 First of all, when I retired from practice about 10 years ago, something like that, I tried to drop the doctor, because all that does when you retire is just make things cost more. And I tried to get rid of it. But nobody, they'd say, where's Bob Kincaid? I don't know any Bob Kincaid. So I tried and tried, and I could never get rid of it. So I changed from doctor to doc. And most of the young people think that that's just a moniker. They don't know, and I like it that way. I hate to go to these sort of things. I practice food animal medicine, cattle, hogs, sheep, but mainly cattle, and then feeder cattle is a specialty at the end. Go to something like this, and pardon me, ladies, but some little gray-haired lady comes up and says, oh, you're a veterinarian, and I've got Phi Phi and whatever, and I don't know which end, Phi Phi whatever. But I finally found the answer to that. I said, ma'am, I've doctored for 30 years what you eat. Most of them, I might as well threw a five-gallon bucket of water on them. Anyway, let's get started. The other day I was thinking about things, which I do a whole lot when you get older. And I thought that I thought that I had an original thought. And if you look through the world, there's not many original thoughts, but I really thought I had one. And it was this. If you could read that, that says the rumen is to the cow as the soil is to the plant. That's pretty obvious when you think about it, but I thought that was an original idea. It's a symbiotic relationship. Everybody wins in a symbiotic relationship. In this, I got thinking, how does that work? Well, the rumen and the soil, the way they're the same is they're the home. They're the structure. They're the house. Four for bugs. We're going to just try to leave it that simple. In the rumen, I'm talking about the protozoan, the rickettsia, all the billions of bacteria, the amoeba, everything in the rumen. In the soil, when I say bugs, I'm talking about everything from the insects, especially like the dung beetles and whatever, earthworms on down to microzoa, all the bacteria, the fungi, everything in the soil. So when we say bugs in both these, that's what we're talking about. So the soil and the rumen, they provide the place for the bugs. What do the bugs do? And you're probably saying, what's this got to do with mob grazing? Well, it's basic, basic. And you need to get this understood to be a good mob grazer. Anyway, the bugs in the cow. The cow, if you take the rumen out, and yeah, there's four stomachs, but the other's one of them's a real stomach, and the other three do different things. But the rumen, the main deal, you take it out and you've got a monogastric. You've got a pig, or a human. But the rumen, the cow doesn't, yeah, she eats, she grazes the grass, but she doesn't get much good out of that herself. She eats the grass, she's providing food for the bugs. The bugs eat the grass, tear up the grass, digest it, and the cow digest the bugs. That's way oversimplified, but that's basically the way it works. And you've got to keep that in your head. In the soil, we've forgotten, but the bugs, as my friend here, Mark Bader, said yesterday, they don't have any teeth, but they have acids. And soil, when you really think about it, devoid of life is nothing but sand, finely ground rock. You get it so fine and packed together, it's clay. But basically, that's what it is. It's minerals. The bugs go out with the acids, break down some of the minerals in this gravel, sand, we're going to call it soil. They break it down, and they make it available to the plant. I'm going to give you just one little example, but the microzoa, can't think of the lady's name. She's kind of the known microzoa lady. Anybody call that off? She writes several articles. But these things, the real fine filament, you've got to look under a microscope. But they go out several feet, in some cases, hundreds of feet, into the soil. And they pick up nutrients, whatever. One of the things they do is they bring back phosphates. They bring back phosphorus. And they come to the plant, and they trade it. They say, here, take this phosphorus. And the plant says, fine, thank you. Here's some sugar. Go get me some more. And they exchange. That's a symbiotic relationship. They're both gaining. Anyway, there's thousands and thousands, more than we know about, and more than we can grasp at the moment of these relationships between the bugs in the cow, and the bugs in the soil. They do all kinds of stuff. And we'll get on to some of the other, in mob grazing, how this enhances it. But anyway, what happened, and what's happened to agriculture that's bad, is we, as mankind, come along, and honestly, quite by accident, but we tried to take the bugs out of the equation. And at the end of the Second World War, there was huge munition plants. They made gunpowder, explosives for U.S. forces and all the allied forces in the war. War's over. We don't need explosives. We're through blowing up people in the world. What are we gonna do with this? Well, somebody come up with a bright idea that, gosh, you take a little bit of stuff out here, nitrates, phosphates scattered on the ground, and these plants grow better. Here came the fertilizer. We come over here and we said, hey, we don't need these bugs. We can feed that plant directly. At that time, in relation to things, I mean, fertilizer was cheap. Now, we seem to, as a group, I don't know if we wanna call ourselves green or whatever, but as a group, we look at these big corporations and we look at the fertilizer people and stuff and the seed people as evil. Their people is like us. They see an opportunity to do something cheaper, more economical, to make more money, and they do it. That's how the fertilizer thing got started. They weren't evil. They just wanted to sell it. And you try to protect what you're doing and so here we are today. So that's how the fertilizer thing got started, just somebody trying to take an opportunity. In the cow, we tried to get rid of the bugs and you could almost, say, bypass the rumen and make her a monogastric, make her a pig. And this all started also about the end of the war that was fell and named Earl Brookover. And he's kind of the godfather of the feedlot industry and he's almost worshiped in Garden City, Kansas. But he was a young man. He lived in a valley in Colorado and he and his neighbors and all the one thing in that valley they could grow oats. I mean, lots of oats and grow them good and big yield and all this. Problem was, there wasn't any railroad come close to them. They had a heck of a time getting the oats out of the valley to the railroad to sell them. Well, Earl