Grazing Cover Crops with Cattle, Sheep, and Pigs: What Three Farmers Do

0:00 It is 5:30 here, so we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you guys all for tuning in to our webinar this week. Last week was our official kickoff, but this week we really kind of shared it to the public because we saw the value in interacting with you guys and helping you answer some of the questions you might have in regards to cover cropping and regenerative agriculture in general.

0:25 We're going to do our best to keep on schedule here and keep things running. This is only our second webinar, so I do apologize if there's any hiccups along the way, but I do think you're going to get a lot of value out of this week's session.

0:39 Before I introduce our panelists, I just want to go over some basic instructions for Zoom here. All of you attendees are muted at this point so that we can give full attention to the panelists. But at any time if you have any questions, there is a chat and a Q&A at the bottom of your screen where you can type in your questions while the panelists are speaking and we'll try to get those answered.

1:04 I have some set questions for the panelists, but at about 6:15 we're going to open it up to you guys and allow you to ask some of your questions. If you have a question that you feel is worth asking the panelists over video, you can hit the raise your hand button and I will unmute you and let you ask those questions.

1:26 With that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our panelists today. We have Brett Peshik from Mountain View, Oklahoma. Colton Caterton is near Mville, Missouri. And then Jonathan Cobb, are you like from Temple or what's your official town?

1:41 Rogers is the closest incorporated town, but Temple is where the grocery stores are.

1:49 We'll start with Colton. He graduated from Northwest Missouri University with his bachelor's degree in agronomy with a minor in precision ag in May of 2011. He then continued on to get his master's degree in agriculture focusing on alternative forages and cover crops while his wife finished her degree. Colton has been with Green Cover Seed since 2013 as a sales rep in Missouri and he spends his free time in the great outdoors pursuing anything with a heartbeat in season.

2:17 He operates an expanding sheep ranch in the fertile hills of northwest Missouri with over a hundred Katahdin hair sheep. Colton, go ahead and just kind of briefly share your operation.

2:36 Basically I've been working with Green Cover Seed for a while, going to a lot of conferences. And then finally in 2018 we got our opportunity to start our operation here in Missouri on a small acreage. I had years of listening to influential speakers like Dr. Williams, Gabe Brown, Greg Judy, and so on. So I took the best of each of their practices, morphed it into the beginning of our operation, which is hoping to get to about 400 acres in the next two years.

3:10 Very cool. Next up, we have Brett, who grew up in Clay Center, Nebraska, on a small farm with sheep and moved to Oklahoma to work for Green Cover Seed in 2016. He started his own farm operation in 2017 and bought his own property in the fall of 2019 to implement more diversity other than just cattle to produce food and to trial as many different regenerative practices as possible.

3:34 He runs 30 head of cow-calf pairs and retains his feeder calves through the winter on cover crops and perennial pasture. Brett utilizes minimal feed on his cattle herd and has added pigs in the last few months to add additional income and regenerative marketing to the farm. Brett, go ahead and kind of explain how you got to that point.

3:56 I went to the University of Nebraska. I grew up in a small town in Nebraska, pretty close to the Bladen facility actually, and came to study cover crops for wildlife nutrition. Growing up, wildlife and outdoors has always been my passion. So I started studying cover crops back when I was in high school and kind of followed that into my college days. And that's where I started shadowing and interning with Green Cover Seed.

4:32 That's where I really found the soil health. Started going to conferences with them. I think No-Till on the Plains was my first conference that I went to that really broke through that soil health was a key factor not only for wildlife but for livestock as well. And so it's been spiraled down here to which project to do next, which idea should I try, and try to keep it economical on my own operation of all the ideas that we can do in regenerative agriculture.

5:08 Very nice. Finally, we have Jonathan Cobb, who is a fourth generation steward of his family's land in the blackland prairie of central Texas. After earning his business degree and spending several years away from the farm, he and his wife Kalin decided to leave the urban life and continue the farming tradition. Five years into rowcrop farming thousands of acres with his father, Jonathan and Kalin nearly left the farm because they didn't see a future in the industrial rowcrop model.

5:35 Thankfully, before leaving, they were exposed to regenerative agriculture and learned that there was hope to both regenerate their land and enhance profitability. In addition to stewarding their pasture-based farm, Jonathan provides soil health consulting and serves on the boards for the Grass-fed Exchange and Holistic Management International.

6:15 So, Jonathan, I will give you a chance here now to kind of talk about your operation as well. Very similar to Colton and Brett's stories. As I was exposed to soil health and started realizing the importance of soil health, things started clicking and making sense. When we lived in the city, I worked as a landscape designer and so some of the concepts made more sense coming out of that horticulture world to me and so it clicked pretty easily once I was exposed to it.

