Last December I attended and gave a presentation at the 4th National Conference on Grazing Lands.  One of the hot topics was “Ultra High Density Grazing” or “Mob Grazing”.  The basic idea behind this concept is that it’s a method of grazing that mimics the way animals graze in nature.  Like the large herds of grazers in Africa or the bison herds that once roamed this country, animals graze one area intensely before moving along.  The same area is visited again much later, maybe even a year later.  Predators keep the herd tightly grouped which tramples brush and vegetation.  This can be simulated today with herders or electric fence paddocks.  Cattle are packed into an area for a very short grazing period and then moved off.  The area is given a long recovery period before being grazed again.  This type of grazing has shown impressive results in Africa and many parts of the US.

Calves line up for their morning move

We have a permanently electric fenced area in one pasture that creates an area seventy feet wide by three quarters of a mile long.  This fence was installed to keep cattle from lounging on the irrigation ditch banks.  This enclosure is a perfect place to experiment with mob grazing.  Temporary electric fences are erected to create small paddocks.  After some basic calculations I packed in 25 seven weight feeder calves.  I moved them twice daily.  Modifications were made to the paddock sizes after observing how much forage remained after each graze.

Once the electric fence is opened the calves move themselves to the next paddock

I found that the cattle did an excellent job grazing each paddock.  I will need at least 45 days recovery before I can accurately assess the success/failure of this experiment.  One thing I really like is how quickly the cattle figured out that anytime I came around it meant a move to fresh feed.  It is a lot more work than our planned rotational grazing system we currently use, but I really enjoyed seeing the results.  I haven’t weighed the group yet, but I can probably expect gains equal to the calves grazing a more lightly stocked paddock.  I really like how this way of grazing completely eliminates overgrazing as the cattle have moved on before they get a chance to graze the same plant twice. 

Happy to be in fresh feed, the cattle graze happily

I realize I’ve been a delinquent contributor to the YPC blog lately.  Calving season has been moving along and we haven’t really had too much excitement.  After a branding two weeks ago my mare stepped on my foot and broke a toe.  While quite painful, I’m not sure even that could count as excitement.  The weather has varied from sunny and in the seventies to snow.  I sold half a load of feeder calves and bought their replacements at a healthy profit.  We are leasing some new pasture and rangeland and I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on improving a few things. 

All my life I’ve seen the forage on the ranch across the road overgrazed and overstocked.  Cattle were shipped in and set stocked in the spring to calf and shipped out a few months later after grazing everything down to nearly nothing.  Bare ground slowly increased a little each year and sagebrush edged out forage that had been overgrazed.  Our first task this spring was to install some permanent electric fencing to divide the pastures into paddocks so we could practice planned rotational grazing with adequate recovery periods. 

Being that this property is not ours and it’s very unlikely that any of our rent would be put into improvements, it was up to us to find economical ways to install this fencing.  There are a number of very large stumps around a grove of Cottonwood trees.  Using a backhoe, I moved stumps into place to form braces.  High tensile wire was strung up and tightened.  I used up all available stumps on the first fence.  The next fence I used pallets for braces.  Plywood scraps were nailed to one side of three pallets.  The three pallets were then wired together to form a triangle.  I then filled each triangle brace with dirt.  This formed a simple yet strong brace with no cost for materials.  Old copper telephone wire was used in place of high tensile wire on this stretch.  

I’m very excited to see how this rental pasture reacts to planned grazing.  My expectations are high.  Next fall we will broadcast grass seed then feed hay over the top to promote new grass grown in bare ground. 

I recently returned from three weeks in New Zealand.  Most of that time was spent backpacking in the incredible national parks on the mountainous southern island.  Of my time on the north island of New Zealand, one of the real highlights was the three days I spent around Tauranga on the east coast.  I visited a friend that makes saddle trees from wood and rawhide and most of his customers are in the US.  He took us to his friend Graham’s bull farm.  It was quite an experience and nothing like I was anticipating.

