 Hi everyone, my name is Jane Jewett. I have a farm in northeastern Minnesota called Willow Sedge Farm and I know there's this discrepancy between farther east and farther west and whether it's a farm or a ranch. I raise cattle and other things so I call it a farm. So this is a farmer rancher grant project. All right so I also work for the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and the Greenlands Blue Waters Project. And both of those things we deal with sustainable agriculture, Greenlands Blue Waters deals a lot with concerns about soil erosion and water quality and perennial cropping systems. And so all of those things kind of feed into my mindset about why grass fed beef is interesting and important. There are some acknowledgments of people that helped with this project. My three farm cooperators are on top. Edgar Brown, Jake and Lindsay Grass and Bill McMillan. And an interesting thing about this which I'm not sure how relevant it is but it might be is that we're all kind of on the eastern edge of Minnesota. So a particular climate precipitation pattern that may make a difference in what we saw it may not but it's a thing that happened just with who said they would cooperate on this. Troy Salzer Carlton County Extension was a big help, worked a lot with Edgar Brown, helped us with getting access to a livestock scale for those of us that didn't have one. Wayne Martin is the alternative livestock specialist at the University of Minnesota. I told you at my husband and my family in general had to put up with a lot of extra messing around with cattle to get weights and things so I appreciated their help. Kate Clancy and Helene Murray both involved with Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and their previous work on grass fed beef helped inform why I thought this was important. Chris Johnson was on Army Supportive Directors and he circulated the original journal article that got me started on this. And Kate Seager and Betsy Weiland, Minnesota CERICO coordinators have been a great help. The Midwest Perennial Forage Working Group is part of Greenlands Blue Waters and they were a great group of people to bounce ideas off of. Rich Pirag was a co-author on the paper that I mentioned that got me started on this. Laura Payne is a Wisconsin based grass fed beef producer and educator and some of you may know her. She's also a friend and was really helpful in helping me go through some of the concepts on this and interpret results. Okay, so why is grass fed beef production or pasture based beef production? Not necessarily 100% grass fed but pasture based. Why is that important? And Greenlands Blue Waters, we talk about soil erosion a lot, water quality, permanent pasture and hay and pasture will reduce your soil erosion hugely down from what you see in a corn soybean system. And that is important because erosion of soil is loss of wealth from farms, right? And it's also a cost to anybody who's downstream of that. So perennial grasses, these are pictures out of the land institute in Kansas where they grew these in tubes and then pulled them out and washed the soil off the roots and took pictures. And so you've got all these grasses in a perennial sod that are, you know, interlinked with each other and they're living in the ground all the time and soil particles don't have a chance to escape. So this is the paper that Chris Johnson circulated about four years ago, almost five. Comparative life cycle environmental impacts of three beef production strategies in the upper Midwestern United States. Wow, great, huh? So what they did was they looked at feedlot beef, they looked at a system with backgrounding and then into feedlot and at a grass fed beef production system. And they did a lot of calculations on costs of that and productivity of that. And this is a quote from their results section, impacts per live weight kilogram of beef produced were the highest for pasture finished beef for all impact categories and lowest for feedlot finished beef. And I read that and went, how can this be? So I read the paper more and more carefully and found this quote that calves were weaned to pasture calves weaned to pasture in Iowa finish at 505 kilograms in 450 days on a ration of forage and hay. And I ran some calculations and thought, you know, that does not match my experience. I'm doing it quicker. So what that paper was saying is that they were getting about an 1,100 pound live weight animal a year and three months after weaning compared to a feedlot beef finish time of 1,400 pounds of live weight in 10 months. And so the age at weaning was assumed in that paper to be seven months. I realized that a lot of grass fed producers myself included weaned calves at a later age like nine or 10 months. But in that paper, they were standardizing things. So they use seven months. So what they were saying is a total of 22 months of age to get an 1,100 pound grass fed animal and a total of 17 months to get a 1,400 pound animal. So where did these figures come from? I had an opportunity to talk to Rich Pirag who was one of the coauthors on that paper. And he said that they couldn't find published data on grass fed beef productivity. And so they went with a personal communication from the Iowa State University Extension Beef Center which had been collecting some data on grass fed beef and