Real Wealth Ranching

Hello, welcome to the Fat Cows, Fat Wallet Podcast. I’m your host, Jim Elizondo, creator of Real Wealth Ranching. I am a real rancher with over 30 years of experience on regenerating the land and significantly improving profits on my own ranches and with my consulting clients on MANY different environments. My passion is to help ranchers to achieve the same. If you’re an ambitious farmer or rancher who’s looking to maximize your profitability while improving your land the fastest, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started.

I got a question for you. Have you already implemented the Total Grazing Program? Doesn’t mean if you have taken my courses, I have plenty of people with good results who have used what I have published online. I’m getting straight to the point here. But listen, we are at the end of 2021, so I think I’m at the liberty to say that if you’re a regenerative rancher or an aspiring one, total grazing will change your life. I’ve been in the regenerative space for a ...

 Hello, I am Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching

Today we will talk about Total grazing and adapted genetics/selection guidelines.

When we start to implement the process of total grazing in your land you may need, for better results, to use adapted genetics with correct selection guidelines. Then, what should we do? Only total grazing? Or at the same time implement adapted genetics with correct selection guidelines?

The good news is that this doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, I want you to consider how this two big subjects' impact or can impact your cattle business. You will come out of this podcast with a decision. Will you implement total grazing and use adapted genetics/correct selection guidelines? Will you only do total grazing? Or maybe a little of both?

I’m going to say up front: to achieve the best results in our ranches/farms it is important to increase our grass production using low-cost biological methods, increase our harvest efficiency to get more cow day...

Transcript.

Hello, welcome to the first episode of the Fat Cows, Fat Wallet Podcast. I’m your host, Jim Elizondo.

When I’m out in the world and I’m speaking with other ranchers or farmers and they ask me what type of grazing I do, and I explain to them, the looks I get from them are very entertaining and show a lot of confusion.

Sometimes they just change the topic or they’ll say something like, “Oh that’s cool”. But all in all, I usually have to explain what I mean. And I thought, you know, I bet others of my Total Grazing students deal with the same thing. So why not start this podcast with an episode to help all of us to better explain what we do, because it goes beyond an isolated grazing event. It’s more advanced than that, it’s more detailed than that and it’s part of a bigger picture. So in today’s episode, I talk in detail about what exactly Total Grazing is and how it works within a ranching business. And I’m going to give examples of ranchers practicing Total Grazing an...

The main problem when selecting for maximum EPDs is that it will shift the size of our cattle to larger animals, and this goes against low maintenance which is so important to achieve profitability on a ranch or farm.

We can recognize that there must be a limit to the size our cows can be imposed by the environment on which they need to grow and function.

When should we stop in our search for higher and higher weights at weaning, at a year of age, size of carcass?

We must remember that high weaning weight has a big component of high milk production which goes against low maintenance cows.

Could it be that the larger frame and late maturing cows ensuing from this are what we need when selecting for larger weaning weighs?

Could the environment play a role in determining which size of cow is more efficient to maximize pounds of weaned calves sold per year?

We need to ask ourselves: what is my goal

Is it converting your forage produced per year into more pounds of weaned calves i...

As we know, the leaf to stem ratio determines the level of available energy for growth in the plant and how much energy can be used to feed soil microorganisms by root exudates.  These soil microorganisms, in return, make nutrients in the soil available to the plants.  It is a virtuous cycle that depends on the leaf to stem ratio.

This is so due to the leaves producing energy through photosynthesis and the stems consuming energy by respiring.

We also know that leaf has higher digestibility, 60-70 percent while stems only have around 30-40 percent. This means your cattle will have better nutrition when they consume more leaf.

Now, how can we quantify how much leaf, by weight we have in relation to stems?

We need to remember that stems weight much more than leaves.

1.- Cut one square yard of grass flush with the soil

2.- Weight it on a scale

3.- Separate the green leaves from the stems and brown leaves

4.- Weight them each in their own separate bag

5.- Divide the weight of the...

Silvopasture in my opinion is having edible trees that we can also use as forage, as shade and to improve our environment by bringing more biodiversity.

Watch the video as we discuss the benefits of silvopasture and different examples as well as how to manage very palatable trees which can be damaged by cattle if not managed properly.

To be happy we all need to have peace, and harmony is needed to be able to have peace.

I have visited many farms and ranches where the owner is burdened with too much work or debt. This is not fun!

On one farm, the owner was trying to raise laying hens, chickens for meat, pigs, and beef cows.

I suggested that we do a return-on-time analysis of those different enterprises and found that they spent more time on these side businesses and much less time on the beef cows that generated most of their profits as they sold their meat direct to the consumer...

When we calculated the return to their hours worked, we found that they were losing money with the laying hens and with their broilers, and earning a little with pigs, but most of their income came from the beef cows to which they allocated much less time.

We have all made this mistake, of trying to do many things without taking a break for our family or our own needs.

We must work intelligently and not make life difficult; ensuri...

Many times, we can profit from overseeding higher producing annuals or perennials on our pastures in different times of the year.

While tilling the soil or using herbicides may give a better stand or an earlier and higher yield compared to no till drilling without herbicides or tilling, you can still benefit from this practice by timely severe grazing and or mowing.

No till drilling Sudan grass in cool season forages to get higher forage production in the summer slump is one example.  Another could be incorporating new herbs, like Chicory or plantain, into cool season forages for better drought resistance in milder environments.

Another could be no till drilling of tall grass prairie species into cool season forages.

In all these cases we need to consider two things:

1.- The allelopathic effect of the established pasture

2.- Good seed to soil contact

For the allelopathic effect we can play with the season to make sure the established pasture species are dormant or weakened whe...

Overgrazing happens when an individual plant is re grazed before it has fully recovered from the previous grazing. It's not the same as severe grazing where if adequate rest is given, promotes leaf production and a better leaf to stem ratio that allows the plant to be more productive.

Under Total grazing we strive to harvest as high a % as possible and in practice we usually achieve 80-90% harvest efficiency. This is very high as when machine cutting for hay harvest efficiency is usually lower.

Under Selective grazing cattle harvest, by definition, a lower quantity of forage than under Total Grazing, usually 30-50%.

Let’s think about the consequences of this.

Under Selective grazing, where they harvest only 30% of available forage means that only one third of the available cow/days is harvested by the cattle.

The cow/days harvested per acre determines, in a given area, how many days pass between grazing and the herd returning, which is the rest period.

Harvesting 90% of availab...