6:50 Got involved with Green Cover Seed though that's not in that little short bio in 2012 because we understood the role of diversity from the annual cover crop mixes and being able to make those mixes. So I contacted Keith in 2012 and that's when we first met and I've been working with the company since then kind of as a strange one in the early days, not being in the structure of things as the company was growing but now do consulting work with understanding ag and serve on those boards. Our operation has moved from row crop to introducing cattle and then introducing sheep. We've run pigs for several years. We don't have any this year, but and then ransom laying hens for a while. But primarily sheep now is what we're doing.

7:55 Awesome. Well, I'm going to get us started here. Like I said before, I will take some questions from the audience. So if you guys want to put those in the chat or the Q&A, we will get those answered right around 6:10 to 6:15. But first for you panelists, what are you guys seeing in the markets with COVID-19? We talked about this at the beginning here. I'm seeing a lot of empty shelves, but the price is not seeming to reflect that demand in the markets. So how is this affecting your respective industries?

8:31 So I saw a very interesting video that Texas A&M put out, I believe it was last week, where they talked about the wool market, the European sheep, the wool sheep, and then the hair sheep markets. Now, the wool market and the European breeds, the wool breeds of sheep seem like they're going to be hurting pretty bad because a lot of their cuts are used in cruise lines, high-end restaurants, that kind of marketplace, and there's only a few slaughter houses. So if those few slaughter houses shut down, it's going to be detrimental, just like what we're seeing in the cattle market. But then the hair sheep on the other end seems like it's a lot more direct to consumer or there's a lot of smaller processing facilities. They'll process it on a local community basis. So they expect that market to maintain pretty well as long as people can maintain jobs and afford to buy what is a relatively expensive meat compared to the others.

9:36 So Jonathan, you run a lot of sheep as well. Is that kind of what you're seeing in your area in Texas? It'll remain to be seen for us personally because we're not in marketing season right now. We're in lamming season as far as how we primarily market now. Our direct market stuff is pre-sold the year before so that we know what to raise as far as finishing out on those lambs. So that's not yet affected. I do think that the folks who are in position in the direct market pasture-based world, those who are positioned in what I would call large to midsize that have their really good supply chain setup for demand, I think they've been in a really good position to take this uptick and have that.

10:23 Supply. Hopefully that will stick for them and hopefully we'll see some paradigm shifts in the way that people are buying because what I would like to see people learn from this is that there is stability in diversity. Just like we see in nature, I think the same is true to be applied for the processing facilities. You know, if we rely on a few packing facilities that come down with employees that get struck and unable to work in one region, then we're very vulnerable as a country. And so having diversified, spread out producers and processing facilities, hopefully we'll see a change in that because it's been going, you know, the other way for the last 50 years. So that remains to be seen though once everything kind of shakes out. And then I think the economy is going to play a big role. You know, a lot of people without jobs right now and so it's going to be interesting times ahead, but I think we all need to be ready to adapt and shift our operations where we can to take advantage of it.

11:28 Yeah. So Brett, you're a little bit different because you are dealing more with the cattle and the pigs, primarily cattle. What are you seeing in the cattle market?

11:39 Cattle market, it's a mess. Like Jonathan said, you know, it just really proves that the food security issue of just having a few slaughter houses that are processing 95 to 98%. You know, the local slaughter houses, they're doing all right. They were pretty busy before this. Their dates are really backed up, but they're only handling maybe 2% of our beef out there in the United States that's getting processed and going to the consumer. And I would say that's a friendly estimate. So the fact that the rest of the country is relying on several main packing houses to stay open because of working conditions with the virus going around, whether you believe in it or not, it's a concern. And so it's been manipulated on the cattle side to where the highest box beef prices in the stores we've seen, but nothing has trickled down to the producer. And that's just an indicator, you know, that we need to start looking at direct marketing if we want to capture that and not be vulnerable in those scenarios.

13:18 The hog market, I would say that it's always been down on a commercial scale. They've struggled. The hog market's always been down. They're always competing with these viruses and flu going through these swine houses and just not been there. But the direct marketing on hogs and beef and sheep, everybody that I've talked to, they've sold out in the matter of days and they wish they had more in the freezer. They wish they had more stock to support their community. So hopefully the community starts looking to them for more future references than just a scare. And so I think we'll see some transitions there.

14:08 Yeah. So, speaking of markets, how have you guys structured your operation around the markets and how exactly do you market that? Is a lot of it direct market? And Brett, I'll let you start this one.

