the weather. This gets them used to you. And you’ll get more familiar with the individual cattle and how they are doing. You’ll probably go through more pairs of boots, but it’s cheaper than fuel and engine parts.

2. Study up on Managed Grazing. This is the step that both Salatin and Judy did when they eventually moved to Allan Savory’s methods of ultra-high-density stocking.

3. Start laying some temporary electric lines out with battery-powered chargers, subdividing your existing pastures so that cattle just have enough to eat for a couple of days in every small part. You’ll probably want to start with a small herd in a back pasture. We have some heifers and steers we keep back until they’re ready to meet the bull or the processor, so they are a good experiment. Take a nice pasture that already has a water supply available and a good perimeter fence.

(We stumbled onto an interesting idea of creating pie slices and moving the two long sides of it. This is until we can install a nice electric line inside that perimeter fence to power it. Put your charger at the point with some ground rods so you don’t have to move the charger every day. Sounds simple, but I’m writing it down here so you don’t have to figure it out – you’ve already got tons to figure out. This is just to get you started.)

4. Start buying hay with the money you’d spend on fertilizer, fuel, and equipment for hay. It should buy you the same amount or more. Quit growing your own. Import other people’s grass onto your farm and use it to fertilize your own fields.  Now, I’ve been starting to lay out the hay on the bad spots (over-farmed) spots in my fields (even gullies) so the cattle eat and manure right there. In those spots by two years’ time you have a very thick growth coming on where nothing much did before. (Of course, if they don’t eat it down, it’s hard to disk, but we’re really moving back to permanent pastures everywhere, anyway, aren’t we?) But put those hay bales out where they’d do some good – not just in a feed lot where you are having to move it back out to the pastures again. Takes some foresight – but you’ll use your tractor a lot less during the winter as you do.

5. Start moving your cattle through those former hay pastures. Under managed grazing, you’ll get through these about three or four times over eight months. In mob grazing, you’ll get through about twice a year. All that former hay ground can start making beef pounds while it’s fertilized at the same time. Win-win.

6. Study the temporary layouts you are using. Cattle need three things – water, grass, and shelter. They actually like trees better than barns or sheds. So the best layout for a pasture is a savanna, where there are these huge shade trees popping up every 50 feet or so on a grid. You see, grass likes partial shade and cows keep eating in the shade. (One tip I heard was to trim off the lower limbs as high as you can – this keeps the shade moving, so the cows don’t just drop everything under the trees. You still need a lot of trees to pull that concept off – another blog post, another time.) In “Grass-Fed Cattle”, Julius Ruechel says that you can take your whole farm and simply rotate the cattle through it as you go. Our own farm is dotted with ponds, strips of woods, and waterways that are full in the spring, so this is a no-brainer.

7. Study where you are putting fences – if you keep putting them in the same spot, maybe you should put a permanent fence up there. We use steel t-bar posts for corners and just leave them there with the insulators on (so we can find them later) and this tells us where we are coming back to all the time.

8. This brings up another point – use what you got to start with. There’s a lot of great fiberglass poles out there and fancy-dancy geared wind-up reels. We use reels for power cords and our old rebar poles with plastic insulators on them. (If you can’t shove them in with a heavy leather glove on your hand, you can carry a hammer on your belt for frozen or summer-hardened ground.) Invest in better gear when your cows start bringing you more profit from the lower overhead.

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These are just the transitioning steps. Find and read everything you possibly can about the subject. Clip articles and put them in binders so you can re-read them. Buy books and dog-ear the good parts. Keep all this stuff by your easy chair so you can read when you come in to cool off or to warm up. Attend extension meetings and ask for these subjects to be brought up when they only want to talk about machine shops, grain storage, and crop prices.

And talk to your neighbors when you can. Compare notes.

This stuff can be done. And you can make a nice five-figure income which pays all your costs every year, as well as taxes and some nice retirement CD’s. The alternative is going broke and watching the trees take over. Still pretty, but not as exciting as raising cattle and getting all that good exercise plus lots of great beef in your diet.

PS. Just set up an Amazon mini-store so you can find all your books on raising grass fed beef cattle in (mostly) one place. Check it out!

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(While I don’t raise Holsteins, we’ve certainly had some tall grass this year.)

