Happy, Healthy & Wealthy: Why Farmers Are Struggling and How to Fix It

0:00 [Music]

0:07 So I entitled this presentation 'Happy, Healthy and Wealthy.' Who wants to be happy, healthy and wealthy? Yell real loud if you do. Yeah, okay. He wants to be really happy, healthy and wealthy. So, and I mean seriously, is there any better profession than farming for being happy, healthy and wealthy? Best two out of three, okay.

0:42 So I mean, there's a lot of good things about farming and ranching. I mean, you get to be your own boss, you're out in nature and beautiful surroundings. I mean, there's a lot of good things about farming and ranching. So why are we killing ourselves? Literally killing ourselves.

1:05 I got a poem I'd like to read here. I'm not much for poetry, if you didn't already know that, but this is one that when I came across a guy from Australia wrote this. So you have to understand he's speaking Australian and I'm not quite fluent in that language.

1:32 His cattle didn't get a bid. They were fairly bloody poor. What was he going to do? He couldn't feed him anymore. The dams were all but dry. Hay was a hundred bucks a bale. Last month's talk of rain was just a fairy tale. His credit had run out, no chance to pay what's owed. Bad thoughts ran through his head as he drove down gully road.

1:59 G's great grandpa bought the place back in 1898. 'I'm such a useless bastard. I'll have to shut the gate. Can't support my wife and kids, not like Dad and those before. Crikey, Grandma kept it going while Pop fought in the war. With depression now as master, he abandoned what was right. There's no place in life for failures. He'd ended all tonight.'

2:28 There were still some things to do. He'd have to shoot the cattle first. Of all the jobs he'd ever done, that would be the worst. He'd have a shower, watch the news, and they'd all sit down for tea. Read his kids a bedtime story and watch some more TV. Kiss his wife good night, say he was off to shoot some roos. Then a paddock far away, he'd blow away the blues.

2:59 But he drove in the gate and stopped as he always had, checked the roadside mailbox, found a letter from his dad. Now his dad was not a writer. Mom did all the cards and mail, but he knew the writing from the notebooks that he kept from cattle sales. He sensed the nature of its contents, found moisture in his eyes. Just the fact his dad had written was enough to make him cry.

3:31 'Son, I know it's bloody tough. It's a cruel and twisted game. There's life upon the land when you're screaming out for rain. There's no candle in the darkness, not a single speck of light, but don't let the demon get you. You have to do what's right. I don't know what's in your head, but push the bad thoughts well away. See, you'll always have your family at the back end of the day.'

3:56 'You have to talk to someone, and yes, I know I rarely did, but you have to think about your wife and think about your kids. I'm worried about you, son. You haven't rung for quite a while. I know the road you're on because I've walked every bloody mile.'

4:14 The date: December 7th, back in 1983. Behind the hayshed, I had the shotgun rested up in a tree. See, I'd borrowed way too much to buy the Johnson Place. Then it didn't rain for years. We got bombed by interest rates. The bank was at the door. I didn't think I had a choice. I was going to squeeze the trigger. That's when I heard your voice.

4:42 'You said, 'Where are you, Daddy? It's time to play a game. I've got Monopoly all set up. Looks like we might get rain.' It really was that close. You're the one that stopped me, son, and you're the one that taught me there's no answer in a gun.'

5:02 'Just remember, people love you. Good friends won't let you down. Look, you might have to swallow pride and take that job in town just till things come good, son. You've always got a choice. I mean, you get this letter, ring me, because I'd love to hear your voice.'

5:21 Well, he cried and laughed and shook his head and put the truck in gear. Shut his eyes and hugged his dad in a vision that was clear. Dropped the cattle at the yards and put the truck away, filled the troughs the best he could, fed his last 10 bales of hay, then he strode towards the homestead, shoulders back and held his head held high. He still knew the road was tough, but there was purpose in his eye.

5:50 He called his wife and children who'd lived through all his pain. Hugs said more than words. He'd come back to them again. They talked of silver linings, how good times always follow bad. Then he walked towards the phone, picked it up and rang his dad. And the wall, while the kids set up Monopoly, he hugged his wife again. Then they heard the roll of thunder and

6:14 They smelt the smell of rain. It's called rain from nowhere by Murray Harten if you want to look it up.

6:24 Farming is now, according to one study, the number one occupation for suicide in the United States. We're not happy. We're not healthy. We're also one of the highest risk occupations for diabetes, obesity, and a number of other health factors including cancer. And we're not wealthy. In 2018, medium farm income was negative $1,621. We're not happy, we're not healthy, we're not wealthy—universal desires of probably every person on earth.

7:14 And we're none of them. So how do we become happier, healthier, and wealthier? Well, I was going to say buy this book and that'll do it. But the answer actually is through regenerative agriculture. So yeah, buying this book might just help. But the system of regenerative agriculture is designed to make us happier, healthier, and wealthier.

