Building a Grass-Fed Beef Operation with Cover Crops: Gary Nitschke's Circle Inn Ranch

0:10 I bet you Oliver is glad to see me, as I am to see you. Because I'm the last guy, and yesterday our first speaker Steve Tucker made a remark that they always saved the best for last. Then Alan and Jimmy and John, everybody else came along and dazzled us with their superior intellectual grasp of the subject matter, their relevant experiences and insights.

0:40 I'd like to go ahead and set appropriate expectations for this session. I'm a second generation part-time rancher, and my wife Lauren is a transplanted city girl with interests in health, nutrition, and biology. We're both Texas Aggies, but we are not agricultural Aggies. We both have environmental design degrees—that's an architecture degree. We still have our architectural signage consulting and contracting company, and it so happens that Max's company is one of our customers.

1:24 So I'm the last speaker. Smart guys have spoken, the experienced guys have spoken, the experienced ranch lady has spoken, the two bright young guys that are getting her done have spoken. I can't compete with any of those on knowledge or experience. I feel a little bit like that turtle up there—how'd he get up here, and what's he going to do now?

1:52 Since I can't compete heads up on cover crops, I'm going to lead with one of my favorite subjects first: me. This is our place, Circle Inn Ranch, just south of Waurika. Southwest of Waurika is Wichita Falls. My parents were raised on small farms within a mile of each other west of Wichita Falls. During their 59-year marriage they put together the ranch while living in and working in.

2:34 Wichita Falls, it was a set stocked cow calf operation, native grass based in and creek bottoms. From the time I was four years old up until I could get a driver's license and get a paying job, I ranched with my dad weekends and two or three nights during the week after he got off work, depending on the season.

3:00 Upon graduation from high school I went to college at Texas A&M and pursued the non-agricultural career path in Dallas.

3:20 Dad died unexpectedly in 2003 at the age of 87. I say unexpectedly because he always used to say if I die, sell the cows and lease the land. That was a laugh line, just so you know.

3:48 Does that come through? I brought my own and I need to prime the pump a little bit. Dad's favorite word—he had five words that were very dear to his heart: work, work, work, work, work. He was very fortunate in that he was able to get up on and ride his horse until about eight weeks before he passed. He was a very special man indeed. I'm honored to be his son.

4:20 He was pretty set in his ways, so decades before he died my sister gave him this sign which hung in the ranch house for everybody to see: 'This is my ranch and I'll do as I please.' That was pretty much the operational strategy of the Circle Inn during his tenure, and some would say it survived him. Would he have done cover crops? Yeah, if he wanted to.

5:03 The last several years of his life he had a friend and the friend's grandson helping him with the ranch. After he passed, I inherited those.

5:13 Relationships so that we could keep the ranch in operation. I travel back and forth from Dallas a couple times a month for a number of years to try to get a grip on what we needed to do at the ranch. I was raised as a little cowboy but never had to be concerned about profitability or really providing food for the cows or what the revenue model was.

5:42 In his later years Dad was not able to raise replacements so we had more grass than we had cows. It was suggested that that was a great opportunity to get into the stocker business with some lightweight calves. After several months of daily death toll reports I came to the realization that that was not a good lifestyle choice for us moving forward.

6:16 About the same time an adjacent property owner called me out of the blue and asked what we were going to do with the ranch. I told him we planned on keeping it. He told me that Dad had asked for and been given the right of first refusal on his land when he was ready to sell and he said he was ready to sell and do I want to come look at it.

6:37 Looking at its location the existing ranch surrounded it on three sides so it seemed like a good real estate strategy to at least go and look at it. To make a long story shorter, Lauren and I bought it. It was not inconsequential that there was a beautiful pond side future home site in an oak grove on one end of the property, nor that there was what came to be known as Trailer Rosa, a 1973 Town and Country mobile mansion that would make a great weekend place in the meantime.

7:18 With the place to lay my head at night I quickly reconnected with my boyhood ranch roots. In the next several years my sister and I split the ranch.

7:30 Which is a whole other story. Lauren and I bought the cows from my mother and leased the land from her, and we bought additional cows to get to where we thought we needed to be.

7:45 At this point we were still doing cow calf and holding the yearlings over on winter pasture, then either selling direct off the ranch or hauling pot loads to Oklahoma City stockyards.

7:59 After a few years of this model and discussing the merits of going grass-fed, we did something disruptive and made the commitment to go get started with the grass fed.

