How to Build a Regenerative Cattle Operation from the Ground Up

0:08 Today I'm going to talk about how we have embraced the concepts of soil health and more importantly why. But first I'd like to give you a little background on Hunt Hill Cattle so you'll understand our perspective. We're commercial cow-calf. The interesting thing is we've got into the soil health thought processes. Most of the people that we have originally learned from were all focused on row crop and so we've had to learn how to accomplish these in the southeast dealing with perennial grasses and incorporating cover crops. But all these locations we manage the same to try to keep it simple.

1:02 Katy and I live in Woodville Mississippi right on the Louisiana Mississippi line. Our tremendous unfair advantage would be the tremendous moisture we have and we can grow grass virtually 365 days a year if we're smart enough to manage it. We always have grazed one herd at each location. We try to maintain the same health protocols. Our genetics all originate from Hunt Hill Woodville and as these animals mature we have all the heifers out at Hunt Hill Woodville get them re-bred and then they're sent out to the other three ranches.

1:43 Angus based genetics. We calve in the spring, weaning in the fall and background on cover crops. We're all about conception to consumption. We have to have a fertile cow, a live calf and an end product in high demand. That end product would either be a quality carcass or a female, a documented replacement valued female with proven data. We implement a lot of technology. We use both from highly proven sires. We basically breed our heifers and feeder steers and then those non-replacement quality females end up being fed to genomically enhanced CPDs.

2:32 Even when we started very modestly, Katie and I both had business degrees. I was an economics major, she's a business major. So the only way we knew to get started was with data and she was great at keeping financial records and production records. It's so interesting. We had dinner the other night with Tammy from Washington and Tammy has a background in soil science and weed breeding and she's saying man I wish I knew more about business and economics and I said well I've got that part covered but man I feel woefully lacking in your areas of expertise. So it's just something we all have to learn together.

3:13 We're members of U.S. Premium Beef which is a rancher-owned beef marketing company. I'm going to emphasize low-stress stockmanship last because there's three things that we'll talk about that I'm going to try to emphasize throughout the presentation and low-stress stockmanship is one of these management changes that is having an emphatic impact on our business. It's interesting how we get into this whole holistic thought process. So many of the things that we're going to do now are absolutely free if we can break our old habits and just start thinking different and thinking holistically. We have seen low-stress stockmanship having a very big impact on what we're doing. We thought we were good and we are just coming to recognize that we can do so many things so much better and we're seeing some pretty miraculous things as a result of that.

4:15 Our mission statement is pretty simple words but it really took us a time to formulate this. The soil, the forge and the cattle and the beef and healthy people are so interconnected and it starts with soil. You've heard that repeatedly. Our issue was that we didn't know what it took to create healthy soil. We thought we did and you'll see in my next slide that we spent a fortune on synthetic fertilizers over the years thinking that was our ticket to improving the quality of our soil, quality of pastures, etc. And we found out it was quite the contrary. We spent the money thinking that it was an investment.

5:05 Investment to the future. And at some point we would be able to eliminate or greatly reduce that. And much to our dismay, after reviewing soil tests over the years, we found out quite the contrary. And what I'm trying to depict to you here is this was a vicious cycle that we were in. And again, understand that I did not have an agronomic degree. KD and I were self-taught, but we understood finance. And what I'm trying to reflect here is that every time we add it in, we were lower our pH, and we're in a high acidic area. So I mean, we already had an issue, but it didn't matter if it was ammonium sulfate, your real ammonia nitrate. God forbid if you used anhydrous, but we would add in, we would lower our pH. So we'd have to add lime. So then we would top dress again, have to add more lime. Get tired of spending that money, we would plant legumes to try to fix nitrogen and reduce these inputs. And that worked for a little while until the weeds encroached and we'd spray, spray the weeds and kill the legumes. We're back to square one, and it haunted me.

6:19 The other thing I wanted to pick was haying and disking were the same vicious cycle. Every time you hay, we could grow phenomenal hay crops in our area, and that's fortunately one thing we never did—we bought hay. But every time you hay in our area, you're removing nutrients, you're mining your soil. And I came to find out just from other issues, you will never see in our country synthetic fertilizers replace the nutrients that you're removing with a hay. Impossible. Disking the same thing. We never did prepared seed beds. We just scratch the soil in the fall, but every time we expose that soil, we were burning up organic matter. Now we're trying to be sustainable. We're trying to do things, and these were obviously terribly counterproductive.

