Grassfed Cattle How to Produce and Market Natural Beef Julius Ruechel
GRASS-FED CATTLE
GRASS-FED Cattle
How to Produce and Market Natural Beef
JULIUS RUECHEL
The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment.
Edited by Marie Salter, Elaine Cissi, and Deborah Burns
Art direction by Cindy McFarland
Cover design by Vicky Vaughn
Text design and production by Erin Dawson
Cover photograph by © Peter Dean/Grant Heilman Photography
Illustrations © Elayne Sears
Infographics by Erin Dawson
Indexed by Daniel Brannen
Technical review by Lee Rinehart, Livestock Program Specialist,
National Center for Appropriate Technology
© 2006 by Julius Ruechel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or other — without written permission from the publisher.
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Printed in the United States by Versa Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To Anne
For a dream, a vision, a whole lot of spice,
and a most exciting journey of discovery
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: The Fundamentals of Grass-Based Beef
1 The Great Herds and Their Grasslands
The Ticking of Geologic Time
The Great Herds
Lessons from the Herd
2 Genetics and Breeding: Selecting the Right Animals for Your Herd
The Pitfalls of Single-Trait Selection
Environment and Climate
Characteristics of the Ideal Breeding Animal
Culling Animals: Training Your Predatory Eye
Breeding for Your Target Market
3 The Cattle Year on Grass
The Calving Season and Predator Exposure
The Calf: Birth to Sexual Development
The Heifer Calf: Sexual Development to Calving
Photoperiod: Sunlight and Fertility
The Bull Calf: Sexual Development to Breeding
Cattle Processing: The Human Role in the Cattle Year
Marketing Grass-Fed Cattle
Moving the Calving Season
4 Grass and Grazing
The Rumen: The Forge that Turns Grass into Beef
Root Reserves and the Ideal Grazing Interval
A Recipe for Healthy Soil
Grass Varieties
Rejuvenating Old Pastures
PART TWO: Infrastructure and Management
5 Electric Fences and Rotational Grazing
Factors to Consider
Energizers
Permanent Wires
Posts and Braces
Insulators
Permanent Gates
Portable Electric Fencing
Training Cattle to Respect Electric Fences
Understanding the Goals of Pasture Rotation
Pasture Rotation: Herd Migration in Your Own Backyard
Training the Herd for Pasture Moves
Managing the Calving Season on Pasture
6 Livestock Water
How Much Water Do Cattle Need to Drink?
Peak Water Supply
Water Quality
Direct Access to Open Water
Pumping Water
Water Storage
Piping Water
Cattle Behavior at the Water Trough
Rotational Grazing Patterns and Water
Laying Pipe
Winter-Grazing Patterns and Water
Watershed Conservation: Managing Riparian Areas
7 Planning for Winter Grazing
Winter Grazing: The Twelve-Month Plan
Supplementation and Forage Analyses
Low-Cost Winter Feed for the Transition to Winter Grazing
8 Planning for Drought
A History Lesson
Preparing a Drought Plan
9 Managing Your Herd
Integrated Herd Management
Low-Stress Handling
10 Pests, Parasites, and Diseases
The Mechanisms of Disease
Preventing Disease
Specific Diseases, Pests, and Parasites
Making Healthy Soil for Healthy Animals
Complementary Grazing Species
11 Soil Fertility
The Importance of Soil Analyses
What Does the Cow Think of Soil Fertility?
How Healthy Soil and Grass Work
Calcium and Magnesium Revisited: Proper Ratios Are Critical
Organic Matter, Humus, and Nitrogen
The Scoop on Macronutrients
And a Pinch of Micronutrients
12 Weeds
What Is a Weed?
Variety Is All
When and Why Certain Plants Emerge
Quick Fixes Versus Long-Term Solutions
Educate Yourself, Then Put Your Cattle to Work
Weeds to Remedy Nutrient Deficiencies
13 Soil Moisture and Irrigation
Decreasing Evaporation
Reducing Runoff
Increasing Water Infiltration
Take Responsibility for Water
The Disadvantages of Irrigation
Calculating Your Irrigation Needs
PART THREE: Business Planning and Marketing
14 Land and Equipment
Acquiring Land for your Natural, Grass-Based Cattle Enterprise
Equipment
15 Market Options
Commodity-Market Opportunities
Niche-Market Opportunities
Determining Your Target Market
Three Case Studies
16 Stocker Cattle
The Cattle Cycle
Sell/Buy Economics
Stocker Logistics
17 Grass-Finished Beef
The Art of Grass Finishing
The Health Benefits of Grass-Fed Beef
Lessons from the Slaughterhouse
Cutting and Wrapping
Inspections
Pricing Your Meat
Pickup and Delivery
Cooking Grass-Fed Beef
18 Organic Certification
Seeking Certification After the Transition
Headaches of the Certification Process
Choosing the Best
Solving the Most Common Challenges
19 Dynamic Marketing
Developing a Profile of Your Target Customers
Demystifying Product Labels
Your Advertising Strategy and Label
Market Exposure
20 Helpful Business-Management Tools
Importance and Urgency
Getting the Biggest Bang for your Buck
Weighing Decisions, Solving Problems, and Handling Crises
10 Percent Chance, 90 Percent Work
Your Unfair Advantage
PART FOUR: Your Business Plan: Putting Principles into Practice
21 Your Goals and Market Opportunities
Your Business Plan
Starting with Goals
Your Goals
Assessing Your Market Environment
22 Your Financial Plans
Determining the Focus of Your Business
Conscious Profit Planning
Determining the Price of Your Direct-Marketed Beef
23 Your Cattle Year on Grass
Planning the Ideal Cattle Year on Grass
24 Your Grazing Infrastructure
Planning for Your Herd's Water Requirements
Preparing Your Farm Map
Piping Water
25 Your Grazing Plan
Your Summer-Grazing Plan
Your Winter-Grazing Plan: Managing the Grass Reserve
The Winter Grazing Map
26 Your Herd Nutrition Plan
Developing Your Herd Nutrition Program
Procuring Samples for Forage Analyses
What the Livestock Nutritionist Needs to Know
Locating a Livestock Nutritionist
Formulating Supplements and Monitoring BCS
27 Your Grass-Finishing Plan
Grass-Finishing Essentials
Slaughterhouse Considerations
28 Your Marketing Plan
Developing Profiles of Your Target Customers
Designing Your Product Label
Formulating an Advertising Strategy
29 Planning for Adversity
Drought
Financial Preparedness
Crisis Management
30 Planning for Change
Committing to the Change
Plan Thoroughly
Moving the Calving Season
Turning on Your Herd's Migration
Switching to Winter Grazing
Making Additional Changes
Epilogue
Metric Conversion Chart
Glossary
Resources
Bibliography and Additional Readings
Index
Foreword
THE HARDEST THING FOR MOST LIVESTOCK producers to realize is that we are not in the cattle business. We are in the grass business.
