A Midwest Journal

(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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(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.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”