For grass fed beef, you really have just two major profit points – as long as you’re feeding hay:

1. When they’re weaned.
2. When they’re yearlings.

Anything else gets eaten up in the winter hay cycle. While a grass fed beef is only about 22 months old at harvest, it’s gone through at least 2 winters, usually 3. Because you have to add in the 9 months of gestation to the cost – which takes it up to nearly 2 1/2 years.

Cost of hay isn’t just baling it, you also have to fertilize the land it came from, or it won’t produce as well for you the next time (and eventually, you’d only be raising short, unpalatable weeds – or sand.)

So working to finish cattle actually takes the remaining profit out of that last 8-10 months. They are going to put on their final weight, but this is also where they lose their efficiency of gain – each pound of gain takes more and more pounds of forage to achieve. And so the relative efficiency of grain-fed beef, who are harvested at about 14 months. That is, if you have the cheap grain to feed them.

Trying to finish cattle on grass usually means another winter of hay, which is additional cost. Auction prices for beef gets you paid commodity prices, which are as low as buyers can get away with. So your fertilizer cost, plus equipment and fuel, eat up any profit from those last few hundred pounds.

Now Missouri has lots and lots of tough, but tasty fescue grass. So this is why it is one of the top beef-producing states. Mostly, it has feeder or stocker (yearling) calves which are then shipped off to feedlots for fattening.

What’s becoming more popular are grass-finished beef, locally marketed. This is where you get your premiums and the reason for finishing anything at all. When you can jump the final price up above your costs for that last year, you can then simply be able to make any profit you want that the final consumer will pay for.

Example is that while a cow at auction will bring about $800 and your 600-pound carcass will cost you another $300 for processing – this comes to somewhere around $2.00 a pound for the whole animal. Visiting the local big-city market found that just hamburger from a verified grass-fed beef was bringing $5.50/lb. and sirloin steak was $18-19.00 per pound.

Now, that was individually wrapped, USDA-inspected. But it shows that farmers taking over their own market can reap the profit harvest to the tune of somewhere around $3,000 per animal.

Without taking your own marketing into your own hands, you are really stuck with sellling yearlings at auction, your next best profit margin.

To create a sustainable farming solution, increasing profit on grass fed beef at commodity prices is to take out the hay costs – which entails something called mob-grazing. By intensively grazing cattle and letting the land recover (one expert at this says his cows only see the same spot twice a year) – this actually make the grass lusher and means you don’t have to feed hay at all, there’s plenty out there if you ration it during the winter.

The other point would be to get a premium above commodity levels – in other words, quit selling a commodity.

But I’ve got far more to study on this. I sure would like to move onto finished cattle, but there’s going to have to be some changes in order to “mine them them hills” of grass to see more gold.

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This article does point out that for anyone wanting some real profit, it’s in the middle, not the farmer nor the supermarket. Grass fed beef roughly twice what conventional commodity beef is.

From my experience, farmers are happy to simply get a guaranteed auction/commodity price per live animal. But read down to the bottom. This guy can’t get enough beef to supply his clientele. And it’s a USDA inspected abattoir, meaning they can sell their parts direct instead of by wholes, halves, and quarters.

Figure out of the cost of grass fed beef, the farmer is taking a third, the middleman taking two-thirds. And that is just for hamburger. The whole animal can bring as much as $3,000 – so your farmer is getting roughly $800 of that and the middleman can rake in $2,200 per animal.

Can you say “six-figure income”?

Access to an abattoir was tough even for Joel Salatin <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2008/07/a_day_at_polyface_farm.html> of Polyface Inc., a high-profile farmer thanks to his role in Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He had relied on T&E to process the cattle and pigs he raises on his farm near Staunton, but it became clear several years ago that the owners would soon retire. “It was absolutely our weakest link,” Salatin said. He paraded many potential buyers through the 70-year-old plant, but said “it took a lot of hooks in the water before I got a bite.”

Cloud was a good prospect because love of food and wine runs in his family. His brother Roy Cloud runs Vintage ’59 Imports <http://www.vintage59.com/home.php> , a French wine importer in the District. After his father’s plans to start a vineyard on farmland near Staunton were thwarted by an accident, Cloud began helping his mother manage the farm. Soon, he was wondering whether to trade his office in Seattle for a herd of cattle in Virginia.