We are, in effect, grass farmers. Grass is the beginning, the end, and everything in between in natural cattle production. It deserves both our respect and our attention. For example, the annual growth cycle of your grass will determine when you should calve, breed, and wean. How closely you mesh these three activities will largely determine your cost of production.
Pasture subdivision and controlled rotational grazing give you a steering wheel, clutch, and brake for your four-legged grass harvesters. Consider the folly of trying to harvest a grain crop with a motorized combine without the use of a steering wheel, clutch, and brake. Now, consider that most ranchers attempt to do exactly this.
The mineral balance in the soil will largely determine the quality of the grass you grow and its protein and energy content. These two elements will in turn determine the range of potential grass-based enterprises you can realistically consider — and the choices don't end there. For instance, how far you plan to take your cattle on grass will determine the range of cattle genetics from which you can select. If you plan to take them all the way to slaughter on grass, you will need to choose an early-maturing, easy-fattening breed.
The list of considerations for anyone entering a grass-based enterprise goes on and on and is well covered in this book. The primary point to remember is that virtually every decision you will make in cattle production will come back to grass. Grass-Fed Cattle serves as an excellent how-to book for grass-based natural cattle production. It is one you will want to read and reread many times.
— ALLAN NATION
Editor, The Stockman Grass Farmer
Preface
IN MANY RESPECTS, NATURAL GRASS-BASED cattle farming is an entirely new trade that is emerging as an alternative to conventional beef production and marketing. It requires a whole new set of management skills and an entirely different knowledge base about the unique evolutionary relationship between cattle and grass, all of which are foreign to the technology-dependent, commodity-driven, conventional beef industry. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the lessons first learned by our prehistoric ancestors about cattle and grass are finally converging with our modern understanding of the natural world and our technological advantages. As such, natural grass-based cattle farming is an exciting journey of discovery into our distant pastoral history while taking us to the forefront of our ecological understanding about plants and animals and relying on our most innovative technological advances. This is the frontier of the modern natural/organic agriculture movement.
Grass-Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef is the guide I wish I had had when I was searching for advice on how to create a profitable, financially stable, and environmentally sustainable business in the new trade of natural grass-based beef production. It contains all the information vital to the setup, design, management, and marketing of the low-cost, high-profit grass-based cattle enterprise, from calf birth right through to the steak on the customer's barbecue. It is much more, however, than just a comprehensive production and marketing guide. It is also an essential business management tool that will accompany you through your individual process of designing and managing your own natural grass-based cattle enterprise. It is designed to give you independence, to provide you with choices, and to allow you to confidently take charge of your future, a future that you will have the skills, knowledge, and tools to design yourself by the time you reach the end of this book.
The knowledge, techniques, and skills described are universal, regardless of farm size or climate. They are suited equally to farmers new to the trade, established organic farmers looking to integrate cattle into their production systems, experienced family farms seeking to transition from conventional to organic production, and even to the herds of the largest conventional farms looking for new, environmentally sustainable and financially stable production and marketing options.
Within these pages, I hope to help you see the cow's world through new eyes. You will never look at a simple weed the same way again. Raindrops will carry a new meaning. A cow's foot will become the most powerful tool at your disposal. You'll discover the fascinating world of cow psychology. Calving season may actually become your favorite and most relaxing time of year. And I'll help you design your own plan to make a profitable and financially stable living in the most exciting and emotionally rewarding business in the world.
Part 1, The Fundamentals of Grass-Based Beef, takes an in-depth look at grass and cattle and the interdependent relationship that evolved between them during the millions of years before domestication, grain surpluses, and modern technological Band-Aids. It also explores the effect this relationship has on grass, soil, cattle fertility, genetics, and the seasonality of the natural cattle production year. This foundation of knowledge serves as the blueprint for all the production techniques described in the remainder of the book and provides you with the confidence to trust nature as your guide.
Like any practical trade, natural grass-based beef production relies on certain tools that allow us to harness this natural relationship between cattle and grass and turn it into a profitable business capable of sustaining our families, communities, and environment. Part 2, Infrastructure and Management, is about this toolbox. Some of the tools are the low-cost infrastructure of natural grass-based beef productions; others are skills and management principles that allow you to manage your cattle herd and create a salable product from it. These are the unique tools of your new trade.
