Farm and Ranch life

Certainly, but first a big picture overview. I'll try to be brief.

When I bought the ranch in the mid 90's I was very interested and inspired by the work of Allan Savory and intensive rotational grazing with its impact on soil ecology. I was going to introduce those practices at the ranch but it didn't take long to realize I didn't have the skills, attention or knowledge available to make it work especially in remote Mexico. But my interest never waned and evolved into research about regenerative ag and grazing. At the very deepest level I believe living vibrant soil holds the key to many of the issues we deal with as society today. { I'll spare you my wordy philosophical pontifications about that for now}

On my farm I began no till multi specie year round practices about 10-12 years ago and indeed have seen positive results. I eliminated synthetic fertilizers years ago, have never used pesticides, fungicides, RR crops and greatly reduced but not eliminated the use of gly. While there have been improvements being a restless soul I have not created what the vision is in my head. Then I ran across Dr. Allen Williams of Understanding Ag. Undergrad at Clemson. PHD at LSU, then taught at La. Tech in Ruston. The stars aligned and I knew I found the pathway forward.He's brilliant, very familiar with my ecosystems, works alll over the world deeply networked with all the right people.

I hired him to take my farm to the next level employing regenerative practices designed to light up the ecosystem . One of the first things he said was that I cannot reach my goals without animal impact. So a plan was created anticipating more cattle centric with silva culture grazing and using the cattle to terminate the plots spring and fall. Then hurricane Laura hit last year. While devastating , ugly and destroying a significant % of timber in retrospect it was a blessing in disguise. Just meant we needed to shift the 'tools' required to create the outcome we wanted. Hence goats! But directionally we will have goats, cows, sheep, laying hens, broilers, seasonal turkeys, organic market gardening, honey production,...and anything else we can stack as an enterprise. I want life to flourish on the farm! I'm turning this it into the 5th career in my life and candidly the one I'm most passionate about.

In August I hired a bright talented guy experienced in regenerative grazing plus experience in organic market gardening and challenged him to build the program from the ground up. He's on fire!

Now to answer your question. We graze/browse the goats no more than 4 days per paddock for reasons mentioned above using 3 strands of electric fencing. Last summer I brought a trac hoe in and created lanes for larger paddocks . We have rigged a Polaris with a jig to use plastic posts and string the wire. It hardly takes over an hour to create the paddock. The most time consuming chore is dividing the larger paddock into smaller ones which is unique to my farm because of all the downed trees. The goats take very little coaxing to move to a new paddock which 1 person can easily do. We have Buddy The Wonder Dog living with the goats and have had zero predation in spite of a healthy predator population.

The secret sauce to all this is intense short duration grazing with lengthy rest periods for each paddock . Observation is the key. There is a wealth of information about regenerative grazing on YouTube and at its basics easy to employ though daily attention valuable.

I could rant on more but enough for now......
 
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This is Buddy The Wonder Dog. The goats here are in the training pasture teaching them about the electric fence. That takes about a week then they know exactly what those 3 wires are....thats where the devil lives. Stay away! Once trained they go to the woods where they happily browse.
 
I am very intrigued by regenerative agriculture. I wish to someday have the resources to put a similar plan in place, my biggest hurdle though is moving to the land to be able to manage it. Good luck on your ventures, please keep us posted!
 
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Triple C and others have noted how rare truly older bucks are. I post this pic out of the many we have this year to show what a 13 yr old looks like. We have followed this buck since he was 4 . Always been big. We call him Captain Hook because of a unique hook kicker he has consistently had. While he has had a drop or two since maturity last year is when he started get much more non typical with a bunch of drops and broke 200[ at 12! ]. He has been high 90's to right at 200 for a bunch of years. Last year we put an archer on him but unfortunately he broke off several drops saving his life. Cant make that promise for him this year. He's an eyeful in real life and a privilege for us all to get to see him thru the years.

BTW this photo was in August. He continued growing for another month getting nicely bigger.
 
Just back from a week at the ranch. I think the deer from the Deep South brush country are as handsome as bucks anywhere in the country. BTW this buck is either 9 or 10
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Cruddy photo off the tv from some video we got doesn't do this 7 yr old justice at all. I'll try to get a better shot cause he's magnificent. Mid to upper 190's


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That is amazing! Please shoot a video of the goats moving into a new paddock. I could watch that all day long.

You've got all the pieces in place to process and market all those animals? That's the bottleneck up here, there is just no processing capacity. Anyone that wants a local farm animal almost has to do it themselves.
 
THE GOATS WILL SAVE THE FARM:

Bet you never expected to see a header like that!

What I am seeing is that the goats will save the farm. I'm up to 320 now and am using them as a brush clearing tool. We mob graze them on small paddocks moving them every 3 days. Thats the key. Keeps them from overgrazing plus breaks the parasite cycle.

Over much of the farm the briars have become so thick that they choke out everything underneath much like canopied woods. Therefore the more valuable weeds, Forbes, and shrubs and grasses cant grow. The goats are opening that up allowing sunlight to hit the ground . Yet by moving them quickly there is still abundant vegetation left for deer and all else.

Another challenge/opportunity is goats seem to love tallow and are eating the young sprouts to the ground. A concern I've had is with so much open territory in the woods, tallow, privet, and gum trees would take over. Appears goats will help correct that.

I only have 15 cows now but we are in the process of buying 60 more soon. The plan is to follow the goats with the cows further opening up the brush working towards a savanah outcome...with lush herbaceous understory. WE are investigating corriente( SP? ) cows which apparently readily browse and are well adapted to woodland foraging in the Deep South.

More to come


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Are you going to be marketing the corrientes to rodeos? I know that is a breed that typically isn’t much sought after in the meat market.