Salatin, who was leasing a few of their fields, proposed that Cloud buy the slaughterhouse instead. “You certainly don’t have the allure of the country life in a slaughterhouse, the kind of thing sought out by the weekend farmer,” said Salatin. “But processing plants and distribution are the two biggest hurdles in the local food movement.” Cloud eventually agreed, sinking 40 percent of his retirement savings into the deal and signing up his mother, Helen, and Salatin as partners. They bought the plant in July 2008, and Cloud has been pulling 50- to 60-hour weeks ever since, managing a workforce of 20 and fielding calls from restaurants and farmers.

T&E now processes meat for more than 100 farms, up from just a handful before the sale. The number of animals he slaughters has shot up 70 percent — during the worst recession since the 1930s. Cloud sells local beef, pork, lamb and poultry out of T&E Meats’ store, but unlike Blue Ridge, he can’t make the business work without buying some beef from the Midwest and pigs from Pennsylvania.

He can’t get enough locally, nor can he sell it at a price his longtime customers are used to paying. “For 40 years it was the cheapest place in town,” says Salatin. “Now we’re trying to make it the best.” T&E, for example, sells conventional ground beef for $2.67 a pound. The local ground beef, from animals without antibiotics or hormones, goes for $3.50 a pound, and local grass-fed beef runs $3.99 a pound.

Cloud is putting every dollar he makes back into the business, expanding into poultry processing this year and hoping to grow again in 2011.

Now, I’ve got a lot more on this, as I just finished a whitepaper on the subject, entitled “Feed More By Farming Less. And you are invited to digest all 56 pages of it.

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Some grassfed beef links:

Family raises, produces grass-fed beef | savannahnow.com

Savannah Morning News
Names: Debra and Del FergusonJobs: Owners and cattle farmers, Hunter Cattle Co. in Brooklet What they do: As owners and cattle farmers with their business, Hunter Cattle Co., the Fergusons make it their mission to …

More Ohio Producers Exploring Grass-Fed Beef Production

GILEAD, Ohio – Ohio livestock producers are exploring grass-fed beef production to meet market demands for what many consider to be a healthful and ecologically sustainable product. However, the production side of the system can be …

Is Grassfed Beef Too Pricey? | Free The Animal

by Richard Nikoley
I recently got an email from a reader asking that if grassfed beef was out of the question budget wise, whether a paleo dietary style still ought to include meat. Of course, a resounding yes. I think that most people will gravitate to …

Trader Joes Fan : Recipes and Favorite Product Reviews – Grass Fed …

I highly recommend this if you enjoy beef but may be avoiding it because of saturated fat worries. If you search online you will discover grass fed beef is lower in saturated fat 35-65% to its grain fed counterparts and …

Jim Fiedler: Raising Grass-Fed Beef On Green Acres | Earth Eats …

by Annie Corrigan
Earth Eats’ Annie Corrigan talks with Jim Fiedler, the man behind Fiedler Farms, about grass-fed beef and his return to Indiana after 20 years in New York City.

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PS. Here’s the recipe that goes with our Flickr image above:

Red-braised Beef with bamboo

1.1 – 1.3 kg beef for stewing
5 cm piece of fresh ginger
2 spring onions
3 T peanut oil
6 T chili bean paste (from pixian)
1 litre beef/game stock
4 T Shaoxing ricewine
2 t dark soy sauce
2 t whole Sichuan pepper
1 star anise
1 cao guo
salt, to taste

Blanch the beef in boiling water for a minute or two until scum has risen to the surface, then remove the meat and rinse it under the tap. Cut the beef into 3-4 cm chunks. Crush the ginger slightly. Cut the spring onions into 2 or 3 sections.

Heat the oil in a flat-bottomed saucepan over a medium heat. When it is hot, add the chili bean paste and stir-fry for about 30 seconds until the oil is red and richly fragrant. Add the stock, the beef, the wine, the ginger, the spring onions, the soy sauce, and the spices. Bring the liquid to the boil, skim if necessary, then turn the heat down and simmer gently until the beef is beautifully tender. This will depend on which cut of beef you are using, but it should be at least 2 hours. (if using a crockpot, longer)

This time I added this special kind of fresh bamboo shoots that needs some time to cook. I’ve sliced them up and added them half an hour before the end of the cooking time.

Although I liked it, I was also a little bit disappointed. It wasn’t that spicy and I couldn’t taste much of the sichuan peppercorns. Maybe I was expecting it to taste more like the “water boiled beef”. But once you’ve accepted that is still is a very nice stew and I actually think it would be served best with mash potatoes!