Graham’s farm is 600 acres of hilly volcanic ground north of Tauranga.  He has 400 bulls scattered around in 20 mobs of 20-30 head.  He also has 40 horses that he uses for a children’s riding camp he puts on during the summer.  These 600 steep acres are subdivided into 260 electric fenced paddocks.  His bulls are almost entirely Fresian and come to his place when they are 200-250lbs.  They are finished around 1250lbs.  He says the bulls don’t fight if they are together as one mob from the time he gets them as calves.  If he buys bulls as feeders he will put a donkey in with them to keep them from fighting.  This seemed incredible to me, but I didn’t see any fights in the paddocks with a donkey.  Like all livestock in New Zealand, his bulls are grass fed. 

During my visit we spent the morning doing “paddock shifts”.  Each paddock is grazed for two days and then the bulls are shifted to another paddock.  The grazed paddock gets a thirty day recovery period before being grazed again.  Graham is definitely a one of a kind rancher; he rides all his horses in just a halter without shoes while wearing shorts.  Like most ranchers in the country, he has a variety of stockdogs to help move the bulls around.  This day he only took a single Bearded English Collie to go into the brush and bark to bring out bulls.  It was a great experience to see how they do things in a totally different environment from the arid environment I ranch in.  He told me that because the environment is so lush he has a year round growing season with all warm season grasses.  The best part of the day for me was that nobody was around to see me riding in my travel clothes and looking like a total tourist!          

We started feeding our cattle a few weeks ago while I was gone to Australia and New Zealand.  I returned from the southern hemisphere’s warm and sunny summer to cold Nevada.  I guess I can’t really call it cold, it’s been warmer than usual this week, but it still feels cold to me coming from hot weather.  We have been feeding our stocker calves dried distiller’s grains (DDG) since December.  In early January we split the group into two herds, the heaviest 59 calves continued receiving a maintenance diet of DDG and winter pasture while the lightest 117 went on an alfalfa diet as hay is very cheap at this time.  Our spring calvers eat stockpiled summer forage until a week before we start calving and then get fed a little cow hay every other day. 

There’s not much else to say about feeding hay except I’m always happy when we are finished even though we feed a lot less hay than just about everybody else around here.  A cow here gets about $40 of supplemental feeding (this includes fuel and labor costs) each year.

It was a cloudy when I loaded the hay on our 1964 GMC 5000 in preparation for feeding.  It started snowing while my sister Leslie was feeding the light stockers.  By the time we made it over to the first calf heifers large wet flakes were really coming down.  Yesterday afternoon I was on

cow checking duty and brought in a first calf heifer that needed a little help.  I pulled my first calf of the season last night and I’m thankful all we had was a little rain for weather at the time.

A few days ago we brought in all the spring calving cattle to vaccinate.  We split up, I went with the group to get the cows, the others went north a few miles to gather our first calf heifers.  Our first calf heifers are bred to start calving in February, our cows two weeks later.  Imagine our surprise when we discovered three new calves born that morning!

My father gets the first calf up from her hiding place.

Moving the first pair towards the trailer, the other two new mothers are visible in the background.

Since that day, we’ve had two more calve, and the rest are looking more ready each day.  Right now it’s too late to do anything about starting the calving season a month earlier than normal, but we have some thoughts about it.  This afternoon my father and I went to bring in the three pairs we had left behind.  It would have been about four miles to drive them, and the calves were much too young to travel that far.  We set up a trap and were very lucky in that the three were very gentle and good mothers.  Everything went smoothly, but few things are quick when dealing with young calves.

Luckily our "trap" worked quite well, we were able to easily load the pairs.

Last week I attended GLCI’s conference on grazing lands.  I was one of many presenters; my topic was on management intensive grazing on native meadows in Eastern California and Western Nevada.  I met a lot of people from around the country and am brimming with optimism about the future of cattle and grazing in the United States.  I’m always optimistic to some degree.  I figure there are enough pessimistic people in the cattle world already, I’d rather not be one of them.  One of the things that really caught my attention was Nathan Mudd’s presentation about cattle ranching on the island of Sitkinak in Alaska.

Nathan Mudd owns and runs Alaska Meat Company

 Wild Cattle in Alaska

Nathan Mudd gave his presentation right before I went.  He talked about his family that leases the island of Sitkinak from the state of Alaska.  There are around 650 head of wild cattle on the island, they were introduced a long time ago and turned into a totally wild herd.  To me, it was fascinating to hear what domestic cattle will evolve if they are left to fend for themselves.  The cattle graze the hills in the summer and winter on the beaches.  Like most large prey species, More...