7:43 So what makes us happy? Well, if you ask—I'm no social scientist, I'm an agronomist—the social scientists tell us there are some factors that do make us happier. What are those factors? Well, one of them is meaningful work. This is how we picture ourselves as farmers. We're producing food for a hungry world. Boy, that's meaningful work, isn't it? Absolutely it is. You know, we feed people. We take a lot of pride in that. We should take pride in the fact that we produce an essential of life.

8:21 But can you take pride in that process if this is your field? How many of you would be proud if this was your field? Can you take pride in the process when you go to the local agriculture experiment field and they have this notice about excess nitrate in the drinking water and it has to be run through a reverse osmosis before you're allowed to drink it? That's a little frightening. How much prouder can you be of the process if you're this farmer—one of our customers down in Texas—sent this photo to me.

9:09 Look at this. This is what his soil looked like until a few years ago when he started down this regenerative agriculture path. This is all new topsoil right here. Isn't that exciting? Now check that—how much more nutritious will the food be produced from that field than it would have been before?

9:37 And one unique aspect of agriculture is it's not just a job. It's not an occupation, it's a legacy. So often, you know, we have tend to have family farms. And our desire is not just to pass on a job to our kids but a legacy to our children and grandchildren that'll bring health and happiness and prosperity to them for generations to come. If you're going to pass your farm down to the next generation, which of these two soils would you rather pass on?

10:20 These two soils were taken about 30 miles from here, across the road from each other. Can you guess which one was farmed with regenerative agriculture practices and which one wasn't? And you can take pride in the fact that the method that you're using to farm is making a happier, healthier planet.

10:50 I'm going to show you my own results. I put in an irrigation system at my previous farm up in north central Kansas, dug a trench to put in a water line, and here is as deep as I could find a root—18 inches down. Look at this soil structure. It looks rather like Play-Doh, and it's gray, which indicates a lack of oxygen in the soil. I'm like, oh my.

11:24 The deed said I owned from here to here on this field, but it didn't specify down. Now if I expand my farm horizontally, I have to take on more debt. But I can expand my farm vertically and nobody cares. I can gain more volume of soil simply by increasing my root zone. What a deal. That's a lot better than taking out another mortgage.

11:58 So here's what I did. I planted Eastern gamagrass—really productive forage grass. This was on irrigated ground by the way. And people thought I was stark raving nuts when I took corn and soybean ground out of production and planted Eastern gamagrass and alfalfa and chicory and bird's foot trefoil and a whole bunch of wildflowers. And then I rotationally grazed it with daily moves.

12:35 When I put that in, like I said, 1.9 organic matter, 18-inch root zone. 15 years later, after my divorce, had to sell the place. The new owner thought it was pretty silly to have good irrigated ground growing grass, so he disked this up and grew corn. And that enabled me to sneak out in the middle of the night one night when he wasn't looking and take a soil sample.

13:11 This is after that now. I dug a pit while I still own the place. Here's the same 18-inch root depth. Roots were now going seven foot down, and I had 8.7 percent organic matter in the surface six inches.

13:30 Now, just to put this into perspective, if you were to take all the world's agricultural land and increase the organic matter to percentage points, you would take all the carbon dioxide that's currently in the atmosphere out. We would have no CO2 left in the atmosphere with an increase of two percentage, and I did in 15 years. I did three and a half times that amount increase. We can fix this planet. I've never been more optimistic about it.

14:11 Okay, we have a choice. We can farm like this or we can farm like this, which is going to make that planet smile bigger.

14:25 Another factor in happiness is community. There's lots of ways to define community. Community can be, you know, the local town we live in, or it can be our circle of friends and family and so forth, but basically it's the people we surround ourselves with. In the early '70s, Earl Butz said to U.S. farmers, 'Get big or get out.' If you're a farmer, how do you get bigger? You take out your neighbors. Right? What's that done to our community? It's destroyed it.

15:08 The county I used to live in in 1950 had 12 high schools. Now it has one. And they're in danger of going down to six-man football because they don't have enough kids to play eight-man football anymore. We've destroyed our rural areas. And has it made us happier? Has it made us more financially stable? If you're losing money on every acre, does eight more acres help?

15:55 I think maybe instead of focusing on taking out which of our neighbors we're going to take over, maybe we should focus on improving the profitability of the acres we currently have. But we have this insatiable, illogical desire to always expand instead of doing a better job on the acres we have. We're just gambling with bigger stakes and higher risk.

16:28 Even if we were to get rich, does it make us happier? Hey, guess who else commits suicide? You say, 'Well, oh, these guys, they're in a high pressure occupation. You know, they're really stressed.' Is there any less stressful way to earn a living than having a winning lottery ticket? Well, maybe there is. Being rich doesn't necessarily make you happy. I mean, you do need, and we'll talk about this, but you do need enough money to pay your bills. Being unable to pay your bills is definitely a way of being unhappy.