7:15 I guess that's the first thing. When trying to solve a problem, you got to admit you have one. And when you make changes, you have to be committed to making the changes. So we did a lot of reading, a lot of due diligence, travelled to a lot of places. You know, how do we get out of this? We knew it was inherently wrong. What business model is there out there where we literally could spend every penny in profit every year with some soil amendment—lime, spraying, and if it's not lime, it's nitrogen. If it's not nitrogen, it's di-ammonium phosphate. If that didn't work, they say you need sulfur or you need boron or you need zinc. It was never-ending. So we said, okay, we're getting out of this trap one way or another. But we knew whatever we did, it would have to be sustainable. I mean, you can do a lot of things. You can quit all your inputs and fall off a cliff in a few years, and where are you? So our next step was we learned about higher-density grazing. Mob grazing—very generic term. Some people take it to 30,000 pounds per acre. To other people, it may be minimal or anything in between. But the interesting thing is, and it goes back to low-stress stockmanship, the exciting thing was this was a mindset change. This was a management change with no silver bullet. You didn't have to buy anything. What costing us anything? And our goal was to create our own fertility.

8:45 I went to a meeting and I got back in the middle of the night. Katie said, what did you learn? I said we were going to stop mob grazing. She says, when? I said, tomorrow morning at daylight. And we were fortunate because we had already had a lot of electrical fencing. I mean, we did that just again. It was a finance decision compared to barbed wire. Electrical fencing, you know, I just we went into the electrical business early on. So we had a transmission line. And we've heard a lot of things again from great speakers this morning. And Keith said something that hit home so hard the other morning. He said, don't be overwhelmed, and it's so easy to be. I come to these meetings and I've heard some great talks today. I mean, gosh almighty, listening to Jonathan Lundgren.

9:32 That doesn't make your head spin, I don't know what does. But you need to step back and those presentations are vitally important, but you need to step back and say okay, if I'm gonna make changes, you know, just don't make them so complicated. It's not that complicated.

9:49 And all we did the next morning was because again we were already running cattle in one herd, so we were doing some things right. We just started building tanks. I mean, we just said okay, we started to water source. I've got a field right here, and for those, someone had a great question yesterday. They said, man, I got 10 paddocks, how do I get into this? Well, I'm going to tell you right now, you're already doing good with 10. That's great, but you could and you'll see a little bit better, maybe graphically later. But whoever asked that question, if they're still here, the very first thing you could do, you could be at 20 paddocks tomorrow. All you have to do is take a piece of poly wire, split that field you're talking about, and graze the first day or two or three at the water source, take the fence down, and go to the next paddock. Very, very simple. You could really even do it three times. I mean, that's kind of what we do. Our magic number as they roll, and it depends on the time of year, it's about a three-day back graze. You know, we've seen grass start growing as your systems get changed at about the third day, third to fourth day.

10:53 See, it's just not that hard. Don't make it that hard. If you got one pig pasture, split it into, I mean, it's just get started and you'll see improvement. So animal impact is what we were trying to get. We were trying to do some things without spending money, and again, you know, the advantage as opposed to the row crop guys is we got cows. We're in the cow business, so we use those cows to try to stimulate some fertility issues. And all we did was start increasing paddocks. We'd always rotated, but not as aggressively. And we went from, you know, 30 paddocks to 100 paddocks or 35 to 100 with poly wire, and they're not up there all the time. It's not something you have to do all the time, and you know, you don't have to have a million pounds per acre, but whatever you do, I promise you, you'll grow more grass.

11:53 So we increased our paddocks, we grouped our cattle tighter, moved them faster, and the key is, you know, the long rest and recovery. And you know, the interesting thing is, you know, we heard a lot of claims about the mob grazing, and I came back and I said, man, if half of this is true, half of what I've heard is true, this is worth trying because it wasn't gonna cost us anything. I'm spending a little bit of time with the cattle, which I'm already gonna do. And so, you know, this long rest and recovery, we found, you know, everything you've heard the last few days, I mean, we've kind of built drought resiliency, interrupts our fields, bruised pastures, the plants are much more deep-rooted. You know, we're moderating salt temperatures. We had to get over the mindset about trampling forage. It's not waste, you know. Waste is spending money on fertilizer. And I'm not anti-fertilizer. I'm not saying do it cold turkey, but this was something that I'm telling you, we saw a way to get out of this input never-ending input battle.