was an enterprising young man like this young man here on the front row and he said, hmm, we got a lot of cattle here too. So he took the cattle, put them in a lot and started feeding them the oats. They fattened up real good and he drove the cattle to the railhead, shipped them Chicago and killed them and made money. There was the beginning of the feedlot industry. People in the valley said, hey, that's pretty good. So they started doing that. Earl moved to Garden City, Kansas. It's the only city I know of has got a feed yard almost right in the middle of it. I don't know any place else in the United States that would tolerate that, but there wouldn't be any Garden City if there wasn't any feed yards to start with. And there's IVP or what used to be IVP is JBS, but all these big packing plants all around it and everything. So that's both of these industries. And what we tried to do was get rid of the bugs and make a monogastric out of the cow. And we, you know, we don't need to, well, we can put all this stuff in there and do it ourselves. Well, things changed. These plants, they weren't near as healthy because remember back there we were talking about the microzoa? Instead of just bringing phosphates, instead of just bringing food, they also brought a whole lot of other minerals. They enabled that plant to produce a lot of immunity, to be resistant to a lot of plant diseases, to a lot of organisms that invaded it. They even have kind of a warning system that says, hey, these nematodes are coming. And that plant would put out more cellulitic material, pull the sugar kind of out of the roots up so that nematode comes along and says, ah, it ain't worth trying to eat that thing. It's too tough and not enough sugar and it goes on. And there was this whole feedbacks, symbiotic thing. We got rid of that. And there's always unintended consequences when you mess around with mother nature. And so we get all these plants that they got no resistance. So we got to come up with herbicides and we got to come up with insecticides and we got, you know, to protect and in the cattle. You know, they're all these high grains. And again, Mark Bader, I guess we went into all kinds of stuff about acidosis and alkalosis and disease and everything. When you really get down to this, there's a quote and you all have probably read this somewhere and I practiced medicine for 30 years. So this was really hard for me to accept. But there is no such thing as disease. Carry that in the back of your mind. No such thing as disease. There's only deficiencies and toxicities or deficiencies and too much of something or too little of something. And that's when you get things out of balance. When you mess around with mother nature, you get disease, plants, animals, whatever. Anyway, you know, I told you, I thought this was an original thought. And I was pretty proud of myself. I'd done all this stuff. One of the things that I kind of like to do is read these ancient guys, you know, the Greek philosophers and whatever. And this internet's all new and everything, but I love it because I just get lost and spend days there reading about things. But anyway, I had this thing pulled up quotes by Aristotle and I'm reading down through there. Now Aristotle was born 2,350 years ago, approximately. Now I figured he wasn't very smart until he got about 50. So I'm gonna take off 50 years. But 2,300 years ago, approximately very close, that's 300 years before Christ was born. Aristotle said, the soil is the stomach of the plant. Now he'd not say that better than I did. And he said it 2,300 years ago. How dumb are we? How long does it take us to learn something, to quit messing around with Mother Nature and do what she wants? Aristotle also said one other thing. He said if there's two ways to do something, I'm not, I don't have this quote down quite like I said, but if there's two ways to do something and one of them's better than the other, that one is probably nature's way. So there was two ways to grow cows and two ways to grow plants and one of them was our way and one of them's Mother Nature's way. And I think I've got you convinced that Mother Nature's way is the best. I wanted to talk about a few other things that are out here on my radar. You're all in here, we're all in the same sort of thing. We're kind of out here in a field that's relatively new. It ought to, in some ways it's the oldest field, but anyway, it's new to us. I want you to keep your ears open to a thing called carbon char or biochar. And that's essentially like making charcoal. But I've started reading on this stuff and we're all with mob grazing. We'll get there, I promise. We're trying to increase our productivity of our soil. Now what we're really trying to do is we're to increase our productivity. Bugs, we're trying to put the bugs back in the soil. We're trying to get them to work. That's what we're really trying to do. That's how this fellow, Ian Mitchell-Ines, I think over in South Africa, it's really crazy. It's unbelievable. But he's running as the twice or three times as many cattle on one third of his ranch as he was, and friend here, eight times the production of what his father, grandfather, neighbors, everybody else was doing. Those are the possibilities with mob grazing. But those possibilities are possible because of bugs. Remember bugs. If you don't remember anything else today, that's what you're trying to do. Okay, anyway, there's carbon char. Some of you may have read articles about the, let's see, it's called Negro Perta, meaning black soil. And it was discovered several years ago, 10, 15, in the central Amazon jungle. If you know anything about rainforest, they got topsoil about like most of Missouri, about that thick, and you get rid of the forest and you got nothing. These people, over 2,000 years ago, so they must have listened to Aristotle. They somehow charred carbon, we don't know how, and all that really is is you're burning a carbon source in the absence of oxygen. You're driving off all the gases, all the other things to where you're left with the carbon and the minerals. You work that down into the soil and apparently it just keeps working deeper. One gram of carbon char is about that much on my thumb. One gram has the surface area of two tennis courts. And that's, you gotta grasp that. One gram, two tennis courts. What that means is you get that carbon in your soil and what is organic matter except carbon? But you get that in the soil. When it rains, I don't know this, but I've been told that if you could get a ton of carbon char in your soil, you can hold six inches of rain. Now, what if you had that this spring early when