- Our next speaker is Justin Morris,
and he's gonna talk about soil microbiology
related to grazing, and Justin comes to us
from NRCS in Madison, and he's got a history
of working out west in Montana,
and Utah, and Idaho, Oregon,
so he can tell you the rest and we'll get started.
Thank you very much.
- [Justin] Thank you, Otto.
Good morning!
- [All] Good morning.
- [Justin] I didn't hear you.
- [All] Good morning!
- Alright, I love you guys.
It is a real privilege to be up here.
I've never been this far north in Wisconsin.
I almost felt like I was back in Montana again.
You got some beautiful country up here,
and it's a real privilege to be able
to be here with you during this conference.
Today I'm gonna be speaking a little bit
about grazing management, and also how
that affects the health of the soil,
the biology in the soil.
And to start out with, I first want to
give a little story,
and it was June 22nd in 2010.
I was in Springfield, Missouri for a conference,
and I heard these two gentlemen up here
on the screen give a talk.
And the whole reason I went to this conference
was because I saw the title of the presentations
of both of theirs on soil health, and I was thinking,
"Oh, that's kind of an interesting topic,"
and so I went to that conference
just because of those two words
and these two gentlemen that were
talking about soil health as it relates
to grazing and forages.
And I would not be here standing up today
if it wouldn't have been for these two gentlemen.
Both of these gentlemen here are good friends of mine.
Some of them you might have heard of them before:
Ray Archuleta, Ray the Soil Guy.
You can Google his name and you'll come up
with several YouTube videos on him,
and also Doug Peterson, and what they shared
with me back in June 22nd of 2010
literally changed my life.
And it changed my life so much so
that I want to continue sharing that message
as long as I am capable of doing
because I feel that as we look at
our farming operations from a soil health lens,
or soil health perspective, that we can truly
become not just sustainable, but actually regenerative
in our grazing and farming practices.
So when we start on this journey,
we have to first talk a little bit about
exactly what is soil health,
and we see here that the soil health
is really the capacity of a soil to function
as a vital, living ecosystem.
And I want to emphasize living.
That's why I've underlined it,
and that ecosystem sustains plants,
animals, and humans.
And when we're looking at the soil ecosystem,
there is as much going on below ground
as there is above ground, and oftentimes
it's very easy for us in our management practices
and from a day-to-day standpoint
to not even think about this stuff because we never see it,
and that's why it's so important when I go out
to the field, that I take a shovel with me
so I can actually start seeing some of the soil biology,
like the earthworms and the dung beetles,
and within the context of farming
on grass with grazing livestock, we have the opportunity
to totally rejuvenate that soil ecosystem
by our management practices.
The livestock are gonna be munching on that grass,
they're gonna be excreting that grass out
as digested material, they're gonna be
trampling a lot of that grass, and so
that manure, the urine, the trampled vegetation,
the dead plant residues all provide the opportunity
for our soil biology to get a well-balanced meal.
And we see from the diagram here,
the first feeders on that organic matter material
are your bacteria, your fungi, and your nematodes.
Well who cares about all those little critters, right?
I mean, what good are they?
We can't see them with our naked eye,
but if I can impress upon your minds
anything that I say today, it's that
as we manage for that life in the soil,
the bacteria, the fungi, the nematodes,
which then are part of a larger soil ecosystem,
that that will provide the opportunity
to actually raise more and healthier
nutritious forage for livestock, and then of course that has
a ricochet effect through an entire operation.
Okay, so how does grazing management
affect soil biology?
This paper here, when I stumbled across it,
was a gold mine of information because
I wanted to find some conclusive evidence out there,
scientifically, of what actually happens
in different levels of grazing management
on soil life.
And so some research that was done by W.R. Teague
was able to look at the influence of different
farm operations using different grazing
management strategies.
So some of those farm operations used
season-long continuous and they stocked it
fairly heavily, some of them still used
season-long continuous, but they did a lighter graze,
then some of them were also using multi-paddock grazing.
Now when we get into multi-paddock grazing,
there's a million different names out there for that,
and I totally realize that,
and then what they did during the study is
they also looked at well what happens in a graze exclosure
where we exclude animals from there,
and this would be analogous of what you would find
like on CRP ground,
Something that doesn't get grazed and the material's
allowed to grow, and grow, and remain there
and not get periodically harvested.
One of the things that they looked at,
the people who were practicing multi-paddock grazing
is they used a flexible recovery period,
so during periods of fast-growth conditions,
they were allowing those paddocks to rest
about every 40 days between grazings,
and then during the longer, hotter,
dryer periods of time, those rest periods
might have been 80 days.