What I would do differently next time: not use the pixian douban jiang but the one from Lee Kum Kee. I would increase the other ingredients like ginger, sichuan peppercorns, etc. And I would leave out the cao guo. I just don’t think I like that taste. Maybe I need to get used to it, but for now I give up.

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Many thanks to Fotoos VanRobin

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We had our second “genetic crossbreed” calf today. And the promise is exciting, since he’s a new line of improved grassfed, high-quality beef that we’ve been working on for years.

The problem with most beef is that it’s been genetically selected to gain weight on grain. But not only are grain prices higher, but the extra fat (weight) these animals put on is bad for your health. That type of fat gives you the “bad” cholesterol – mainly because the omega 3/6 ratios are off. You see, cows (and fish) produce omega 3 fatty acids from the forage they eat.

Grass fed beef used to take years to mature, so using an abundant (and underpriced) grain to fatten them up seemed to make sense for our growing population.

But the whole trick is to understand how to raise grass to feed the cattle. Modern methods which have developed by a South African conservationist-turned-rancher, Allan Savory, have shown that ultra-high-density managed grazing (also called mob grazing) will actually improve the density and diversity of the perennial forage so that the cattle will improve their diet and fatten nearly as fast as their corn-fed counterparts.

One of the trick with this is to get the fast-growing larger animals, but also improve their foraging ability.

We are crossing our existing all-black Angus herd with a belted Galloway breed (broad white stripe down the middle). The Belted Galloway (or “Beltie) was originally bred in Southern Scotland for ability to survive harsh winters, eating a wide variety of forage. Angus is also a Scottish breed, but our American version has been crossed with Continental and African breeds to get a larger frame size. They tend to put on weight rather quickly.

The combination of the two is reported to keep the larger size, but also be able to fatten on a wider variety of forage. So the result is a more efficient grazer who produces medium-large frame for beef production.

The other advantage is that Belties are far more docile than American Angus. And docile animals put on weight more quickly.

Combined with mob grazing, this is designed to give us the highest possible efficiency while also eliminating the vast bulk of greenhouse gas production associated with corn-fed beef production.

While it’s been a couple of years now, we are still excited about our new calf. His mother (dam) is a white-faced Hereford/Angus cross, so he looks a bit like a panda from one side. But with all the Angus only distinguishable by their ear tags, any markings for us are welcome.

Our one earlier result in this cross-breeding is known as our “little goat” – since she is found to be eating on the fence lines and uncommon areas usually. We expect this new calf to do the same for us. While heifers are kept back for rebreeding, bull calves are generally made into steers so that they fatten faster and aren’t a problem mixing with cows and heifers when they come of age. So this new belted cross will be one of our first “to market” tests for size and quality of beef.

Maybe too cute right now, but when he gets big enough to butt you around the pasture in a little less than two years, you’ll see that he’ll be better off for all concerned when he goes to market.

It’s just as good that the little cusses are cute to begin with, since it just gives another reason to keep raising them.

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Just had to link and forward this one.

This is exactly where I’m heading with my studies on mob grazing.  Holistic Management Institute is at the forefront of getting farmers to graze both efficiently and effectively.  Ultra-high-density grazing is where we need to be in order to achieve a sustainable life process on this planet.

And nothing beats carbon-sequestration (stuffing that CO2 right back into the soil) than mob-grazing cattle on perennial-grass pastures. And nothing beats the taste and quality of beef than grassfed beef cattle raised this way.

I’m right in the  middle of an overdue whitepaper on this – where I will lay out the business plan for this type of scene.

There’s a lot of hope for this area – and the light-hearted approach this video takes is a great start.

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If Al Gore’s histrionics and his data-massaging chronies at the Climate Academia weren’t enough, we actually find out that they are missing the boat entirely. Not that they are wrong, but they are only looking at a small part of the problem.

The reason? Money fixation.

Al Gore is personally profiting from his doom scenario – funneling government funds (read: our taxes) into his own pocket. And those Climate Gate scientists are riding a cash cow, since foreign governments and petro-chemical companies are pouring money into this area. So it pays to keep a controversy growing.

**update** Climate-data-related scandals list keeps growing…

The problem is – they are shouting down the wrong rain barrel. So-called “greenhouse gases” are the symptom, not the cause. They factually are not even the real problem, but a relatively minor distraction.

Yesterday, I ran across a couple of links to some fascinating data.

• Alan Savory’s talk at Colorado College
• Jim Snyder posted a link to a dire list of the environmental troubles we face (Mother Earth News article).

