How Do You Know You Do A Good Job?

If Bud Williams was even half right with his opinion that "95% of the people who work cattle for a living, have no idea how cattle really work" would mean that roughly half of the ranchers and hired hands have never seen cattle worked right. With that in mind, how sure are you that you are really doing a good job handling cattle? If you haven't seen cattle worked in the right way, then how can you get a clue you aren't doing it as well as you could?

The following is a short list of common problems. If you don't have any of these problems, congratulations, you are doing an excellent job. If you have fewer than four of these problems on a regular basis, you are doing a fairly good job. If you have more than half of these problems, you may be getting the job done, but thinking you are doing a good job is only your ego talking.

1) If you blame the cattle for how they react to you 
2) Your cattle won't stay where you put them
3) You have a lot of herd quitters
4) Cattle won't stay paired when you are driving them
5) Cattle are wild in the pens
6) Cattle won't go by you when sorting
7) You need rattle paddles or flags to sort cattle
8) Cattle can't find the gate
9) Cattle want to run off instead of going into the pens
10) You have areas where it is a foregone conclusion the cattle are going to give you a problem

The first step in getting better at the job is realizing that nearly everything they do is a direct response to how we are handling them in that situation. The second step is realizing that it is often possible to get the reaction you want out of a cow without putting pressure directly on the cow, and learn how to get the desired response without applying more pressure. There are plenty of websites and videos on the internet to help you get started on the right path.

Another difficult area for ranchers to really know how good a job they are doing is in grass management. Once again, if you are only comparing your pastures to your neighbors, chances are you have no idea of how much grass you could really have. NRCS has  drastically changing their grazing recommendations in the last few years as demonstrated in this video.  

The point to all of this is we are all biased to think we are doing a good job on the ranch. But how much room do we have to drastically improve the quality of our work?

It is possible for most ranches to increase the pounds of beef they produce per animal by simply changing the way they handle their cattle. This actually requires less labor than what they are doing now to increase their profits.

The majority of ranches could also increase forage production enough to increase stocking rates by changing how they graze. While the average ranch reduced stocking rates and fed more supplement, other  ranches managed to actually increase forage enough to increase stocking rates while feeding no supplemental feed.

While many ranches judge their overall performance on average weaning weights, the most successful ranches strive for the most pounds of beef marketed per acre. Do you still think you are doing a good job on your ranch? If you think you have room for improvement, visit Natural Cattle Handling for more information as well as other educational links.

Calculating the cost/benefit of the Keyline Plow

Before visiting the link from the Circle Ranch on using the Keyline Plow, here are some things to think about in order to see the financial benefits as many people can see the benefits, but think it is too expensive. Yet these same people are busy making diversion dams and dirt tanks which help some, but basically are diverting water or holding it so it can water a few cow and evaporate.

The cost of sub soiling with the Keyline Plow runs $20 an acre, which does sound expensive, until you compare the results. $20,000 put into subsoiling 1,000 acres of ground with scattered grass and forbes will explode with the first one inch rain (remember, that 1,000 acres just received 27,154,000 gallons of water which would have run off). This explosion of grass and forbes will slow the water and make each subsequent rain be more effective.

Grazed properly this can amount to 7 to 9 days of feed for 1,000 cows, or 7,000 grazing days the first year. If one continues to graze properly, the feed will continue to improve for several years and continue to hold its feed value (not to mention the wildlife habitat it creates.) Now lets compare what that same $20,000 will bring with conventional uses.

Dirt Tanks- Will hold water for cattle without producing feed. They will also evaporate water (at a pan evaporation rate of 88” or 55 gallons per square foot) lose 2,395,800 per acre. Figuring the cost of water being .005 cents per gallon, one is basically throwing away $11,979 worth of water per every acre of water held in dirt tanks. If you have 100 acres of water in dirt tanks, you are basically throwing away $1,197,900 worth of water each year.

Diversion dams- These will create some feed growth but basically still divert billions of gallons of water off the ranch rather than into the ground. Many also have a tendency to wash out and need to be repaired after a few years.

Hay- At $230 A 1,000 pound cow eating 3.5% of her body weight will eat 35 pounds of hay a day. To feed 1,000 cows per day would take 17 bales per day. $20,000 will (almost) buy 87 bales of hay which would feed 1,000 cows five days.

This means that spending $20,000 to run a Keyline Plow in the proper areas your money produces nearly twice the actual benefit of hay. While it would be nearly impossible to calculate the true value of diversion dams, they are of minimal benefit as they are still diverting water off your ranch, rather than putting it into the ground. Dirt tanks have some benefit if you do not have pump-able water, but otherwise you are letting millions of dollars worth of water blow away in the wind.

Now that you have an idea of the cost/benefit ratio of the Keyline plow, take a look and see what they have done with it on the Circle Ranch in far west Texas!

Desert Garden(s) of Eden

This video produced by the the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory in collaboration with several northern Mexico ranchers shows just how much grass and diversity can be created in a desert environment. All it takes is asking the simple question of "Why is grass disappearing?"

