grazing

I went to a grazing workshop last weekend. I am not a farmer and don't imagine I'll ever have the patience to run a real farm. But I do love animals and was quite sure I'd learn something, as I knew basically nothing about grazing. The workshop was taught by Ben Bartlett, a farmer and retired Michigan State University extension agent, and organized by the university here. It was held at the Large Animal Research Station. We were asked not to wear our normal farm clothes to reduce the risk of farm-to-farm contamination. 
When we went around the room for introductions on Friday, I was one of only a few without a herd of some sort. Others had sheep, musk ox or swine. One had a "small cow-calf operation." I was glad to be able to say I just had chickens, as if that were some minimal qualification. Ben was gracious, noting that chickens eat grass, too.
He gave us a handout titled Successful Grazing with Holistic Management that said the goal of the workshop was to make us successful graziers. He said the idea of holistic management came from Allan Savory, in Africa. It's a tool that, used correctly, can help people "achieve an enjoyable, profitable, and sustainable future," as the handout put it. I did some Googling: According to the website of the Savory Institute, Savory was a Zimbabwean biologist, game rancher, politician, farmer and rancher who wanted to “save the beautiful savannah and its wildlife.” The website includes a video, made with help from Deepak Chopra, that claims “grass needs animals to thrive” and argues we can reverse desertification by managing livestock in a way that mimics wild herds. Ben is a board member and educator for Holistic Management International, an independent non-profit based in Albuquerque dedicated to helping farmers and ranchers around the world.

Ben introduced holistic management more from a personal than a planetary perspective, as a way to run a farm that makes money and meets social and environmental goals, kind of like the "triple bottom line" approach of looking out for profits, people, and the planet. He said for a while MSU was giving grants to farmers for various marketing projects, but when they checked back a few years later, many of the farmers had abandoned the projects. Sure, they made money selling at the farmers’ market, but they had to get up at 4am every Saturday.

Ben did not push his vision of social goals. He introduced some principles of decision making, like figuring out who needs to be involved in decisions, how much money you have to invest, and what resources are available to you (your truck, or someone who can do chores when you’re away, or a source for a new ram). Then he asked us to consider what’s important to us: “What do you want out of life?” He gave us a few minutes. 
Ben’s wife Denise sat in the back of the room. 
He did not push, I say, except that his and Denise’s vision was hard to argue with. We will have a life that is active, productive and always learning... It talked about honesty and integrity, financial security, and a "mutually rewarding marriage." It took them two years to write. Even the way Ben talked about money -- that most obvious of goals -- belied it as a means rather than an end.

He encouraged us to think in terms of goals and whether the things we do help us reach them. He and Denise realized recently they could get by without farming; they considered if they wanted to keep doing it and decided yes. You should run the farm, Denise said. Don’t let the farm run you. A man with cracked and dirty hands said he’d heard there’s a period of misery at the start of every farm project. “I mean, how long do you let that go?” he asked. Ben said it’s important to monitor whether you’re meeting your social goals as well as your financial goals. 

What you leave behind is really important, he said. You don’t want to be the guy who dies with lots of money and is remembered as a cheapskate. He said he wants to help people graze better, and then he gave us a few minutes to imagine our own legacy.

“When you write something down, be careful, because I can flat guarantee it’ll happen,” he said.

If some of this makes Ben sound like an out-of-touch idealist, it shouldn’t. He jokes that he doesn’t want to be remembered as a man who dutifully separated his plastics for recycling, and he is far from a hobby farmer. He and Denise have 400 to 500 ewes and raise 100 to 200 head of stock cattle each year, with only occasional day help. They grow over a million pounds of grass each season.

In Ben’s view, livestock farmers are primarily growers of grass: “It’s all about collecting sunshine to grow the plants to feed the animals to make you money.” The number of animals you have is limited by the amount of feed available (and the opposite, in a sense, but more on that later). He said he would raise camels if they could convert grass to cash better, to which Denise replied that they would not raise camels.

