What's wrong with my farm? Sustainable farming lessons might change your life

wait a minute it's not the grass it's the soil so folks welcome to the farm blog today we are in missouri in the farm country of missouri and we're out here at the greg judy grazing school at greg judy's ranch so awesome regenerative ranching school that we're attending here we're going to give you guys some tidbits and tell you what it's all about we've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 95 to 100 people back here everybody's here to learn and we're doing a field day awesome hope you guys enjoy [Music] so greg how many years have you been doing the grazing school here uh this is our 14th year awesome man yup lots of lessons learned lots of mistakes made oh yeah lots of triumphs still learning some time learning i say sometimes farming's failing right it is every time you think you get it figured out mother nature tells you something different that's it good stuff i'm going to share with you some of our successes and mistakes that we've made setting up a profile grazing operation and there's a whole lineage of you all out here different there's a young guy there's a young fellow here right there you don't have anything just starting now there's people that had 400 cow-calf pairs so there's a there's a huge diversity in the crowd here and folks there's nothing wrong with not having anything starting actually sometimes that can be beneficial because you've already got something and it's kind of you're handing it it is handed to you and it's running that way and it's not running real well sometimes this can be a little bit tough to break that mold and actually set it up differently if you want to make a full-time living on the land folks it does take some numbers it's going to be tough for you to do it on 12 acres unless you're growing marijuana or something like that but for a ruminant animal it's pretty tough to run enough of them on you know 10 acres but you can still feed your family you can still teach your kids what it's like to to do it correctly and who knows that 10 acres down the road you may have a a wealthy let somebody move in and buy an 80 across the road from you so don't be perturbed with small acreages we've got this is an 18 acre acreage right here that you're sitting on but it fastened on 13 farms together we've got 13 farms here in row now and so you really got to stay focused on you know i see people getting pickup trucks for instance and they'll drive across their pasture and not think a thing about it i'm like wait a minute no no no don't be doing that there's times you can if you're gonna have to get out there maybe bring some hay out or something but don't get in a habit of driving across your farm especially when the animals are eating you can do it on a four-wheeler or a side-by-side but pickup trucks and tractors are pretty hard on your pastures because there's so much life in the soil and if you think about a heavy piece of equipment going across that land what's it doing it's compressing the soil and you think greg you're getting kind of nitpicky there am i no because when you compress that soil and it rains that part of that soil drove on is not taking in moisture it's running off so i like to say i'm a hog for moisture i want to keep it all i don't want to give my neighbor any of it and so by having when you walk out on your land it should feel kind of spongy kind of soft that means that your soil microbes are working for you if you walk on your farm it feels like you're walking on concrete you've got a lot of work to do so trees give your forages lower lignin lignin is a compound that cattle can't digest so if you have a few trees spotted across your landscape if you fortunate enough you can find a farm to lease don't go out there and cut them don't cut anything for a couple years and you may be some out there that are too thick you need to take out a few but don't go out there and just indiscriminately start cutting them what we have found out folks is we try and graze around all of our farms twice in the wintertime in the non-growing season we'll get two rotations so as long as they don't take it all now in that first rotation those cows are thriving they're getting the very best so on the second rotation around your farm how do you make sure they don't lose weight because the good stuff is gone you got to give them a bigger piece so you're making up for quality with quantity given more of it and there's still not enough food there to keep that cow working well you might need to give her a molasses lick and you can tell look at the cow pass if they start getting thin on you your stockpile is no good you can't starve a profit out of a cow and the beautiful thing about fescue is in the in the sun spring late winter early spring what we call march mud month josh you ever had a mud month in there yeah it's pretty bad isn't it you just can't keep them out of the mud fescue it's your friend it can be a curse and it can be a friend what i mean by the curse is kentucky 31 that's what this is endophyte infected fescue so it's got an endophyte in there and the endo fights in there to keep the cows from overgrazing it if you don't graze kentucky 31 down short the worst toxin is in that first one to two inches that comes out of the ground right above ground that first two inches well don't grace your pasture short they're not getting pretty much of that toxin okay so that first two inches don't graze fescue short in the winter and you'll get by pretty good if you have a cow that does get affected by fescue she starts limping real bad she never gets over it you got a celery but the other let's say you had 10 cows and one started limping the other nine are doing just fine well if you keep those nine that genetics is going to go in the right direction okay you can treat them and get them over it but then make a mark on her your take that cat probably ought to go to town that's the first one that i made the great judy bailin roller and now kendall's really improved on that but the beauty of that thing is you can use a four-wheeler and you know we always get march mud month and josh and i were talking earlier he said he'd have been in a pickle without one of those this winter i'm the same way folks i have a hydra bed on that truck out there or over here guess how many bales i fed with that hydraulic bed this winter we had a wet winter there's no way i'm putting a truck out on my field and leaving to me that's a rut some people like if i go out there and not get stuck that's not a rut okay if you hit that the next year on a four-wheeler you're gonna think it's a ruckus