17:12 So what does regenerative agriculture offer to us in terms of community? Well, those of you that hang out in the regen ag crowd know that events like this are a great social group, a tremendous warm crowd that's fun to hang out with. I mean, I always say I love the conference, but it's the evenings after the conference or in between the days of the conference that's most important. We argue every year: should we make this a one-day event where people can just show up and then leave and you don't have to commit to two days? And I always fight that because I think the most valuable part of this conference is what goes on in the evening between the two days. That's what I live for. That's my favorite part. And I don't have to listen to some boring speaker—I'm just kidding. I can listen to all these boring people instead.

18:14 And when I interviewed with Green Cover Seed, they said, 'Why do you want to work for us?' I said, 'Because you guys know all the cool people.' People like Rick Haney. How cool is this? Who's hung out with Rick Haney before? I don't know how the guy ever got a PhD because anybody that much fun to hang out with had to spend some time incarcerated. I did think he, it was maybe in his 50s when he finally got his PhD, but here's Matt Clover from last night.

18:54 You know he and his kids played everywhere I go there's somebody along the way that I can stop and visit and see what they're doing on their farm. And his farm is really cool. It's in an absolutely gorgeous area, about an hour that way, stunningly beautiful, and he's doing some really interesting things, pastured pigs and so forth.

19:18 Meaningful relationships, another factor in happiness. I can tell you from experience that working 16 hours a day is not a recipe for marital happiness. I can tell you from personal experience that working 16 hours a day is not a way of forging a strong relationship with your children.

19:48 There's mine. This is a much better way. It's my niece and nephew, and first time they ever went fishing I was able to be part of that. Of course, meaningful leisure times a great way of forging some family bonds.

20:11 And of course, financial security, freedom from anxiety. You don't need to be rich, but you don't need to be on the verge of bankruptcy either. Being able to pay your bills, meet all your financial commitments without worry, and some of the things I'm going to focus a lot on that in the rest of this talk.

20:32 Okay, and then justice and fairness. Everything we buy in farming seems to be stuff we buy from criminals. The stuff we—if you're selling meat, it seems we buy from—we sell to criminals. We sell grain to criminals. Are we in a system that's fair and just in agriculture? How do we get away from this? Are there ways we can grow crops without buying fertilizer from a corrupt institution? Can we sell meat without going through a Brazilian-owned criminal organization? I mean, I think there are. We'll talk about those. Well shoot, even the marijuana business—even the dope growers are getting shook down. So you know it's bad then.

21:27 Are we healthy, and how do we become healthy, and how does regenerative agriculture make us healthier? Okay, when I was a kid, we put up hay by throwing, and all the farmers I know who spent, you know, fed their cows by throwing bales, looked like Conan the Barbarian. Now we put up hay by throwing levers, and we look more like Conan and Brian, or worse yet, you know, we're just fat.

22:07 Obesity in the United States. What's the general term for this region of the country right here with all these fat states? Farm country. Is this a little alarming?

22:26 We have always looked at labor as something bad that we need to get rid of. We need labor-saving devices. We need labor saving, you know, no physical labor. Keeps us healthy and keeps us living. And so when I say put up some picture about running a poly reel, people go, they recoil in horror. I said no, no, this is a good thing. I'll talk about that in a little bit.

23:00 Okay, and we—this is how we used to eat. We used to have this kitchen table, and there's garden, you know, peas from the garden. Here's some home-grown meat, and you know, was prepared at home and fried in lard, which 30 years ago nutritionists told us lard? That's awful. That's like liquid distillation of Satan himself, you know? It's going to cause heart attacks. And now we find out, you know what does cause us to have heart attacks? All the substitutes they sold us for lard back in the days.

23:35 Nowadays we don't get our food at the kitchen table. We have this nutrition center we call Casey's. And you can find all your nutritional needs at Casey's. You can. There's an aisle where you can meet your minimum daily requirement for alcohol. You can meet your minimum daily requirement for caffeine and liquid sugar and your minimum daily requirement for trans fat and empty carbs. Oh, your minimum daily requirement for colorful sugar. And your minimum daily requirement for nicotine. And when you check out, there's a place where people who are really mad at bad at math can do their gambling. And you can get a completely balanced meal—16 ounces, 16 ounces.

24:27 Can you tell which cowboy gets his meal at a Casey's? Can you tell which cowboy won the lottery ticket?

24:36 So why are farmers not wealthy? Well, obviously we pay too much and get too little. If you pay high input costs and you get low returns, you're not going to make much money. So how do we fix these? Okay, because this is what farming feels like right now. What do we spend money on? And I'll focus on crops first. Land cost—we're probably not going to change that until we change our mindset about our desire to take out our neighbors in order to expand our operation. How much of it is just simple pure greed?