Ben shifted toward the nuts and bolts, presenting us with a blank table in the handout for us to tally our fields, acreage, and estimated productivity in pounds of grass per acre available for grazing each year. I asked how much variability he assumed in grass production and he said fifty percent is not out of the ordinary. Plans are inevitably wrong when you’re dealing with biological systems, he said. We can land the Mars Rover within yards, years after takeoff, but we don’t know if it’s going to rain this afternoon. He seemed okay with that.

We went outside and walked through a gate onto a very green hillside.

“This is some real nice grazing here,” Ben said. There were small patches of brown, and some places with very little grass, but mostly the grass was thick. Little cones of musk ox poop were nearly hidden in the grass. We gathered around Ben, who wore leather boots and Wranglers. “Listen when I shovel,” he said, aiming for a clump of thick grass. He struggled. “You brought me a dull shovel,” he teased the animals’ caretaker, a young woman named Emma. He ran his hands through the wedge he’d cut and explained that it was all grass, several inches down. There was no dirt, and therefore no way for the organic matter to be broken down by bugs and other means. 

He talked about watering troughs and how they were “manure magnets” because animals will have a drink, walk twenty steps, and poop. The animals end up transferring nutrients from where they graze to where they poop. Moving the water source can help. 

He explained that an uneaten, lush spot was likely a urine spot, and he told the story of a dairy farmer intent on getting his cows to finish a last green strip in a paddock. You got enough room in your milk tank? Ben had asked him. Yup. You got more pasture? Yup. Then move them.

The fact that some spots were grazed low while others were still green suggested the animals were being choosey, he said. If you have eight donuts for nine people, people will grab for them, but if you have dozens for a few people, they’ll get picky. Animals with lots of freedom will form trails; those more confined will spread out evenly.

A graduate student had a special tool that measured kilograms of biomass per hectare, which Ben said is almost the same as pounds per acre. She got about 2,000 kilograms where we were -- an acre’s worth of grass weighed about a ton. Ben said they will graze 400 family units (ewes plus lambs) on eight acres for two days. Assuming a ewe and her lamb or lambs together eat 8 pounds per day, the animals will eat 6,400 pounds over the two days, or 800 pounds per acre. They could keep grazing there, but it’s important to leave some green leaf so the grass can grow back quickly. 

Ben explained how they put lambs and ewes on adjoining paddocks after weaning so they can talk through the fence. He made fun of old ranchers who separated calves, branded them, and put them on a new pasture – where maybe on a clear night they could hear their mothers bellowing a half-mile away – and then wondered why they got sick. "I mean, can you stress them any more?" he said.

There was only one time when Ben sounded a little out of his element, like Fairbanks was a long way from the Upper Peninsula. When someone explained that people here think compost just kills the grass, Ben suggested spreading it in fall, after the growing season. A man from the cooperative extensive service said that's not recommended because spring run off will wash it away. Late summer? Ben said.

Emma told me she wanted it to rain because she’d just spread fertilizer.

When we went inside, Ben stressed “pasture walks” as a way to learn from others. Even a veteran farmer will be a beginner if he doesn't try new things or take advantage of others’ experience, he said. “You’re not going to get 100 grazing seasons, and you can’t learn it from a book.” Try new things, visit other farms. Ben said farmers knew about rotating crops for many many years, but forgot most of it in the Midwest. “You talk to guys in Iowa and they think corn and soybeans is a rotation,” he said, and everyone laughed. It encouraged me to think the passive solar chicken coop we're building might be an experiment we and others can learn from.