we had some rain and you held that and it was able to feed off slowly all summer long? You talk about drought-proofing your ranch, which is all the magazines got these articles how to drought-proof. There's real drought-proofing. Now, the only problem is, the only way I can figure out right now, I can make about 35 pounds of carbon char every six hours. So, there's a lot of work to do here, but keep your eyes open to that. That is something you can improve your soil quickly. You're doing it slowly with mob grazing, but that the other field is composting. Everybody thinks composting, they think of the suburbanite and a little barrel in the back and he throws the scraps in the leaves and turns it on and on. That's composting. But just a deal I went to with the old Ron to haul him down there to South of California. These were pretty much turkey growers. And there's a hatchery and whatever they're also. Anyway, they all banded together, because they're getting, I think it's the phosphates that build up in the soil when you put on too much turkey litter or you put on too much cow manure or whatever. So they needed to figure something to do with all this stuff, you know? They couldn't just put it on raw. Well, they worked around, found some people. Anyway, there's a great big tanker car that's like on a railroad, you know, what haul fluids? And they cut both ends out of it and they essentially made a turning composter. But I mean, it does tons and they all bring in kind of like death in all guys. Maybe they weren't all bad. They developed a few good things, but it's like a big co-op. They all bring in so much litter. There's dead chickens, dead turkeys, bad eggs, all of it, and they figured out how to compost in seven days. They take that, every seven days they got this train car load of compost. Then they all take their shares back out and spread it. Anyway, look into compost, man. Spend some time there, those two things. Before we get on, I wanna come one more thing because I told you that mob grazing in the title was the greatest opportunity in agriculture today. And I really feel that. I'm not very good at all this, but anyway, that's the United States of America, okay? If you take the cattle industry the way it is today, and I used to feed a lot of cattle. I used to buy a lot of cattle, move them and on and on and on, so I put up with this. And you put it in quadrants roughly like this and it varies from time to time and it varies whoever's doing all the statistics, but 60 to 80% of the feeder cattle, the ones we mainly eat are produced in that corner of the United States. Everybody thinks it's up here in the West. Now the West has got really great big herds, but good guys, they need 40 acres per cow-calf unit. These folks need four or five. Anyway, that's where they're produced. Most of these cattle, about 80%, the Ogala Residore. We'll take Nebraska, Kansas, goes down in here in Texas, whatever, 80% of those cattle are fed here. One more line over here. 80% of the beef, mutton, meat produced in the United States is consumed, I think it's within 200, 250 miles of the coastline up and down on the East. Now, wouldn't you just like to have the truck bill, the transportation from here back to here? That's a hell of a profit. Okay, I'm done with my little points. You know, today, the buzz word is mob grazing. The person that introduced it to me is sitting right back there, Greg Judy. And some people say that mob grazing, that moniker, is just an extension. You know, you got, this isn't the US anymore. It's a 10 acre or a 10,000 acre pasture. You put a fence in it, you got two pastures, five acres or 5,000, doesn't matter. You put one fence in it, you're starting to do some kind of managed grazing. Cause you're grazing half of it, it gets to rest, you're grazing the next half. Well, just fast forward that and keep building fences. You know, anyway, you keep cutting it up and cutting it up and cutting it up and it becomes more, you know, we went from managed grazing to managed intensive grazing or MIG, I don't know other names selling in here, but we ended up with what we call mob grazing. There is one big distinction between what we're calling mob grazing and it's a very important distinction. We'll get there between it and managed grazing. But anyway, all this comes. Now, where all this came from, there's this fellow, Alan Savry. Some people say he's Savoy, but you know, you're probably all familiar with him, holistic resource management. And he's the one that talks about looking at everything as a whole. In science, what I grew up, take this one little part and you work on it and this other little part, we weren't getting anywhere. Well, that got us to no bugs and fertilizer and corn, but he's trying to teach everybody to look at it as a whole, the all these symbiotic relationships and leaving it. So if you're interested in mob grazing, first thing you do, read that book, holistic resource management. It's a tough read now. I mean, you'll get bored, you'll get whatever, but read it. But he said in his book that he couldn't, he just couldn't get this to work like it's supposed to. You know, he was basing it all on simple examples of Serengeti. You've all seen the specials on TV of millions of these wilder bees taking off over this big plane, the Serengeti planes, and they move every day and they're eating all this up. And that's the idea. But when he tried to put it on ranches and stuff, things just didn't work like he wanted. He finally pulls this old book called Grass Productivity by this guy, Andrew, he's a Frenchman, Andre Visen. And that again, it's not a great fun read. It's a whole bunch of trials and stuff and goes on. Andre, it's two things that really got me. One, this is in France and it's in the late 30s early, well, it's in the 40s, right after the war. He said, of all the systems in agriculture then, you could get more calories per acre per hectare there, but more calories per unit of land through a grazing operation done, he used the word rationally, not rotation, whatever, but rational grazing. But you get more calories per acre than any other system they knew of then. And not just a few more. I can't remember the big figures, but it was like the best farming deal they had produced 400, 4,000, 4 million, four-something calories. With the cattle, it was six-something. That's one-third more production than any other deal out there then. He called it rational grazing. And I really prefer that term, but mob has caught on and that's what we're gonna use. I'm gonna bring this on out now. The big difference of mob grazing and all other managed grazing is you're working for an effect