it may throw you off your four-wheeler so i could put out a bell ring i think that's the mistake that i made starting out as i didn't have that unroller i didn't have any way to unroll them and so i just fed them and anywhere i put a bail i killed out a 30 to 40 50 foot area of sod i mean those cows just stomped it this deep trying to feed on that hay and i also lost the baby cat that baby cat got up against that bale on it shouldn't have been cavity in the winter duh i was and he got up against that bale to stay warm and he got trampled in the mud yeah made me feel about that tall probably the lowest point in my career seeing a calf stuck in the mud animals can walk it's a whole lot easier to walk animals to a group of hay than it is to bring the hay to the animals so if you can strategically place your bales around your farm on high points don't put them down in the bottom get them up on the high points [Music] so a 1400 pound cow will only wean maybe 50 of her body weight a thousand pound cow will always win around 60 they're just more efficient animals the more square inches of surface area of that animal the more that is the higher maintenance they are it takes more to keep them warm it takes more to keep them cool it takes more to get a calf out of them so just on that a sheep will always be more efficient than a cow they're smaller animals that's why our sheep don't get any hay in the wintertime those darn things can look at a dried leaf and get fat a cow would starve to death on that diet they're just more efficient rainstorms i ran the big cows eighteen hundred pound cows you can't drive a foil over that pasture that i raised and that was 20 years ago they destroy your farm they compact the soil when you go to sell them a 400 pound calf out of a thousand pound cow a 400 pound wing calf will bring more per pound than a 600 pound wing cap out of the 1 500 pound cap they bring more per pound you've also got another calf to sell an extra calf there's no i mean there's there's no debating i mean if you want to make money on grass now if you've got grain in your grain farming you can pour the grain to them go have fun and do that but at the end of the day it's hard on your farm it's hard on your farm to do that [Music] you are the predator and you're hurt you're never gonna ever heard any better than what you call for so if you set your standard bar really low oh she's all right she'll do this she'll do that oh i'm sorry you'll do better next time you start doing that and make the excuses for your cows pretty soon you've got a whole herd of pampered babies there are 17 there's seven 16 different minerals in there which one do they eat the most of them phosphorus that's when i need the most of you can't get that be purina the one they call wind and rain that that's a good meal twenty eight dollars a bag or something it's expensive greg what do you think about using the fly re fly the igr in that wind and rain nope yeah i don't want anything in that mineral the most valuable asset coming out of a cow is the manure path and you know i don't know how many times they poop a date cliff you studied a lot of cows how many times they poop a day especially you got your arm up in them right [Laughter] i don't have any idea i'm gonna say it's four to five times i'm pretty conservative there probably so every every time they poop hope that's a dollar bill so you walk around your farm you look at those dollar bills like there's a dollar there's a dollar it's it really is in minerals and nutrients cell biology and so what you did is you took the most valuable asset on your farm which is the manure pile you turn it into a toxic liability look at it this way if they poop on your land five times a day and nothing will go in and eat that manure pile because you've got this igr that's crafted you just covered up five square foot of your farm times 300 head uh that's 1500 square feet a day i'm covering up they're not going to eat that and it's going to stay there because the manure is not being broke down great way to go bankrupt don't do that [Music] so you never put your mineral where your waters at the water is up there where those cows are all congregated that shade we'll go up there in a minute um but the uh the mineral you want to put in on the opposite side where your water is if you water's at the top you want to put the mineral down at the far bottom and that way the cows as they go to mineral water they're walking the bowl lengths back and forth so what are they doing when they're walking the trampoline what else opening and peeing that's right so you're spreading your fertility out if you put your middle in the water in the same spot you can expect to have a lot of money right there [Music] all right folks we're on day two of the greg judy grazing school today's focus is gonna be on again pasture management and sheep so it's gonna be pretty fun we're gonna sit down and talk with greg a little bit we'll get you guys a little bit of background footage but we'll interview greg and talk to him a little bit about what this grazing school is all about who it's for and whether you guys should attend it and learn a little bit yourself we're going to start out this morning talking a little bit about the animal performance and uh just talking about different things that we've picked up over the years to ensure that if you do get you know once you get your fence and your water set up and you bring the animals on a lot of people don't really realize are they getting enough to eat or what do they look like when they don't get enough to eat what are some of the things that we should be looking at the hardest thing to capture on pasture in any gra all grass system is energy and energy we found if we can keep up here in the upper part of that plant the the tips that's where the sun hits the tips of those plants we get a lot of energy right there and if we graze it on down lower we get into problems we get first of all we get a slow response from the plant the animals no longer getting a really good diet they're eating a lot of the candy wrapper and that little tiny that daughter tiller right there at the very bottom you want to watch don't remove that if you take that off any time during your grazing once you remove that little sprout they call it a daughter tiller you've cost yourself two to three weeks of regrowth that's how much it impacts the regrowth of that plant so we're not only talking about animal performances when we're talking about plant performance because if your plants don't perform your animals don't either so don't take that off this was taken in south carolina i'll pick on south