#109 Using Livestock to Improve your Land

Hello, I hope you are well and thriving. I hope your Spring grass is coming up great and you have an abundance of fat livestock and are making more money by converting your grass to saleable products as efficiently as possible.

This is a series on the previous post on the onsite course we will have in Tallahassee, Florida at Ayavalla Land LLC this next June 21 and 22, (2024) Friday and Saturday after Father’s Day.

I named this onsite course: Increase your profits 300% with the 4 Pillars of Real Wealth Ranching for a reason. 

Profits on livestock farms or ranches are hard to come by, most livestock owners lose money or break even 8 out of 10 years, and this needs to change. We can normally triple our profits by implementing the 4 Pillars of Real Wealth Ranching in your property.  

How can I make such a claim? Most livestock owners around the world have the potential to reach that triple profits goal and many of our students in all environments are getting there.

In this large grazed property you will see, touch, and feel how the land is being regenerated with adapted livestock, selected according to what nature is showing us. The results are evident in the soil, forages, cattle, environment, and wildlife. 

We are getting more and more wildflowers which are crucial for pollinator insects and migratory butterflies, we are also increasing our legume component which seeds feed young quail and migratory songbirds. This land is heavily populated with all sorts of swamp birds and they are protected with ponds out of bounds for them to roost in at night. It is enjoyable to watch them as they come at dusk to their roosting ponds.

One of the main money-making parts of a grazing livestock business is grazing management because depending on how you manage your grass and soil will respond. 

In this property, grazing had been rotational for many years. Over 15 years of rotational grazing and rolling out hay in their winters for 5 months of the year, trying to feed the soil and increase long-lived soil organic carbon. After those many years and over half a million dollars spent in hay, the results were just not there! The soil did not improve, grass productivity did not improve much after the first two years and woody shrub control was taking too much money every year. Something needed to change. 

They started the Total Grazing Program which allowed them to minimize overgrazing.

Do you remember what overgrazing is? Overgrazing is not a severe or high harvest efficiency grazing just as when mowing grass to make hay is not overgrazing if you do not cut it again too soon. Why? Because overgrazing is grazing a plant when it is too young, not when it is taken off and allowed to recover adequately. 

By minimizing grazing grass that was too young, their grass productivity went up. How much? Enough that they were able to stockpile as standing hay around half of the property in a drought year. 

This large area of standing hay allowed them to minimize hay-feeding which saved them around $10,000 per month for 5 months of the year before Spring.

What else did they implement? Well, they had started with pure Angus, registered Angus, which were unadapted to the high heat index and low-quality grasses they had in Florida.

I suggested using pure Mashona Bulls on their pure Angus cows, but not just any Mashona Bull as Mashona’s are lacking in good muscling or beef-to-bone ratio.

I had been improving the Mashona herd north of Orlando Florida for some years by then and had very good Bulls for sale at that farm where I was consulting for. They bought some Mashona Bulls and were elated with their offspring. Now, we are creating an adapted composite breed tailored to that environment and will be selling breeding stock for people in difficult environments who want to regenerate their land with adapted cattle.

But, is adaptation all we need? No, we need high real-life fertility and a larger yield of weaned calves per acre. For this, we need efficient and functional cattle.

This is why we use selection guidelines to never contradict nature. Maybe you know this but it is important to understand what makes a given animal more efficient in converting grass to beef than another.

And I will teach in the classroom and in the field, with real cattle, how to select your best cows to select your best Bulls out of them to use on the rest of the herd to spread the cow’s genes.

I bet you did not know this, that we start by selecting your best cows that have thrived in your environment under your management. We look for your cows that have had the longest productive longevity and have not given any health problems under your management.

Why is this so important? I was talking to a grazed dairy owner from Tasmania last night and explained to him that buying semen from other herds was not as good as producing his own bulls on his farm under his management due to epigenetics.

Epigenetics is a fancy word for explaining how certain genes are turned on or turned off by the environment and explains the expression of genes.

As environments AND management differ, it is advisable to select your best Bulls from your best cows to spread the genes of those cows into the rest of the herd.

This is how you can advance much faster in the genetic improvement of your herd.

Come to the onsite course at Ayavalla Land LLC in Tallahassee, Florida the next weekend after Father’s Day, Friday, June 21, and Saturday, June 22, (2024).

We will provide an air-conditioned classroom onsite, with ladies' and men's bathrooms. And will go out to the field to observe pasture and grazing and will go to the corral to asses and observe cows and Bulls to review what was taught in the classroom. There will be ample time for answering questions in the field and the classroom as will allow questions at any time in the class.

If you want to start improving your land the fastest and maximize your profits this is the onsite class to attend, Increase your profits by 300% with the 4 pillars of Real Wealth Ranching!

Register for this onsite course at  www.rwranching.com/tallahassee2024.

I hope to see you there and show you the improvement to soil, grass, and cattle they have achieved, I also would love to answer the questions that I am sure you have.  

Come and see for yourself, as they say: seeing is believing!