on the soil. You want to really, let's get the word bugs back up here. I hope this is not as irritable to you all too well. Erase this as it is for me to do it, but the big difference between all grazing and mob grazing is the stimulation of these bugs. When you get the concentration right out here on the ground of your stock, their manure, their urine, their saliva, hair, chaff, everything that falls off of that cow. It's worm food. It's bug food, okay? Cow's got a clove and a hoof. When every time she takes a step, they separate. That's just kind of like a little bitty cultivator. Just moving that plant a little, a little stretch to it. Breaking that soil surface up and that weight pushing down. And what's that doing? Is it saying to those bugs, hey, it's dinner time. There's stuff up here for you to eat. Mineral, urine, all this stuff fell off. Plus, if you got that concentration right, you're eating, and I guess I should go into this right now. If you got that concentration right, now this is a review from Barksdale yesterday, but he drew a better blade of grass than I did. But this grass, when it grows, sunlight hits it first up here, it's pulling minerals and stuff here, and I could go into all this physiology in a million a little bit, but nonetheless, you want that cow to eat that top third. You want her to tromp this middle third in the ground, worm food, and you want to leave this bottom third for this plant to come back. That top third has got the most sugar, the bottom third's got the most protein, and the middle is a mix. So see, you're giving a balanced diet to the bugs. Okay? Anyway, you're out here, you've woke up the bugs with the trompin' and said, come on up and eat. They've got the laid over plant, start decay, start to eat on. They've got all the off all everything from the cow. Now you've got to get enough concentration to get this effect. So when you took this 10 acres or 10,000 and cut it in half, you're not gonna get that effect. You're gonna get a little more productivity. Our NRCS and ASCS and stuff out here, they say if you're really gonna be doing some rotational grazing, you need about eight paddocks, and that's okay, but you really need a lot more paddocks. If somebody would, or just kind of like in church pass these around, but this is an aerial photo picture of our farm, and there's 57 paddocks there. And I don't know what the magic number is. In this area, and it'll vary a lot in different areas, but in this area, it's kind of a consensus. I don't think there's any been professors have said this, but you need about 30, 35 rest days before you go back and graze. So to me, you need at least 35 paddocks. But anyway, you've got to get this concentration. And don't any of you new ones in mob grazing, there was an article some time ago, I think in Missouri rule list of a trial down here in Missouri and this guy says mob grazing doesn't work, it's no good. He had a million pounds of cattle. That's a thousand, thousand pound cows for a million pounds on one acre for one day. And he says this stuff doesn't work. And you'll read in other places where people are got a half million pounds. Now, when they say a half million pounds per acre, they're talking about their concentration. That's what they've got out here. They may have 10 acres, so they got five million pounds of livestock on it. But they're not gonna leave them there all day. They're gonna put them there two hours. Sometimes even an hour. Now, I don't use those concentrations because I'm not young and vigorous and motivated enough to get out there and move them over two hours. My friend Greg, he's got these interns. Well, hell, they gotta have something to do, so move them over 15 minutes, you know, and that's okay. But you got a, okay. A point I want to make here. As a presentation, this Mitchell Lyons was at and it was his young lady there. And she kept pestering him and pestering him because she wanted a cookbook, A, B, C. I take X number of cows, I put them on X number of acres and I move them in so many hours. She wanted that. And he was really nice and trying to be nice to her. And I finally interrupted and I said, ma'am, there ain't no cookbook. It's kind of like my wife making rolls or whatever, you know? If it's cold outside, it takes longer for the stuff to rise and if it's hot, the razor's too quick and on and on and on. Every day is different. Every farm's different. As you get doing this, you'll learn every paddock's a little different. And what you gotta do is develop the grazer's eye and that's the art. I don't want to say science because that's all major and everything, but that's the art of this mob grazing. You gotta develop that eye. And that eye is, did we eat roughly a third? And that's gonna happen on every plant. Did we tromple about a third of the grass out here? Did we leave about a third of the grass? And you'll develop that. That's all I can tell you. I did, took me about two years. The other big thing that you gotta get in this, you know, we're talking about a million pounds and all that, this time factor of moving them. I can tell you from experience, now this is, I started manage grazing seven, eight years ago. I had paddocks from five acres to 20 acres. And as you can see on this thing, I shot to make all these paddocks between four and five acres. But I was improving, but I wasn't making much headway. So this would be, if I still had my cows, we'll get there. But for two years, I really did mob grazing and tried to do it right. But I remember two years ago in the spring, and if you remember two years ago, we got all kinds of rain. I took this 20 acre paddock and I was cutting that thing into about, between probably about two acres. 