13:01 So we got into the trampling forage, and we started focusing on all this soil life, you know, the microbial activity and dung beetles and things that I went to Brazil, Nebraska, and to learn about a lot of this stuff. And you know, if you had asked me five years before when, you know, we're in the cattle business, but I'd be as interested in dung beetles as I am cows, I said, man, you are crazy. What are you talking about? But it's that important if you want to be a low-cost producer. I'm telling you, this is not a fad. And the cows get into it. I mean, it's not an issue. I mean, we move the cows most times daily. Don't get hung up on that. If you can't move daily, three days, four days, five.

13:52 Days, whatever you do is better than continuous crazy. And again they learn, they get gentle. You know, that's one strand of poly wire. It's a pretty simple process. This is, if I can make this right there on the bottom left is where the cattle have just come from. That's their line with a poly wire and our water's back here to the left and we're just moving away from the water source.

14:19 We're trampling forage, we're trampling forage, we're creating an environment for the soil life that is going to allow us to accomplish the goals we want. We're not terribly high density right there and I've just, would be guessing, fifty, sixty thousand pounds there. You know, I don't get too hung up on that. You know, we definitely are getting much better manure and nutrient distribution. And again, boy, we just constantly are thinking now: roots, roots, roots, feeding the soil life.

15:00 It's easy again to think about all the reasons you can't do something. You know, this is not expensive. You know, two of the four ranches we have now, the last two we acquired were no electricity anywhere. So you know, how do we? First thing we had to figure out: okay, how do we fence these things off? We can't manage. I can't manage. And again, some of you guys in the West, you'll laugh, but you know, 100 acre pastures a big pasture for us. And but we're not, you know, we're running a cow two or three acres. Okay? You know, we used to run a cow to one acre. But we can take these tools: portable energizer, tread ends, poly wire, piece of rebar with an insulator, maybe a tee post or T post insulator. For less than a thousand dollars, we can get inside and subdivide anything anywhere in no time at all.

15:55 So it's not expensive. The real issue, it's all about shade and water. We've got to get water to every place. Now again, we have a lot of rainfall, so we have virtually every ranch it's got ponds and tanks. Three of the four ranches that are in Louisiana are owned, or owned by partners, but the ranching entity is just, you know, we just manage the property. And so we have issues. Even though we control several thousand acres of grassland with partners and we can afford to do a lot of things for the long term view, you know, it's a little bit hard to put a lot of expense in permanent infrastructure.

16:42 So you know, watching the oilfield guys use poly pipe, you know, we can, we can get, without a lot of expense, we can get water just about anywhere if we got well water. And we just run roll that poly pipe that's probably an inch and a half line with a reel. And we take, you know, I got an ingenious partner and we just took our hay on rollers and hooked up these big reels. And man, we just go and we can lay out water. We will get in this particular field, we're going to, it's probably a hundred acres. The water source was right in the center. We build a little set aside around it with geotex fabric, concrete washout, red clay, gravel, whatever, to hold up. And then we power off of it so that we can really effectively graze a pasture.

17:27 Shade being the other issue. You know, there's one field that the pond is absolutely in the worst place in the world. So we had to build an alley to get shade and also access the pastures that we needed to. When we do use tanks, we fence them off in either one or two ways. They're big enough and deep enough and it's kind of hard to see here, but we've got this poly wire right here. And we cut the edges and really we don't have to worry about spending money on a lot of concrete and concrete wall shutout and all that. The land gradually moves into the ponds so the cattle can get in here, drink, get out, and it's big enough, deep enough, it stays clean.

18:20 Talking about water, you know, it's funny, these ranchers are within 45 miles as the crow flies, even closer, but there are differences. And gosh, we have found out that water is absolutely the most important nutrient you can have. The best stand of forage in...

18:38 The world and cattle will not consume it if they can't get the proper amount of water. Their intake will go from three percent to one and a half percent. You'll be wondering what in the world is going on, and it's water. I mean, you've got to have good clean source of water.