8:14 One day I was working in Dallas and I knew that my guys at the ranch were working calves that day, and I called them up and said, 'How many of the steers have you not yet implanted?' and they said '25,' and I said, 'Okay, don't implant them.'

8:34 So that's how we left into the grass fed business. We just said, 'All right, we're going to stop and this is going to become the first class.'

8:44 These 25 continued to grow, and I started thinking like the turtle on the fence post. Now what? We had not developed a marketing plan for them. It just seemed like a good idea and just kind of taking one step at a time and then figuring out where your foot goes the next time was our model.

9:04 I did some googling and found out that the American Grass Fed Association was having their annual meeting in Austin that year in a few months. I went down there and started talking to people and I met this long-haired dude in a cowboy hat named Don Davis.

9:22 I came to understand that Don had formed the Grass-Fed Livestock Alliance for the purpose of supplying the southwest region of Whole Foods with all their grass-fed beef. We shipped our first class of grass-fed.

9:38 Calves to Whole Foods in 2008 and shortly thereafter we started Nitzki Natural Beef to direct market animals that we did not commit to Whole Foods. Many of our original Nitzki Natural Beef customers are in our old neighborhood in Dallas. We also generate sales through websites such as eatwild.com and localharvest.org.

10:07 We were really novice about finishing cattle, and Betsy Ross is one of the pioneers in grass fed down around the Austin area. We had her come up a time or two and check to see if our calves were ready. This one, for instance, we still had some concerns about because you can still see his ribs. And as we found out when we harvested him, they were quite well covered with fat. So he probably hung at about 850 pounds.

10:45 It's been an interesting experience to do the grass fed. I would have a hard time going back to an operation where we were not responsible for the whole product, where at some point we had to hand it off to somebody and then just lose contact with it. We like putting healthy, nutritious food that we feel good about on people's table.

11:20 We were having a conversation the other night at the dinner table and visiting with other guests and talking about grass-fed beef, and somebody said, well we got something from somebody and it was tough and stringy. It's like our stuff is wonderful.

11:44 We do get some help from the Noble Foundation and

11:49 I don't think they have any problem eating when they come over and we fix lunch. And I don't think we've done the steaks yet, but we've done burgers and roasts. But it's very tasty. The diversity of forages that they get out there walking around for two and a half years just gives you a wonderful flavor profile.

12:15 What's it like providing grass-fed beef for Whole Foods?

12:24 For us, grass-fed means American Grass-Fed Association certified. Grass-fed meat means that it's raised on mama's milk and grass. We can feed hay, we can feed legume hay without limit. We can feed very limited non-grain-based cake allowed, such as cotton seed. Can't use antibiotics. If we have to doctor an animal, it comes out of that program. Can't use implants. We can't use confinement, the feedlot situation. You can see americangrassfedassociation.org for the complete criteria if you're interested.

13:11 We are subject to an animal welfare protocol. And again, these are just the bullet points, but pasture not feedlot. We have to castrate by three months of age, and we can't wean any earlier than seven months. Current animal welfare is Global Animal Partnership, and you can go to their website for more information on that.

13:40 Because of both of these, we get audited annually. And they look at our records. We have to keep individual animal records: when they were born, when they were worked, if they've been sick, if they were isolated from the herd.

13:58 We have to keep a binder that has all of our any kind of purchase feed or mineral supplement or whatever. We have to keep that show that the inspector so they can be sure that we're complying with all of these protocols that we're supposed to.

14:21 The red line is the outline of the ranch just to give you an idea of what we're working with. It's around 850 acres, it's about 25 creek bottom a lot of which is dedicated to feral hogs and greenbriers, not so much by choice but that's the reality of it.

14:44 We've got about 25 percent native pasture, about 25 bermuda grass which we put in through EQUIP programs since my dad died, that's another story. We've got about 25 in annuals and transitional.

15:06 The transitional lands includes additional EQUIP land where we cleared mesquite's one time, gave it a few years, came back, cleared it out again, and just this last year we did plow it in order to drag it and get it leveled out and we planted a green cover seed product, not using it as a cover crop but using it as annuals for production.

15:40 Some of the other transitional land is we've got about a hundred acres of prairie dogs that, well they're just bad, they're just bad.

15:55 We encourage life above and below the soil and avoid practices that destroy that life, except for prairie dogs.