100 cows, 100 baby calves, was through cabin. And I go back there and four wheeler, going to move my cows this morning. Everything was so green and beautiful and everything. And I topped this little hill that night. We had somewhere between three and six inches of rain. I topped the hill and I mean, the stomach, I just got sick, sick of my stomach. I was like, oh my God. I mean, it's brown. Just about the color of these chairs. You see a little bit of green sticking through here and there. But I said, ah, I've rined. I've rined that. It'll be two years. I don't know how long it'll take for that to come back. That's terrible. And I'm feeling responsible. My cows, they're not out here, they've got it out grazing. They're right on the terrace. This used to be farmland. And because that's the driest place they could stand. I'm sick. I go down, I go down at first. And I'm doing all this at that time with polywire. And my next paddock, you know, I double it. I had maybe two or three built ahead. I just took the center fence out and doubled the size. Because I thought, ah, I don't want to trump any more of that. Well, you know, one mistake leads to another. Anyway, put the cows out there. And you know, I'm feeling a little bit worried about them. They're out there grazing. They look happy. And I'm like, you know, worse thing, folks, this was right along Route J. It's a main black top, sorry, area. So all my neighbors have been kind of white-eyed and me and kind of, you know, Doc, he's a good old guy. But he's over here. They're all going to see this. They're all going to laugh at me. You know, I just feel terrible. Well, you don't want to make any judgments in this. We go on. At that time, I was probably on a 35, 40-day rotation. So I kind of forgot about this. But I just knew when I come back, I'd skip that area. Well, I come back. I can't even pick that area out. I wish I'd left some kind of markers. Because, you know, it's all a polywire. But to the best of my ability to see, the best grass I had, the taller, the more the spacing was closer, the variety of plants in it was more diverse. All these things I wanted to try to do, I did. But I thought, oh, hell, you know, I mean, that was, I thought I'd really messed up. And I remember saying to myself, well, hell, I'm just going to tromp the hell out of it from now. You know, the heck with it. Anyway, when you're rotational grazing, we'll get into, or mob grazing, we'll get into the three most important things. But the last one of those is time. And since we're here and I'm kind of disorganized, the time in the paddock, that's what visen passed on. You know, we all stand on somebody's shoulders. We all learn a little here from this guy and that guy. And we're kind of like walking through a crowd from shoulder to shoulder in life. Or we should be every now and then we fall off and we got to crawl back up somebody and get up there. But that's how we do it. A visen was a shoulder for savory on this time thing. Because savory was like, how long do I graze it? How many? All this. But he wasn't thinking about how long should it rest. And that you can mess up on the time you leave the cows in the paddock. You can tromp this whole thing in like I did in the mud. And that's a lot better than leaving them there in good weather and eating that whole thing. Or bailing it, whatever. It's a lot better to tromp it in than it is to overeat it. But whatever, even if you overeat it, eat a little too much. That's important. But it's not nearly as important as the rest time. The time you're away from the grass. Visen made another statement that's like, I don't know if any of y'all ever took geometry, theorems. You know, in geometry a theorem is something that holds true no matter what. That's true. And you got to pick out theorems in life. They're your guiding star. You know, I'm headed there no matter what. Anyway, one of my theorems, Visen said it, but one cow on a paddock, acre, ten acres, whatever your ranch is, one cow in that for a whole grazing season, same area, will kill thousands, hundreds if not thousands of plants. Now the reason that is, this plant, you eat this, tromp this, this, it pulls whatever reserves are left down into the ground. It's kind of like recovery time for an athlete. It recovers and it prepares, and then it shoots right back up. If you graze right, it'll shoot back up taller than it was before. It shoots right back up. Remember, this is the sugar. This is the sweet part. Well, that one cow has been walking around there all, all time. And you all have run cows. You watch them and they'll be roughly the same place every day. Or if it's a great big ranch, they'll be roughly in the same area. Whatever it takes to make their rotation, they'll be back that same area about the same time. And the reason is, they found these few, three or four different varieties of plants, or maybe just one, they love, they really like. Like you and I sitting down at the smorgasbord, I'm going to take this, you're going to take that, but that one cow loves it. She comes back and bites that off, and then she comes back and bites it off again two days later. And the plant keeps trying to come up and come up and come up and finds his eye with it. Goodbye. Dyes. All these other plants, that one even becomes more desirable because all the other plants are maturing and they're getting older and they're getting less digestible and they're getting, you know, not only is she not like them when they were young and tender, she doesn't like them for sure now. So she kills hundreds, if not thousands of plants. But, Bison said, you put 1,000 cows on that same paddock for one day, tromping into the mud, and you will not kill a single plant. Now that's a theorem, that's a truth. Keep it in your mind. On my place, we call it the two-day rule. No matter what, whether I've overgrazed it, undergrazed it, whatever I've done, two days they move. That's me, okay? In mob grazing, or in all the grazing, there's three things. You know, the first thing is your herd size. How many cows you got? Might have two cows, might have 2,000. Whatever you're grazing. But you got a herd size. And for most, that's going to stay the same. You know, you're going to have incremental gains, hopefully, each day. But you're not going to fool with that much. You're going to leave the herd size the same. The second thing you got to mess with is paddock size. I'd recommend that any of you that are just starting, try to get a hot wire somewhere down through the pasture, whatever that you can set up, that you can hook the polywire to. And for the first year or so, do it temporarily. So you kind of learn your place, how you really want to fence it. I made a lot of mistakes on this. But I'm old and lazy, and I don't like, you know, polywire is wonderful to string it out on 70-degree day, a little breeze blowing, sun shining. That's wonderful. But when it's sleetin' and it's 30 degrees and it's cold, I'm too damn old. So that's all one high tensile strand in that farm. But anyway, you want to get this thing strung out. For instance, I don't care if you've got a ridge run in north and south or east or west, we don't have two level spots on the farm. One of them the barn sets on, and the other one the house sets on, everything else is either going up or down. Which are where that ridge runs, you will find that the cows, if you run your paddock over the ridge, one side or the other, that ridge, they're going to graze a lot more than the other. More sunshine over here, it's sweeter, I don't know. But they'll graze it. You're a lot better to run your