Part 3, Business Planning and Marketing, describes how to convert the salable products produced by your farm (cattle) into a profitable business enterprise. This section is about the business end of the trade: the grass-finishing, slaughter, marketing, and financial management techniques unique to natural grass-based beef. It is also about building a cohesive plan that allows you to meet your personal, business, and financial goals with the resources available to you, in the environmental and market conditions unique to your specific situation.
By the time you reach the final section of the book, you will have begun developing an image in your mind about how you want your new natural grass-based beef enterprise to look. Part 4, Your Business Plan, allows you to turn theory into reality. This section provides you with a step-by-step planning framework to identify your goals and guide you through the process of designing your own profitable and financially stable natural grass-based cattle enterprise, built on the foundation of knowledge, skills, and tools from parts 1 through 3. By using the framework provided in this section, you can build the blueprint of your production, management, and marketing strategy as it applies to your unique circumstances, your unique market, and your unique personal goals and ambitions.
I wish you an exciting journey of discovery.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An enormous amount of work goes into putting together a book like this. I would like to thank the good people at Storey Publishing for their hard work and for sharing my vision in creating this unique guide. Their mission and my goals for this book are an ideal partnership. In particular I would like to thank my editors, Deborah Burns, Marie Salter, and Elaine Cissi, my illustrator, Elayne Sears, and designer Erin Dawson for transforming my writing, concepts, and ideas into a cohesive package.
I give my appreciation to the Saskatchewan Grazing and Pasture Technology Program and in particular Zoheir Abouguendia and Bob Springer; Dr. Dick Diven and his Low-Cost Cow Calf Program and School for Profitable Beef Cattle; and Prof. Harlan Hughes, Extension livestock economist at North Dakota State University. Their efforts introduced me to low-cost grass-based livestock production. I also thank Lance Brown and Ted W. Van der Gulik at the BC Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries and Dr. Temple Grandin of the Department of Animal Science at Colorado State University for their generous copyright permissions. Thanks too to Lee Rinehart for his technical input.
Special thanks to my wife, Anne, whose endless encouragement during the long hours of writing and whose talent at editing cannot be overstated. She has been invaluable to me throughout the entire process of developing the vision that went into this book, from cheerfully building electric fences with me at -35°F and patiently sitting through the thousands of miles of Canadian and U.S. highways that formed the research phase of this project to inspiring the planning framework featured in part 4 of this book.
A big thank you to my mother, Charlotte, and my siblings, Charles, Lorna, and Emily, and her husband, Don, for trusting me with the responsibility of managing the family farm at its most difficult moment and for their confidence in me during the growing pains of transitioning the farm from conventional to organic production while I developed my vision. Particularly I thank my dad, Michael, who, before being interrupted by his head injury, opened the door to new agricultural ideas more than fifteen years ago when organic farming, rotational grazing, and grass-finishing were still bad words not to be spoken on Sundays. His smiles of support have meant the world to me, even if his speech and mobility have been stolen by his injury. Thanks, Dad, I hope you enjoy the book — you saw it unfold from the sidelines and here is the completed vision.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to Stan Grimshire, Ron Dalhuisen, and David Jupp for putting their faith in my ideas. It's not easy to ride for the brand
when everything you've been taught as true about beef ranching is suddenly being challenged and turned on its head. It takes courage to question long-held beliefs and be willing to step into the unknown. I could not have done it without you.
And a special thanks to my mentor, Prof. Dr. Rainer Newberry, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, the most remarkable rock and ore deposit detective, who taught me always to question conventional wisdom. Whether about ore deposits, grass, cattle, or people, the lessons of being a good detective remain the same.
Introduction
CATTLE AND GRASS EVOLVED TOGETHER FOR millions of years, each adapting to the other to create an efficient partnership that shaped the landscape of our planet. Long before humans arrived on the scene, cattle were already among the grazing species that roamed the savannah in vast herds, defying predators, keeping encroaching trees at bay, and creating the fantastically rich soils of the ancient grasslands. The remarkable ability of cattle to convert green grass to meat, fat, and milk; their calving ease; their resistance to disease, predators, and drought; and their predictable nature compelled ancient peoples to choose cattle as an ideal species for domestication.
Our prehistoric ancestors did not have the technological advantages that our modern conventional beef industry is so dependent upon. Consequently, for their own survival, they jealously guarded the small amount of grain they did grow and never used it to feed their cattle, which had to forage for themselves just as they had always done, their lives determined by nature's seasons and the natural world around them. Human intervention was limited to shepherding the cattle and harvesting the excess meat and milk produced by the herd. (Grain did not become part of the cattle diet until after the Industrial Revolution, when machinery created vast grain surpluses, which were recycled through livestock.)
When we developed our modern technological advantages and began interfering with the natural, seasonal, grass-dependent life cycle of cattle, there was actually a dramatic increase in problems in the cattle industry, ranging from increasingly severe disease outbreaks to widespread calving difficulties, which have become the norm rather than the exception. This trend continues even today. Sadly, we have become so accustomed to the prevalence of all these problems that many farmers now pride themselves more on their emergency response to crises than on their ability to prevent difficulties through good management practices.
