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sc ks | I thought this was a thought provoking article by Meg Grzeskiewicz that was in the Stockman Grass Farmer so I emailed her and she sent it to me with permission to post it.
SHIFTING THE WORKLOAD TO YOUR LIVESTOCK
Raising livestock is hard work, there's no way around it. However, you can minimize your time and labor
investment by shifting your farm’s workload from yourself to your animals. They have their entire lives
to spend doing a few simple jobs: eat, grow and reproduce. You, on the other hand, have numerous
important things to do. This mindset for farm management will lead to a low-input business that can be
run on just an hour or two per day. Note: I refer specifically to beef cattle in this article, but the
philosophy applies to all species.
One of my pet peeves is farmers’ acceptance of, and even pride in, the stereotype of living terribly hard
lives. There is a quote circulating on Facebook that says “Farming: the art of losing money while working
400 hours a month to feed people who think you are trying to kill them.” I fail to see the humor in this. I
always post a correction comment whenever I see it, saying “Farming: the art of running a profitable
business as part of a balanced lifestyle, feeding supportive and thankful customers!”
Your only obligations as a livestock producer are to provide your animals with humane living conditions,
clean water, plenty to eat and relief from suffering. All decisions above and beyond that are up to you.
You certainly do not owe them 60 hours per week, broken relationships or high blood pressure.
We are all about sustainability here. To me, true sustainability in farming and ranching goes beyond
production practices to also encompass efficiency, profitability and personal well-being. If you are
starting a new agribusiness or making big changes to an existing one, a heavy work and time
commitment will be necessary in the short term. But for a farm or ranch to really remain viable for
generations to come, the profit it generates must be great compared to the amount of time, effort and
resources expended to operate it. Essentially it must run itself with occasional nudges from you.
Fortunately, all farms exist within a living, dynamic ecosystem that is capable of thriving with minimal
intervention. There is great potential for agricultural progress when we harness our living environment
instead of trying to fight it.
I also think that if we expect millennials to choose agriculture as their career field, this stereotype of
backbreaking burden must be changed. For better or worse, each new generation has a different set of
expectations about careers, money, success, work and play. One hundred years ago, hard physical labor
was a fact of life for a huge percentage of Americans. There was no quick, easy way to do anything.
Times have changed staggeringly fast. Why would any young person today choose to spend all their time
doing hard physical labor, when they could easily get a higher-paying desk job that leaves them with
plenty of free time for fun? We have to build farm businesses that provide a comfortable level of income
with less pain and sacrifice in order to ensure the continuation of our industry. How is this possible? By
making our livestock do the work for us!
Make your rules.
Start by envisioning your perfect farm in your perfect world. Let yourself fantasize without regard for
paradigms that make you think “that would be nice, but it’s not possible.” What if it is possible? Every
endeavor must start with a dream. Without a dream, you will have no passion for what you are doing,
and it won’t take long for the inevitable obstacles to convince you to quit.
For example, my vision for my perfect farm is this: It will provide me with a comfortable living yet still
allow me plenty of free time for family, friends and hobbies. My operation will lead other farmers by
example, teaching them how to build profitable and ecologically-friendly grazing operations. It will
provide the grassfed beef industry with a source of exceptional genetics, and consumers with healthy,
delicious food. My cattle will thrive naturally as wild bovines have for thousands of years, with a
minimum of human assistance.
Next, translate your ideal farm vision into a management plan that will allow you to get there. Base this
on the level of all resources you’re willing to expend in order to reach your desired end product and
level of production. Think holistically, not just about money but also about enjoyment and balance in all
areas of your life. Allan Savory’s book Holistic Management talks in depth about this approach to farm
planning. If you have not read it, make it a priority.
Here’s some important tenets of my management plan: I won’t spend more than 10 hours per week on
average doing farm work. I will move cattle once per day. Breeding season will begin September 1 for
June 1 calving. No preventative health products will be given to any animal (but sick animals will be
quickly and effectively treated).