25:22 Fertilizer, I gave a whole talk on fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, fungicide. Yeah, these are all things that we can greatly reduce if not eliminate. Seed depends a lot on what kind of seed. Machinery—what do we use machinery for? Well, tillage is a big one. Let's take a look at some of these things.

25:50 Nitrogen fertilizer—70 million pounds of nitrogen in the atmosphere above every acre. So why are we buying it in this form when we can grow it in this form? I showed you these yesterday, so it's kind of redundant, but hairy vetch being roller crimped so it's being killed without a herbicide, planting in the same operation. This is pretty minimal machinery cost here, and then a perfectly clean field. No herbicide, no tillage, no fertilizer, and no weeds. What a beautiful system, and this guy is selling corn for ten dollars a bushel, still clean a month later.

26:41 You can use cover crops to control weeds without herbicide. This is annual rye grass cover crop, and see weeds over here, absence of weeds over here. If you want to learn more about this, we've got a couple videos up on our YouTube channel that you can check out. They're well worth the watch.

27:09 Another source of anxiety in farming, of course, is the weather. Say well, you can't control the weather. What's this guy trying to control? What do you think he's praying for? What do you pray for every summer when you're farming?

27:37 Honestly, I wonder what God thinks of when we pray for rain. This field out in western Kansas, it rained an inch 10 days earlier. Where'd this water come from? Here and here. What's this water doing? It's not soaking in. This is fresh planted wheat. I went out and trespassed on this field, hoping the guy that owned it didn't catch me because I was pretty curious about this. I went out here, there's wheat planted here in powder. It's not going to sprout till the next rain, so in this very same field there is standing water, field where it's too wet to plant, too dry to sprout, and a dust storm where I had to turn on my headlights driving down the highway. Is this a sign that maybe we're not doing things right?

28:53 Here's the guy right across the highway, no-till with heavy residue. You could reach under that residue and squeeze moisture out of that soil. You know what annoys me—well, I don't know if it annoys me, I shouldn't say that, not my place to be annoyed, but do you think maybe God gets a little annoyed when this guy prays for rain? You think maybe he's up there and he says, why do you want rain? I just sent you one and you completely wasted it. It's like your kid's asking you for money. What'd you do with the last hundred bucks I gave you? Maybe God shines favor on people who don't pray for rain now.

29:48 My son was really good at track in high school, and his relay team ran the second fastest time in history on their four-by-one in Kansas State 1A history, and so they're really excited to go to the state track meet. Well, the very first race of the season, he pulls his hamstring and doesn't run again. They said maybe he can run at state, and he can't run at regionals, so they have him as an alternate. I'm sitting there at the state track meet, and it's just such a depressing situation because he's just sitting there, and he doesn't run the first day. I go under the bleachers and I pray. I said, God, you know, it's right before the four-by-one, I said, God, can you please take my son's pain away so he can run? I go out there around the four-by-one without him, get fifth. Now, I guess he didn't run, and they had the second fastest time in state history prior. This is so depressing.

31:33 He's an alternate on the 4x4, which is the very last event of the state track meet. I go under the bleachers again. I thought, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Apparently I'm not praying correctly.

31:55 So this time I said, if you won't take his pain away, give him the strength to overcome his pain. And I walk out of the bleachers and I look across and he's on the infield and he gets up, takes off his sweats and he starts warming up.

32:23 Apparently I figured out the secret here. And he warms up and he's running the second leg and he gets off, gets the handoff and they're like in fifth place, or actually I think they're in like ninth place or something like that. He's behind a lot of people when he gets the handoff.

32:46 He takes off like a shot and passes about five people and then he reaches the 200 meter mark and then he pulls up and starts hopping. Oh no, he takes about three hops, he takes off running again and he passes everybody and gets him in first place and they end up winning the gold medal. And he didn't walk again for a month.

33:26 Don't pray for rain. Pray for the wisdom to use the rainfall God gives us. That's far more powerful prayer.

33:38 So how do we change our livestock program make us happier, healthier and welfare well, what are we spending money on unnecessarily? What creates stress and what creates danger for us?

33:53 Now I'm going to tell you what a great cattleman I am. That is a first calf heifer. I took this picture about 20 years ago. That is her calf a few days before weaning. She's a thousand pounds. He weaned off at 920. How many of you have ever had a heifer, first calf heifer, wean over 90 percent of her body weight?

34:36 And in a moment I'm going to tell you the rest of the story. That's where I need to get my clown nose and glasses.

34:48 So I took beef science class in college and they put a break even up on the board and they said 80 percent of your total cost in raising a calf to weaning is feed cost and about 80 of those costs are for feed for the winter time. So what costs are involved in providing feed well you got land, fertilizer, seed, herbs, all this stuff here.