The Problems We Face
Today, diseases — from pink eye and mastitis to pneumonia, coccidiosis, shipping fever, and scours — abound. Less common but extremely frightening illnesses such as foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) have become part of our reality as we have adopted increasingly unnatural cattle-production methods. Tractors, fertilizers, feedlots, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, diesel fuel, tilled soils, and all of the environmental problems that accompany these modern advantages
now dominate the same North American landscape that supported vast numbers of wild bison just a few centuries ago.
What's wrong with this picture? With a more advanced scientific understanding of the natural world, agricultural food production should be more — not less — efficient, problem-free, and profitable. Technology should help us capitalize on livestock's natural advantages rather than imposing upon it and forcing it to adapt to artificial production regimens. Instead of spending our time trying to overcome nature from the seat of a tractor, we should be out in our pastures, cooperating with nature to produce grass-fed cattle in an enjoyable, stress-free way modeled after nature's example. Our greater understanding of cattle and the natural world should translate into grass-based cattle enterprises that are resistant to extreme weather, market turmoil, drought, disease pressure, feed crises, predation, and other common causes of economic downfall. But these enterprises are few and far between. How can we change?
My Experience
I returned to my family's beef ranch in 1998 to take over the farm management. The farm had struggled immensely during the ten years since my father was incapacitated by a severe head injury. Despite valiant efforts by previous managers to turn around the financial situation, the farm had become unprofitable. My quest to save the farm and restore its profitability took me on a fascinating, though desperate, journey that dramatically changed my conventional perspective on beef production and marketing and significantly altered my understanding of the relationship between cattle and grass.
Having an education in economic geology, not agriculture, I felt quite unprepared for the task of fixing the farm: I was trained as a rock and ore detective, not as a conventional farm operator. So I set out to rectify my lack of agricultural education by diving into the piles of conventional agricultural literature and sources of information that I was familiar with from my childhood: agriculture newspapers, agriculture magazines, equipment dealership publications, plant variety trials, farm fairs, equipment demonstrations, agricultural Extension services, and advice from the fertilizer dealer and feed mill.
I thought I could balance the unprofitable accounting books with my enthusiastic efforts: I'd take on more enterprises, find the glitches in those already on my plate, and try to grow bigger and more efficient.
I soon realized that this approach was only taking the farm farther down the same unprofitable path. It was a road of drudgery that often seemed like voluntary slavery.
The new equipment, new infrastructure, bigger workload, constantly changing technologies, extra-long work hours, aborted new ventures, persistent disease and calving problems, and lack of tangible results were wearing everyone thin. I knew farming wasn't supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme — I had heard that preached often enough at the coffee shops and auction barns. But if farming was supposed to be about a healthy lifestyle and being closer to the land and animals, I sure didn't see where that came in while spending fourteen hours a day sitting in the cab of a tractor or lying on my back underneath one, soaking up oil in my beard and cursing the next mechanical disaster.
If it was such a wonderful lifestyle, then how could I justify the long hours, mud, veterinary medicines, stress, and enormous financial cost of having such an enviable life? If that was not the road to success and enjoying life, what was? There had to be a more natural, healthy way to work.
A Revelation
Then a number of occurrences and changes coincided to completely alter my outlook on farming. It began when my wife and I switched to eating organic food, despite my displeasure about the higher grocery bill. The changes to my health were remarkable. I had been a severe hay fever and allergy sufferer since early childhood, but organic nutrition began to change that.
As I first began exploring organic farming as an alternative solution to the farm's problems, my mind became focused on fulfilling the rules of organic certification and enduring the minimum three-year transition period required to achieve certified organic status. Although the concept of organics theoretically made sense and my improving health convinced me that I was on the right track, the requirements for certification seemed like a merciless checklist of things that I would have to eliminate, that I had come to depend on for the very survival of the farm. This, however, is the crux for every new organic farmer: How do we eliminate the herbicides, pesticides, hormones, synthetic fertilizers, and so much else while still producing crops and livestock that are in good enough shape to make it to market without withering away or dying en route?
As my health improved, I began noticing its delicate balance. Although I was leading a relatively allergy-free life among all the farm pollens and dust, I still had a tremendous sensitivity to chemicals. Exposure to certain chemicals, whether the heady vapors of a new carpet, secondhand smoke, an herbicide application, or the smell of fresh paint, could completely disrupt my equilibrium. Fatigue, stress, poor-quality food, nervousness, and injury seemed to magnify these triggers a hundredfold. As the old allergies reappeared, I'd grow irritable and distracted, and I was no longer able to perform at my peak capacity.
I began to view my immune system as a bucket that I could fill with any variety of stresses without ill effects — but only to a certain point. Once the bucket was full, a single additional drop would make it overflow and cause my ill health to return. I realized, then, that the key to my health and productivity lies in managing my life to avoid overfilling the bucket so there is always room for the normal stress of unexpected daily challenges. The same is true for animals and plants.
If animals and plants are under stress, chemical or otherwise, their resilience is compromised, making them prone to pests, disease, and poor nutrient uptake. They struggle to compete with weeds, pests, predators, and even each other if they are exposed to foreign substances and environmental conditions that they have not had the opportunity to adapt to over thousands of years. What is the true natural potential of our plants and livestock, and how many problems can we alleviate by raising them in natural conditions as similar as possible to those in which they evolved to thrive?
Health and productivity in any ecosystem, whether it is my own body, that of a cow, or the whole farm, is driven not only by the elimination of chemicals and other ingredients restricted by the organic-certifying agencies, but also by eliminating stress so that natural evolutionary advantages can be fully expressed. Cattle's stress comes in a multitude of forms: nutritional, chemical, social, climatic or weather-related, the stresses of light deprivation or excess, heat and cold, pests — even the simple removal of a key player in the function of the soil, plants, or rumen or other part of the larger ecosystem. In sum, any departure from cattle's natural balance with their optimal evolutionary habitat can induce stress.
