Real Wealth Ranching

Hello! This is Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching where our goal is to maximize your profitability while you improve your land the fastest.

Can I let you in on a secret? There is a little bit of a selfish reason I love hosting this podcast and teaching Total Grazing, and it is because not only does it improve the environment but it is because I get to meet and talk to people and students from all over the world, from all walks of life, ranchers and farmers who are inspiring, who have been through loss and triumphs and who have been persistent and succeeded despite all odds, who have been through enormous challenges and are still standing. 

I feel very blessed to get the chance to hear their stories and learn about their journey as they have gone through my Total Grazing course.

But the best part of all is hearing about their success stories once they start applying the principles they have just learned.

This is what I love the most, hearing about their successes, how they...

Residual, what’s in the name?

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching, and it is my pleasure to present this podcast about residual after grazing.

Nature is always striving for higher complexity and higher productivity; please keep this in mind.

We have been told that we need to leave ample residual as armor for the soil and have been shown thermometer readings in the Summer of bare soil, soil covered by vegetation, and soil covered with residue. 

I, myself, used to believe that leaving much residual was good for the soil, as it is logical that harvesting more of the total available forage to create more forage seems counterintuitive and feels like a bad thing. But when we consider the impact, this has on the rest of the property and on the individual plant and soil microorganisms, and leaf-to-stem ratio in the regrowth it all starts to make sense. We should consider the impact on the whole year and the future productivity of each decision we make.

I have...

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...

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 not so much fun but is fundamental for your success, and this is economics. 

When I think about fun in my operation, this means being hands on. Being in the ranch, observing my cattle’s condition, my land, forage and taking decisions. This is the cool stuff for me. 

I don’t necessarily think that economics are fun but they are fundamental for your success and fortunately, I’ve known this since day 1.

They are absolutely necessary for the growth and scaling of your operation and they have definitely helped me along the way.

I’ve gotten better in this as years go by and I want to share this with you in this episode. I’m going to give you...

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

Today we are going to talk about fat cows at high stocking rates while doing Total grazing.

Achieving these three things at the same time:
1. fat cows
2. at very high stocking rates, and
3. doing Total Grazing
Sounds too good to be true?

It is doable and me and my students have been doing it with success! 

Let’s emphasize each of the three.

Fat cows, means to me, cows in good body condition

High to very high stocking rates, means 2 to 3 times higher stocking rate than with selective grazing

Total Grazing is a program where we aim for very high harvest efficiency to get more cow days harvested per grazing as this allows the paddocks a much longer rest period than with selective grazing.

I know some concerns people have when they consider doing Total grazing.

First, they worry that their cattle will lose body condition when...

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

I have long read and heard that unrolling hay and leaving much hay residual is not waste but good for your soil with many teachers telling ranchers to use unrolling hay to build fertility in poor areas. While this may be good advice if hay is used efficiently, due to concentrating manure and urine, many have mistaken this for building a fertility program based on wasteful hay feeding, which for me is a mistake as I am going to explain.

Now, I am going to talk about building soil humus. Soil humus is your soil’s real fertility, and unlike available nutrients, it stays around for a very long time, how long? Up to a hundred years! So, it pays to build up humus.

Let’s start by defining that humus is the stable fraction of organic matter that cannot be further degraded by the action of microorganisms. This also means that organic...

Welcome to this podcast of Real Wealth Ranching where our goal is to help you reach maximum profitability while your land improves the fastest.

I am Jim Elizondo and today I will speak about how to use Total grazing to increase our productivity and stocking rate while at the same time make sure we avoid overgrazing that does so much harm to pastures and ranges.

Many cattlemen confuse overgrazing with an efficient harvest by the cows. Nothing further from the truth, we need to consider how the plant functions and how livestock graze if we allow them to do their will. When we leave livestock in a paddock for more than one day, they start to select the best species and parts of plants that they prefer. This means that the best or desirable species will be consumed all the way down to the ground and the undesirable species will be avoided allowing them to take over your field. We need to remember that plants compete above ground for sunlight and below ground for nutrients and water....

Transition from Selective Grazing to Total Grazing.

Most cattlemen allow their cattle to do selective grazing where cattle select the best regarding forage species and parts of plants while leaving behind as residual the undesirable species and stems, as they prefer leaves. This is the main reason that the undesirable species take over a field or paddock. Besides, the residual that is left behind inhibits the regrowth of leaves for the next grazing as those stems continue to consume energy by respiring which weakens the roots or crowns. We need to remember that competition between desirable and undesirable plants occurs above and below ground. Above for sunlight and below for water and nutrients.

The consequence is a lower harvest efficiency and less leaf production per square yard, acre or hectare. This also means less humus production as humus is formed by the bodies of the microorganisms near the roots of the plants that fed on root exudates created by the plant, these root...

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo of Real Wealth Ranching and today we are going to consider how to save on hay when feeding it out.

You may think, isn’t it better to feed the soil with hay? Isn’t that a way to increase humus content of our soils?

While rotting hay may give some temporary surge of grass growth due to its organic humic acids being released, it is a very expensive way to increase soil humus as most soil humus is not produced by litter being degraded in the soil, but it comes mainly from the decomposition of the microorganism's bodies and these microorganisms are fed by the plants root exudates which in turn depend on the leaf to stem ratio in the plant. We know we can affect the leaf to stem ratio in the following regrowth by doing Total Grazing as my Total Grazing students have been doing with good success. Remember: green leaves produce energy through photosynthesis while stems consume energy through respiring.

It is important, therefore, to use your...

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching and today we are going to talk about "How to make sure cattle don’t get out of electric fences under dry conditions".

I hear from many people that electric fences do not work well or are not very effective. This usually means that when conditions are ideal the livestock respect it but when conditions are difficult, they get out and exasperate the farmer.

In my own experience, when I am off the farm, my helper will tell me that the electric fence failed or that the livestock got out and when asked the reason, I only get a blank stare from them and sometimes I believe they are convinced that electric fences are not reliable or do not work, period.

Well, let me tell you, One wire electric fence is very cheap, durable and should be enough if we pay attention to details.

They are so cheap to install and to maintain, to the tune of 3 to 10 times lower cost than barbed wire or wire netting that they make absolute sense...