16:08 We do not use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

18:24 Degree background so we've gathered knowledge where we could get it. The Noble Foundation has been a tremendous help. We go to Elaine Ingham's seminars, read her materials. We sent our ranch helper to her compost tea class, set up a brewer, etc. We study but I can't say that we practice holistic management practices. We're not yet into intensive rotational grazing.

19:05 I read the Stockton Grass Farmer magazine of course, Green Cover Seed and Watson Ranch Organics. We use them for our fertilizers—seaweed, fish, molasses, such as that. And the Grass-fed Livestock Alliance is the production group that gathers for Whole Foods. And we get a lot of good insight on putting pounds on cattle from the combined knowledge of the group.

19:36 We've been through various fertility programs. My dad was a very frugal man and I inherited some of that. And so our first fertility program was none. We're organic, right? You don't do anything to it. Well, that didn't work. The foolishness of that hit me in the face a few years ago when I was at a Noble Foundation sponsored program and somebody that is near me and produces a lot of Bermuda grass hay was talking. He said, well, if you've got good fertility you can do a ton of Bermuda grass with 4.33 inches of rain. I said if you don't have bad for—I said if you have bad fertility it'll take over 20 inches of rain.

20:36 And your bermuda grass will basically just die off. And I was like, that's exactly right, that's what's happening.

20:49 So we got back into trying to find a fertilizer program that worked for us. Went to one fertilizer company, their products were decent but we didn't get the personal support. We went to another one, same thing, products were good but we didn't get the backup that we needed to be successful. We felt like we bought a compost tea brewer, put that together at the point where the ranch split it, got set up on the part that my sister got, so we basically never put it back together.

21:28 I went through a little phase where I panicked and did a call for some urea. Got over that and then settled back into our Watson Ranch organics program, which is all mixed in a spray tank and has a fan jet. And it takes a while to put it together, it takes a while to get it applied.

21:54 So we were, we are attracted to using cover crops to provide the fertility because of the economics of it and the difficulty of finding fertilizers that are fast and easy to apply that still meet our criteria.

22:31 This was the first green cover seed that we did, and we sold it in April of last year. We got it in right before the rain started in May. Jim Johnson the Noble Foundation helped us with the mix, and it seemed to start slow. We had some forage collards that came up first.

22:55 Then I believe the mung beans came up and then the corn and sunflowers started kicking in and it was a good experience.

23:12 Observations from that experience: the progressive salad bar effect with varying maturities was nice given our need for high quality forage for finishing animals.

23:25 We learned that every species does not perform the same in all of the tracks. We learned that the cows really like that grazing corn, but unfortunately it does not grow back. They would take it from this tall all the way down to the ground.

23:46 The cows were not excited about sunflowers, but some pretty girls stopped by to take their pictures out in the sunflowers. The turkeys, while turkeys love the sunflower field and they still do, with the seeds that were dropped.

24:06 Having the summer forage provided good gains on the finishing animals and allowed me to rest the natives and stockpile some of my bermuda grass.

24:22 And finally, if you know it's going to rain 20 inches the next month, don't bother to plant your poorly drained areas. We had a lot of seed that rotted in May because of the rain.

24:42 That's just a picture of some of our native grass that we were able to rest for a full year. It had been badly beaten up in the drought like everybody else's, but with the large amounts of rain that we got last year, it's recovered well. It's a good lesson on resilience.

25:13 We did another.

25:15 Winter mix that we planted in September of this year. Again it was multi-species on annual tracks and transitional tracks. Observations were that we planted some into warm season grasses too early and we were disappointed with the performance early on. It seems to be coming on now after a few frosts and a little bit of time.

25:54 Some of the brassicas were uniformly distributed and some were really bunched up. I couldn't figure out if that was a drill problem or if it was where my guy was hitting the corners or it was fertility based or I don't know. But they'd be extremely dense over here and you look over here and in a 30 square yard area you wouldn't have any of them and some other tracks they would be in rows just like they should be. Not smart enough to figure that out.

26:33 I need to get some fertility down with the seed next year if I'm going to get any grazing out of this before spring out of my winter pasture. And I was really happy to hear John talking about those compost pellets that he used because that might be a good solution for us.

27:05 We've been exposed to a tremendous amount of information these last few days. It's been great for me to talk to a lot of you all and see where you are in the process of improving your soil health. And I guess as we try to wrap this thing up and go home, it's going to come down to what are we going to do individually. Are we going to take the attitude if this is my ranch and I'll do as I please, or am I going to be influenced by the people that drive down the road, or am I just going to wait and see if I'm any younger next year to start making changes. Thank you very much.