Modern medicine teaches us to think symptomatically — we focus on reacting to the symptoms of disease. Thus, while we have become experts at resolving various ailments and diseases, these are really just the symptoms of a much greater underlying problem. We rarely seek to discover what knocked out of balance our perfectly designed systems in the first place so that disease could find its way in. After all, aren't disease, pests, weeds, and predators designed to remove those individuals that are not able to function optimally in their particular environmental niche? Isn't that how evolution works? Actually, crisis is merely nature's way of pointing out that its delicate balance has been disturbed. When the symptoms of crisis appear, consider them giant arrows directing your attention to the underlying problem. We need to address not only these symptoms, but also whatever caused the weakness that precipitated the crisis, so we can avoid it in the future.
For example, a predator problem with coyotes is a symptom of an out-of-balance livestock management system, not a signal that there are too many coyotes. Something in the balance of the farm ecosystem is making our farm a target for coyotes or is giving them an unnatural advantage. The underlying cause might be that we are calving in late winter or early spring, lean times when these calves are the only easy food source. To recognize this, however, we have to stop blaming the coyote for our problems and look more closely at our management role.
Similarly, we should not consider a pneumonia outbreak as merely an incidence of disease to be fixed
by a course of antibiotics. It is a clear sign that something in our management style is compromising the immunity of our herd. What is causing this stress? Perhaps we are weaning during the rainy season or perhaps the collection of manure and mud around the feed bunks needs to be addressed by a different wintering system.
In order for a farm to be a thoroughly viable enterprise, the farmer him- or herself and the farm's profitability must also be factored into its ecosystem. In the search for a more natural approach to raising cattle, it is not realistic simply to open the gate so our cattle can regain their natural balance while we turn to hunting and gathering. We have to live in this world too, which means that we have to consider our financial goals, marketing, personal priorities, and involvement on the farm when we analyze the source of symptomatic farm problems. Personal stress, loss of profitability, a sagging fence, and a lineup of machines needing repair all suggest that we have a role in the problem.
A New Way of Thinking
As my outlook on farming evolved, I realized that I had confused profitability with productivity, an easy mistake to make in our volume-oriented, commodity-driven marketplace. How many head of cattle we own, how many pounds each calf weighs when we sell it, how many hours of work we perform each day, how many gallons of milk each cow produces, how many bushels of grain or tons of forage we grow per acre, and how much each individual calf is worth on sale day are often how we measure the success of our farms and our relative success as farmers.
But high productivity does not automatically equal high profit. The more effort we put in, the better results we get, right? Not necessarily. We have to think in terms of high profit, not high productivity. The difference may seem subtle at first, but it requires an enormous shift in focus.
We must begin by measuring our success in terms of net profit per acre, not on the illusion of profitability created by our focus on maximizing yields (such as our obsession with producing the biggest possible calves at weaning). We should value ourselves by the results of our efforts instead of priding ourselves on the effort itself. It isn't enough to eke out a living from our maximum productivity. To maximize our profit, we need to adjust our priorities toward minimizing expenses and addressing logjams in our production systems before we focus on boosting production.
Switching to a natural grass-based beef production and marketing scenario isn't easy. We have to replace time, machinery, effort, and many unnecessary expenses with knowledge. The greatest tools at our disposal are the lessons we can draw from the wild herds that roam the world's grasslands much as our livestock's ancestors did before we domesticated them — before we became so enamored of our modern technological solutions that we let them eclipse nature's solutions to our production challenges.
Although natural grass-based beef production may be new to us, nature's great herds, grasslands, and soils have been succeeding at it for a very long time without our help. Their examples provide us with the reference, insight, and large-scale working model against which we can measure our ideas and will guide us toward sound, positive, simple solutions to our production challenges.
Let's begin.
PART ONE
The FUNDAMENTALS of Grass-Based Beef
Chapter 1
The Great Herds and Their Grasslands
LONG BEFORE HUNTER-GATHERERS BEGAN roaming the earth, the ancestors of our cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and domestic birds lived much as their wild counterparts do today, flourishing within the balance provided by natural selection, nature's seasons, their specific environmental adaptations, and competition for resources with other species. They thrived remarkably well without us. When our forebears finally arrived on the scene, they interacted with game as predators but barely made an impact on nature's vast abundance. Modern humans, however, have been far more intrusive.
When we decided to domesticate animals, it was for our convenience, not their benefit. Domestication changed their lives in obvious ways (their range was limited with property boundaries, for example), but it is a fallacy to think that we improved them or their lives in any way. Before we interjected ourselves, nature's creatures lived and evolved together to create a vibrant, healthy, self-sustaining balance among soil, grass, microbes, herds, and predators. They were remarkably successful and much can be learned from them.
Despite our dismal record of environmental stewardship, today we persist in inventing expensive technological quick fixes and artificial solutions for the troubling problems we face on our farms and in the environment. We have forgotten how to look to nature — to the great wild herds and their rich grasslands — for guidance and solutions.
The good news is that we don't have to run to fertilizer dealers, seed companies, Extension agents, and equipment dealers every time we want to increase our productivity and efficiency or try to resolve an issue on our farms. Technology has its place, but our first thought should be to look to nature for practical and ecologically sustainable solutions. Animals and plants evolved for millions of years to live in sync with their environment. We certainly have not changed them so much in our short period of influence that they have lost the specialized adaptations, characteristics, and natural traits that made them so successful during their long history.