35:19 What do we use all this machinery for? Cows have four legs. That's for making hay. These are all the expenses involved in making hay plus all your cost of growing. This is the cost in converting standing feed into feeding these little circles. And then what does it cost to feed the hay itself?

35:42 I had a kid tell me one time he says, well I can feed cows for a dollar fifty a day. He was dry loading cattle year round. I said dollar fifty a day, what are you figuring that? Well my hay and silage. I said well, how does it get to him? Oh I got this mixer wagon here. I said well what pulls the mixer wagon? Oh one of these Ford tractors. And uh said well how does the feed get in the mixture? Oh I got another Ford tractor with a grapple hook on it.

36:10 And so I said well do you run both tractors? No, I hire a guy to do run the other tractor. I said so I calculated up. I said okay, here's where I calculate depreciation and interest and then you're probably burning 20 gallons of fuel an hour between two tractors. And did you have any repairs? Yeah we busted a cylinder. Said uh, what are you paying the guy? Oh you know, 15 bucks an hour. Said uh, what do you pay yourself? I don't count my own labor. I said well then come work for me. I'll hire you for free.

36:49 And then you know, once we calculated his actual cost per day, five dollars and 31 cents a day. His machinery costs to just feed the hay and the silage was twice as much as the cost of the feed itself. And that's something very few people actually calculate is all the machinery cost involved.

37:20 Why do we do this because our mentality is still back stuck in 1973. 1973, these bell bottoms were in, I guess they've come back, but it took a while. But we thought in 1973 we thought

37:46 It made complete sense to do for the cow with machinery what she can do for herself because in 1973 beef was 50 cents a pound, diesel was 15 cents, nitrogen fertilizer seven, big round baler was three grand and this guy was cool.

38:14 My how things have changed. Now beef has gone up two and a half times—it's a dollar twenty-five now. How many times has diesel gone up? About 20 times. Nitrogen fertilizers about 14 times. Big round baler about 20 times. So the stuff we sell has gone up two and a half times but the stuff we buy has gone up about 20 times. What do they say about doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results? We cannot afford to pour machinery into livestock anymore.

38:54 So how do we use less hay? Well let's talk about the choice of calving season, your grazing season, and reducing the cost of the hay feeding process. So I'm going to tell you the rest of the story. This was she was in a group of supposedly open heifers. The rest of my herd calved in May, so I bred them all to Kevin for May. I checked my cattle January 1st in the middle of a snowstorm, and this guy was one of four black dots in a snowdrift. The heifers were not all open—some of them were bred and they have January 1st.

39:45 The rest of my herd was on dry grass, corn stalks, sorghum stubble—just roughing them through. You cannot feed a lactating first-calf heifer that way. So four of these cows got separated, managed differently, fed them alfalfa hay. Now I was bragging about 920 pound weaning weight. Well he was 13 months old when he got weaned. The rest of the herd—because he got weaned the same time as my May-having calves—and they were you know eight, nine months old, but they averaged 816, which is pretty doggone good.

40:42 When I took these calves to sale, these four calves brought 16 dollars a head more than my May-born calves. Can you buy four months of alfalfa hay for a cow for sixteen dollars? Then you need to tell me where you're getting it from because I sure as heck didn't pay for that, even 20 years ago.

41:18 So let's take a look at how our calving season affects our cost. If you take high quality hay—I just plugged in some prices here—a lactating cow and calf is going to eat a lot more than a dry cow. So I just plugged in a thousand-pound cow, roughly 1200, gonna consume about 45 pounds of hay a day. 160 a ton, 8 cents a pound, 45 times 8 cents is 3.40, and 120 day feeding period, that's 408 dollars. What can you sell a weaned calf for right now? How much percent of that is eaten up by this? Quite a little chunk of change, isn't it? And you haven't even fed them yet.

42:10 You got to hold that cow over two and a half tons of hay. So let's take a dry cow instead. Let's have a cow calving in May. In the wintertime that you're feeding, she's only going to eat 30 pounds a day, and you can feed her some pretty junky hay because she's not milking. So that's four cents a pound, 30 pounds, that's a dollar twenty a day. So if you're feeding the same number of days, that's 144 dollars. And you're hauling less, so you don't have the machinery cost involved. That's 260 dollars less per head. That's a lot more than the 16 extra dollars I got from Kevin four months earlier.

43:03 Now here's another opportunity. You know the number one rule in range management is to take half, graze half, and leave half. What do you do with the half you leave going into winter? Most time it's nothing. Why not? Well, say this stuff is like three percent protein. It's useless. It's not very digestible. You know what kept millions of bison alive for a few centuries? Why does it not work for our cow herd? Well, because we're calving in February. You cannot sustain a milking cow on this, but with a little protein supplement, it'll sure work for a dry cow.