carolina a little bit now she was doing a grass-fed beef and she had 800 acres and she had about 60 cows and you can see the grass under her feet this was taken in june should have been grass at least up to their knees the whole farm looked like that she was gonna do grass-fed beef with that folks that cow is about uh one classification away from falling over there's uh just right so these are a herd of custom grazed cattle we call that our salt and pepper herd [Music] all right folks we've got the man the myth the legend here greg judy we're on the judy farm right now uh greg thanks a lot for putting on the grazing school yeah it's been a pretty good time this is the day after the grazing school and i kind of wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about what this is about like what what the grazing school uh is is hoping to accomplish for both new farmers old farmers experienced farmers uh i mean there was just a broad array of different age groups it was um so we have people in their 20s up to people in their 70s yeah and people are wanting to learn how to how to farm regeneratively there was people there that had no land no animals yep they were just wanting to get started learning yep the most interesting question i heard was how many times does a cow poop a day yeah and uh we didn't have an answer yeah the vet had an answer yeah yeah that's right so there's a lot of people especially now in this pandemic thing they're getting more and more concerned about their security of their food and even being safe you know and get out in the country and get you a place set up and you can raise your own food and it is secure it's a nice feeling you can go in the freezer and get you something to eat that's it that's it and it's good food josh it's not that stuff that you it's real food or out of a box right right nutrient dense food that's what it's all about and and doing the right thing for the land so greg talking about the grazing school why would someone want to come out to green pastures farm for your grazing school and you and you do this twice a year here on the farm at the moment yep we do a spring grazing school it's always the first weekend of the month in may and then we usually do one in september it's usually around the first uh 10 days of september somewhere um and we host it right here at our farm jan and i we've been doing this now for 14 years and we normally have a guest speaker come in and help me with the school and this year because the lockdowns is a little bit harder to get in there's a guy from africa used to come over yep and anyway uh so this is the first one that jan and i did solo just me speaking the interns helped some uh but i just couldn't do it without jan i mean she really puts a lot of the planning together and getting all everybody you know signed up and it takes well you saw yesterday oh there's some work it's quite an undertaking we had a hundred right at 100 people show up from i think we had like 20 some states and there was a guy there from australia yeah i had dinner with him last night yeah we we met up and uh and all had dinner last night what a neat guy yeah yeah he's actually coming to my farm uh next week oh he is yeah cool he's traveling the country it's funny i'm gonna see him at joel salazar's next week yep yep so after joel's that he's coming down south about three hours so yeah you'll be in my my neck of the woods next week yes yes that's right i wanted to kind of basically sit down here and talk with you guys i i flew out here from north carolina we are in missouri we're about near columbia missouri about two hours uh it's basically the tote the smack center of missouri we're two hours from kansas city we're two hours from st louis so you can fly into either airport depending on where you're coming from or you could drive up lots of people drove up from as far away as florida and ohio it's an opportunity to to come and learn about regenerative ranching and walk a farm uh that you just couldn't walk any other way yeah people can watch your videos and guys i'll post a link both in a pinned comment and a link to greg judy's website and his uh youtube channel if you're not watching this stuff you need to be watching it if you're dreaming of farming if you're thinking about farming or if you just want to know about food and soil that's what it's all about and you mentioned during the presentation yesterday that you're you're not a beef farmer and you're not a sheep farmer you're a soil farmer you're a micro farmer absolutely so great point josh that all starts in the soil and so when you get your soils nice and healthy that grows healthy plants healthy plants grow healthy animals healthy animals grow healthy people absolutely it's just a chain reaction but it all starts in the soil if we mistreat our soil and spraying all this stuff on and killing it and telling it and rolling up always having bare dirt showing you're you're going to struggle yeah you're going to struggle i mean mother nature's going to win in the end you're going to get burned you're going to get burned keep that soil covered absolutely so on our farm and if you so happen to want to swing down on our farm man you're gonna you take a look at that you'll be like whoa whoa what's going on here so why i'm here and why you guys should come to a grazing school like this is so that you can see the way it's supposed to be and you've been at this on this farm for 20 to 30 years yeah how many years have you been farming here uh well this year we're sitting in the yard of airbnb right here and this is where i grew up in this old house and so i've been here since 1965. okay um i've always been in this area but i started actively farming once i got my own job and bought some land that started in about 19. about 1985 somewhere in there so it's been a while yeah it's been a bit yeah so i was nine so i've got a long way to go man and when you can pick somebody's brain that has that amount of experience and knowledge it's not only just telling you need to do this it's telling you i did this and it was the wrong thing to do yeah here's what you need to do and that's why a lot of people come to the school is they want to see the right way to put in the water the fence look at the right kind of cattle that we're trying to build up get the right kind of animals the docility and how to pick out those animals how to look at the ground and say okay these are plants that i don't want these are the ones that i do how do i get rid of them there's just a whole lot of stuff in here i mean people walked into that cow herd on thursday afternoon and all you could hear is this rip rip…