Ranching Full-Time on 3 Hours a Day Cody Holmes Acres USA, 2011
In Norwood, Missouri, a 1,000 acre ranch stands out from the rest. The grass is green and lush. More than a hundred species of plants are grazed by intensively managed herds of livestock, and the ground is fertile. The cows are low-maintenance and the ranch is low-input. Healthy food is produced here, and it doesn’t come only from beef cows. Milk cows, pigs, sheep and chickens add to the beef cow/calf operation, promoting diversity and ecosystem health on the ranch.
That’s the short story of Cody Holmes’ operation. Cody uses his experiences and advancements on his ranch through his book, “Ranching Full-Time on 3 Hours a Day” to educate others on how they too can be successful farmers in today’s environment.
Don’t let the book’s title fool you. When I first purchased it, I thought the book would focus on how to be efficient and run a cattle operation with minimal effort. That was a little misleading. In one section of the book, Holmes talks about the fact that a couple hundred head cattle operation is NOT a full time job, and shouldn’t be treated as such. That leaves time to focus on other aspects, such as marketing and focusing on the management of other species. Overall, though, the book was more focused on holistic management and not efficient time management on a ranch.
Each of the chapters in the book focus on an important aspect of farming, including grass management, economics and multi-species grazing. Holmes has a lot of opinions on those and other topics, and shares his wisdom and experiences with the reader. It reminds me a lot of Greg Judy’s book “Comeback Farms”.
If you’re looking for a book on how to manage a cattle operation with just 3 hours of labor a day, this isn’t the book for you. But if you want ideas for holistic management, rejuvenating the land, and thriving on the family farm, you’ll enjoy Cody Holmes’ book.
Across the country, cattle farmers and ranchers are hard at work.
For some, they are wrapping up a long calving season and sighing a breath of relief as the warm, dry weather settles in.
For others, like here in Northern Maine, winter is holding on until the bitter end (literally) and calving has either just begun or not even started yet.
Here on the Wood Farm, our first calf is not “officially” due for a few weeks; we would not be surprised, though, if some of our girls delivered early, maybe even in the next week. With that being said, we are in full calving prep mode.
The calving bucket has been cleaned up and restocked with all the necessary supplies for handling a newborn calf: iodine to prevent infection in the naval, MultiMin, needles and syringes for that all important vitamin and mineral injection, ear tags and gun, banding gun and bands, hoof measuring tape for weight estimate and a sling scale.
Before we know it, we will be checking the herd every 2-3 hours throughout the calving season, watching for signs of the onset of labor!
Chuck Jolley recently wrote an opinion piece on modern agriculture for Drovers Cattle Network, defending the large-scale farming model we have in most of America today. His basic point? Farming has become BIG, BIG, BIG, and has to remain BIG to supply food for the nation and the world. He defends the bigger-is-better mentality as a necessity. For instance, he describes the high costs of farming as a reason farms must be big.
Equipment is as expensive as those high dollar Italian supercars. A new tractor? Think a Ferrari-like $300,000. A combine? Think a Rolls-Royce Maharaja Phantom Drophead Coupe at $400,000. And the cash to pay the monthlies? It comes once a year if the weather holds and the farmer made all the right choices along the way. Like every other worthwhile business pursuit, farming is a ‘pay-to-play’ corporate pursuit which means it has to be big to generate the income needed to play another day. Small farms tend to be hobby farms; few generate the cash needed to be self-sustaining without outside income. People who operate them often live hand-to-mouth and are called ‘richer in other ways,’ a polite old phrase meaning they’re going broke but it still feels good. Regardless, banks still say ‘show me the money’ at the end of the month.
What Mr. Jolley fails to point out, however, is that a large reason for high equipment costs is the profitability of farming at large scales that has driven these costs through the roof. Also, government subsidies have helped these farms grow to such a high level and produce food at a much lower cost. This has certainly made us more productive, but at what cost? Many can argue our food is less healthy and nutritious, more difficult to trace, and heavily subsidized by the taxpayer – so how cheap is it, really?
For better or worse, we’ve created a situation in agriculture where one has to be BIG to be profitable. But is that really the case? While one can argue that high production agriculture is a good thing, I would argue that Mr. Jolley’s presentation of modern farming is NOT the only way to be profitable in agriculture. A small but rapidly growing movement of small scale, local farmers have found a way, working with nature and keeping costs down, to provide healthy, wholesome locally raised food at a generous profit. Here’s how Jolley describes today’s small farm:
The nostalgia surrounding small farms certainly plucks at the heart strings of an urban America without an even distant memory of what life was like way back when. Returning to an imaginary era of a more sustainable time when fresh eggs could be plucked still warm from the nest, chickens for a family Sunday dinner were scurrying around the back yard, a hog was slaughtered in the fall, and fresh-picked and canned vegetables were kept in the cellar? That nostalgic image of carrying the family through the harsh but Norman Rockwellian, cover-of-the-Saturday Evening Post winter puts a smile on everyone’s face but it ain’t real life, folks. It’s a pleasant, back-to-a-simpler-life fantasy created early in the twentieth century by Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney to sell magazines and movies. Large corporate but still family-owned farms using the latest technology are what feeds America and the world today. Owners of most of those idealized small farms can only feed themselves and a few friends. They’re the people you see at farmers’ markets in the summer, selling their excess produce during the height of the picking season. The very small profit they hope to make helps tide them over until next year. Year around ‘in town’ jobs help them pay the monthly utility bills and cover expensive necessities like health insurance.