they kind of had some averages and they gave the authors their advice on what numbers to use. So then I started thinking, okay, I think what might be going on here is that there's some confounding because if you're collecting data on grass fed beef production you've got a lot of people who are using heritage beef breeds or they're using some fairly poor pasture. I know some people who are doing grass fed beef production and they're using some pasture that I would call rough pasture and also heritage beef breed at the same time. So that's not the same kind of animal that you've got going into a feedlot. So what if that life cycle analysis used input numbers that you got from modern beef genetics and good pasture with good management? And so I asked Rich that question and he said yes, that would have made a difference in how things shook out in that life cycle analysis because the biggest thing that made grass fed production look environmentally bad was the long length of time that it took to finish those animals. Okay, so again my collaborators, all of them are using some form of managed rotational grazing on improved pastures and the livestock breeds that were being used were mostly modern British breeds but Jake and Lindsay Grass of Grass Meadows Farm had one whole group that was Scottish Highlander which is a smaller frame more heritage type breed. It actually was not my idea to include them in the project but they really, really wanted to and that's why you have collaborators because sometimes things don't go the way you plan but it's better. So here's the bottom line. We've got this chart that shows all of the data points from all of the animals in the study. This line is the average, okay so this is age of Cadillac slaughter in months down here plotted against the carcass weights and this line for feedlot, the vertical line is average age of animals finished in a feedlot 17 months. Average age for grass fed just shy of 22 months and where the circles are is where the carcass weights for those systems are. So this is the average grass fed beef carcass according to that paper and here's the average feedlot carcass. And so these are all the animals from the farms and they kind of fall into some clusters so there's those Scottish Highlander cattle. Here's the Angus Galve from the grass meadows farm and oh yeah there's Edgar Brown's cattle and so those three are all overlapping somewhat with that average grass fed. They have a few animals, you know younger than that, a few animals heavier than that. There's kind of where they all fall together somewhere around that average and then you've got Bill McMillan's animals that are a hundred percent of them are finishing sooner than the grass fed average and also a hundred percent of them are finishing bigger than that and then you've got mine which are finishing earlier but not not as big as Bill's. Okay so there's all those clusters. So there's a few interesting things you start to see there are some patterns but it's kind of hard to look at that way. And so I went with this age weight index which is really simple it's just the carcass weight of the animal in pounds divided by the age and slaughter at months and I was able to calculate that really precisely that age for the animals in this study because I had their birth weights and their slaughter or their birth dates and their slaughter dates and so the numbers are exact for their ages. And so these are the averages from that life cycle analysis paper. If you look at it as an index, the feedlot beef has a 49.7 and the grass fed beef has a 26.5 and here's how that looks on a chart with again all of the data from all the animals in the study. Now as an age weight index that's the number here and I just plotted it against time when they were slaughtered down here just to have something to plot it against. So these reference lines this is the average grass fed age weight index of 26.5 here's the average feedlot and then when you're dividing that carcass weight by the age to get a performance measure Bill McMillan has one animal that's exceeding feedlot performance on grass and alfalfa forage which is pretty amazing because he said he's been told he can't do that. He did it. Let's see another thing to notice here is that the Scottish Highlander these are the blue diamonds all of them are below that average grass fed line and that's important because it supports my contention that heritage breed is a confounding factor so if you're comparing a grass fed system and a feedlot system and you're looking at heritage breeds in the grass fed that's confounding it. You're not comparing the same kind of animals. And another thing that's important here is that there's there's really a range within every farm right and so to me that says there's potential within farms for farmers to improve and push more of their animals into the higher end of their range and then also there's the potential if you have this kind of you know data from several farms that you're looking at to say okay I'm boy I'm here I'm kind of low look at what that guy's doing and start to think about how you can push your whole system towards higher productivity if that's what you want to do. All right and these are the averages per farm on that age weight index again and again you can really see here this is the Highlander