Now I mention to you these recovery periods
because in designing a grazing management system
and in managing livestock to improve the health
of the soil biology, that recovery period
is absolutely critical, and that's something
that doesn't happen on our continuous graze pastures.
So what did they end up finding out?
Well they looked at the bacteria,
they looked at the fungi, they looked at nematodes,
protozoa, and then they looked at that
bacteria to fungi, or fungi to bacteria ratio
as a way to be able to figure out
what's exactly going on in the soil ecosystem.
So they noticed that in between all the treatments,
whether it was continuous graze
or multi-paddock grazing, the total bacterial content
really didn't change a whole lot between those.
When we get into the total fungi content,
the total fungi were dramatically higher
under the multi-paddock grazing system
versus the season-long continuous systems.
And the other thing with this is
since the fungi content was a lot higher,
then that fungi to bacteria ratio
was also higher, and when we
look at these ratios, the fungi to bacteria ratios
ended up being like a three to one ratio.
So you have three times as much fungi
in that soil ecosystem as you did bacteria,
and under the continuous graze systems,
it was virtually a one-to-one ratio.
So why is that really important?
Well what they found out is it's an indicator,
this ratio is an indicator of a soil
that has a high water-holding capacity,
as well as a high nutrient availability,
and also a high nutrient retention,
and this right here, this water-holding capacity
and nutrient availability and retention
is what is so critical for the soil biology
to do their job of recycling those plant residues
and making that real available to the living plants.
So when we look at this, there's
kind of a paradigm that I like to subscribe to
and it really is feed the soil.
Feed the soil, feed the soil.
Oftentimes what happens is soil isn't even
a thought in our minds.
We're concentrated on feeding the above-ground livestock,
feed the above-ground livestock,
but it's actually if we use our management
to feed the soil, that soil will help
to feed the plants, which then will feed the livestock,
and then the livestock helped to recycle that
to feed the soil again.
So quality starts in the soil.
Now when we look at,
"Well, how are we gonna plan this out?
"How are we gonna plan on feeding the soil?"
Well I alluded a little bit to it
in that I talked previously about the different types
of grazing management systems that help to
give the fungi a head start and increase their numbers,
but there's four main principles here
that I think are absolutely essential,
and you can use these principles whether
you are in a cropping system or whether
you're in a grazing system.
So that first principle here is minimize disturbance,
and that disturbance can come in a cropping system
either through tillage or using herbicides,
fungicides, insecticides.
It can also come in a grazing system from overgrazing.
That is also a huge disturbance.
We also look at providing a continuous living root.
Well, in perennial pasture systems,
we're usually providing a continuous living root,
we're not tearing up our pastures every single year,
we've got that stuff in a permanent cover,
but the question can be asked which leads us to
the fourth principle of diversity,
we want to have a diverse plant community there for,
not just the above-ground livestock
to be able to consume, which Susan Beal has
already talked about so well, but also we need
that diversity in our pastures to feed
the below-ground livestock, the undercover livestock
that are critical to supporting your operation.
When we look at that third principle of maximizing cover,
in systems where we have a lot of continuous
grazing taking place, we generally have
very little to no soil cover, and we leave a lot
of bare ground exposed so that whenever
we get a rain event, those raindrops are helping
to seal that soil surface so that subsequent raindrops
don't have an opportunity to really infiltrate,
and I'll show a little bit of video on that
here in about another 20 minutes.
And in essence, folks, the main goal here
is we want to create the most favorable habitat
for the soil food web.
That should be our goal when we are
managing our operations is how can I create
the most favorable habitat for them,
because as we create that most favorable habitat for them,
everything else in an operation comes together,
and I've seen it with my own eyes.
So I'm speaking from first-hand experience on this.
So the big picture here really in any operation
is to have a production system that
mimics nature as much as possible.
Some of you might have heard the term biomimicry.
if you just go on Google, you go on the TED Talks,
the T-E-D, TED Talks and you put in biomimicry,
there's a presentation on biomimicry.
But in essence, what biomimicry is is looking at life,
looking at biological systems and being able
to mimic those systems in our own natural environment.
And I'll talk a little bit about how we can do that.