fence down the top of the ridge so that maybe this is the side they don't like, but it's all the side they don't like, so they can't select. They'll eat that. But it's all the same, so they eat it a lot more even. And you'll find places on your farm that are a lot more fertile than others. Cows, no dummy. The grass there is a lot better. You need to try to fence these paddocks where they match the fertility, they match the lay of the land. That's difficult, but you can get along. Okay, let's talk about paddock size. But the most important thing you control is the time. And that's the time in the paddock and the time away from the paddock. And a point I forgot to mention way back. You know, our government isn't bad. They're doing what they think is right. And you know, for years, the NRCS and the National Forest Service and all this stuff, they've been making the western ranchers and everything less and less cattle, you know, because we don't want to destroy the vegetation. Everything is out here. And again, you know, that's really stupid. But they didn't know any better. But that's that term that Alan Savry said in the United States seemed to him when he came over here that the whole country was understocked and overgrazed. Well, when I'm talking about the one cow in the paddock for a season killing hundreds of plants, that's understocked and overgrazed. What you want, if anything, is overstocked and undergrazed. Because all of that plant that you don't eat you want to try to eat enough of it to keep it vegetative but don't get into the horse race of trying to get all the seed heads. Mature grass has got more, the cow gained better on it than this lush spring grass. I think Greg's going to cover a bunch of that tomorrow about, you know, how you try to manage your grass. But anyway, we'll get into that a little bit. But the third thing is the time. And on mine, you know, they have, I rotate faster in the spring. You know, my paddock's roughly, roughly 100 cows. I'm going to move about every 12 hours. As it gets more and more mature, you know, go to 24, 36, never over 48. And you say, why am I on 12 hours? Well, I'm 70 years old. And wife and I, we got 12 grandkids. There's always a ballgame. There's always a recital. There's always something. And I want to do this and I want to do it right and I want to build up the farm. But my lifestyle comes first. You got to think about that yourselves. You know, what can you devote to this? If you're young and broke and nothing else to do, you'd move the damn things over 30 minutes. That's okay. But if you're not, you're like me. I try to make it 12 hours. That's another one of my theorems. I'm going to make it work on that. Anyway, you'll learn, you'll develop that eye. But remember, the rest is so much more important than the amount of time you grazed it. And we all, that seemed like an oxymoron. It ought to be the other way around, but it's not. You can do more harm coming back to that grass too soon than you'll ever do overgrazing it or over-tromping it or whatever. Okay, you got the three main things. How are we doing on time? Don't have much left. In my map there you got, if you look that thing over closely, if you're trying to set up, I don't like lanes. I've had them when I was doing this temporary thing one long and keep, you know, back and forth. I try to design mine with as few lanes as possible. And what you might call lanes that are there, they're only used one at the most two days. And then cows are not back there for another roughly 50 days. Maybe in the spring, maybe 25, 30 days when it's growing real fast and you're rotating fast. One point I want to make here, you know, I said a while ago, don't be afraid of that mature grass. How many of you grazed cattle through this drought this summer? Okay. Did you notice if you were rotating and you're doing it right? I come back, my wife got tired of me saying that. Okay. I said, I can't believe. Now my cows didn't get fat, but the condition these cows are staying in. There's about two inches of green down here at the bottom and the rest is all brown. It's dead. I just thought straw might be better. That's what I thought. Anyway, the cows stayed in good condition and the calves, I think the cows are given the highest butter fat, the richest milk, maybe not the volume, but the richest milk they've ever gave. The calves were fat, growing, doing good. And they couldn't graze but 10, 12 hours a day because they spent all day in the shade. You know, they're coming out about sundown and they're going back in about sun up. That's the way it was. But they really did good. And the other thing, I go back and look at this paddock and they didn't eat near the volume of grass. You know, when you're lush and green out here, you know, you graze this paddock and if you overdid it a little bit, they've reached under the fence some and that's a no-no tells you you've got to move quicker. You can see a big difference. This summer and I rotate them. I mean, you can see a difference. You know, they're tromped a little more over here and whatever, but not nearly that big a difference. So don't be afraid of that mature grass. They did wonderful. The other great thing about the drought and doing this when you've done it a while and you get to where you can read it, I told my wife, guys, I think it's sometime in the middle of June when it was really starting to get dry and I said, well, if we don't have any rain, not a drop all summer long. I said, we can go to the first September, but that's it. You know, I'll be done. We had just a touch of rain and everything. We went to September the 10th. Now, I'm pretty proud of that estimate. By September the 20th, somebody else on my cows made that decision. I'm not going out here and buy the 80 and 100 dollar hay and truthfully, my cows are all about like me. You know, they were getting old. So it's time to do something different. So anyway, that was my choice at the end of that. But I was just astounded at how we went through the drought and I think a lot of that was to do with just the two years of the mob grazing that I'd done. But the big thing about mob grazing, all this other grazing we're doing, you're still to make it look nice, you're going to be clipping pastures, maybe fertilizing a little, maybe seeding a little, whatever. But with mob grazing every year, when you do this concentration and you stomp it in and you're, most people has been in wasting two thirds of your feed every time you go through there. You're building that soil. You're building a quarter. Some people claim a half, but you're building at least a quarter of an inch of topsoil every year. And