cattle they're well below that average grass fed productivity line so clearly the Highlander genetics are are pulling them down in productivity per steer not necessarily per acre but per steer okay and then here Bill McMillan is well above that average. So what do we know now that livestock breed matters when you're comparing grass fed systems to feedlot systems so if you're looking at an environmental kind of analysis like that paper was and comparing you know what's going to happen with grass fed beef versus feedlot beef and the grass fed beef are hampered by having a lot of heritage breeds thrown into that average that's going to make it look worse for grass fed it's not necessarily accurate. The grass fed system has the potential to approach the feedlot system in productivity and I think that's a really important result out of here looking at Bill McMillan's system and he wants me to tell people every time I talk about this that his is a high cost system he's a former dairy producer he's got the dairy infrastructure the silos he makes a lot of alfalfa halage he's on higher value ground down in the Rochester area of Minnesota so he's got a high cost system but you know clearly he's approaching that feedlot productivity and there's room for improvement of grass fed beef production systems and I think that's another important take home message because we sometimes hear that you know there's feedlot productivity there's grass fed productivity and never the twain shall meet and I think clearly with that slide that shows the range of productivity over all these farms that there's lots of room for improvement there's lots of potential for grass fed to get closer to feedlot productivity in terms of how fast those animals finish and how heavy they finish and you know we need to look we need to as researchers as farmers doing on farm research we need to start looking at ways to push that productivity and to not just assume that it can't be done thank you I'll take a couple questions now and then if anyone is interested how much time do I have left ten minutes okay I've got a couple slides showing the economics on the farms to kind of a comparison because how the economics come out is not quite the same as how the environmental considerations come out which is interesting too any question in that paper they didn't count subsidies no what they were looking at was carbon emissions primarily and they were figuring in the kind of the embedded carbon in the corn that was being fed and the fertilizer and pesticides used to produce it and the same for the grass system and actually they were assuming quite a bit of input into the pastures in the grass based system so it was fairly similar to Bill McMillan's high cost production system with regular fertilizer applications and so forth and so all of those were figured in in terms of carbon emissions but they did not subsidies were not part of it and they did not look at soil erosion either at that external cost it's question was did we get live weights and carcass weights and did we see a difference in that at the different ages yeah yeah so we took weights at weaning and at turn out onto pasture and I didn't do a lot with those weights in in the analysis because the weight that I was able to get consistently from everybody all the time was the carcass weight and the live weight so the focus was on that but yeah you know we we meticulously documented age of animals so I had birth dates I had slaughter dates so I knew exactly how old those animals were at slaughter and then their live weight and carcass weight we did see a lower carcass percentage on the grass fed beef animals than is typical for feed lot and that's on here so this this was calculated assuming a carcass yield of 60% for the feed lot beef and 52% for the grass fed beef and actually that Bill McMillan had some carcass percentages higher than that but to kind of be conservative and not get accused of inflating the results I used 52% so that's that's stinging the grass fed beef a little already on the carcass percentage relative to live but well yes because these you know this is the chart of age at slaughter versus carcass weight and so you know the older animals as you go across the chart this way they're older as you go up the chart this way they're bigger so you know so kind of but not not really linear it it depended a lot on the breed of the animal too and the system it was in we didn't do any marbling tenderness any of that we were just looking at carcass weight okay so I'm going to go ahead and show a couple of the economics things so the farms were really different in the quality of winter feed they were feeding Edgar Brown for instance relative feed value of 90 which is low he doesn't use bail rings he lets the animals sort through the bales and get what they want so they're actually eating better than that grass metals farm and my farm also both relatively low relative feed values yeah that's that's part of the situation in that part of Minnesota you get some really low quality forage sometimes when you're making it Bill McMillan had a much higher relative feed value again his high value dairy infrastructure alfalfa halage he was making and feeding bunk feeding so you know he's he's really kind of using the more of a feedlot type of infrastructure but feeding only forage