18:53 We also will have situations that we're just now experimenting with. Well, we will use these water tanks as reservoirs. We've devised a device where we'll just throw a siphon hose over into the pond, and as long as there's sufficient elevation difference, gravity will flow water to a tank that's got the necessary pail around it to keep cattle out of mud. That seems to work. So far it's worked great. We had to find the right floats and we had to have the right capacity because, you know, we're probably grazing as a rule two to three hundred cattle per herd. So we've got to have water source and we've got to have recovery.

19:48 The mob grazing was a real start in that timeframe. We were doing some other practices as I mentioned. We had never cut hay. We really, for the most part, never sprayed, and those were some things that were beneficial from a soil health perspective. The impetus was financial, and then we came to find out we were doing some good things. But the next big thing and the big step that helped along this fundamental changing of our business was we got a chance to hear Ray Archuleta and Doug Peterson in North Louisiana. We went and visited and heard them speak. There were a lot of visuals and the slake test and NRCS rainfall simulators where you're looking visually at different tillage practices, be it from pasture land to no till to fully prepared seed bed, mixing water with it. For some of us that were at the field day, you saw them do this, and I'm telling you, if that doesn't get your attention, nothing will.

21:15 We learned about mycorrhizae fungi and soil life and root exudates, and Katie and I looked at each other and said, my gosh, this is it. This has got to be the answer. One of the first things Ray and Doug talked about was animal impact. I had not met Ray, and since then would become dear friends. Doug Peterson, both NRCS guys. Doug Peterson had also read and talked to him before about his mob grazing, so he had a lot of credibility. But one of the things we learned was animal impact. We said, my gosh, there are five principles and we're already doing one of them. We're twenty percent there. Let's see about the rest of them.

22:09 If y'all have heard over the next few days, minimizing soil disturbance is critical. When you listen to Ray and Doug and you're talking about what damage the tillage was doing to the soil aggregate stability and the soil life, we said, well okay, we can comprehend that because we had, a few years about the same time we started the mob grazing, just intuitively we knew disking just didn't make sense to us. We weren't even doing a prepared seed bed. We were doing slight disturbance to Bermuda, and you'll see some pictures, but we had quit disking and gone through the process of just sowing the rye grass and clover out on top of the ground. That gave my coop an absolute stroke, and they're good dear friends and big-time producers. They said you can't do that, it's gonna be a failure. I said, trust me, I'm gonna try it. I believe I can do it. You're not responsible, just do it. And it was effective.

23:22 Trying to quit being and we're trying to be sustainable and regenerative and stop burning up organic matter. How can we keep on discussing this? We hadn't tried that, and we in so we were doing it with these over seeding of annuals, and then the next thing they taught us was living roots year-round. Again in the south, man, we all are planting regrass. This was again, we had such an advantage because we were kind of doing all of this. The difference is we were doing a monoculture here, and we'll talk about that, but again, you know, in the southeast we plant winter annuals in September and October with these warm seeds and perennials, and you can see it's just real easy to grow grass. I mean this is overstated.

24:15 Grass kept cows or tromping it in with no fertilizer. What does it cost? If you ask a hundred farmers in Iru how to plant rye grass, and the blonde shades are here from Abbeville, so they certainly would have tested this. You'll get a hundred answers and they're all right because it's easy. I mean, you know, we're not farmers. I mean this is not hard to plant grasses. You one or two passes with a desk call to pack or hire any combination of that. It's probably three hundred dollars an acre at one time. When I figured it, didn't maybe different now with some fertilizer prices dropping. I mean, we were doing it for twenty percent of that number or less. You know, we were basically, and when we went through this transition, you know, we had the coop spread to see, so we had to use week. We had quit fertilizer. We had to use pellet lime, pelletized lime to get the seed out. So basically pelletized lime for spreader court spreader truck fee, and the cost of the rye grass and clover seed continuous all cover with one of these principles. Again, you know, it just made so much sense, and we were partway there because we had eliminated disking, and we had also been using for fifteen years extensive use of stop power.