14:21 Okay. Yeah. So I try to direct market as much as possible. When I first got into the cattle business, I structured my marketing of what can I still sell at the sale barn. You know, you can have the best cow out there. But in reality on the beef side, it's hard to go from nothing to selling 30 calves a year on a direct market source. I don't deem it undoable. But so I still relied a little bit on the cattle side. I'm adding the pigs to my operation to add to the marketability of my beef. And I think that's what I've been doing. And we're seeing more of this across the country of having more products, more diversity of animals on farm to market their main product or add to their bottom line. So I want to produce food. I want to produce for my community and I would much rather sell to my neighbors than sell to somebody that's six states away because they don't get to see my animals. They don't really see the respect that I do for my animals. And to me, that's a big sale for why I consume my own meat.

15:47 That's good. Jonathan, how about you? And you're still on mute, John.

16:01 I mean to echo what Brett said there at the end. I mean, it was very important to us to produce high quality meats and produce off of our farm.

16:14 Land for ourselves and for our community. However with our context and I want to stress the context of everybody's place because everybody's got different land base that they have to support different families they have to support different bills that they have to pay different houses all of those things. Context is really important when listening to people talk because my situation is not yours. But we needed to support our land base that my parents own and that my sister and her husband and my wife and I purchased. And the direct market runway, if you will, trajectory that we were on was a pretty good one, but it was running out before we wanted it to or could sustain. And quality of life was a big thing there. And so being wearing hats of producer and marketer and inventory control specialist, freezer repair man, all the things that you have to do when you're maintaining walk-in freezers and those types of things, took their toll on us personally. And we needed more cash flow more quickly, more rapidly. Kind of like Brett's saying on the, you know, ramping up that quickly is it's a challenge. But for us we saw the answer to that in the sheep operation. We could scale them up quickly and get quick cash flows. The sheep crop is faster than a cash row crop as far as from birth to weaning with them and so we can get cash flows coming in from them. So those were choices that we made.

18:08 But to answer your question finally and more specifically, sorry. We structured our operation and our operations continue to be structured around our holistic goals. And what I mean by that is that we took as a family a long hard look at how we wanted our lives to look and our land to look both today, tomorrow, 50 years from now, and tooled that around those goals and desires and then the function of the operations are an aggregate of decisions based around those central goals. Financial planning was is one that we lean heavily on because we really believe that being debt-free is an important part of having the liberty to do what you want to do. And so we structured ourselves in a way that is based on our financial planning to keep us out of debt and to operate without having to borrow money.

19:10 Colton, why don't you finish off this?

19:14 So basically tried to structure my operation on being a young producer trying to figure out how to actually raise animals on pasture. Everything before this has been on concrete. So just learning how to be an operator is what I focused on my first two years trying to learn that art form. So I just structured my lamming operation not around the highest profits which would be the first four months out of the year for that 60 70 lb lamb but more so just lower input farming with nature lamming in May on grass. The picture behind me would be our property that we raise livestock on the last two years and there is no shed. So from negative 35 to 105 heat index wherever the in between they've got to make it out there in the open.

20:04 Have you had any challenges with that? I mean not having shelter or have they adapted pretty well?

20:13 So being first-time operator, you kind of want to see what they can handle. But not push the limits. So the first heat index first year is a drought of 2018 Missouri. 98% of the state was covered in a drought. We had numerous heat indexes the first one or two. There's a few tree patches on this property, but I didn't want to break up my rotation for other reasons. And so I started off in the shade, but by the time we got to the third, fourth, fifth heat index of over 105, they were just out in the open and acclimating well. I didn't lose a single animal due to heat stress. And when it was negative 35 and six inches of snow, I was really nervous before the storm. I built them a bail windbreak because they didn't have a windbreak where they were, I put the bales there and they just sat out in the open and took it. They didn't even sit behind the bales through the snowstorm. So that was the last time I did that.

21:07 So another thing that I hear a lot of people talk about with sheep especially and Brett maybe you can talk about even pigs and cattle, but the fact that they're able to find their way through any fence. So Colton, what's your fence setup like and how do you manage to keep them in?

21:23 So because I live on a main highway and over here is the lake that you can't see. So a community lake, a lot of traffic goes by. So I decided to use a high-tensil woven wire for the perimeter. On the inside, I'm just using these O'Brien post with I use two polywires and Jonathan does a little bit

21:45 Better than me, but they'll respect these two polywires for me if I respect them. So if I made them stay on this side of the pasture where it's eaten down already, they're going to find their way through that two polywire pretty quickly on me. But if I respect them and if I go out there and they know when I come out there I'm going to move them and I don't just tease them and go back into my house then everybody plays friendly. But keep that fence hot. I mean six seven 8,000 volts.

22:18 And it doesn't really matter what kind of animal that you have. Having a good fence, respecting their boundaries and daily needs is a perfect way, what Colton said, and it doesn't matter what type. It's a mental barrier, not a physical barrier. And can't stress that enough. And animals, they're smart. They know that they can get through it. They'll find a way if they really want to. You might have a problematic animal over time. So, you know, maybe that animal needs to leave the herd or find another good source or marketing way to get rid of that animal to not be a problem to lead your herd off. But more often than not, it's the training, it's the management behind it. If you decide to push it a little bit, that's when you're going to see that respect boundary get broken on my end, whether it's hogs or cattle.