While Jolley’s description is accurate in some ways, he fails to mention the success stories that are providing a model for how small scale farming can be both efficient and profitable.
Joel Salatin works with nature on his beyond-organic Polyface Farm in Virginia to produce enough annual calories on 10 acres to feed 9 people. (for perspective, the Farmland Information Center shows over 900 million acres of farmland in production in the U.S.) Salatin’s farm takes no government subsidies and produces, if I remember right, about $100,000 of product per salary employed by the farm. The farm produces poultry, eggs, pork and beef, among many other products. They operate with almost no mechanized equipment and no chemical inputs.
Gabe Brown’s ranch in North Dakota produces sustainable grain, among other products. He uses holistic management, 100% no-till, no chemical fertilizers and non-GMO grains. And he makes money doing it.
Countless others are making the small-scale, holistic farms work and produce a profit. Can small-to-moderate scale holistic agriculture feed the world? I’m not sure. It’s a small and growing movement that hasn’t yet reached anywhere near its potential, and is being suppressed by many aspects of conventional agriculture.
Chuck Jolley might be right. Large scale industrial farming might be what we need to feed the world. Or it might be an unsustainable practice that drives future generations to destruction and poverty. How do we know which model is best?
I propose a test. Let’s take away all of the government subsidies for all agriculture. Let the little guys and the big guys compete on a level playing field. Let’s get an understanding of the real cost of food in America. Let’s work together, but compete.
Okay, I’ll admit that’s fantasy land. In reality, most things farming will continue as they are. But, Mr. Jolley, it would do us all good to recognize the fact that large-scale production agriculture isn’t the only way to survive, profit, and thrive as a farmer in America.
Like most mature industries, the beef cattle business is broken up into different segments in the production chain. Why? Because as the industry developed over the past century, it became more efficient for a particular business to focus on a smaller segment of overall production. Efficiency means lower cost and more productivity, which is why the beef business is segmented like it is today.
The segmented industry means that a calf born on a farm will likely make three moves before it is slaughtered and ends up on the supermarket shelves or restaurant plate. Most calves start on a cow-calf operation, move to a backgrounder, are finished at a feedlot, and then go to the packing plant. It seems that this should cost more than a simple permanent stay on the home farm, but efficiencies of production at higher scales make this the lowest cost option.
The three sectors of the beef cattle industry are as follows:
-Cow/Calf
-Stocker/Backgrounder
-Feed Yard/Finisher
Cow Calf
The cow-calf operation is the typical family farm or ranch most people imagine when they think of cattle. The farm/ranch maintains a number of mother cows and breeds them each year. Calves are born and raised by the cows until a determined age. The calves are then weaned and sold via private sale or at auction. Average age at weaning is about 7 months, or 205 days. Calves typically weigh around 550 pounds at weaning.
Stocker/Backgrounder
While most of the nation’s cattle are finished at a feedlot, freshly weaned calves are often too small to go straight to a feedlot and need more time to grow frame and develop their digestive systems. The majority of weaned calves go to a stocker or backgrounder. While these terms are used interchangeably, the stocker typically brings in weaned calves and puts them out on grass for a couple hundred pounds of gain. When I think backgrounder, it’s usually a term reserved for a type of feedyard that specializes in feeding small calves in the stocker phase, but on a more concentrated diet.
Feeder/Finisher
At an average of about 700-800 lbs (but this can vary significantly), young cattle enter the finishing phase of their life. They are usually finished in a feedlot on a high energy diet of grain to allow them to gain weight quickly and fatten easily. While the health aspect of eating grain-fed cattle is often debated, it’s tough to argue that cattle with lots of fat and marbling taste great!
Conclusion
So that’s the American cattle industry in a few paragraphs. No doubt there are many variations, but this general model is the one that produces most of the country’s beef. The grass-fed cattle movement is growing fast, but still makes up a miniscule part of the industry. The beauty of cattle is that there is still room for the family farm to make a living with a few hundred cows. In contrast, the pork and poultry industries have become so industrialized that the factory farm is the norm. There’s still a level of personal attention, adaptive management, and TLC needed to successfully maintain a productive cow herd, and the family farm continues to be one of the best models around.