by that, you're putting that much carbon back in the land. You're stimulating more bugs, more life. Whereas you name me any crop system out here, in the normal paradigm that everybody, the corn's being wheat, they lose from an eighth to a quarter of an inch, the good farmers, lose an eighth to a quarter of an inch of topsoil a year. So, you know, I say this is the greatest opportunity. I'm going to make those points in a moment. When you're laying out your pastures and stuff in time, at least in this area, you get out west where it's low humidity and whatever. I remember the feedlot guys telling me, you don't need any shade. Hell, they're all shaded up when they ought to be out there grazing. How many of you people didn't need any shade this summer? You people had cows. Because if you didn't have any shade, you're going to have some dead cows. I mean, where you've got temperatures over 100 and you've got humidity. Now, one thing this summer, it wasn't that humid, but nonetheless, when we have those typical summers, 100 degrees and 90, they've got to have shade. So, if you look at all these, the worst lanes I do have is to let the cattle get back to shade. Now, NRCS and the people, and they're not bad. They're doing what they think's right. But they'll tell you, you've got to have your water source within 6,800 feet. They're not going to turn it any further away because they won't graze that far. Well, I personally think that's BS. That's... In some of these lanes, when I was still doing with Pollywire, cows were over here. They got to come down here, hit this lane, go way over here, go way down there, get shade. You know, get up in the morning, and I see a herd out there grazing. They're concentrated, and they're just going at it. Go over here and have a cup of coffee and talk to the wife and go back. Somebody stole my cows. They're gone. I think the first one goes and 10 minutes, they're all gone. Once shade, stay there all day. You know, 10, 6, 7, night, here comes a cow. They'll have a cup of coffee and they're all back out there grazing again. Hell, I think they'd walk three or four miles if they needed to for water, for shade. You just got to give them that advantage, that possibility. So, don't like shade. I mean, I don't like lanes, so I tried to design it as much as I could where they can get to water and shade. The ridges, all that in our area. You need at least 35 days of rest. One point, don't graze. The same area, the same time every year. You know, this cookbook thing that the young lady wanted to get. When you're rotating a lot of people, well, I want them here October 1st because that's when we're going to work the calves and whatever, and so they work it every year that October 1st. They're here by their corrals and whatever. You don't want to do that because you start favoring one species over another. If we take 35 days, a good way to look at this is okay. Half 35 is 14, 15, pardon me, 17, 18. Anyway, you want to be 17 days if you're here March 1st. Next year, you want to be right here March 17th. You want to get this where you're not in the same paddock, the same area, the same time each year. Another point and that's kind of making me contradict myself. I said I wasn't going to buy any of this expensive hay. But when you really think about it, hay's not expensive. It's against a lot of mob grazers. What do you mean? We want to kick the hay habit and all that. That's okay. You don't want to bail hay on your place. You want to buy hay. Back, I wish I had this research so I could print it out and give it to people. But this was gosh, time gets away. But 20, 30 years ago, when we still had the old John Deere what were they? 500's and 510 bailers. And a big ground bail then weighed 800 to 1,000 pounds at the most. The research then, they took that with the cost of fertilizer 20 years ago. 800 to 1,000 pound bail. And that bail of hay at that time was worth $8 for fertilizer value. So forget the cows. We'd be just kind of like taking the bugs out of the equation. You buy the hay for eight bucks and spread it out on the ground. I mean, whatever you pay. But you got $8 worth of fertilizer value from the hay. Well, today my son-in-law's got a Baylor Gemini. 1,800, 2,000 pound bails. And I have no idea what the multiple is of what fertilizer cost today in relation to what it cost 20 years ago. But I think those big bails are worth $100 of bail. Not to feed the cows. Worm feed, feed the worms. We're all the bail out. But, and if you buy hay, you know, you're going to say, man, I gave $100 for this bail. I want to put it in a racker. I want to stand out here and hand it out. I'm out full of the time. I don't want to waste it. Don't have that attitude. Now, when I started, it's a long story about what, but anyway, I kind of took over management of this place and then married into it and on and on. But when I started, the old fella had lost a calf once. It got caught in a hay rack. It strangled itself, broke a leg, I don't know, back anyway. He'd lost the calf. No hay racks allowed it on the place. Number two, you took the hay and set a bail here. You've all done that sometimes in a storm or whatever. Just set a bail. Did they eat a fourth of it? Maybe a third is the most. Rest of it, it's all Trump, but it's all right in one spot. I agree with him. I don't want any hay racks. But I got a really nice little thing on the back of the tractor. I can unroll one about anywhere. But you unroll that hay, and it's really great when there's snow on the ground. You unroll the hay and you go back out there and look. Here's little bits of hay left. And right side, here's a pile of manure. You know, just strung out. You didn't have to scoop that up. You didn't have to take your loader and scoop it up. You didn't have to take a spreader. It's right there. Might take a pasture here in the summer or in the spring if you wanted to, but just feed the hay over a little further next time. Anyway, it's the value of it and the way you feed it. I'll tell a few story or two. You ladies, you're to blame for all this stuff going on today in agriculture. It's because in my belief, I think the Bible, the teachings of the Bible are all the parables that the stories are meant to teach you something. Well, the parable of Adam and Eve, we were all back. We were hunters and gatherers and we could get all our needs as people in three hours a day. Rest time, we got to sit around and do whatever. But there were some days you couldn't go out and hunt together and if they were too many strung together, you died. We didn't have any reserves. But you women, we went along here and were hunting and you were gathering and