The other thing, too, is that if one
goes against nature, if we're using
all of our cides, our C-I-D-E-S',
okay whether that's fungicides, herbicides,
pesticides of any kind, if we're using
the chemical-based approach to trying to
kill a target organism, we have a lot of non-target effects,
and because of that, we end up destroying
a lot of the life that's out there
that's actually beneficial to our operation,
and there isn't enough chemicals or diesel oil
in the world to be able to go against nature,
and that's where we have to look at patterns
that are found in nature, and then seek
to emulate those patterns on a large scale.
So when we talk about grazing management,
the question can be asked,
"Okay, so how can we mimic nature?
"And what does nature do for free and for nothing?
"And how's all that solar energy captured?"
Well if we go on this continent to the north
up in Alaska and the Yukon,
this is the Porcupine Caribou Herd,
whether we go further south here
where the American bison used to roam,
or whether we go over to the African continent
and we see how wild herbivores behave
in their natural environment, we see patterns,
a similar pattern behaving whether you're in the tundra
or whether you're in the savanna,
and all the ecosystems in between.
And that is where we have to ask ourselves
the question: "In our own livestock operations,
"are we mimicking what nature already does?
"Are we emulating nature on a farm-based scale?"
And in most cases, we aren't.
We're operating outside the context
of our environment, and that's where
by mimicking nature, especially with our
grazing management practices, we can,
essentially, drive the soil biology,
which is going to be the precursor
to driving everything else on our operation.
Okay, so in mimicking nature on a farm scale,
one of the things that can be done
at certain times of the year, and it's certainly
something that gets me excited because
I've seen it work first-hand, not only on
other people's operations, but also in cattle
that I've managed, is implementing a practice
that I call high stock density grazing.
Now some of you've probably heard of it
called other things, like mob grazing,
adaptive grazing, management-intensive grazing,
this type of grazing system strategically looks at
the density of the animals per acre,
and actually using that density
like what nature already does on those
three prior slides, whether it was the wildebeest in Africa,
the Porcupine Caribou up in the northern tundra,
or how the American bison grazed,
and essentially what it is is combining those animals
on a small area for a very short period of time,
and what you're doing is several things,
and I'll go into it in a little bit more detail
here just shortly.
What stock density does is it is really
an incredible tool to be able to do
a lot of different things.
I've got several things here listed.
There's even more than that.
I had to cut down the number of slides
that I had just because I only have
45 minutes to present this in, but we can use
stock density to number one, increase forage supply.
Now that's something that every livestock producer
would like to do is be able to increase forage supply.
And the way that that can be done is because
you are putting down a lot of trampled material
with the hooves of the animals,
and you're dunging and urinating with those animals
on a very small area, and you're getting
very good manure and urine distribution
throughout the entire area.
And by doing that, it helps to turbocharge
the soil biology and get the soil biology
to start cycling nutrients faster and faster.
The other thing too is increasing water
infiltration and runoff,
and that's because in a system like this,
we don't allow the animals to graze it
clear down to the ground.
That's a big no-no.
What we try to do is actually leave more forage
than what the animals take, so if I've got
3,000 pounds of forage there,
I want to leave at least 1500 pounds of forage behind.
Now a lot of producers will say,
"I could have left them there another day or two,"
but that isn't gonna be the way that
we're gonna do it if we're gonna be able
to start stimulating the soil biology
and getting future forage growth.
So when we also look at some of the
advantages of it, we can use stock density
as a way to decrease weed pressure,
because as you get the animals on a small area
for a short period of time, they're going to be
less selective and start grazing a little bit
on all plants, and the other thing, too,
is that will greatly help our diversity.
Have any of you had the experience
of turning animals in, and let's say
they're gonna go into a pasture for 15 days,
and you've done this year after year after year
after year, and you start to see that
over a period of years, your most palatable
forage species start to decrease
and you start being left with less palatable
forage species, and that is a direct result
of the amount of time that plants
are exposed to livestock, and in order
to increase the diversity in a pasture
over a period of time, we have to shorten
that time period that plants are exposed to animals.
And that is one of the big keys to increasing
pasture diversity over a period of time.
Okay, so here's an example of stock density.
If we've got 100 head and they weigh
1250 pounds each, you take the number of head
times their weight, and that gives you
the total weight of the herd, 125,000 pounds.
So if I've got a 10 acre field and I've got
125,000 pounds of animals on a 10 acre field,
I simply take my weight of the animals
divided by the size of the field,
and that gives me a stock density
of 12,500 pounds live weight per acre.
If I get down to a one acre field,
then my stock density's gonna go up 10 times.
And if I go to a half an acre field, my stock density
is gonna, again, double, from 125,000 pounds
to 250,000 pounds.