25:37 Now again, for you guys in Oklahoma and Texas, I mean, you know, we all probably invented stockpile, but we were always told an area with fifty, sixty inches of rainfall, it couldn't work. And I'd say, well, tell me why, and if I can't get an answer that I can understand, we tried. And Katie and I drove into it and we stockpiled. And again, one of fortunate things is that we had never ever cut hay on our property. We had, you know, felt like okay, we'll graze every acre, and it was cheaper for us to buy, so this was some stockpile probably in December because it's turn brown. Its behavior Bermuda Dallas crabgrass, broadly signal grass. You can't see it there, but Johnson grass. I mean, we got everything in the summer, and that's probably, you know, we've done so much soil test over the yummy Fords test over the years that's probably close to ten percent crude protein. And you know, fifty-five to fifty somewhere high fifty statin. And it's something we allocate. You know, again, depending on the water source, we'll just strip graze it away. Don't worry about back grazing that time of year because once they leave, they're not coming back. And they're not going to hurt anything. So we would allocate this stockpile, and it just saved us a whole lot of effort from a hay standpoint, and it was more nutritious.

27:09 Every now and then I can remember, you know, gosh, if it doesn't rain, I mean, we can be grazing this in January. And there's one ranch I'm telling you, we've gotten all the way to February. I mean, that's my goal in life. I'm a simple person. Get me to February, we're home-free. Just happens to be the ranch that is our absolute worst winter pasture winter grazing farm, and I don't know why. We cannot, we struggle there. We've made some changes this year hoping we can get to February. We're grazing all their other ranches with winter grass. You know, we're just, and unfortunately feeding some hay in January. You know, this one particular ranch, I mean, you know, we haven't felt a

27:51 Better hay and if we had the winter grass at this place we would have never fed hay, but you know, it's one of those things that Jason Holt was talking about when those things earlier, and it's sometimes it's unexplainable but we'll figure it out.

28:05 This last thing is our next big fundamental change: low stress stockmanship and plant diversity. Gosh, and it was so logical. I mean, right there in front of our eyes, how does this not, how can we have not figured this out before? We look at our summer pastures and we have a plethora of stuff in there and we've got everything including every weed known to man.

28:34 So we transition, we recognized, okay, you know, we're monoculture in our winter grass. Man, we know we've learned well that's no good, so we've got to get into the cover crops and all the things that you heard about: the increased diversity above ground. When we wish that we think more on the ground now that we do above ground, and the different root structures that are scavenging water and nutrients from different levels, and the symbiosis. And you know, we've been to games and saw the monoculture versus polyculture, and it's I mean, gosh, you know, again, words I can tell you about it. If you saw it, you would never doubt the belief there.

29:22 And you know, the one thing that we've dealt with with ryegrass is it is such a prolific grower, but come spring, you could not own enough cattle to get ahead of it. Impossible. And not to mention the biosecurity issues. So come May when you're trying to transition out of that winter pasture in the summer, you'd have just ryegrass. Then me, we would do everything we could to graze it down, and really the answer was baleage. And everybody cuts baleage, makes a tremendous product, but I absolutely could not do that because I knew I could not afford to mind. That's all I could not work all year and then suck it out in a couple of hay cuttings.

30:07 So this was our answer when we got into these multi-species covers. You know, which would, and we'll look at them in a minute, you know, they basically have different yields and different maturity dates, and all of a sudden we found out minutes seamless. We grazed them, and all of a sudden, you know, come May they're gone. And if summer pastures are going and we've drilled, so we don't have, we haven't killed everything from the previous summer crop, and it made life so much easier.

30:33 And again, the last thing on there, this was a management change. We did not spend any more money. I mean, and that's why it really, this was easy. You know, we were spending X number of dollars on ryegrass and clovers and having the coop tow it out. So you know, the very first year we rented drills, you know, we're very, very cautious naturally. I mean, we did not know if this would work, and we rented drills and we planted all four places.

31:03 You know, I was talking to Jody from NRCS earlier, and we talked about this yesterday: we don't have time for experimental plots. We got cows to feed. You know, life's too short. We planted, I mean we planted, and gosh, then we started praying. And you know, our insurance policy was where we planted a multitude of things. The one thing that, you know, in the multitude of things we're all about 10% of full seeding rate, but the ryegrass we kept a little heavier component. Where we normally would plant 30 pounds of ryegrass, we, I think we had early on the first couple of years we did, just we kept about 13, 14, 12 pounds of ryegrass there because we knew if everything else failed we would have ryegrass. And I'm telling you, it was kind of intimidating.