you noticed that we were here last year and we ate these berries but as we walked off eating the berries we spit the seeds out here and now we got berries from there to here. So I think that the parable of Eve eating the apple was Eve took up agriculture. She said, okay, some of these seeds are scattered around. We're going to have all kinds of these berries or whatever next year. And she's right. But see, that tide is to the earth. That tide is there. That got us out of the garden of Eden and made us go to work. And you know, we as, yeah, you women started it and then us men we really, I won't use the bad word, we messed it up. We really screwed it up, man. And we cut out the bugs and all. So it's your fault and then when we took over, we messed it up even more. I guess, say what? Yep. God and mother nature and you start messing up with the way they set things. All the unintended consequences. That's right. That's division of labor. I guess I'm about done. But the big thing, you know, I said that mob grazing is the greatest opportunity in the world. I want to share one last thing with you. On our farm three years ago, first mob grazing through make a lot of mistakes. I sold 500 pound calf. We paid $35 an acre on 235 acres lease to ourselves. We paid for the supplements. We paid for the vet stuff as if I were doing it for charge. I paid interest on the cows at what farm credit service they were charging on operating loans at the time. Now, it's really great when you get my age and you're not a young man to have to borrow money. You know, when all that interest coming back to you. But if you got this enterprise, it's got to work. Anyway, figuring all this stuff, I had $237 in a 500 pound calf. The national average for the the top third of the producers in the U.S. produced a 500 pound calf for about $475. The middle third produced a 500 pound calf for about $550. And the top bottom third but the most expensive was just a shade over $600. So I'm going to say it cost $500 for the industry to produce that calf. I produced that calf for less than half of what the industry average is. Young man, that's an opportunity if you could produce steel for half what somebody else produced steel. It's just as good a steel. How much money could you make? You know, I'm not telling you to do this because you're going to have a better farm instead of being able to run 100 cows maybe in 3 years, 5 years, I can run 200 cows if I can be like Ian on the same land, same in cost. Forget all that. Just right now you can do it for half of the industry cost. I really think you'll be able to get down to about 30% when you get really good grazer and all the management's right. Then and this is a big then I think I'm too old to get into this but if you can get into the producing the grass finished beef which takes a lot more expertise than what we're covering here but if you can get into that remember my map of the U.S. and all the transportation what if you can produce that thing right there on the farm I produced the next year kept the calves because a really good system and this is you always got this huge spring flush so if you can we kept them in the spring if you can keep those calves and graze them with your cows that's tough for me to do but anyway if you can graze them with the cows or even if you don't let's have two groups one behind the other whatever you're grazing them I produced that calf for just a shade under $250 and the stairs weighed seven something just a little over seven the heifers weighed just a little over seven the stairs didn't quite weigh eight man I never made honest folks I have fed thousands of cattle I've owned them from 300 pounds to 1250 pounds I never in my whole life made that much money per animal never and never made it as easy anyway that transportation if you get into the meat deal you know there's a hundred dollars at least today probably quite a bit more but a hundred dollars ahead that the industry is absorbing either the producer the background of the feeder the butcher somebody is absorbing this transportation deal you know you produce it right there Greg what do you haul your ten miles from your house to that slaughter five miles you know we got little slaughter deals really nice and anyway you do that there's so many advantages in it and damn it when you when you die you're leaving a place better than the way you found it and that's you know doctor I could talk about goodness good things you know you're doing a really good thing there I get it he may plow it up and put it in beans or whatever but it's better when in your care you're leaving it better than what it was okay questions the lady beat you up the ladies always win okay yes ma'am the blue spots are watered the lady was asking the question of how I get watered all the paddocks and the little blue dots are three waterers uh two inch plastic pipe two things there I'm old when I started I put in these hydrants and just big tanks and take very long be decided I don't like chopping ice you know that's a job and so I looked around got the waterers and whatever and you're gonna say man you got a lot of money in that yeah but you know my son in law just bought a new combine you know I'm gonna put it my decision to sell was based on this every time I moved in this drought you know I tried to leave grass and it came back some but it came back less than it came back earlier kept coming back slower and coming back slower and I said if I make another turn another 50 50s on this then I'm gonna start taking away ground cover I'm gonna start letting the sunlight hit the ground somebody SD who has talked about you know it's sterilized I think you use the term nuke them you start killing the bugs you drive the worms a lot deeper you don't want to lose that mat you know ideally you want to walk out on that grass it wasn't any felt like this in August okay but you want to walk out and it's like you're walking on a real thick carpet spongy you know it's got some give to it and that's what you really want when you got that I mean it's teeming that the bugs are doing their thing and we can talk about cows we can talk about markets we can talk about bugs feed the bugs keep the bugs happy and everything's going to be okay try to cut the bugs out of the deal and you're headed down the wrong road yes sir do these things guys farm walks whatever because I don't know at all Greg doesn't know at all, Mark doesn't know at all nobody does there's too many unknowns but we all know little bits standing on each other's shoulders and we know enough we maybe don't always know why or how but it works so as Nike says just get out there and do it okay