okay so feed costs per steer and this included their winter feed for as long as they were on feed so if they were fed through one winter and part of the next one that was accounted for in here and then their pasture use is also accounted for based on the land value the like the cash rent value of the land they were pastoring on so Bill isn't lying he's got a high dollar cost per steer and his pounds per steer that's his average pounds of carcass finish weight which he's also been told he can't do but he's doing it I'm obviously the train wreck here and part of that was because of some nasty flooding in 2012 and all kinds of climate problems but anyway dollars per steer gross this is based on average carcass weight prices for grass fed beef as reported in the USDA grass fed beef marketing report which some of you are probably familiar with in November so it has since gone up but at this point I think we were using 320 per pound of hanging carcass weight to kind of standardize it across farms so dollars per steer net and then your dollars per acre net so bills on land that has a cash rent value of like 222 dollars per acre and so he's netting something that would be competitive with corn and beans in his area when corn is not eight dollars bushel any other questions um no I was kind of trying to standardize things between farms and so these aren't exact numbers for each farm I didn't want to pry into their finances too deeply so their their costs of feeding a steer are based on their relative feed value of their forage which we tested so we know what that was and then the average hay values based on relative feed value points that were reported in central Minnesota hay auction in November so it's kind of a standardized cost of your forage and then the standardized dollars per steer so yeah you know there are lots of little details of the farm operations that could shift their costs higher or lower people find ways to get land on the cheap or you know there are there are lots of details that aren't covered in here I did not know I mean I could with the data that we have but I was looking primarily at the finished carcass weight and the age at finish so off the top of my head I can't say I can plunk it out of my spreadsheet and tell you later yeah we we were kind of inconsistent in getting the weaning weight data from people because of problems with scales and you know lack of help to get the weights done and so forth so so that data is a little bit inconsistent okay what would I change in my system and do I want to get my carcass weights higher was the question yes I would like to get my carcass weights up to about 600 and I'm I'm doing that with some animals my average was again dragged down by a really poor year in 2012 if anybody remembers the city of Duluth was flooded in 2012 I got the same floods but I don't have any hills at all for it to run away on so I had flooding and cows with wet feet for six weeks and it wasn't good so you know when I'm not having that kind of problem my carcass weights are higher they're closer to 575 and I'd like to consistently be getting six yeah some things I've learned from this study that I am already making changes on our things that are contrary to what I've read and learned and heard other places and that is you know what I kind of had in mind on my farm was that I should keep a low enough stocking rate that I could minimize my use of stored forage and graze cattle for the longest season possible and what the other farms in this study that are performing better are doing is really maximizing their use of their pasture and if they have to feed some stored forage at a couple points in the summer to get through that they do that and I think that maximizing your pasture use is a good thing when you start looking at the economics I have more detailed economic tables but your cost your your cash rent cost of grazing on pasture is a lot less than your cash rent for the hay ground and so if you're not getting good utilization of that pasture during the summer grazing season when you should be you're not making the best use of that resource I think according to the economics so so one thing I'm going to do is try to increase my farm stocking rate get more cattle out there and not worry so much about whether I'm getting the longest possible grazing season worry about whether I'm using the pasture as much as I should and the other thing is I'm going to start letting my cows sort their hay more I've taken the bale rings off I'm letting them sort through those bales because Edgar Brown is getting some pretty good economic results from doing that and I've got similar low quality hay so that's another thing yeah I'm slaughtering at 17 to 18 17 to 19 months of age no I mean I'm not saying okay my forages run out I'm sending cows to market I direct market everything and so I've got customers who are expecting cattle at a certain time of year and so I've got my schedule set up based on that marketing plan yeah question was whether everyone determined their own finish and yes my goal with this was not to try to fit people into a box kind of and say this is how we're all going to do it it was to look at what people have and say how does it stack up to this assumed standard for grass fed beef are we better are we worse are we about the same a lot of us are better