31:49 So the covers we planted were first couple of years, and since we've tweaked it, we caught, we planted radishes and turnips. You may see a little veteran there, and this was no-tilled. We were scared. I've heard kind of got an education today like my life story. I never quit, but we had no comprehension we could broadcast some of the cereals, and that was our real fear. You know, we were, and we've also because we were planning in such heavy stuff, that's what, well, we

37:07 Carbon nitrogen ratios and all these technical things in line but what's fascinating is that we plainly planted takács, we planted mung bean, mung beans, cow peas, forage soybeans and a leaf clover. And with ideas, man, let's get something coming up in the summer so we could keep these cattle in these really abused pastures with no forage, just a little bit longer.

37:35 And we got a stand and we wouldn't use fertilizer. Maybe we were wrong, but we just said we ain't doing that. And we got a stand and we kept the cattle in. It was successful. It wasn't a great stand, but the interesting thing is the following winter plantings that we had were better. And then what we also found was in some of these winter plantings, these cover crops that we made on very, very poor soil, and in the winter again we've got stand everywhere. I can't think of hardly any place we haven't gotten a stand, but it was a sorry stand. And there was no way if you were counting on what the cows ate and you had enough year to pay park, and our costs were about 40 dollars an acre by the way, forty-four. And of that sixty percent is the cost of the Lydians. So we are really, really trying to make an investment in these leggings with the hope of them receding and us eventually being able to cut back and then maybe more use more brassicas and doing some other things.

38:40 But the fascinating thing is that even we had living roots, it weren't that deep, but I'm guaranteed the next year we looked at the summer production and there was a noticeable difference. And that was exciting. That was really, really exciting to us, the results of what we're seeing.

38:59 Well, we've eliminated synthetic fertilizers and we were told that would be impossible. And I wasn't sure it was. And we had constantly had a war on this issue. We had gotten better and better and better, but we reached a point where we were just fearful. But we finally broke that cord and we haven't looked back. We haven't used them for two years. We've reduced our hay, but we're still fighting that battle. And probably a lot of it's more management than necessary. But January is our big problem month. Our stockpile is gone, or if not gone, the weather, you know, rainfall is what kills us on stockpile. It'll beat the quality out.

39:49 And either one or two things will happen. It'll beat the quality out of it so bad, or even though we have no bare ground, it'll actually get a little film of mud on it on the leaf and they'll just refuse it. If we can get around that, what we do is we'll supplement. We use that stockpiled and we'll supplement with a commodity by-product. It's very, very farm friendly. And we don't mind because we can manipulate the cattle in different areas of those pastures and really get an animal impact. Consume basically free stuff that we grew all summer. And if we don't mind doing that at all, if we can avoid feeding hay, increased organic matter. You know, every time you think you're doing good, one of your buddies is doing better. And that's life, you know.

40:45 Man, I was so impressed with Jonathan and Caitlyn what they've gotten when they've got to 7%, but we've got on our best soil where we're up to 4%. And in this, the history of this is yes, cotton ground, cotton being worn out, less than 1%.

41:03 The other interesting thing is it's constantly, and I'm as guilty as everybody is. You hear people say, you know, I'm doing this and I'm doing that, and they're North Dakota and we say that's good. He's a North Dakota guy. We can't do it here. But I'm telling you, we've been to places like Dakota, like Oklahoma, like Kansas. Haven't been there, but Noah guys from SexFest. Catch one. Everybody had the same story. They all had a degraded resource. And we've all heard Gabe talk about it, less than 1% organic matter. So they weren't starting with any more advantage than we were. So man, these people is what gave us hope. And we were told.

41:41 By smart good intention people it can't happen. You'll never do it in Mississippi. Well, you know we've got LSU doing a study right now and they're impressed. The microbiologist is just overwhelmed with what we're doing. So we're up to four, but what's really exciting is we know so much more now that we can accomplish this we think a lot faster. You got to balance your quality of life and understand all that you mean, but I can tell you the more you move decals, the faster you move your cows get out of the tillage.