23:30 Well said, guys. I think that's true. If there's not anything to eat, you're going to find your way out. So you can't blame them and blame the animals for getting out because a lot of most of the time it's our fault.

23:47 And what Colton was alluding to is there's a lot of times of the year that we run our sheep with a single polywire. We use Orion steps, just like in Colton's picture there. And we run it on the fifth, fifth from the bottom when we're running a single. We tend to in the fall when we put our rams in in late November switch to two wire and then we run the fourth from the bottom and the second from the top. We found that combination to be the best. And the reason being then is that's when the rams are in things are a little rambunctious and then also the forage is getting, you know, it's after frost then and when we start getting smaller patches of green stuff, little clovers coming up and chicory and plantain and things like that it becomes more tempting to move out of the paddock before we would kind of like them to. And I found that sheep really don't appreciate eating hay. They're not as patient with standing around a hay bale like cattle are. And so it becomes a little bit of a challenge there. And we move too fast for a bale of hay to be quite honest. And so I know it's getting away from your fencing question, but I guess we're just having a conversation. So I'll switch into that if that's okay, Noah.

25:15 Yep, you're good.

25:17 Okay. So we built a hay wagon. It's one of those tumble bug that you carry around with. We put a dolly on the front of it so that we can hook onto it easily and it carries itself as a four-wheeler. And then we just put a piece of bull panel on the bottom to keep the hay from falling through. And that allows us to keep our rotation going because our 220 or so head that were in the group this last fall, it took them about we just kept it out kind of a supplementation for the rest of our stockpile that it took about seven to 10 days for them to go through a 1500 pound bale. And so we used, I think, six or seven bales this year all year as we're trying to build better stockpile. But that's our solution to the winter fence problems, trying to keep a pacifier in there with them so they've got something in that field.

26:23 So it sounds like it's not so much about the fence as much as it is the management and making sure that you're providing everything that they need within that fence and then they'll want to stay in.

26:35 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

26:39 Okay, for perimeter I guess I was just going to answer that. For perimeter, wondering, we don't run just a single polywire obviously for our perimeter fencing. We've got, you know, most of our land didn't have the livestock infrastructure left in it by the time the root crops era was. And so we came back with four hightensil, um, three of those are electric and one's a ground all the way around for most of our perimeter. And then a property that we bought in 2013 had a woven wire hightensil around it which is great.

27:19 Primarily for dog speed on the woven wire because a dog can go underneath the other electric wire a little bit faster. I say that more so from our dogs killing neighbors dogs versus I like to have a buffer there. Just it hasn't happened, but it makes me nervous sometimes. If they were chasing something out of our field, I'd like for them to have a barrier.

27:43 Yeah, I was saying I've seen similar issues with the hay with cattle side. I don't have that with mine. But I've seen similar issues that you kind of talked about, John, of just animals wanting to be there, especially if you're feeding alfalfa hay every day. There's I know there's plenty of producers that are still using hay or trying to cut back or using alfalfa hay.

28:14 What we've seen is rolling the hay, the alfalfa hay out across several product paddocks perpendicularly and then just moving the fence based on the bale that you have in that paddock. And that's changed the mentality of the cattle on grazing habits greatly throughout the day. They're not waiting there every single day for you to show up for a bale. And you can't feed, you can't put a bale out there and show up every third day because that second and third day, they're going to be waiting there for you to bring a bale out there when they really should be grazing and they're burning daylight on that aspect.

28:55 But if you're moving the fence every day, you can roll hay out across the landscape and divvy it out that way. If you're not feeding a full bale per day, if you're using alfalfa hay as a protein source, and we've seen that change the mentality of livestock greatly versus other producers. I haven't done it, but it's changed their livestock mentality greatly because that animal is grazing every single day. They're not sitting there waiting for a bale. And I've just noticed that's been a big improvement for some producers out there that I've seen with that hay and not utilizing it all in one day.

29:43 So I'm going to switch topics here just a little bit more towards the grazing side of things. And obviously this is we are going to talk about cover crops but you guys aren't necessarily grazing strictly annuals but can you touch on some of the concerns with prussic acid nitrate issues with sorghums and then there's also been some reports of toxicity with hairy vetch. So I guess my question is what are some plants that sheep pigs and cattle just won't eat and that are dangerous to their health? And we'll let Brett start that one.

