Ranching Practices and Challenges

can't do that out here no in fact I can show you right here so here this is a Hayfield uh that's right behind us this Hayfield was harvested in July now you tell me that if you cut your grass in July what it's going to look like all the way in almost October yeah it's going to be Waist Deep yeah exactly this was cut back in July there it's got this much regrowth on it we get one cutting and that really does show even with uh you know we're cutting it with machines obviously we're making hay but if I send the cows out here to eat it they're doing the same dang thing and it's not going to grow back so we have to practice a little bit different type of rotational grazing than you guys would but definitely one one cutting one grazing on each pasture and we'll see you next year so a little different so in North Carolina where I live it's pretty common for one to one and a half acres per cow uh yeah oh my gosh isn't that amazing yeah that'd be crazy 35 40 acres per cow yeah and it depends on the year yeah um you know I've got friends of mine that and people don't believe this but I've got friends of mine that live in New Mexico and Arizona where it's 100 acres per cow I think they're eating Sagebrush and Cactus I don't know what they're eating now you you have to hey obviously seven months out of the Year probably six months out of the year yeah so we're feeding hay about 180 days is what we plan for so six months out of the Year we're feeding hay which means that we have to put that up during the summer months and and make sure that we have it the last few years like I mentioned we've been in drought yeah so we've been buying hay from anywhere we can get it and last year we bought um uh what 14 truckloads of hay yes about 200 250 tons out of Missouri and had it trucked all the way up here so you're talking about uh eighty thousand dollars worth of hay exactly yeah easily so being able to put up our own hay is huge um unfortunately we're at the the we were you know at the mercy of Mother Nature if we don't get the rain we don't get hay right exactly at I'm at the mercy of Mother Nature but not at that much Mercy I spent 10 grand on Hay this year we're rebuilding the land and we have no topsoil you guys have topsoil like four feet deep out here probably something like that it's not quite we have a lot of Sandy soils so a lot of our moisture moves right through and not a whole lot of topsoil to try to hold stuff together so a lot of uh a lot of native grasses but…