Real Wealth Ranching

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo from Real Wealth Ranching and today we will discuss ways to save money without hurting our profits.

Why is it so important to differentiate between savings that do not hurt your profits and so-called savings that hurt your profits? Have you heard of penny wise and dollar foolish? It means that one can get so enthusiastic about saving that you start losing potential profits!

I have a lot of experience with this as I started my own medium sized business, a cheese and yogurt factory, to be able to buy my first farm. Learning how to calculate if a dollar can give you much more, when wisely invested, than if kept in your pocket can be the difference between profits and losses.

Sometimes this will be easy and plain to see, but other times not so easy. Today we are going through the 5 steps to make decisions, so you are certain it is profitable to spend a dollar on something or if it's better to keep it in your pocket.

Please remember that grazing livestock...

Hello everyone, this is Jim Elizondo of Real Wealth Ranching.

Have you ever wondered about Direct Marketing? Have you seen how the prices of beef have gone up? And the price we receive for beef and other products doesn’t go up as fast and that is crunching ranchers and farmers into a bitter difficult position.

Today, we will interview Kevin Muno from San Diego, California. Kevin is doing direct marketing and the name of his company is Perennial Pastures. He aims to target consumers that care about the regeneration of soil and the environment. And it is what he is doing with his grazing practices, he is practicing total grazing.

On this podcast, Kevin will be sharing with us the 5 tips for direct marketing. Want to know what they are? Listen to this great podcast episode with Kevin as he shares his advocacy to regenerate the land by applying the Total Grazing and Adapted Genetics practice while running his direct marketing business. 

Here are the highlights of the...

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo, your host at Real Wealth Ranching where our goal is to help you reach maximum profitability while you improve your land the fastest

Today I am going to talk about trees in your pastures.

Depending on the environment, some people believe trees are helpful and some others believe that they deprive their forages of moisture. But, in truth, trees are needed for many reasons and a savanna type of pasture is higher-yielding and more resilient than a pasture without trees.

I have been from Canada to Colombia in America, to Africa and Europe, even Hawaii, and have not seen an environment that could not be made better with the addition of trees in a suitable manner.

Trees act as shade, ambient cooling temperatures by evapotranspiration where the temperature under a tree is much cooler than in the full sun, they can also act as windbreaks of cold or drying winds if planted in rows, they act as mineral pumps recycling nutrients from deeper layers than grasses can...

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....