So when we look at stock density
and stocking rate, oftentimes people get confused,
what is what?
Is stock density and stocking rate the same thing?
And no, they're not.
They're two different barometers,
two different measurements.
So stock density is the number of pounds
of animals per acre at any given point in time,
expressed as pounds of animal per acre,
or animal units per acre, but stocking rate
is looking more at how much forage
is actually being extracted when the animals
are in there over a period of time,
not at an exact moment.
So in...
In implementing a system that's gonna be
using a high stock density, we can increase stock density,
but keep stocking rate the same,
meaning that we're not gonna take out
any more forage than what they did previously,
but we're just gonna move those animals tighter
and get the effect of the hooves,
and the dunging and the urinating more evenly
over the entire pasture.
Okay, so when we look at what stock density is what,
typical rotation systems where the animals are moved
every 15 to 30 days, your stock density
is usually gonna be less than 4,000 pounds per acre.
In a typical management intensive grazing system
where animals are moved like every three days,
that stock density may be anywhere between
4,000 to 50,000 pounds live weight per acre.
We get into high stock density and ultra high,
we're looking at 50,000 pounds live weight
per acre and higher.
I actually have a friend of mine
who gets his stock density upwards of
800,000 pounds live weight per acre.
He'll have 850 yearlings
on about an acre for about two hours,
and then they'll move onto another acre,
and then another acre, and they'll move
through there eight times in a 24 hour period,
and I'll talk a little bit about the technology
that's available that enables a person
to be able to do that.
But the main thing I want to show here is
is that depending on what your goals
and your objectives are in your operation
and the amount of time that you have available,
is going to determine where in these categories
you're going to manage.
The producers that I know of that are doing
some of these really more intensive type systems,
they'll only do it at the level for maybe
two or three months out of the year.
This isn't a system that you do it year-round,
the same all the time.
This is a system that should be flexible
with your quality of life.
The other thing, too, is as we start moving
into these higher densities, I may be
very anxious to see change to start occur on the ground.
So if I want to start seeing things happen faster
on the ground, I'll move the density up significantly.
If I'm not really worried about seeing any change
in my pastures, I can go back to something
that's a much lower density where the animals
are moved a lot less frequently.
Okay, so how does high density grazing
build soil and how does it enhance the soil biology?
Well one of the things here is that
when we go out to graze these plants,
we're gonna make sure that we don't
put animals on a plant until that plant
is fully recovered,
and the reason why is a fully recovered plant
is gonna have a more massive root system,
and that root system right here,
that is the feeding trough for the soil biology.
That is where the plant and the soil biology interface,
right there.
So what is the plant doing?
The plant is giving off sugars in the root system.
We call those root exudates,
these are carbohydrates, and those carbohydrates
help to feed the soil biology, but in turn,
the soil biology are going out and scavenging
other nutrients, other minerals,
and bringing those in towards the plants.
So you've got a symbiotic relationship
occurring between the soil biology and the plant root,
and really, if you get down to it,
they are one whole being,
the whole soil ecosystem.
You really can't separate the plants
from the soil biology or the soil biology
from the plants.
They are really one together.
The other thing too is plants with more root mass
are gonna be able to tap into water
at deeper depths, and they're also gonna be able
to access lower profiles of
your pasture where you've got more minerals hiding out.
The other thing, too, is you put more litter,
more mulch on that soil surface,
and this is where a lot of producers,
when they first look at this, they think,
"Man, look at all that grass you're leaving behind,"
and I say to them, "Yeah, isn't that lovely?"
I love that
because it's that plant material
that's trampled, that's being left behind,
that is providing the habitat for your soil biology.
It's helping to greatly reduce the evaporative effects
of water coming out of your soil
and going back into the atmosphere.
I want every single raindrop that lands
on every little square foot of my pasture
to soak right in.
That is the most important part
of making sure that that water drop
doesn't move horizontally in any direction.
I want it to soak right in.
The other thing, too, is this mulch layer
helps to cushion those raindrop impacts
so that it allows the water to slowly soak in.
If I have a raindrop that's hitting bare soil,
like I was saying before, it's gonna cause a crust
to occur on that pasture, and by having some
more organic matter, some more plant material there,
it's gonna help to cushion that.
Okay, I got a little video here that's quite
good at explaining a little bit of what I'm talking about
with the water cycle.
Let's see if it will go.
I've got audio with this.
Otto, does it play audio through here?
I guess not.
Okay, that's a bummer because this is a really
good video, but what I'll do is I'll explain this.