43:51 So let's look at wintering costs. If you've got dry grass plus limit-fed alfalfa—just give them just enough alfalfa to meet their protein needs—let's say that's dairy quality alfalfa and it's 10 cents a pound, and you only have to feed it every third day. And we're limit feeding, so we're only going to give them 18 pounds of that hay every third day.

50:22 Now instead of eating 30 pounds of grain for four days, they eat four pounds every day and 26 pounds of stocks. That's half of the amount to cause acidosis, so the rumens stay healthy. And research across at University of Nebraska, Purdue University of Illinois, Ohio State, every corn belt university corroborates this. You can double the number of cow days per acre. You can stay out on stocks. We're taking a cheap feed and making it even more economical.

51:02 Okay, and all you got to do is run one of these. People say, 'Oh my god, you don't know how busy I am. I don't have time to do that.' You have time to go to the doctor. Let me show you something here. So here's your general rule. But with strip grazing, you can carry the same number of cows twice as long. And stocks, if you're renting stocks, they're about 10 bucks an acre. If they're your own stocks, they're pretty much free.

51:47 A month of low quality hay costs about thirty-six dollars ahead what we calculated earlier. So every month they're on stocks, you save twenty-six dollars ahead. So if you have a 160 cows on that quarter section, 26 times 160 is the amount you save. That's 4,160. And if it takes 15 minutes a day to move that fence, which is a lot longer honestly than what I've timed myself, that's 277 dollars an hour.

52:27 How many of you will do 15 minutes of exercise if you're getting paid 277 an hour? Raise your hands. Six of you. And but wait, there's more. Remember when I was talking about how we need to get more exercise? We've taken the actual physical work out of farming to our detriment. You're getting paid 277 dollars an hour to be healthier. Okay, and if you order before midnight tonight, there's more. How about we throw in some cover crops?

53:11 This is aerial seeded cover crops. This is 60 inch corn rows with cover crops drilled in between when corn was like at V4 stage. What's this stuff good for? Let's buy you kale. How about post-harvest pasture? Now what you've done here is not only have you created more feed, but you've changed corn stocks from maintenance feed to milking feed. So instead of weaning in October, you put your calf cows and calves out on this and you make those cows work another couple months and you slap another 200 pounds of gain on those calves. How profitable is that? And your soil gets better every year.

54:03 This was drilled in wheat stubble. This is pillage radish and oats. And this carried four pair an acre for three weeks in the fall. And those calves put on right around 75 pounds in that period. And this is some sorghum, some sterile sorghum that was planted in wheat stubble. And this is being pastured in winter. The day this photo was taken, it was 20 below. Cows look pretty happy to me. And you don't have to fire up a tractor. I can't ever start a tractor on a cold morning anyhow.

54:47 I showed you about fescue, and stockpiled fescue is the best January, February grazing there is. But the problem is you can't graze in February what you already grazed in August. You have to stockpile it. You have to find something else to graze in the fall. What can you graze in the fall instead of that fescue? How about some of these things? Okay, and this is just showing how good that fescue is in the wintertime. It's better than most of the hay we feed cows.

55:26 Now, another thing that all these grazing ways of extending the grazing season can make your life better. Not only do you feed less hay, you can do something called delayed weaning. Now the university talks about early weaning all the time. You only wean it three months, just feed the calf directly. Like, why? We've got a perfect system. The cow eats grass and then feeds the calf. I said, 'No, wean early and feed the calf grain.' Are you nuts? Why do we let that cow slide by only working three months out of the year? Why do we let by only working seven months out here? She's happy to do the work. Why do we wean at seven months?

56:16 Well, usually because that's when the pasture season runs out and you don't want, you have to feed a lactating cow. But if you can provide quality groceries to that cow for eight months, nine months, ten months, the same amount of feed that'll put a pound and a half on a calf if you run it through the cow and let her supplement that calf with milk, we'll do three pounds a day. Why not capture the magic milk? As long as you can provide quality feed, you can do delayed weaning. What's the advantage to delayed weaning? When your 18-year-old leaves the house to go to college, mama cries.

57:00 There goes my baby. When your 30 year old leaves the house, mama throws a party. Finally, that's the difference in delayed weaning. You take something that's very stressful on the calf, on the mother, and on the caretaker, and you turn it into really almost a pleasant situation. The cow almost weans the calf by herself. It's so much better and they don't get sick.

57:33 Okay, here's a way of making hay feeding better: space bale feeding, bale grazing. You put those bales out on a grid, and then you just move this electric fence every day with your pulley wire, and you have these lightweight polyethylene bale rings. You only need hay moving equipment one day—the day you put all these bales out on the grid. If you only need equipment one day out of the year, do you have to own it? Absolutely not.

58:07 I showed you these numbers yesterday. This is the English units I showed you the metric yesterday, but look at this. Your control—this is hay feeding method. Here's feeding the hay in a lot and spreading it, and this is feeding directly out on the pasture. All those nutrients go back out on that pasture to improve productivity.