The Ticking of Geologic Time
Our seemingly arrogant preoccupation with our technological solutions and human-contrived cattle production philosophies and our lack of trust in nature's answers to our production challenges can be traced directly to our biased view of evolutionary time. We mistakenly believe that we are central to history, that we are the glorious end product of a long, linear progression of events. We believe that we have been around for a very long time; we even call the time before the evolution of modern humans prehistory, as if it is less important because we weren't part of it. Yet this prehistorical period stretches back through vast spans of time; our human history is but a blink of the eye in comparison.
This bias is hardly surprising if we consider how we experience the passage of time. I have a sense of how long a minute, a day, a week, and a month are. I also have a feeling for how long a year is. But grasping what ten years feels like is a challenge. I doubt that even my grandfather, at age ninety-six, has a true sense of what the passage of twenty or thirty years feels like. I can vaguely imagine the passage of one hundred years, but a thousand years is beyond my comprehension. I know that ten thousand years is a lot less than a hundred thousand years and that a million years is even more, but it's impossible to understand the experience of such vast spans of time. They simply become numbers that are detached from tangible human experience.
In this same vein, I know that after the dinosaurs roamed, mammals evolved, mammoths and saber-toothed tigers flourished, and then humans evolved and started chasing them. We endured a number of ice ages, we domesticated animals and plants at some point along the way, and finally the Egyptians built pyramids. The rest of history follows more or less the way we remember from history class.
Geologic time happens over such vast periods that we simply cannot grasp its implications. Because we cannot relate to the vast passage of this time, we place the greatest emphasis on the brief, most recent interval we know as human history (a few thousand years). No wonder we overlook the significance of the millions of years of evolutionary history that our domestic livestock have under their belts!
To get a true feeling for geologic time and how briefly we have been part of it, we have to put Earth's history in a context we can understand. The chart on this page compares the last 5.3 million years of Earth's history (since the ancestors of our domesticated livestock evolved) with a twenty-four-hour day. This analogy makes it clear how recently we domesticated farm animals and how brief the last hundred years of our modern agricultural practices are when compared with the amount of time our domestic livestock and their ancestors spent adapting to specific environmental conditions.
A WRINKLE IN TIME
Although it helps to assign some numbers to the major events of evolutionary history, the vast scale of time associated with them still remains beyond our comprehension. Events shown in boldface type highlight the long joint evolutionary history of grass and cattle and emphasize the very brief impact we humans have had on them.
245 million years ago: The first dinosaurs evolve.
244 million years ago: The first mammals evolve.
144 million years ago: The first birds evolve.
66 million years ago: Dinosaurs become extinct.
24 million years ago: Grass coevolves with grazing animals.
17 million years ago: The first horses evolve (about the size of a dog, with three toes on each foot).
5.3 million years ago: Mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and the first wild ancestors of cattle, sheep, goats, and bison evolve on the great grasslands of the world.
Mind-boggling, isn't it? Our livestock have been domesticated for only 2 minutes and 10 seconds of their 24-hour history. Our modern farm practices have been around for only approximately 1.75 seconds of this 24-hour history. Still, we naively believe that the solutions to our farm and livestock's health, productivity, and production problems lie in technology, biotechnology, petrochemistry, and pharmaceuticals that have yet to stand the test of time. Odds are that the production challenges we face on our farms would be better solved by learning how the wild grazing herds and their grasslands deal with nature's challenges and by exploring the evolutionary history of our domestic livestock.
The Great Herds
Until very recently in our busy but short history, much of the world's landscape was dominated by great grazing herds of one species or another. Today, we can still see remnants of these herds, which retain adaptations to their grassland ecology and characteristics that are shared by domesticated livestock.
Seeing the great herds gathering and moving through the plains, a hypnotizing, awe-inspiring experience, triggers in us a passion that may be a window into our long-forgotten past as hunters and predators. Certainly, the animal kingdom still recognizes humans as predators.
THE HISTORY OF MODERN LIVESTOCK COMPRESSED INTO 24 HOURS
Wild herds have much to teach us. Their environment, food, herd dynamics, calving, breeding, synchrony with the seasons, and even their relationship to predators all help us learn about our cattle. Because domesticated cattle are so similar to the wild herds, we can immediately apply these lessons to improve the profitability of our livestock enterprises.
In North America, the best-known migratory herds were the plains and woodlands bison. Numbering close to sixty million, they shaped the Great Plains prior to their mass extermination. Even as late as the 1870s, individual herds occupying fifty square miles or more were sighted in the western Dakotas. Their enormous appetites and hoof power helped maintain the vast expanses of healthy grasslands and kept trees at bay. Their grazing impact caused rapid nutrient cycling, which in turn created the extraordinarily high organic content of the prairie soils.
Capable of storing huge reservoirs of plant-accessible nutrients, these soils are the North American grain belt's secret of success. Without the bison, the plains left behind by the receding ice-age glaciers would have slowly turned to brush and forest, which recycle nutrients and build organic matter at rates far slower than grassland under the influence of a migratory grazing herd. Only small, spread-out remnants of these herds still exist.
Elk also once formed vast migrating herds on the Great Plains, as did pronghorn antelope west of the Rocky Mountains. The Four Corners region (where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet) may once have been home to migrating herds of big-horn sheep. In the Arctic, herds of musk oxen and migrating caribou define the high Arctic landscape, providing an invaluable source of meat to creatures along their migration routes and shaping the tundra that is their home.