I’m glad to hear the goats are doing so well! Those things are about as “set and forget” of a livestock animal as there comes… aside from the paddock moves. Eat anything, easy births even for first year mothers, high kid success rates… i have always wondered why the american market didn’t take more of a liking to them.


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I'm hardcore into deer hunting now thru January. Once finished I'm going to begin video series on everything we are doing explaining the regenerative processes, animals, market gardens etc. Stay tuned.
 
Those deer are unbelievable. Like Texas deer on steroids. Amazing!
 
Those deer are unbelievable. Like Texas deer on steroids. Amazing!
When I bought the ranch in the 90's the biggest buck on it was 150" It took about 6-7 yrs before we started seeing significant shifts in quality. Today it bears no resemblance to where we started. Nutrition age and in that country an extensive expansion of water.

Off to the ranch this morning...bet of the holidays to all
 
What supplemental feed do you use
 
What supplemental feed do you use
We use non name feed that is our own blend. That said I think most of the major feeds are high quality. I can expound more on that if interested but am off to the ranch this morning.
 
Certainly, but first a big picture overview. I'll try to be brief.

When I bought the ranch in the mid 90's I was very interested and inspired by the work of Allan Savory and intensive rotational grazing with its impact on soil ecology.
.........
The secret sauce to all this is intense short duration grazing with lengthy rest periods for each paddock . Observation is the key. There is a wealth of information about regenerative grazing on YouTube and at its basics easy to employ though daily attention valuable.

I could rant on more but enough for now......

Its all very interesting stuff... I've always been into wildlife and when you combine it with history - specifically the removal of large herds of wild animals from North America and Africa then the over time replacing it with intensive ag and a path leading back to substance farming the end result is often degraded soils, desertification of larger and larger areas. Productive lands went from massive herds to over worked farms to degraded lands that now are often abandoned waste lands.

It is literally been a more than a couple decades but I remember a guy talking about how the over grazed African savannas lands could be saved by bringing back large herds of animals. Africa's problem isnt too many animals (cows) on the land - its not enough animals and that by bring back large herds (and that cattle could be used instead of wild grazers) you could restore the soils, increase meat production overall and have a more balanced eco system. More importantly would be the Global impact of restoring these large tracts of degraded areas - probably lofty thinking in the end but its interesting how decades later people are again applying the concept on smaller properties. The thought was using High density impact grazing - something a kin to a massive herd of buffalo coming in and grazing for a while then moving on like a wild herd would naturally do through migration grazing. Your kind of doing the same thing by paddock grazing an area hard then resting it for a prolonged period before rotating back to it again.

I image in the bigger scheme of things you keep track of the time of year the paddocks are grazed too and rotate them - based on when the paddocks would seed out. Then again its easy to reseed.. I know that was one thing they talked about how certain areas would benefit from the herd driving the seed heads into the soils with their hooves - mother natures tillers and in the stomped cow-pie effect of seed redistribution. Its pretty cool that you have the opportunity to experiment with herd management and co-wildlife beneficial farming practices on a fairly large scale.
An interesting spin on high density impact grazing is of the train of thought that maybe the most significant mammals were not the elephants and giraffes which people often associate with being able to browse down the larger woody plants keeping an area savanna like but that the most significant mammals were the rodents - the seed eaters and distributors and their prey predator balances. How there population densities played out on what types of plants thrived on the land.

We turned our back on what mother nature did for free and blindly invested in the corporate chemical /pesticide/ fertilizer big lie and are slowly waking up to answers that have always been there.

Jealous as hell as to what you have going on down south there!
 
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Its all very interesting stuff... I've always been into wildlife and when you combine it with history - specifically the removal of large herds of wild animals from North America and Africa then the over time replacing it with intensive ag and a path leading back to substance farming the end result is often degraded soils, desertification of larger and larger areas. Productive lands went from massive herds to over worked farms to degraded lands that now are often abandoned waste lands.

It is literally been a more than a couple decades but I remember a guy talking about how the over grazed African savannas lands could be saved by bringing back large herds of animals. Africa's problem isnt too many animals (cows) on the land - its not enough animals and that by bring back large herds (and that cattle could be used instead of wild grazers) you could restore the soils, increase meat production overall and have a more balanced eco system. More importantly would be the Global impact of restoring these large tracts of degraded areas - probably lofty thinking in the end but its interesting how decades later people are again applying the concept on smaller properties. The thought was using High density impact grazing - something a kin to a massive herd of buffalo coming in and grazing for a while then moving on like a wild herd would naturally do through migration grazing. Your kind of doing the same thing by paddock grazing an area hard then resting it for a prolonged period before rotating back to it again.

I image in the bigger scheme of things you keep track of the time of year the paddocks are grazed too and rotate them - based on when the paddocks would seed out. Then again its easy to reseed.. I know that was one thing they talked about how certain areas would benefit from the herd driving the seed heads into the soils with their hooves - mother natures tillers and in the stomped cow-pie effect of seed redistribution. Its pretty cool that you have the opportunity to experiment with herd management and co-wildlife beneficial farming practices on a fairly large scale.
An interesting spin on high density impact grazing is of the train of thought that maybe the most significant mammals were not the elephants and giraffes which people often associate with being able to browse down the larger woody plants keeping an area savanna like but that the most significant mammals were the rodents - the seed eaters and distributors and their prey predator balances. How there population densities played out on what types of plants thrived on the land.

We turned our back on what mother nature did for free and blindly invested in the corporate chemical /pesticide/ fertilizer big lie and are slowly waking up to answers that have always been there.

Jealous as hell as to what you have going on down south there!

Google up David Montgomery and check out his work

Great reads

bill
 
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