58:34 Now I talked about the take half, leave half deal. Once you graze more than half of the leaf area on grass, it starts killing the roots. This is brome. This black line is smooth brome, common grass in eastern Kansas, Nebraska. This is grazed to a three inch double height. Here is at a six inch stubble height. Can you name me any other thing that'll double your productivity without writing a check?

59:05 You say, well, that looks good, but the cows don't follow the system. What's your grazing height on this? Cows didn't get the memo. You're supposed to bite every single grass right here. You're not supposed to take 90 percent of this, none of this, but they keep coming back to this grass because it's got tender regrowth throughout the season. You look from the road, it looks like this pasture is fine, but you get out in here—look at this. This grazed 90 percent. What's that do to your root growth? Kills it. Next year, how productive will this plant be? Did this plant this year, did it contribute at all to your financial status? None.

59:55 How do you fix this? Your rotational graze. Now, this is simple rotation. You graze a week here, week here, week here, week here. So when you get back to here, how many days of rest has this pasture had when you get back to it? 21. Here's daily moves. You graze it a day here. You still graze seven days here, but they only get one day's worth at a time. So when you get back to here, now how many days of rest have you had? Calculate it. You get 27 days because you're still carrying them 28 days, but now this little strip here when it gets back has had 27 days of rest instead of 21.

1:00:56 Is there any increase in growth between 21 and 27 days? Anybody bail alfalfa? Basically doubles in yield from 21 days of rest. 27 doesn't it? This is the magic rotational grazing. Here's something else magical. If this is your pasture, what are you going to do? If you're renting this pasture, what's the landlord tell you to do? That's a mess. Get rid of that stuff. Call a plane. Get the Paraquat out.

1:01:31 Why do you want rid of this stuff? Cows won't eat that. Yeah, they will if you're daily movement grazing. See the wire? Poly wire. This is Brett Peshick's pasture down in Oklahoma, and that picture that I just showed you actually is just a close-up right here. They will eat that stuff. When you move that fence every day, it changes the cattle mentality. The best—and now I don't know why, but the best analogy I've heard is that if you walk into the Pizza Hut buffet and you're the only person in the place, you're going to walk up that buffet and you're going to look around, and you're going to walk around twice and pick out the very best thing. If, however, you're walking up to that, you hear a screech of brakes, you look out, and it's a school bus carrying the high school football team and they start unloading, you're going to grab whatever the heck you can while you can. When you bunch cattle up, they become very competitive for feed and they eat everything, and it's not because they're being starved to death because I've done this, and the first thing they'll eat a lot of times is this brush that they don't touch under continuous grazing. Now we also know that nitrogen makes grass grow. Here's 0, 100, 200, 300.

1:03:09 Obviously you get a lot of grass when you apply a lot of nitrogen. Only problem with that is you got to write a check for the nitrogen. Or you can grow it. And I showed you some of these figures yesterday as well. Look at that. When you add legumes, it's just as good or better than adding nitrogen. Plus you get more protein. Plus you get better animal performance because this is a toxic grass and these, especially this, neutralize that toxicity.

1:03:45 Now look at that also. It's pretty, isn't it? You get a pasture full of flowers. Is there a species of livestock that can take flowers and change them into money? How about these? If you're rotationally grazing with legumes, you will have sequence of bloom throughout the entire summer that you can monetize. My daughter makes lip balm on a big scale out of beeswax. She's monetized basically monetized pasture flowers.

1:04:23 Okay, another income stream you can generate from pasture and a means of increasing pasture productivity is by putting monogastrics out there. Got some pastured pigs here, pastured poultry. Why does this increase pasture productivity? Well, I thought hogs tore up pastures. Well, if you leave them in one space, one place the whole season, they definitely will. But what if you move them around? Then they do this. Look at this soil. This is across the fence. When you run all that feed that you import through that animal, change it into manure and worms and soil biology, work it over, this is the kind of soil you can get that will grow some serious grass.

1:05:15 Another way increasing pasture productivity and reducing your stress is to understand how grass grows. This is tall fescue. This is bermuda grass. Cool season grass, warm season grass. They're different, obviously. This fescue in April, I took this photo April 7th. This is a superior grass to this. Then now, this is fescue in July. See how nice and green it is right here? Almost dead. This is warm season grass, eastern gamma grass. I took that fescue picture right over here. Cool season, warm season. They're different. They each have strengths and weaknesses. And when you can make a system where you incorporate both of them, this is cool season grass grazed in the summer. It does nothing. She's got fall in the blue, summer in the yellow, spring here. So these were herds all grazed on fescue in the spring. Some left on fescue, others put on warm season grass, and then fescue in the fall. Look at how much more gain you get when you move them to a seasonally appropriate grass.