When you view these together, you’ll see that we have been being lead in the wrong direction. Too narrow a view.

The Situation: Government-Sponsored Commodity Bankruptcy

The problem has been that we’ve been steadily moving away from our own land as it ceased to provide a viable  living for the families involved. Instead, these generations flocked to the cities for “jobs” and our culture started living off petroleum- and mining-based products, both exhaustible resources.

Our current president has been funneling billions into “green energy” jobs and payola – but the problem is that this is again the narrow view. According to the capitalist/free market explanation, we’ll start recycling when it’s profitable to do so. And our environmental activists (read: Alinsky radicals) would take all the power they can get, even if it means destroying any ability to fix the actual problem.

The core problem is that the land has quit producing a viable living for the families on it. Two factors in this: commoditization of produce, and increasing advertising dominance.

Farm produce has been cheapened by creating a few product lines of commercial value. All corn is yellow. All beef is black. All sheep are white. And what the farmer pays isn’t enough to keep them farming – unless they also manage to carry substantial debt. So profits are sucked into bankers’ salaries, bonuses and benefits. Meanwhile, they use corporate and government-backed university research to use a pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer cocktail to genericize the produce so it can fit into an assembly-line model.

Advertising, meanwhile, has been used to base our society on instant gratification and subconscious desires instead of working to educate and raise the sights of people to attain their best qualities.  TV and media are advertising supported, so their quality (and trustworthiness) also goes into the tank — along with the culture. Why? because advertising is based on psychological profiles (as Cialdini covers in “Influence”) which take advantage of subconscious desires, rather than pragmatic wants and actual needs. (Just look at what’s happening to the credit card industry in this recession to see what happens when people wise up…)

Look, it’s really simple. There is no need to continually centralize any industry. Or locate them on the coasts. Consider Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke model. Rural cities are tending to fall over each other to give tax credits in order to lure factories and warehouses for their jobs. (Of course, some companies simply pick up and move when the tax credits run out…) But the point is that there, again, are people who want and need jobs in rural areas because the farms don’t produce enough income to support everyone – despite agriculture being the leading industy for the area. (Remember that high-debt overhead farmers are carrying? It’s invested in monster machinery which is able to handle massive acres in days. A handful of people with thousands of acres – compared to a building which doesn’t even cover a quarter acre that pays several hundred people to unload, sort, store, find, pick, and ship boxes. Do the math: which one pays more taxes?)

And so you see how the government scam we are under has a vested interest in making sure we all live in big cities, bunched up together – like cattle in a feed lot. “Economies of scale – subsidized.”

Solution: Farm Your Way Out

Naturalists such as Alan Savory have been studying this particular situation for years. And they have been looking to the historical evidence of our earlier civilizations going the exact same route we are currently going – only they did it just for local empires, not globally as we are currently doing.

The trick is in rebuilding the soil through restoring the natural intensive grazing of heavy hoofed animals. The government policy has been to remove more and more animals from the land, which actually results in top soil loss through erosion – and ultimately creates deserts, as Savory reports in the above MP3.

For me as a cattle farmer, the fascinating point is that it’s far more profitable to raise grass-fed beef than it is to raise it through “conventional” (commodity-style) means.  Inputs drop dramatically, while a premium is paid to enterprising farmers who market directly to environmentally-responsible consumers. The beef produced is healthier, higher in nutrients and omega-3′s.

The bottom line, however it that by improving the soil through proper intensive grazing, you increase the density of plant life, which actually increases carbon sequestration. So instead of using fossil fuels to raise grain, ship it to central feedlots, feed it to masses of cattle who stand and live in their own manure (creating more methane meanwhile, which is released to the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by nearby plants) – grass fed beef simply add pounds of beef while being part of the ecosystem.

The land improves and adds topsoil which in turn sequesters more carbon. It is possible to have agriculture be a net sequestor of carbon instead of the contributor.

Now, as you add topsoil with permanent pastures, the increased density of plants require more animals added to continue the process. You have to add more cattle to “keep up” with the improved growth. Several different studies show that this tops out at about 400% of the earlier stocking density.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations shows that where you earlier could keep only one cow per 2.5 acres, this increases to an average of one cow per .8 acres. Same land, same water supply (which improves, BTW).  At an average commodity auction level of $800 per animal, this gives you a potential income of selling four yearing calves off that same acreage, or $3200 for the same land area. After paying off inputs for fencing only (don’t need other supplements, and even vet bills can disappear), and subtracting winter hay (which isn’t needed in a true mob grazing/ultra-high density grazing scenario) – where some local farmers get $60 profit per head, grass fed beef gets around $600 per head.