30:18 My answer is any animal will eat any plant once. At some point, you know, it may not be palatable at a certain time and year. They'll still take a bite out of it if they're in a competitive nature. Kind of starting back to the prussic acid and nitrate, you know, that's always a concern. I still pay attention as to what species I'm moving into, whether that's Johnson grass or sorghum sudan or forage sorghum. I've grazed animals in higher stress environments. The biggest thing I can say is diversity. We can't stress diversity enough. Animals know what they need. And so that's one thing that you'll learn to train your eye to in a grazing scenario. If you're approaching a paddock, whether it's perennial or annual, and for whatever reason you have a soil underlying issue where there isn't the diversity that you like there, you need to look at that paddock as a monoculture and find ways to diversify that. I see my animals for instance have trained themselves to goutweed, mare's tail, etc. and I'll notice a big difference in animal behavior. If there's not enough of those broad leaves in a paddock, they'll be looking for other broadleaf sources and that's cattle, pigs, sheep. They will be looking for diversity. And so I think that's important to train your eye to when you're rotating or approaching a system, how much diversity is there, what's truly available for those animals to select, not just standing biomass. If it's standing biomass of a monoculture, that may not be the biomass that they need.

32:24 I'll let Jonathan go ahead and talk. I know he's passionate about talking about some hairy vetch. Yeah, I mean what Brad said on diversity is key. Never graze a monoculture of anything. But I'll start with the Johnson grass because that's such a fear in the south. Urban legend status. Nobody wants to be the person that lost all their cows. So everybody's so afraid of it. But you know coming out of rowcrop thankfully the herbicides don't work and

33:01 Getting rid of Johnson grass. So that's our base forage while we're trying to build perennials. And so we live on Johnson grass and diversified Johnson grasses. Not only Johnson grass, but as far as a base perennial that we have access to, Johnson grasses is what we have for warm season grass. While we're establishing these others and while we're using other species of annuals such as sorghum sudans that would be a higher quality and so while that fear is still there and every year coming into frost season it's like 'are we sure, are we sure?' But I call the old-timers that I know and trust and they assure me they've been grazing Johnson grass for 40, 50 years and have never lost an animal and we haven't either. And it's everybody's decision to make for themselves.

33:58 The thing that they tell me is as they're if they're eating Johnson grass all the time with other things and it's in their room and as it's changing over, they're adapting as they're eating it. And so you really don't have any problems. I think where we see animal deaths is again animals that are too hungry. They bust out of a fence because they're starving and they go into the ditch where it's a heavy load of nitrate from runoff from fields or it's around a hay storage facility and there's lots of Johnson grass. It's pretty hot and they gorge themselves on that and then die. So it is real, but it's not something that we change our management practice because it's in all of our fields. So there's no getting around it. We're not going to pull off somewhere and stop our rotations during the frost.

34:49 I will say kind of a funny story. Colton's got a donkey in that picture. Donkeys are supposedly higher susceptible to it. And so we had a donkey that we got rid of for other reasons, but we used to send her in as a canary in the coal mine and if she didn't circle the cows. So you can do that too. But as far as the hairy vetch, it's everywhere in our fields as well. There's no getting around that. And we have grazed very heavy stands of hairy vetch in every vegetative state all the way through having seed pods on and have never lost an animal or had any negative effects to it. So that's my two cents on that.

35:38 Again, diversity, diversity is key. Colton, do you want to comment at all? You want to pass up on this one? I'll move on. We'll move on.

35:51 Did you guys touch here? I'm going to ask you probably just about two more questions and then we'll open it up to the audience. Explain your guys' rotations. How often are you moving and how does that play into what you guys are using for minerals, wormers, and other supplements?

36:14 I'll start. With our sheep, we have a kind of a hard and fast rule that they're not in one place, one paddock, any longer than 5 days ever. Because that's the hatch cycle for the barber pullworm, which is their main parasite. And so just by having that hardest rule, there's never a parasite hatch that they can ingest because we're moving on to a fresh paddock. That being said, it varies. It's pretty rare that we're ever in there for five days. It's more between one and two days or multiple times in one day, up to three days. And during lamming season, we relax that a little bit because it's chaotic every time you move. And so we try to gently move by opening up the middle paddock line and letting them move at their own pace over the course of 24 hours or so. And then everybody slides over there and then we'll put up another back fence and then just kind of creep along that way. A little bit larger paddocks, a little bit longer time. Then once we get done with lamming and hit the active growing season, then we're moving faster and trying to fluctuate up our densities and diversity of that.

37:33 We don't use any wormers and any other supplementation other than we keep a three-way tub out that's got a mineral mix. That's a low copper for sheep. And then a loose salt. And then we keep a mixture of diatomaceous earth syrup and baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, in the other tub. And that's all they have and water.

38:08 Brett, how about you?