Where did our pasture go?! Winter come early. November 1, 2014.
We live in northern Maine. Cold, snowy winters are the norm – not the exception. Winter can start as early as the beginning of November and last until well into “spring” time. We accept this way of life – albeit grudgingly at first – but nonetheless, we hunker down and get it done – rain, sun, snow, sleet, freezing rain, ice, etc.
Our animals’ livelihoods depend on us and being a cattle farmer is not a pick and choose career. This is not a hobby. This is not something we will get bored with in a few years. And, this certainly is not something that we do as a status symbol. For us, our beef cattle farm is so intertwined into our work and personal lives that there is no separating it out.
Father and son admiring their herd
Being beef cattle farmers is not just something that we do, it is what we are.
Plain and simple.
This all being said, our devotion and passion for being beef cattle farmers has been tested day after day this winter, as we, in northern Maine, shatter one record after another and plunge down into recorded temperatures only experienced 2 other times in recorded history.
For example, with wind chill, our temperatures last night were just shy of -50 degrees F.
I can probably count on one hand the number of days we have had the last two months where the temperature reached 20 degrees F or higher. There have only been two days in the last two months where I have been able to take our 2-year old son outside to play. Two days. We are active people and we are used to being able to be active outside even in the winter. Our son is active – oh so very active. Two days. It.can.drive.a.person.crazy. The month of February will likely go on record as the coldest February in recorded history in Maine.
If it isn’t a blizzard outside, we are having 40-mph wind gusts or the temperatures are hypothermia- inducing type temperatures. Or some sort of horrible combination of these weather conditions.
It has been a bitter, brutally cold winter thus far and our cattle are the ones most affected. Miraculously, our cattle are still with us! 🙂 All I can say is that we have some tough, thick-skinned cows. Our herd count is currently at 20 animals, with 10 first year bred heifers, 9 bred cows, and one heifer calf. They astound us every day with their ability to not only withstand this type of cold but to, for the most part, maintain their body condition. We do have one cow and one heifer with body conditions not where we would like them but body condition has been a concern with them even not in the winter. They may likely be culled from the herd at some point. But, as a whole, we have been impressed with our cattle this winter.
Starting hay bale grazing a month earlier than anticipated, in early-November.
We have discussed in depth in previous posts our method of wintertime feeding – hay bale grazing. Now, not only have we been experiencing a harsh winter but winter came about a month early for us and with that, we had to start our hay bale grazing a month earlier than we had hoped, in early November. Our girls transitioned well coming off pasture into hay bale grazing. We were especially pleased with how quickly our first-year heifers adapted to this type of feeding.
As winter roared into December and then into the new year, though, we noticed that our cattle were consuming almost double the dry matter that we had anticipated for them. Our girls were consuming unbelievable amounts of hay and with the bitterly cold temperatures we were experiencing, I can’t say we blamed them too much. BUT, we were starting to notice quite a bit of waste and a pattern developing where our girls would eat the highest quality portion of hay in each bale and then attempt to move onto the next bale.
At times, our cows were ignoring entire bales of hay and attempting to crawl under the electric wire to get to more hay. Due to some issues with terrible winds and rain disrupting the tarps over our hay bales in late summer/early fall, we did end up with a range in hay bale quality. That being said, though, the hay quality in even the worst quality bale was/is certainly still a sufficient food source.
To be frank, our girls were starting to get spoiled and a bit lazy. They wanted to take the cream off the top of the milk pail with no interest for the actual milk. We had to start restricting access to bales and “encouraging” them to clean up bales before opening up more access. This worked well for a while.
Then, January hit and temperatures plummeted even more and we were facing a huge problem. Even with restricting bale access and pushing our cattle to minimize hay waste, we simply did not have enough bales to last our the winter. We were straddling a very fine line with pushing our cows but also not letting them lose too much body condition. We had to do something and we had to do it NOW.
We are fortunate to have a good relationship with our hay supplier and he came through for us in a big way. In the end, he delivered almost 50 round hay bales to our farm. These hay bales had been stored in his barn from the previous summer’s cutting but they were still sufficient bales to feed our cows.
Because of the weather conditions and our limited resources, we were not able to get all 50 bales positioned into our existing hay bale rows. So, we supplemented our restricted hay bale grazing with feeding out the older hay bales in our round hay bale feeder.
After a few weeks, our cows’ hay consumption finally started to balance out and we are close to our goal value of dry matter consumed/day/animal. Those 50 additional bales are long gone, and we are back to full-time hay bale grazing. We feel confident that our remaining hay supply in our hay bale grazing sites will last us until green grass.
Oh, sweet, green grass. Please let springtime come early this year!