1:06:41 So this is how ranchers now spend their time and money. All spring, calving. All summer, baling hay. All fall, treating sick calves. After winning and all winter, feeding hay. Well, if you do all the things I talk about, here's how you spend all your time: building meaningful relationships and meaningful leisure time.

1:07:05 So how does regenerative agriculture build local communities? Well, what does your community produce that gets sold outside the community? If you're in most of rural America: beans, wheat, corn, cattle. Okay. What does your community buy that is produced outside the community? Everything. That you buy in here, where's this stuff produced? China. Yeah, that's good for our rural economy, isn't it? Is there anyone here that thinks a new Walmart in town is actual rural development? I hope not. What does your community produce that is consumed within your community? I can hear the crickets chirping. Think about it. What does your community produce that's consumed within your community? Can you think of much of anything?

1:08:13 Here's what we sell: number two yellow corn, 10 cents a pound. Here's what we buy down at Walmart or Dollar General: four dollars and 33 cents a pound. Is there a little markup? Where's the money go? Here's what we sell: fat cattle for a dollar 25 a pound. Here's what we buy: the cheapest cut of beef, 5.49 a pound. Where's the money go? So why don't we grow and sell real food and consume that same real food locally? So here's an example: wheat, 7.60 a bushel, which is one heck of a price by the way, 12 cents a pound. You can mill that wheat and sell this, 1.29 a pound. 10 times the price, folks. And all you got to do is mill it. Or you can mill it then bake it. What if you have a bakery now? You're at 30 times the price. Little difference. Where's the money go? And then we've got, can we do this? So well, I don't want to bake bread.

1:09:34 What you do is just like we did with East Kansas Energy up in Garnett. We put together a cooperative of farmers to market our own products and turn them into money. There's a reason there's a rainbow here. After we did this, what happened to the price of corn in 2006? Skyrocketed.

1:10:02 We don't have to just raise commodities. Here's Natural Grocers, this daikon radish we sell $1.99 a pound. You say well we can only grow that in the summer. No, we're not limited to summer. We can grow year-round, sunken greenhouse. I want to show you something here.

1:10:20 Allen Nation, Stockman Grass Farmer, said we need to find our competitive advantage. And someone asked him well where's the best place in the country to raise grass-finished beef. He said well, first of all you gotta take this out because it's too cold and you gotta feed too much hay. And here it's too hot. Cattle don't gain in the summertime. And over here it's too dry. It takes too many acres to carry it. Said over here it's too wet. You gotta fight mud. Well, that's not much of the country left. He said oh yeah, you gotta take this out because up here you gotta compete against subsidized corn, the ground's too expensive. That leaves you here, and we are located here. This is the absolute easiest place in the United States to raise grass-finished beef. You know why? Because we can do it year-round. We can grow cool season grasses, warm season grasses, grazed cover crops, and do it cheaper here than anywhere else in the country.

1:11:27 If this is up at Garnett, this is Bauman's Mobile Meat. If we process it locally we could be selling this, instead of beef at a buck 25. And so now our rural communities can have a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, a tannery, furniture making out of that leather, hey, grass-finished dog food. We can sell it locally.

1:12:03 Let's take out Dollar General and Walmart and actually have our own grocery stores that are not farmers markets, it's open one day a week, but stuff open and sells where people actually buy groceries on a routine basis. And these places become not just grocery stores but like the Mildred Store, a community center. Who's been to the Mildred Store? If you're heading north you got to check it out, it's a neat place.

1:12:33 We've had centuries of urbanization. What we need is ruralization. And here's what happens, and this is why it's so important. Has anybody seen the movie Apollo 13? Here's my final thought. Here Apollo 13: Houston, we have a problem. You know, they have this disaster in space and they can't land on. Not only can they not land on the moon, but they only have half the oxygen they need to get back to Earth. They're facing almost 100 certainty of suffocation before they get back, and they're in a vehicle not designed for reentry.

1:13:18 There's a scene where they put all the stuff out on the table. This is what's in the landing module. Said you guys figure out a way to bring them back safely using what's in that landing module. I thought, you know, this is like every Sunday afternoon on the farm because the planter broke down. You can't get parts till tomorrow and it's supposed to rain tonight. Said I bet those guys grew up on a farm.

1:13:52 I heard an interview by Jim Lovell when he was speaking at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. He said he owes his life to the fact that every single person in the command center, all 26, grew up on a farm and were able to figure out with duct tape and baling wire how to bring them back alive.

1:14:23 At that time in that era, five percent of the U.S. population grew up on a farm. The odds that that's a random occurrence, that every single one is 0.05 to the 26th power, I don't even know if there's a word for a number that big. It's one over that number, that that's a random occurrence.

1:14:49 The greatest product we ever produced on our farms was not corn, wheat, beans, or cattle. It was our children. And we have eliminated generation after generation of our best product through this desire to get big that's destroying our communities. Let's figure out a way to keep more money back on our rural farms and communities. Thank you.