38:11 Yeah, so I love the term adaptive grazing. That's one of my favorites. It probably could be underlined as procrastinating. Sometimes, but I'm always adapting. I wouldn't say that I move intensively every day. There's days that I'll take a weekend and move three to five times in a day in an area that I want to change and there's times that I'm gone and on the road that I'm

44:32 He says, 'How do you guys get rid of foxtail from a sheep pasture? He is in Bakersfield California.' So the giant is it giant foxtail or I look at that as a grass that is an annual. I try to approach weedy species that we may not be utilizing and how can we utilize it or maybe it's an animal aspect. How can you utilize it? Giant foxtail. You could run some chickens behind the sheep and you have seed for chickens and capitalize that way. There's opportunities there.

45:17 Some of those species are responding to lack of residue. I know sand burrs are a big one that do that. Different weeds accumulate different micronutrients. So it could be a micronutrient in your soil that your soil is trying to heal. And that's why I look at it as each plant has a purpose at some point. Maybe it doesn't serve our profitability or farm directly, but that's not the weeds fault or the plant's fault. That's our fault that we can't capitalize on that or can't find a way to capitalize on that. So we need to approach that system kind of looking at that aspect. And a lot of those species will disappear or come in cycles if your management's not changing. We'll see Mare's tail do that come in three-year cycles because the management didn't change and so the soil didn't truly heal.

46:15 That's kind of how I would respond to that. I have a beautiful 7 acre patch of foxtail that comes up every year. And the trick is for me is I just got to get in there when it's in an early to mid vegetative state and they absolutely hammer it. It's when it gets that late vegetative seed head coming out, that's when the utilization rate definitely goes down.

46:39 Have you seen the species change? So it's one of those fields that was soybeans and then I just let it kind of come up with whatever nature wanted to provide and foxtail was the dominant species. It's going on its third year and it hasn't changed too much. So I've been influencing it with domesticated cool season chory plantain assortment of legumes and grasses.

47:06 I think with species that dominate and take over, you know, we had in crop fields where we pulled out and let nature take over. For us it was white heath aster. I didn't like the monoculture it created or the amount of food that it produced but we did take forage samples of that and send it off and it was quite a bit higher in quality across the board than really high quality hay that people buy for a lot of money around here. And it's palatable and the animals eat it. But as far as switching that ecosystem, Brett said earlier, there's times, you know, and I think we all do this in adaptive grazing, there's times that you've got some time on your hands and you can affect change on that by hitting it with a higher stocking density.

47:56 The times of the year depend a lot. You know, if you hit that wet with a bunch of cows and you pugged it up, you're certainly going to shift something. What we've seen in those times are after high disturbance like that, we'll get a lot more broadleaf flush. Wild mustards, different kinds of brassicas and early responders to the disturbance. For us, we matched our enterprises based on what we were given. After rowcropping, we got a lot of forbs. And so sheep match that really well because they love to eat the forbs. And then as we build these perennial tall grasses back, we'll see how all that shifts, but we're liking the sheep a lot. They're also a little lighter footed on the heavy clay soils that we operate on.

48:46 But all that's to say is that our operation was influenced by what nature was giving us. And so we didn't try to dictate upon the land what it wasn't ready to provide for.

49:02 So kind of along those lines, we have two separate questions here, but both involving thistle. Sarah says, 'Do you have any tips for grazing to get rid of yellow star thistle?' And then Justin says, 'How do I get rid of Canada thistle without spot spraying? They run horses and cattle and have this issue in hay fields but don't have the ability to graze.' So really two questions, but how do you get rid of a star thistle with grazing and how do you get rid of Canada thistle without the ability to graze?

49:33 I'll say a question that came up for me regarding some of these noxious plants or what we used to consider that is because I would hear people talk about using sheep to condition a pasture or to clean up the weeds from a pasture so that your grasses are better. But being in the sheep business and finding that they're an enjoyable operation and

49:56 Profitable, the question became, do we want to get rid of those things that they like to eat and that are mineralizing the soil? And the answer was really no. We don't want to get rid of that. It's part of the diversity. If it were taking over a spot and causing a monoculture, then that would be an issue. But if you're watching that and grazing it properly, I don't see that happening.

50:30 Yeah, I have same same. Brett, we're having a hard time hearing you. Did I lose you? Well, we can hear you. It's just pretty quiet. Okay. Give me a second. Okay, Colton, do you mind answering that question here while Brett figures that out?

50:51 Oh, I don't I'm not familiar with the Yellow Stars thistle, so I won't go there. But the Canada thistle, I did have a patch here on my place, relatively small, so I went out and spot sprayed with salt brine. Now, I know his question, it says, 'Don't have the ability to graze this site, but I'm not sure what you do there without the herbicide, but we sprayed some salt brine on it. It kind of wilted the plants and then it made it more palatable a few days later, but you got to make it pretty salty. And you got to be in an environment that can then wash that salt back out of your environment. If I was a more arid region, I'd be more concerned, but not when we got 70 inches of rain last year.