In Patagonia, at the southern tip of South America, there were once migrating herds of guanacos. Southern Africa had the springbok, which can still be found in small herds today. In sub-Saharan Africa there are remnant herds of topi (also known as tiang) antelope, and in southern Sudan there is still a yearly migration of up to a million white-eared kob antelope, rivaling the great herds of the Serengeti. We can still see the herds of wildebeests, zebras, and Thomson's gazelles migrating across the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania. Remnant herds of dorcas gazelles live on the edges of the Sahara Desert. There are even elephant herds roaming now in parts of Africa. Asia still has remnant herds of chiru antelope on the Tibetan Plateau, saiga antelope on the steppes of southern Russian and Kazakhstan, and Mongolian gazelles, also known as zeren, on the steppes and in the sub-deserts of Mongolia, northern China, and southern Russia.
All these herds have been greatly reduced from their former sizes by hunting, habitat encroachment, and competition with domestic stock for resources and space. But in their glory they were truly great. Not so long ago, these herds were accompanied by an even greater variety of species. From woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses to prehistoric horses, woolly camels, and aurochs (wild cattle), a host of fantastic ice-age creatures molded the great plains of their time with their grazing, manure, and pounding feet.
Most of us can relate to at least one of these great herds, and knowing about them will provide a benchmark to which we compare our ideas about cattle husbandry and livestock production. The legacy of these great herds will accompany us throughout this book, from our discussions of genetic selection and grazing practices to electric fences and water sites, as we try to replicate in our domestic livestock what we see in the wild.
Lessons from the Herd
A number of years ago I had an opportunity to watch the Porcupine caribou herd migrating south into the foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska as part of its fall migration pattern. Over the course of a few days, I saw close to a hundred thousand migrating caribou. Though the herd had split into smaller traveling bunches ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand, these groups were all within a few miles of one another, traveling across the tundra toward the same distant destination. From the valley floor I could see many individual dramas, such as cows searching for their calves and individual caribou panting as they strained to keep pace with the herd. I saw hunters harvesting caribou and wolves harrying the weak members along the herd's flank.
But from the hills above, another view unfolded. The individuals merged, their identities lost within the massive herds. Thousands and thousands of caribou were bonded together by a single purpose of mind, linked as if by some invisible glue, the individual dramas blending into the masses like little whirlpools in a giant river. The herd had gained an identity of its own. The individual caribou within it seemed like little more than tiny cells within a much larger body, unaware of their role within this giant living organism that slowly snaked its way across the tundra.
Nor did the herd as a whole seem aware of the individual caribou within its midst. It swelled and flexed in response to the terrain, winding its way over the ridges and valleys, heading south, driven by a higher collective consciousness. From a distance, the herd itself had become an individual, interacting instinctively on a grand scale with entire weather systems, vegetation zones, mosquito plagues, river courses, and wolf packs, just as an individual caribou might react to a gust of cold wind, the grass beneath its feet, the mosquito on its ear, the water in its path, and the lone wolf harrying its flank.
As a collective, the Porcupine caribou herd is capable of shaping the landscape and vegetation of the Arctic and sustaining entire populations of wolves and other predators. Through its calving grounds, which lie in the middle of the proposed controversial oil-drilling programs in the Arctic National Wild-life Reserve, it even influences the politics of global oil economics. To fully understand the wide-ranging impact of the caribou herd, we cannot limit our focus to the individual members of the herd; we must recognize the herd's identity as a whole.
The relationship of the herd to grass, soil, water, nutrient cycles, climate, vegetation, microbes, and predators can teach us much more than an individual cow can.
If we watch a flock of birds, we can observe the same phenomenon. With a rush of furiously beating wings, the birds lift into the sky and suddenly individuals disappear into the flock, now a cohesive whole. Instead of crashing into each other, individual birds fly in perfect harmony as the flock twists and turns; they move as if driven by a single mind, working in unison for the benefit of the group.
If we focus on an individual, we do not see its connection to the larger group. Watching the caribou mother calling her calf, we see an animal looking for food, struggling for survival, and seeking the companionship of her young. We see wolves feeding on the weak and vegetation being trampled into the ground. From this vantage point we can study individuals within the herd, become experts at caribou calls and the hunting strategies of wolves, and learn about vegetation growth, but we will not gain an understanding of the instincts driving the herd. Only after we have stepped back and looked at the herd as a whole can we understand how the individuals are shaped by the dynamics of the group: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The relationship of the herd to grass, soil, water, nutrient cycles, climate, vegetation, microbes, and predators can teach us much more than an individual cow can.
The Porcupine Caribou herd travels south into the foothills of Alaska's Brooks Range.
Of Microbes, Humidity, and Feet
Have you ever looked at the ground with your nose inches from the soil and poked around to see what is happening beneath the surface? Have you ever sat in your pastures and tried to figure out how vegetation is recycled? Have you considered what it takes to recycle nutrients back into your soil? What does grass have to go through on your land to grow, flourish, reproduce, die, and be reincorporated into the soil so its nutrients become available to the next generation of plants? Not surprisingly, the decomposition and recycling process varies greatly throughout the world because of climate. Temperature and humidity are at the heart of the great herd's existence and therefore play pivotal roles in the herd's ability to create and maintain the earth's grassland environments.