This is a rainfall simulator.
And what they do, they've got a continuous grazed
pasture sample on the left, as you see here,
coming from this field, and then they've also got
a well-managed, well-rotated pasture
with plenty of material over the top.
And so they're using this rainfall simulator
to see what amount of water is soaking in,
versus what's running off.
And I'll let him do his little bit of explaining here,
but you can see on the left, the jar on the left,
which is representing the continuous grazed pasture.
If you think that your pasture looks like a lawn
when the animals are done and that you've
got water that's soaking in, it's not going in.
It's running off.
So you can see here on the left,
most of the water that went on the continuous
grazed pasture just ran right off.
On the right, very little of it, which is
this jar right here, on the right
right here, that was the runoff from the tall pasture,
most of it soaked in, which is this jar.
See that? Here's your runoff.
Here's what infiltrated.
Here's what runoff.
That's huge.
Absolutely huge.
And that water cycle, the amount of water
going in versus running off, what do you think
all the soil biology need to be able to move around
and survive?
Most of the bacteria, the fungi,
the nematodes, or protozoa are semi-aquatic organisms.
They need water.
If they don't have water, they dehydrate out and they die.
So these guys right here, semi-aquatic organisms,
they must have water, and our grazing management
with how much we take is gonna influence
their ability to be able to survive.
So, little did you know it, but when
you bought an acre of land, you not only
put some livestock on it, but you also
have a micro herd under there.
Now how healthy that micro herd is
depends on the level of grazing management,
but in a healthy soil, you can have
as much, when you add up the weight of the bacteria,
the fungi, the algae, the protozoa,
the nematodes, the earthworms, and the insects,
you can have as much weight in them
as a couple cow-calf pairs that are
grazing on an acre.
Think of that.
You could have as much pounds in livestock
below your ground than you do grazing above.
So if I was gonna get into this and actually
start implementing this, I would look at
varying my stock density over a period of time.
One of the things I tell producers that
are looking into this is I tell them
you don't have to commit your whole life
to this when you start this.
This is something that can be done
for a very short period of time
in just one little corner of your field.
Most of you probably have a little bit
of electric fence laying around.
I can take a group of 10 or 20 animals,
stick them in the corner of a field
for about three hours, they don't even need water,
they can survive without water for three hours.
I can stick them in a corner there,
and I can watch to see how their impact
on that little corner can vary
depending on what you're typically doing.
So I can put them at a stock density
of a couple hundred thousand pounds
live weight per acre in just a corner of that field,
I'll take a picture of it before I start,
I'll make sure that they only graze
maybe 30% or 40% of that material
and then take them out, put the electric fence back up,
take another picture so that you can
kinda see what that area looked like
after they got done grazing it,
and then monitor and watch that area
as it recovers.
Now it may take a little bit longer at first
for it to recover, but let me tell you,
once it recovers, it's gonna be amazing
because what you just did with the livestock
is you really fed that soil biology.
If we don't feed the soil biology,
eventually our pasture starves to death,
and most of our pastures are lethargic.
They're running off of hardly anything,
and we gotta give something back to them
and that means feeding it with the dead plant residues
from trampled plant material, the waste
from the animals, and as we do that
and as we give that pasture enough time to recover,
eventually that area is gonna start growing
more and more and more forage.
The other thing, too, is monitoring the animals,
and I would use this when I would be
moving livestock myself, if I opened up
the wire and the animals just lunge right in there
and they drop their heads and start eating
like they're starved, then I probably didn't
give them enough in their prior paddock.
I want animals to be fairly contented.
Generally what I'll see is when animals
go into the next paddock, they'll usually
kinda search out the boundaries of their paddock,
and then they'll drop their heads and start grazing.
So I can use the animals' behavior
as an indicator, did I take too much forage,
or did I leave enough based upon
how aggressive they start eating as soon as
they go into the next paddock?
The other thing, too, is I'll also
look at rumen fill on the animals,
so you want to look at the left side
behind the last rib and in front of the hip bone,
and if that area is concave,
if it's like you could put a cereal bowl in it,
obviously the animals are being limited on their intake.
I want to make sure that their rumen,
it has the same level of smoothness
or evenness with the rest of the side of their body.
I don't want to see that dished in,
so I'll use their rumen fill also as an indicator.
The other thing, too, is if I have calves
in there, if all the calves are out beyond the hot wire
and they're not in with the herd,
I probably got the animals in there too tight
and I need to loosen it up,
I need to make the area a little bit bigger
or move the animals more frequently.