Ben explained that grass basically goes through three phases. First it draws on root reserves to get going. Then, once it has some green leaf to absorb energy from the sun, it grows quickly. And finally, when it’s done growing, it reproduces and goes into senescence. (Minus the photosynthesis, it didn’t sound too unlike humans.) He said we should start grazing when the grass has three leaves -- most grasses can support exactly three healthy leaves, although broan grass can have a dozen or more -- and stop grazing when there’s still some green leaf left. The pasture we visited was suffering from grazing deficiency, or too few animals, allowing the animals to be choosy. In some places, they’d eaten the tender new growth in spots they’d already grazed, depleting the plants' reserves.

Ben asked a man with 18 ewes how many bales of hay he could get from an acre of grass, and the man struggled to answer. For a few years his grass was four feet high, but for the last three years it’s only grown to six inches. A man from Delta Junction said farmers were grateful this year if they had a third their normal production; some didn’t even harvest their hay. He said one dairy farmer is already buying round bales from Alberta -- for $300 to $500 a bail.

Ben said it’s important to find your average production and recognize that half the time you’ll be below average. He didn’t mean to be insensitive to Alaskan farmers suffering from a summer without rain. He just meant you have to put up hay in the good years.

At one point, he said, “Nothing is as good as grazing,” and I think he was comparing grazing to buying feed, but it seemed like he could have meant it without any context. There’s nothing as good as grazing.

As we left for the day, it started to rain.

On Saturday morning, we started in the classroom again. Ben said he was up at 4 am thinking about grass. He showed us photos on a PowerPoint of his farm – ewes and lambs in mid-May, sheep and steers separated by five-wire fence, a border collie doing what it was bred to do. The sun was out and the grass was filled with clover and buttercup and dandelion. Visions ran through my head. “This is when you’re really excited about being a sheep farmer,” Ben said. 
Sometimes they’ll move the sheep as much as a mile -- a thousand animals trotting through the woods, led by a husband and wife and dog. Even five abreast, the animals could stretch a quarter mile.

There was a long discussion on using a self-feeder for loose minerals. (Rain can leach the salt from a salt lick.) I took away that Ben and Denise look for the best product at a fair price and accept that they’ll have to modify and fix it. “If you can’t build something so it won’t break, built it so it will break where you want,” he said.

Now might be a good time to mention Ben’s affinity for aphorisms. I’m actually kind of a sucker for these bits of wisdom -- even when they’re painfully obvious, it would help us all if we actually followed them. Here are a few, from the two days:

You gotta do something different to get different results.

Plans are Nothing; Planning is Everything (attributed to Dwight Eisenhower).

Plans are only Good Intentions unless they immediately degenerate into Hard Work (attributed to Peter Drucker).

Big things never happen. (Keep the big picture in mind, but focus on small steps.)

Slow is fast (when animal handling).

We can only achieve what we can dream.

The one time I questioned this type of thing was when Ben said, “You spend your life doing the means, but the means are not what it’s all about.” I think he meant that raising livestock is satisfying because it makes their life “active, productive and always learning.” But for all his talk about social goals, it seemed odd to downplay the day-in, day-out. If you didn’t like the acts of farming -- or anything else, for that matter -- it’s hard to imagine lasting long enough to reach your goals.

During a break, I stood outside with a guy who works at LARS and talked about chickens. We concluded they’re not a moneymaker but worth it anyway. A hundred yards away, a few musk ox shuffled back and forth in the late-morning mist, moving surprisingly fast, and smooth, with their thick hair covering up most signs of motion. “I’ve never outrun one,” said a man with a musk ox farm in Palmer. The two of them talked about breeding techniques.

Ben took us through some paddock math. If you graze your animals (graze can be transitive or intransitive and can refer to the farmer’s action or his animals’) for three days in one paddock -- the longest you’d want without risking animals eating new growth -- and it takes about three weeks for a grazed paddock to recover, you need 21 divided by 3 paddocks, plus the one the animals are in.

He gave us time to imagine our own farms. I thought about the land where I grew up in upstate New York. If you could produce 2,500 pounds of grass per acre on a 20-acre farm, you could only have 50 ewe families, and that would only feed them during the growing season. It made me think you’d need a lot of land to have livestock.