Where I grew up in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, uneaten grass quickly browns and crisps in the relentless summer heat. By early fall, though, the rains start, and by early winter, they've washed many of the nutrients from the plants. The wet snow crushes the plants to the ground, and within a year the stalks are indistinguishable from the rest of the organic layer in the soil — gone, reincorporated, from dust to dust. Untreated fence posts rot from the top down almost as quickly as from the bottom up, and a tree that falls in the forest turns into a mushy, rotten mass full of centipedes and beetles in just a few short years. In the rain forest on Canada's west coast, the nutrient cycling occurs even more quickly. The microbes that break down dead organic materials are extremely active year-round, above and below ground, in this warm, humid environment.
In arid regions, however, the story is very different. Although fence posts still rot where they come in contact with the soil, material above the soil's surface seems to last forever. The dry, dead grass oxidizes, turns gray, crumbles, and blows away in the wind, never returning to the soil. Years later, dry grass still stands, almost as if it died just the day before. Dead trees in the forest seem to be permanent fixtures. Gray on the outside, the dry wood hardly seems to change, only growing less dense with time until it finally disintegrates. Things don't seem to rot in such a climate. Why?
In humid climates (left), plant decomposition and nutrient recycling occur even without animal impact due to flourishing microbes both in and outside the soil's protective environment. In arid climates (right), animal impact must break down and return plant debris to the soil because soil microbes are not as broadly active.
In order for nutrients to be recycled back to the earth quickly, the microbes that decompose dead plant and animal remains must be active. Like us, these microbes need water to function. In humid areas such as rain forests, microbes can do their work in the open air, but in dry regions the microbes work efficiently only in the moisture zone below the soil surface. Until dead material can make contact with the soil, it remains untouched by these microbes. Nutrients from these dead organic remains are not recycled back to the soil for future plants; instead, they disappear into the atmosphere through oxidization or are broken down by the wind, ultraviolet sunlight, and physical weathering until they blow away as dust.
Herds are nature's steamrollers and plant crushers.
Rainfall and warm temperatures alone do not drive this process. More important is the humidity in the air between rainfalls. The decomposition microbes need the right balance of moisture and temperature to survive and work efficiently. If the air is very dry, the microbes will be confined to the moist soil, becoming less and less active as the soil dries out. Some areas may get high rainfall amounts over a relatively short period and have tremendous plant growth, but if the air is dry for the rest of the year, the dead material won't decompose and be recycled unless it is physically pushed down into the moisture zone in the soil. Other areas may get less rainfall, but if they are more humid, the microbes can continue to work aboveground, breaking down and recycling dead plant material even before it contacts the soil.
As an area becomes drier, microbial nutrient recycling becomes less efficient and we have to look to some other process to help break down and recycle dead plant material. We can certainly turn on sprinklers or use heavy equipment to mash the material and bring it into contact with the soil, but at what economic cost? Mother Nature has a much simpler solution: hungry animals, sharp feet, and manure.
If we look at the distribution of animals around the world, we recognize an interesting trend. In humid areas such as the rain forests around the globe, where microbes can be active outside the soil year-round, we see more and more solitary animals or small groups of animals spread uniformly throughout the area. Yet in areas where microbial activity is limited by decreasing rainfall and humidity or by the onset of a dormant winter season, when temperatures drop below the microbes' comfort zone, we see larger herds of animals clumped together. There is a great advantage to this massing of feet and mouths: Herds are nature's steamrollers and plant crushers.
Animal grazing plays an important role in ecosystems: Animals eat grass, before it can become old, dry, and unpalatable. Periodic grazing maintains grass in its growth (or vegetative) stage, during which the plant roots spread out, much as they do in a lawn. As the grass extends across the soil, it becomes an insulating layer that shields the earth from direct heat, which in turn helps to retain moisture. When the rains finally come, the carpet of live grass and dead grass litter slows the water runoff, giving it more time to be absorbed by the soil. The more water is absorbed, the more water is stored and the longer it will take the soil to dry out after the rains.
It sounds like an ideal arrangement because it is. Grazing animals and grass are a perfect match; they coevolved twenty-four million years ago to take advantage of each other's best traits.
Animal feet knock over the dead plant material, driving it into the ground so it contacts the microbes in the moist soil. Looking closely at the feet of the majority of animals that make up the great herds (including cattle), we can see that most have two toes on each foot. As they step, and especially as they step violently, these flexible toes twist and flex, particularly at the front edges of the hooves, where they are the sharpest. The sharp hooves slice up the dead plant material as they push it down into the moist soil, where the active microbes are waiting for lunch, and also fracture the ground, allowing rainfall to penetrate easily through the hard crust on the soil surface. Plant material that has been trampled further slows rainfall runoff, and the depressions left by the animals' hooves create little pools to hold water.
A grazing animal's foot in action: The toes twist and flex, slicing up dead plant material and pushing it into contact with the moist soil layer. The footprint behind shows water being absorbed by the fractured soil.
But that's not all. The animals also leave behind their manure and urine, pure gold to the microbes. After dead plant material has passed through the digestive tract of a grazing animal, the finely chewed and partially digested material becomes much easier for soil microbes to digest. Manure piles also provide a perfect moist environment in which soil microbes can flourish. This is why cattle, bison, and so many other grazing animals have such seemingly inefficient digestive processes that appear almost wasteful (poor conversion rate, in scientific jargon): Partially digested plant remains play a vital role in feeding the soil microbes, which keep the soil fertile.
Plant digestion in the soil has a great deal in common with plant digestion in the rumen of the cow; in fact, they are intimately linked in a healthy grazing environment. In the first step of plant
Source: https://www.scribd.com/book/153615391/Grass-Fed-Cattle-How-to-Produce-and-Market-Natural-Beef
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