51:38 All right, Brad, are you with us here? Can you hear me better now? It's quiet, but yeah, we can hear you. Okay, I'll try to speak a little bit louder while let me know if I'm blowing out your ears.

51:52 So on the thistles, probably that's one of my biggest aha moments when I recognize weeds as a plant that can it's just another way to look at it. I encourage you to go out and look when you're looking at those thistles. You see the grass about a foot high, a foot taller around those thistles. And why is it doing that? Why is the grass or plants around that taller than the rest of the field? A lot of times that's got a deep tap root that's tapping into mineral deep residual moisture that's pulling it up the subsoil surface. We'll see this with chicory. We'll see this with other deep tap rooted plants like alfalfa. But even thistles will do that and you see the grass two times more biomass more lush healthier around those thistles and that's just the indicator that has serving a purpose in that ecosystem.

52:58 Now, in the hay field, what I would encourage because you don't have grazing animals, I would look at rotating hay fields or hay areas. Weeds are opportunist plants. And so, anytime that a weed finds an opportunity to spread is because we're making the same impact the same time of year, year in and year out. So rotating that hay field around can change plant communities. Allowing for more residue in the fall if it's getting a lot of residue taken off going into the winter time frame is a good opportunity for small seeded weeds to come in or thrive in that area because it gets compacted over the winter time frame. And so there's couple ways to approach that but I would say diversify the rotation within a hay field or look at rotating hay fields in and out in a scenario like that.

54:02 The yellow star thistle's same way. It's not as aggressive as the Canadian thistle. I have some in my pastures here in Oklahoma. The cattle actually graze them really late. You'll actually see them strip all the leaves off after a frost. I don't know why on what I've seen. It's just one of those deals that it's serving a purpose. Even if you do let them seed out, you'll notice how the plants move around. They don't stay in the same spot because they're fixing different areas of the soil. But I would say encourage the diversity. Obviously, you got to keep landlords happy. So yeah, I try to dig thistles if I need to. I also have four donkeys that eat all those thistle heads off. And so the largest thing is that they see is a purple flower. Well, if it never flowers, they never see it. So those donkeys kind of serve a very good purpose for me even though I don't market them any other way.

55:13 I have a last question here before we wrap things up. Brett Wright says, 'What about washy grass this time of year? Grazing a fall planted mix. Barley, cabbage, winter peas, rye grass, tulips, and radishes. Not sure if that's

55:29 Yep. Turnips.

55:36 And Brett, I'll let you maybe work on your microphone here real quick. Jonathan or Colton, do you want to answer that?

55:51 You're muted, John.

55:55 I wasn't ready to answer. I was reading myself the question. Sorry. I'm just putting you on the spot now. Yeah, I think I understand the question as far as getting too much protein and being a little washy and runny. Hopefully I'm getting that right unless I'm getting the context wrong and it's somewhere where there's heavy rainfall and it's low in nutrients. But it's certainly hard to limit those intakes whenever there's candy out there available, then they're going to go for it.

56:37 You can try offering dry hay on a trailer like we talked about earlier where you've got access and you can continue your rotation logistically with a trailer like that. But continuing to move. But I would say on those covers specifically, I think one thing we run into a lot with people is they get a little too jumpy at turning in and they turn in too early and too early of a vegetative state and don't wait long enough for there to be a little bit more carbon source than that to balance out the CN ratios in the plant. And so there's a nutrient imbalance there and a washiness in the rum. Hopefully I understood the question right. I'm sorry if I didn't.

57:25 Well, no, I think that's good. He can comment in if that wasn't exactly what he meant by that. I did say that was the last question, but we've got Jimmy Emmens on Facebook asking, 'Is anyone grazing multiple types of animals together?'

57:43 We have, we're not currently during lamming season, but we have run the cattle and the sheep together in the past. It was typically the best time to do that for us is after lambs have gotten on the ground and gotten going and calves have gotten on the ground and gotten going. So it tends to be kind of a mid to late summer time period for us that works well. Getting into some of the bigger species of annuals, sorghum sudans mixed with warm season mixes, and then on into the stockpile period. I think we certainly will be doing more of that in the future just because I don't want to manage multiple herds all over the place. And so a lot of that is quality of life and sustainability for ourselves. And so they also have a lot of good synergistic benefits to grazing them together because they're both dead-end hosts for each other's main parasites and they're non-competitive grazers. So a lot of good things go with it. I will say when we did do that, the only issue that we had for a couple of days was introducing the dogs and the cattle together. If you're going to do it, bring the sheep to the dog to the cattle, not the other way around, because if it's the other way around the cattle are seen as an invader into that territory of the dog. So bring the dogs and the sheep to the cattle. And then an advantage for us is it was hot in the summer and it's kind of like dogs and cats in the winter. Necessity will drive enemies together. And so when there's one source of shade, it took about two days before the dogs and the cattle were laying together in the same shade. And then after that everything was fine.