Scientific Evidence Behind Holistic Managed Grazing

Despite millions of acres of evidence supporting it, our colleges and universities have a tendency to ignore holistic planned grazing, or dismiss it as a hoax.  However Dr. Richard Teague (PHD)  of Texas A &M
not only has researched multi-paddock, planned grazing, he has done a three county, multi-ranch study. This study not only shows the benefits, it also points out the reasons why previous university studies did not work. 

Dr. Teague sent me pdf files of his study to post. Part one is here. Part two is here.

Differences Between Conventional Cattle Placment and Placing to Graze As a Herd

 In conventional placing, we hold the cattle in one place until they are grazing in different directions. This means that, while the cattle are in the same area, they spread out which also spreads out the herd impact. In placing cattle for holistic, planned grazing, the object is to have the cattle mimic a herd. To do this the cattle need to be as close together as feed and terrain will allow, while grazing in the same direction to maximize herd impact and reduce selective grazing.

To do this we must first move the cattle with the least amount of stress as possible, then slow down the front of the herd until they start grazing and allow the rest of the cattle to catch up. While we can help the cattle in the back catch up, we need to let it all happen. Much of the time it will only take four or five grazing stops to have the cattle acting as a herd and grazing out together, and going to water together.

While on the Ganaderia Valle Colombia Ranch in Mexico we were working on several sets of cattle the first two days rather than concentrating on just one group. We started working on the cattle in this video on Wednesday, and by Friday they were beginning to come together as a herd. At the end of the video you will notice the cattle coming up and grazing towards the cattle at the lead and grazing as a herd.

In another few moves they will have all of the cattle grazing tightly together and be able to graze where they want, when they want, without building more fence while having their herd impact more concentrated than they do in their smaller pastures in the valley floor.

Innovative Fence Idea for Cell Grazing

Anyone who has ever ran more than two bulls is familiar with how much fence a couple of bulls can tear out. While at the Ganaderia Valle Colombia ranch in Mexico last week, Octavio Bermudez showed me how they keep the bulls from tearing up the fences at the cell centers. It is a slick method that could be used in other areas.

Beyond Stockmanship At Rancho Las Damas

The problem I was asked to solve is one of the reasons many cattlemen do not want to try holistic, planned grazing. During calving season the cows would leave their calves behind on the daily pasture changes, resulting in a loss of 15 to 20% of the calves. As it turned out, this was a simple problem to solve. This short (2:36 ) video shows how dramatically you can change cattle behavior in a short five days.

 One of the benefits of instilling herd instinct in your cattle is that it allows you to create herd impact in areas cattle ignore without going to the time and expense of putting up and tearing down additional fence. The cattle in the picture below were placed there the night before, and spent the night because they wanted to, not because they were fenced in.

While what was accomplished with the cattle is impressive, even more impressive is the amount of forage they have created in only eight years, with nearly half of that being under drought conditions. Before beginning their grazing program, the ranch looked like their neighbor's did in the picture below.

This is what most people assume the desert should look like. Because this is what we have seen land in desert regions look for most, if not all of our lives, we wrongly assume this is what this land is supposed to look like. When talking to old timers, and people whose families have ranched here for generations, we discover that the Chihuahua desert was an immense grasslands up until the last hundred years. Then we started building fences, adding windmills and letting cattle "take care" of themselves.

With a change in grazing patterns, it does not take long for the desert to turn into lush grasslands like the picture below. Alejandro Carrillo was explaining how this grass he is standing in looked exactly like the picture above less than eight years ago. His grazing techniques were the only tools used. No plows or seeds planted other than what the cattle have done.

Looking straight down into the grass, you can't see the ground.

However when you trample the grass down and part it you can see how much seed is getting to the ground.

Occasionally Alejandro feeds cattle, or spreads straw to create litter. The picture below is of a spot where he fed a few bales earlier this year. You read that correctly, this was bare ground only a few months before this picture was taken.

The above results were obtained without the use of any mechanical equipment or seed. The only fertilizer used was that provided by the cattle. While looking at this I was thinking of the number of ranches that will feed calves in a set of pens all winter. Wouldn't it make more sense to put a set of foamed, flat proof tires on your pickup and feed them in a different spot every day? Doing that would allow you to put the gains on your calves while basically getting paid to create more grass!

One other thing which has been happening is the reduction of brush and mesquite without using herbicides. As the grasses get thicker, they are literally choking out the woody plants and killing them as in the picture below. Why would you want to control brush by spending money and time on burning expensive fuel to pull equipment or spraying chemicals which are bad for the environment when you can do it all by simply changing your grazing methods?

The amazing thing about all of this is that the seed is already in the ground. All it needs is enough animal impact and a little rain. Alejandro has been consistently adding grass to Las Damas, even through the drought of the last several years. The diversity of grasses is incredible, including the sprangletop he is pointing out in the picture below.

 If you are ranching in an arid, brittle environment, you could be transforming your ranch into one similar to the Rancho Las Damas.  For more information on how to accomplish this, visit Holistic Management International and the Savory Institute. Contact me if you would like to hold a stockmanship school on your ranch.