10x profit potential. You don’t have to raise corn, just shift pastures every day. Leave the tractor in the barn, sell the combine and grain silos. Invest in more fencing.

Go from grain-fed beef to grass-fed and see 4000% increase in profitability. At least on the back of that envelope.

Practical results? Better quality beef, improved quality of rural living, less dependence on foriegn fossil fuels. And you get to enjoy the pleasures a life surrounded by Nature’s environment for the rest of your life. (And it only takes a few hours a day to do this – looking for a part time job that pays 4x what you’re making now?)

It’s not that money is bad. But if you look at the broader picture, you can improve your life quality and have all you want. Just have to get smart and take the blinders off to see the whole picture.

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But Time Magazine recently did an article covering how some “greenies” on the East Coastal have decided to get into raising beef in order to save the environment. Not just any of these academic megalopolis types, but real bona-fide environmentally-resonsible authors who walk their talk:

None of this would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that [these] …are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post’s gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it.

Turns out that the studies these radical activists are quoting (and I have a great deal more on how bogus thse are in a later post) are actually missing part of the data.

When you spend all that fuel raising corn or other grains, and then all that fuel transporting this grain to feedlots, then coop up animals in unhealthy conditions where their manure ferments and creates more gases – guess what? You’ve just made a ton of all sorts of these gasses to get your beef.

Now, grass fed beef, especially in mob grazing, takes a different approach. Perennial grass consumes these gasses. Beef, when rotated in a managed grazing program (especially in high-density mob grazing) actually stimulate this growth by cropping, fertilizing, aerating, and cultivating that pasture so that it actually gets healthier and lusher – making it grow more and consume more of these “greenhouse gasses”. The article covers this:

“Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint.” Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones, their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.

When you add that in with local processing (not trucked hundreds of miles), you then cut the net gas level enormously.

You also have to take into account that a lot of the studies producing this data are very, very flawed. But I’ll go into that later.

Some interesting quotes out of this article :

By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That’s certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon.

But the activist radical vegans will argue that if you don’t eat meat, it will save you eating those hormones and so the greenhouse gasses as well. Time rebuts this:

To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. “I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country,” he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland. (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. “The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world’s ills is ridiculous,” he says at his Maine farm. “A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO2 than I am.” A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they’ll “be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals,” he says. “And even though we can’t eat the grass, we’ll be turning it into something we can.”

As I’ve said, there’s a lot more to bring to light in this area. I hope to do more this week on this, as the research has been stacking up and needs an outlet.

For now, check out the Time article and decide for yourself.

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Haven’t talked about my Missouri grass-fed beef cattle in awhile, so I stacked up some ideas meanwhile – and so I blog now:

We’re still on how to make more profit raising beef cattle, which is the first reason I’m researching mob grazing. There are other apparent benefits (such as being more environmentally responsible), but that will come later.

Milo as standing winter feed instead or hay or stockpiled grass

This year’s experiment in lowering input costs has been to raise milo (the idea from a local farmer, Harry Cope) so the cattle would eat it instead of having to feed hay this winter. I got it into the ground a bit too late, so I’m now just hoping for a very long fall before the first killing frost (3 nights of below 22 degrees) and so allow it to make seed heads. Now, a recent post over at Yahoo Groups – GrassFed Beef gave me pause, but a later post there gave me more ideas.

First, if you’re feeding grain to animals, it messes with their digestion and throws off their Omega3/6 ratios. So it’s fine to feed corn as a grass, but not the seed heads (corn cobs) it produces. (That’s from a purist standpoint. Factually, they love corn like candy. So IMHO, corn-cob chunks are a good training treat, but not good as a diet.) So trying to grow milo and feed them the grain head in winter is counter productive to making high quality beef.

Second, it still cost me to put that milo in – but probably a fifth what the same ground would produce in terms of the cost of putting hay up. So it’s still cheaper – and the experiment hasn’t run its course yet. If seeding it so late that it doesn’t really get properly developed seed head still leaves a lot of stalks standing above the ice and snow, it’s probably a decent investment and cost-saving production.

You either have to stockpile grass, or feed hay. Growing milo as as a stockpiled grass source is cheaper than hay, but not as cheap as stockpiled perennial grass.