59:38 Brett, have you run animals together at all?

59:42 Can you hear me now?

59:45 Okay. Yeah, no, I did have some sheep about a year and a half ago for a little while. I ran them together. Probably my biggest first mistake is I've trained my cattle to eat much more broad leaves than probably the average cattle herd. And so they took down too much of the broad leaves and so the sheep started finding a way out because it became a monoculture Bermuda grass field. So keep that in mind. If you train your main animal to eat a lot more weeds, broad leaves, and you add an animal like sheep or goats, particularly goats—goats require a much higher percentage diet of broad leaves. They need about 80% woody browse species. Sheep are about 50 broadleaf, 50 grass, and cattle are about 80/20. But if you take those out through high stock density or training your animals to eat those weeds, those animals will find a way out because it's not the food source that they want. And so that was my first mistake. But I've ran my pigs and cattle together. It's kind of interesting for the first day. Try not to have the cows chase the pigs.

1:01:08 Through the fence, they hung around. They didn't leave the countryside. But I would say start small on implementing anything like that on getting those introduced. Fence line introduction is way better at first. I would agree. Let them introduce each other over a hot fence because each one's going to respect that hot fence versus just throwing everything together all at once. So fence line introduction and then intermingling works a lot better than just throwing them all together at once.

1:01:53 Yeah. And I do apologize we're going a little bit over here, but just one final question I have for each of you. Brett touched on this as far as like the amount of broad leaves to grass. What have you guys found, specifically maybe here on sheep, you know, what percent legumes, grasses, broad leaves do you guys like to have?

1:02:18 Specifically to, you know, planted annuals or short-lived perennials. We're in love with chicory. Chicory plantain. We've probably gotten a little too carried away with legumes over the years. And we're finding that that's probably inhibited some of our grass development and stuff, but we graze pretty heavily legumes because we have a lot of them, just volunteer and growing. But a lot of high tannin plants, the broad leaves, so like curly dock, things like that that are growing just wild in the fields. What are some other spiny lettuce, prickly lettuce, just a myriad of primrose, evening primrose. That's a hot one right now that they're loving to eat out there in the fields. But as far as planted forage, I would say chicory is one of our very favorites that we've added to our mixes, but then ours is in its fourth year of a stand right now and doing really well. So they'll give you a good bang for the buck as far as the seed cost.

1:03:38 But they're a tonic plant for the worms, the tannins and stuff and the secondary metabolites and that is why. And it's got some anti-bloat characteristics as well. So the more you can diversify it with broad leaves, I'm thrilled to see them. Up here in fescue country, ragweed comes in during the middle of the summer and they've never met a match like a sheep. I got videos where you can go ahead and if you graze it right, the ragweed will come back and then you get to graze it again and it is super productive during that time of year. So yeah, I'll go and turn them in paddock and they'll pursue mostly broad leaves and then they'll go back and touch on the grass day two or three, but they're not going to be their first choice.

1:04:27 All right, Brett, why don't you round us out?

1:04:35 You're muted. Can you repeat the question again? I was typing up a response online. Yeah. What percentage of broad leaves, legumes, brassicas do you like to graze? And for you maybe specifically on cattle.

1:04:50 Okay. On cattle, I try to cut my mineral out as much as possible. So I actually push the broad leaves. It also is a buffer for me to leave residue because cattle aren't going to graze large amounts of broad leaves, but they still will eat quite a few. I try to do about 60/40, 60% grass, 40% broad leaves because broad leaves typically aren't high carbon to nitrogen ratio plants. So broad leaves aren't going to leave a lot of residue. So I don't want to get over that 50/50 mark. I feel with cattle, otherwise I'm not leaving enough grass residue for the next crop, whether it's a cover crop or my perennial crop for regrowth. So it depends. I'll range from 20% broad leaf to 40%. But I try to shoot for somewhere in between there when I'm diversifying a pasture or doing a cover crop when I'm grazing.

1:06:01 Yeah. Well, with that, we'll close up here. Again, sorry for going a little late, but first, thank you guys for tuning in. Also want to thank the panelists for your guys' time and answering these questions. If you guys do have any other questions, you can email any of these sales reps. You can find their emails on our website. And please tune in next week. We're going to have Keith and Dale back. They are going to be talking more specifically about perennial pastures and things like chicory plantain and going into more depth as to the characteristics of those species and taking crop land and putting it back to pasture. So we would love to have you guys tune in for that. I'll be sharing that link on Facebook and if that's something that you're interested in, you can go find it there. And we will also try to get that posted to the website. So thanks again all for tuning in and we hope you guys have a wonderful evening. Yeah, with that, take care and we'll see you next week. Thanks.