The other thing, too, is
looking at their rough hair coats,
looking at their metabolism,
that can also give me a little bit
of an indicator as far as the nutrient density
of that forage and how well the animals are doing,
and then when we look at
their positive signs, we want to see good,
full rumens, smooth, slick hair coats,
and we want to see that if we do have
calves in this system, that the calves
are basically staying with the herd.
It's alright if a few calves get out beyond the hot wire,
that's no big deal, they're out there
creep-grazing anyways, but if all the calves
are out there and leaving their dams behind,
we've obviously got them in there too tight
and we need to flex it up and make the area bigger.
Now when we get into some of the equipment
that's used to do this, it kinda goes
without saying that you have to have a flexible system,
and like I've told producers in the past,
this is just a tool.
This is something that you can use
at certain times in certain fields
for certain conditions.
And if someone were to use this tool
all the time, year-round or whatever,
well that's not practical, and so what I may do
is I may pick a field that's closest to my house
that I can implement this on for maybe
a week or two, and then I can go about
my merry way on the rest of my fields,
and then I can just monitor that field
that I have close by and see what changes
I'm starting to see occur.
So if I'm running a flexible system,
really a bunch of interior permanent fencing
is gonna be more of a roadblock to me
because it doesn't give me the flexibility that I want,
and that's where portable electric fencing
is so much better when trying to do
something like this.
A lot of folks that get into this,
if you've got an ATV, (groans)
ATV is one of the best inventions in the world
for being able to put up and take down
portable electric fence very rapidly.
Here, this ATV has been retrofitted with
some bars to be able to store pigtail posts
or to be able to pull the mineral tubs
from paddock to paddock.
Geared reels, polybraid are really essential.
I saw that they're selling them here
out in the vendor area.
This here is a batt-latch, which they do have
back there coincidentally,
and this batt-latch right here,
this is the way that producers are able
to set up their paddocks in a multi-paddock system
and be able to have the animals move themselves.
How would you like that if your animals
would just move themselves from one field to the next?
Of course you got to set it up,
but once you set it up, this batt-latch system right here,
you can actually set the time of day
and the time that it'll go off,
and it will release a coil spring gate
that goes out of the way of the animals,
and then the animals emit themselves
into the next paddock at the time of day
and time that you want it to happen.
Good friend of mine, Neil Dennis up in Canada,
who operates in a 16-inch precip zone,
he has seven of those set up sequentially.
It takes him one and a half hours
per day to set up eight paddocks
for 850 yearlings.
So he's got a very well-thought out,
well-designed system, but he shared one time
on a video, he said, "If I would've known,
"if I would've had access to this kind of technology
"and this style of grazing management
"when I was 30 years younger, I would have had
"a lot more kids 'cause I would've stayed home
"a lot more."
And so technology like this can really, really
make it a lot easier and a lot more practical
to do stuff.
The other thing, too, is if you get into
the time issue, a lot of times I hear folks,
"I don't have enough time, I don't have enough cows,
"that won't work here, this is northern Wisconsin."
I've heard just about every excuse in the book,
and the thing is is this style of grazing management
that I've shared with you, the principles are the same
no matter where you go on the planet,
but how you apply them are gonna...
There's gonna be some tweaking,
some adjustments.
Like when I talked about that recovery period
between grazings.
It may not be 45 days, it may be 35 days
in your given environment during
periods of fast forage growth,
so I don't want you to get hung up necessarily
that some of these practices are environment-specific,
because they're not.
This is one aspect of how nature maintains
an intact grassland ecosystem,
and what we're doing is we're taking
a template from nature, and we're overlaying it
on the farm during certain times of the year
when we have the time and materials
and labor to be able to do it.
So you can do this seasonally,
you can do it occasionally,
you can combine herds with a neighbor's
so that you can get more recovery on your pastures.
A lot of times on our own operations,
we don't have enough time for recovery,
and so if we combine animal groups
with a neighbor, or if we have the opportunity
to run the combined herd on one operation
and then move over to the next
so we get more recovery,
and what this really comes down to
is the soil's the basis for everything that we do.
And when we look at animal performance goals,
financial goals, and personal goals,
really what it gets down to is if we manage
for the integrity of that soil ecosystem
in our grazing management, all the other pieces
start coming together.
And just to wrap it up,
quotation here from Dr. Krome,
"The quality of our lives depends on
"the food we eat, the water we drink,
"and the air we breathe, and all those things
"depend on the quality of the soil."
And with that, I'll open it up for questions.
(applause)