42:16 I was talking to Justin earlier. I'm not sure if he's still here. I mean, you know, he's in West, he's in Western Oklahoma. We heard his story. I mean it is so real that we have to go down this path if you want financial stability. So we've seen that organic matter, and again the Haney test has been encouraging and we've done it a couple of times and we're seeing more microbial life and then we've seen all of these other things that we talked about. But we are retaining more water. We need to learn more about infiltration because I can't talk to you much about that, but we know we're growing more grass on less water. That's a fact, our results. We are growing more grass, but I'm emphasizing more roots.

43:09 Allen's film the other day about grazing and recovery. More you break over that 50 percent removal line and man, you were really whacking your roots and you're going to have a longer recovery. You know, you think about the definition of insanity. We used to do it. What I mean, you know, again it's not magic. We can grow so much forage during the summer. It's amazing, and then in September I would be in an absolute panic because I had to get rid of that grass to plant more grass. You know, and we did that for years. And now man, we graze that grass. I mean it's a good thing, and we got no-till drills and we drilled through that 12 to 18 inch layer of Bermuda. We move our grazing season back because the grass is going to be later. So what it's all about, net, and as I mentioned earlier, not tilling up that grass in the fall. Man, we have a seamless transition in the spring. We're reducing water runoff. We're holding more water.

44:13 We had an NRCS field day with Ray Archuleta and a member of Michael Lindsey. You know, man, they were out there digging the day before and we were in a really dry period and I mean he was sensing moisture a couple of feet down and was just amazed. We used to not see earthworms. We're seeing them now. You know, the NRCS rainfall simulator, gosh, if you've not seen it, you know, make sure you find a way to do it because I mean that's I could talk all day. But if that doesn't get your attention, you just need to keep on doing what you're doing. And we certainly are doing a better job with the distribution of manure. Cows are getting less selective with grazing, and that's a fact.

44:56 I mean, again, this transition to mob grazing was so easy. And the interesting thing is, and I'm not sure we were just not observant before, but we'll turn up the cow, into our groups of cows into pastures now, and I mean it'll be the prettiest of hay and Bermuda and clover, and you would be amazed. It's pig weed and the vervain and the horse nettles. They eat. I mean, almost go to and eat first. Astounding. And then we come to find out that you know they, it's as nutritious as alfalfa, and we worry about killing it. Now obviously you don't want a whole field of pig weed because then you got a monoculture of something else. So you know it's balanced. Cattle get a lot more gentle and easy to move and easy to check. And you'll see what I'm referring to. We open a gate. We make them walk by us. We stand at the gate. We stand on the left side with what we look for that room. Until we look at the manure paddies and make sure, you know, they're not real clumpy and where we're getting them too much fiber. And if we have an issue, I mean rather than chasing around a big field and trying to find 300 cows and 300 calves, you go no. The issues.

46:13 They're the last ones to the gate easy. Healthier cattle perception makes sense. Logical, intuitive—a balanced diet of multi-species attracting nutrients and minerals from different levels in the soil. Some like calcium, some like phosphorus, some attract this, I'm attract that. And I've talked to consulting vets and I've talked to nutritionists since then and they confirm it. They said, 'Man, you're right, you're dead-on. It's no doubt that they can have a healthier environment, reduction in external parasites.' Again, these were all things we were told of in the mob grazing, and you know, caution with all those things—it sounds too good to be true. The people that were telling us this weren't selling anything, makes a pretty big difference.

47:08 It took us a few years and then all of a sudden one year you can't not notice. And again, talking about Hunt Hill Woodville, we noticed one summer we didn't have any parasites, we didn't know having horn flies. And again, when you think about our temperatures—I mean, we literally some years we'll have temperatures that we may not get below freezing two or three times—so you can imagine the environment we have for external and internal parasites. So Katy and I made that observation and it happened to be that year we had changed to a warmer product. So we attributed it to that, so much so the next year, you know, the other three ranches and 600 head of cows, we gave that warmer to all of them. And the next year Hunt Hill had no horn flies. And the second ranch that had been in our program for probably eight or nine years wasn't bad, but the two new ranches were eaten alive. And we said, 'What's this all about?'