We ate lunch in the classroom. A man told me about the breed of pigs he’s raising and how the sows did fine down to 50 below in an unheated shelter. The boar got frostbite on his testicles.

Ben came back with some broan grass he’d yanked up from a wet spot, to show us all the leaves. He talked about electric fences (shock the lambs once good in the spring and it won’t matter if the fence is broken in August) and ways to get water to paddocks (they use a special plastic pipe from Israel).

The last part of the workshop was devoted to low stress livestock handling. It was one of the reasons I’d signed up, imagining wrapping my arms gently around a caribou, or running my fingers through the amazing long hair of a musk ox. In fact, animal handling just means moving animals, which rarely if ever involves actual contact.

Low stress animal handling emphasizes non-verbal communication and relies on asking animals to move rather than forcing them. Its pioneers are Temple Grandin, the expert of animal science whose design ideas have dramatically changed livestock handling facilities; Bud Williams, the expert handler who once corralled a whole herd of Canadian reindeer alone and on foot; and Burt Smith, whose research has helped explain animal behavior. Ben talked about animals’ anatomy (they can see and hear a lot, but not well), instinct, and how they learn from experience.

The man with the musk ox, who is large, said he scares off his young bulls, even runs after them to put them in place. A man with sheep, who is thin, said his rams keep testing him -- he has to tie them up or they’ll charge him from behind. Denise advised him to find some new rams. Ben said he doesn't spar with their animals; he just assumes they will respect him.

Someone asked about their rams, and Ben had to think. “Where are the rams right now?” he asked his wife. The hill lot, she said. They only have 11, and the animals just graze here and there, cleaning up weeds.

Ben showed a video of him moving a herd of 1,500-pound cattle toward a gate. He was alone and on foot, walking straight lines (curved lines are threatening), back and forth, at the edge of the animals’ flight zone. Don’t force them to move, just get them to want to move. The herd will follow the leaders; stragglers will follow the herd. It took two or three minutes. Slow is fast.

The skies cleared up and we went outside. We followed Emma down a passageway and filed into a small enclosure. She and Ben stayed in a larger enclosure, then opened a gate and led three musk ox in. Ben carried a plywood shield; Emma had only steel-toed ExtraTufs. The animals’ hair nearly brushed the ground around their hooved feet. Ben walked the two-year-old back and forth along a fence, and then the 16-year-old, who was less testy. The 18-year-old (I forget their names) stood by the gate with Emma. Ben said the animals were confused because Emma hadn't fed them yet. 
The musk ox bull and his harem (in another field) wandered down the hill and gathered on the other side of a gate. The bull roared like a lion. The 16-year-old walked over to him and started butting her horns repeatedly against the metal gate. Ben came over to talk to us while Emma tried to get the three females back into their field. She walked around calmly, putting her hand on the rear of the old ones when she had to, because the old beasts knew her and let her.

The reindeer proved harder to move. (LARS has musk ox, reindeer, and caribou, about 60 animals in all.) There were four females, two older and two younger. Their ankles clacked like castanets as they walked. Ben tried to herd them into a corner, but they kept returning to a different corner. We leaned our arms against the metal gate like old ranchers. A flock of sandhill cranes flew overhead. 

The longer we watched, the more I saw. The antlers of the two-year-olds had a single long spike, while the older reindeer’s antlers had several points. One of the reindeer twisted her head nearly upside down, stood on three legs, and with delicate balance scratched the velvet of an antler with her hoof. Ben said the girl with the velvet had a lot of attitude. When they decided they wanted to, they moved to the far corner. But then they started to get nervous, so Ben stopped. “There’s not a lot of flight zone, but there’s a lot of attitude,” he said, adding that it is possible to breed for temperament.

One of the older cows walked almost straight toward us and snorted. Then class was over. We said our thank yous, and Emma went off to feed the musk ox.