Courier New;Cambria Math;  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 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)