48:14 So now we just went through our third summer and it's no question. I mean, and maybe I'll find out that it's something different, but all I can attribute it to is all this soil life consuming these dumptruck gun pals and not providing an environment for the horn fly to live. And I don't like chemicals, but I'm going to tell you, before I'll let a thousand flies eat a cow alive, I can't do it. I got too big a heart, I guess. And I better also understand there's economic ramifications, but I'm going to tell you, that is liberation. That is so exciting to not have flies on your cows and not have to treat them. I mean, it literally would look like we had to fly to fly tags in each year and had poured them on every three weeks. I mean, I'm not—we're not there on the other ranches yet.

49:08 Now, this is one of the things that we were told, and boy, it's really hard to see, but this is a field of hairy vetch and it's all throughout the field and we never planted it. And you know, again, it's so nice when you follow a journey or a path and you start seeing these things coming to fruition. And I can't remember how long we've been mob grazing before that came, but we've also seen since then another plant—another leg, a Cali payer, single payer Terry pee—come in a bunch of places. And I asked one of my agronomist buddies and he said, 'Yeah, I was planted in the 50s,' so that's this latent seed milk we're talking about. And there's a lot more stuff that I can't identify. I mean, one day I've got to get my agronomy guys with a notepad because I'm telling you there's things coming that we have never seen—foxtail millet, and the cows eat every one of them. So it's pretty cool, man.

50:16 The cows, we, they get used to this program. They trust us. You know, Alan said something the other day about bringing them across a lot of good forage to go to a certain place. I mean, I'll swear that's the truth. We do it all the time because they know when we stop they're getting a great diet that they want to have. So our new cycle cows get grass, bugs get carbon, plants get nitrogen, we grow more grass, we're not spending any money. Man, I can't tell you how thrilling that is. It's awesome.

50:55 The only problem is when you acquire new properties for its menu when you know it can be done or it's hard to man it's just hard to wait on it happening. It seems to be about somewhere around that fourth year when things really start happening. I don't know where this organic matter is going to go and we can do so much better but you got to balance your quality of life and you got so many things going on. We can graze a lot better, a lot tighter, a lot longer but we're planting this eleven route deal, we got carried away, we plant fence row to fence row. We're planning every open acre we've got our short-term goals. We're trying to learn our optimum stocking rate. There was a time when we were using a lot of fertilizer, we worked out to a little over an acre and a third, about a cow acre and a third with fertilizer. There were times we were stressed out. It is not going to rain sometime in Mississippi and Louisiana for 90 to 100 days every year it seems like but we just don't really know when that is so we were always stressing. Now we really don't stress. We are little listening adjacent earlier, we've got so much to learn. We're really not farmers, Justin would be ashamed of our farming abilities but we're learning seed depth, seed rate, timing, just what we can get by with. We're trying to figure out can we combine cool and warm seasons.

52:45 Noble Foundation is going to hear a lot more from me because there's nobody in our country doing what they're doing so we need each other. We've eliminated synthetic fertilizers, that's huge. We can get rid of the hay, we will have really accomplished something. We're trying to improve the quality of our fall stockpile. We know supplement is more expensive than grass still not bad because we're combining that supplement with stockpile so it's still economically viable. But if we can get our stockpile up to where we can eliminate the supplement then it's going to free up some labour time to do other things. Our long-term goal is a sustainable system that provides year-round grazing while providing proper nutrition for all livestock at the lowest possible cost. I firmly believe in regenerative, it's a better word. There's no doubt we can regenerate our soils.

53:51 Wrapping up, Katie and I heard this question asked for Dr. Tom Feel from Nebraska, brilliant guy, and I'll bet you there were 700 people in the room and you could hear a pin drop. It was really thought-provoking. The question was, what was your best failure? I've also heard Gay Browne say more than once, if I'm not failing I'm not trying hard enough. What that means to us is you can't be afraid to fail. I know for a fact with my business background that no business stands packed. You're either going forward or you're backing up. Going forward means you got to try new things and you have some inherent failure. You just don't want to fall off a cliff. Moments like this make us realize we have such an obligation to be good stewards and it's so vitally important. My buddy and I are learning together and that's the other thing that's so interesting. He's learning and I'm learning. What an inspirational film we saw yesterday and Mr. Precor, first thing he said, he said man I got too much to learn, I got to get going. That's inspiration. Thank y'all very much.