Now, I started a couple years ago putting hay out on a field, staggered, so I didn’t have manure accumulating in one spot (as well as the mess and expense of firing up the tractor and driving through mud to deliver bales. Last winter, I got the tractor out once – and that was to pick up bales that weren’t going to be eaten that winter.

My approach with this was to put those bales on a nearby crop ground (right next door, across the fence) and put that on the poorest soil, where big sections of the topsoil had essentially been removed by earlier farming (erosion). The trick was that with all that manure and old hay left there, it was either feast or famine. Didn’t disk up very well and didn’t take planting well, either. It took most of the next summer to really digest, and when I did get something planted in it, it took off like all thunder – lots higher than anything around. Or it just sat there, waterlogged. Got the original idea from one old boy who fed round bales without bale rings to his Auxvasse Missouri Longhorns for several years on the top of one worn-out hillock and wound up with a very lush pasture out of it.

But really, that area isn’t a high producing section anyway, so I’m not losing much, I figure.

Hay as fertilizer for worn out crop ground

There was a thread on that forum lately about buying hay as fertilizer, which got me thinking. Yes, it’s cheaper to buy hay than make it. The trick is in how you feed it. Setting it up as big round bales isn’t all that efficient, as you still wind up with concentrated circles of manure, and a center with old hay. (Now the cows and calves love to lie on this when they’re eating the next bale over, so it gets some layers mixed…) But overall, it’s not all that efficient.

I did unroll a bale once down a hill and saw how they went through it. Since it was on a pasture, they ate most all of it and it wasn’t showing the next spring.The trick, with feeding anything in winter, is that the ice and snow cover it. That is where the big bales (or even small square bales thrown out on top of the snow) are easier for cattle to feed.

Some people actually advise growing your fall pastures up tall and then cutting and winnowing that grass so that it is in long, high rows so the cattle can then be strip-grazed on it (they’d waste it by tromping and laying on it if you feed too much at once).

For that poor crops ground above, here’s the next idea: Unroll that hay in contours across the land, so it will catch runoff. But use the rake to pile it back up in windrows. Then feed it that way to the cattle, with the electric fence running perpendicular to the rows, which keeps them eating only as much as they need. No more moving frozen-down hay rings or cold-to-start tractors. Plus, the ground is in better shape to try to crop it next spring. At least that’s the theory.

I’ll try this theory on the milo ground which didn’t produce well (same areas that don’t have any real topsoil.)

Just another idea until I can perfect my managed grazing to the point where I have the nice electric fences all over and can easily move my cattle every day.

Meanwhile, you farm with what you got.

Research on mob grazing continues – to make profitable grass-fed beef cattle.

Next up is to figure how to do the transition from conventional grazing over to managed grazing and then to mob grazing. First situation is both existing fences and water supply. Existing fences are built for rotating pastures when they eat everything off – conventional grazing. They aren’t set so that I can partition them easily with portable electric fences. So I’ve got some engineering to do.

My approach is as I’d been advised, to start partitioning pastures for a few years and see where you are using the temporary fences – and then put a permanent electric fence there so you can set up temporary ones which use that as a power source. So you aren’t hooking up and taking down a battery and charger every time you move the fence (current arrangement.) Means the cows don’t get moved as much as they should. (You can get around this by pivoting off a corner and giving a new pie slice each time, but there’s no back-fence which some prefer for mob grazing so what was just grazed gets to rest and re-grow.)

So I’m studying my existing fences and how I use them to see ways I could set up something that allows more mobile set up and breakdown. (Plus rig the permanent fences so the cattle will keep them cleaned up with no brush growing over them.)

This winter, at least, I’ve got a sizable set of stockpiled grass from our too-wet summer – so I can see how this does over winter.

Plenty to do with what I’ve got to work with. Always got to like having options…

The goal is to knock out cost of winter feeding and to increase the quality of forage I already have. Both will increase my profits for finishing beef cattle on pasture only.

- – - -

Update: While I was doing further research on mob grazing and grass fed beef, I found this story from Eat, Drink, Better. Seems that some of these big packers haven’t been able to keep their beef clean enough from the manure they raise it in. That’s the problem with grain-fed beef, that they simply raise these cattle in their own manure. And keeping the meat from being infected becomes a real problem. Because bacteria is native to manure. Plus that particular strain of e coli is more prevalent in feedlots than pastures.

More later – my research on this is  continuing…

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