#15 Total Grazing Will Improve Your Land the Fastest

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching where our goal is to help you maximize your profitability while you improve your land the fastest.

Welcome back to another episode of Fat Cows, Fat Wallet Podcast. I hope you are having a great week. And today we are going to talk about something that is transcendental, improving your land at a low cost with management.

When I go back in time to when I started regenerating land with cattle, I well remember trying to put all the pieces together, sometimes having short lived success or complete failure, but I persevered in finding information, doing trials and searching for the best teachers or mentors there were. 

We may forget, in the daily hustle, that we are called to be stewards of the land and that we can profit from improving our land if done at a low cost using biological methods. In my mind, this is absolutely necessary as we will not only leave our land better than we got it but will profit from the abundance we have created through our management.

I have learned much over the years, and I want to share this with you in this episode. This is of immense value. Please pay close attention and listen with an open mind. This may be different than what you have been told in the past, but I believe this will resonate and agree with what you observe in your daily work.

If you know of somebody that is trying to improve his land, maybe not making much progress and may benefit from hearing this, introduce them to this podcast, please. I know this can help and I would love to help as many people as possible to regenerate their land so they can achieve bountiful production at very low cost.

We have learned some important things in this podcast, for example, soil humus is the real fertility of your soils, soil humus was much higher a long time ago which means we are mining the humus of our soils and we are not putting back or creating more of it.

It is like if you had an investment in the bank and are taking out the interest plus some of the capital every month. What will happen overtime? You are going to run out of capital! And that is exactly what is happening in our soils, we are running out of biological capital by mining out our soil’s humus that was created hundreds of years ago.

The good news is that it is relatively simple to create more humus, we just need to do certain things right. Please remember that humus is mostly created, around 80% of humus comes from the digested bodies of microorganisms around the roots of plants fed by the root exudates produced by photosynthesis in the green leaves. After many digestions by other microorganisms, they are finally digested by fungi becoming humus after a process of humification. Humus is the stable fraction of organic matter that cannot be further degraded and it’s a storehouse for nutrients, moisture, microorganisms and is what gives your soils a deep brown color and that earthy pleasant smell. 

If you are one of my Total Grazing students, you already know this and if not, you can watch my video explaining how humus is created “The Primacy of Living Roots” in my YouTube channel under Real Wealth Ranching.

Here are the steps to building humus in your soil,

1. Avoid overgrazing. This means stop re grazing before the plant has fully recovered so that roots remain strong and fat. Overgrazing weakens the plant, reducing productivity, and stops humus production.

2. Keep a high stocking rate.

As we know, stocking rate determines profitability, so we need to have a high to very high stocking rate to make money. We also need our cattle to be in good body condition and we need to do this while avoiding overgrazing. But we also need to have enough cattle to consume all the forage we produce, as the land produces more forage, we need to increase our stocking rate, or our land will suffer. With selective grazing this would be impossible, but with Total grazing is precisely what we achieve. Thanks to the high harvest efficiency of Total grazing, we get more cow days harvested per grazing which allows us to give a longer rest period to each paddock which allows roots and crowns of grasses to stay strong and fat for continuing increases in productivity.

3. Desirable species seedling recruitment.

The more desirable species we have per square yard the better, we want to have many green leaves per square yard of our best species

In our program of Total grazing, we also defer part of the farm or ranch for later use as stockpile. When resting for stockpile the best species seedlings can establish in these areas which helps improve the desirable species composition.

4. A better solar panel.

Plants convert sunlight to energy by photosynthesis in the green leaves while their stems consume energy through respiring, the difference between energy produced and energy consumed is the energy left for production and if there is excess, energy for getting fat roots. 

This means that the leaf to stem ratio is crucial to productivity and fat roots. When doing total grazing where the leaves AND stems are consumed by grazing, we ensure that the leaf to stem ratio in the regrowth is higher which makes energy in the plant higher for animals and to increase its energy reserves for next regrowth.

We also know that the more growing points per square yard we have the more leaf we will get per square yard; this means a shorter interplant spacing. The more green leaf we have per square yard the better the solar panel is, the better the solar panel is, the higher the production or conversion from photosynthesis will be. Always remember, we are harvesting sunshine through photosynthesis with animals grazing correctly.

The fastest way to get a closer plant spacing is with total grazing where a high harvest efficiency grazing is followed by a long rest period. This close grazing allows sunlight to reach the soil surface where growing points are, growing points can be killed from too much shade if selective grazing was used.

Conclusions and recap

1. Overgrazing, the re-grazing of a plant before it has fully recovered needs to be avoided to regenerate your land.

2. The only way to achieve this at high to very high stocking rates is by doing Total Grazing.

3. As the cow needs grass, the grass needs the cow.

4. Total Grazing improves your solar panel by creating more growing points per square yard.

5. Total Grazing improves desirable species recruitment by providing a longer rest period where they can establish without being pulled out with their roots.

6. Total Grazing increases humus production the fastest by improving leaf production per square yard.

The online course for Total Grazing will soon be open for enrollment, so if you want to be the first to know and get an exclusive offer, you can join the waitlist by visiting https://www.rwranching.com/waitlist

Goodbye, make sure you subscribe to the podcast in Spotify, iTunes or YouTube, you can also join us on the weekly email at www.rwranching.com/join