Make a list of rules and requirements that your herd must fit into, based on the management practices
you have decided to follow. If your perfect farm is to become a reality, your livestock must do the work
for you! Here are some of my rules for my cowherd: Cattle must remain in good body condition all year
with no feed or supplements other than pasture, hay and mineral. All females must produce a live calf
every 12 months, starting when they are 2 years old. All cows and heifers must calve unassisted, without
night checks.
I must qualify my above statements by saying that your chosen management practices and rules must
not predispose your herd to problems. You can’t decide to continuous graze 50 head on 20 acres all
summer, not deworm, and cull anything with worms. You’ll have an empty pasture! Do your research
when choosing management protocols. Go to conferences, read articles, talk to consultants, ask expert
producers. Discuss your goals and see what others are doing to succeed. Don’t be afraid to do innovative
things and take risks. Challenge all paradigms for the purpose of making informed judgements on what
is and is not feasible.
Build the toughest herd on Earth.
Once you've set the rules for your enterprise, you need to get livestock that are up to the job. This may
involve selling and replacing your entire herd if you already have one. If you realize you need to change
your genetics, buy a handful of the new genetics that you want to try as a test group. You may need to
go through a few test groups. But once you find something that works, pull the trigger on selling and
replacing your whole herd. Do not waste years trying to breed up and modify poor livestock. Get done
with any resulting economic pain in one year, don’t drag it out for a decade. Money will be left on the
table during the transition period, so complete the transition as soon as possible.
Buy breeding stock from an operation that is as similar to yours as possible. In that case, the animals'
durability under your style of management is already proven. Buying from a producer with conditions
more challenging than yours is even better, as long as animals are not mistreated and the climate is
similar to yours.
Avoid sale barns! You never know the genetic makeup of auction livestock or why they're being sold.
That beautiful cow in the ring could be infertile, aggressive, or chock-full of grain. Buying from a private
seller allows you to see the environment in which cattle are living. You may be able to look at multiple
generations of related animals for added insight. Ask the seller for reproduction and gain statistics. Buy
from someone who keeps detailed records.
Once you have secured appropriate foundation stock, line breed! There are no social “family”
relationships between cattle the way there are between people. The thought of breeding “siblings” and
“cousins” together worries most ranchers and disgusts some. But when carefully controlled, close
breeding is no cause for alarm. Morgan Hartman has published an excellent science-based series in
defense of line breeding at www.OnPasture.com. He explains that as long as no more than 50% of a
calf’s DNA comes from any single ancestor, it’s not inbreeding. Father-daughter matings produce calves
with 75% of DNA from the father, which is too high. But even two full siblings mated together produces
a calf with only 50% of DNA from each grandparent.
The mainstream practices of obsessive outcrossing and constantly switching bulls set you repeatedly
back to genetic square one. Imagine this as trying to drive toward a destination in a zigzag pattern. It
takes a lot longer to get where you’re going, and you end up covering a lot of extra mileage. Line
breeding, in contrast, is like heading toward your destination in an airplane on a straight path. Once you
have genetics that perform well on your farm under your rules, don’t stray from them by crossing in
more outside genetics. Don’t purposely scramble your progress! The only way to pack consistent,
proven genetics into your cattle is by keeping lineages uniform and intensifying them in a closed herd.
Gearld Fry has been an enthusiastic advocate of line breeding for decades, and he jokes “I have yet to
get a two-headed calf!”
Hartman also insists that rampant outcrossing keeps recessive genetic defects from being identified. The
supporters of crossbreeding praise it for preventing the expression of these defects. However, I would
rather expose and eliminate them through linebreeding than cover them up and allow them to spread
undetected through the national cattle population.
The benefits of terminal crosses created using two high-potency purebred parents are welldocumented.
This phenomenon is known as heterosis. However, maximum heterosis occurs only in the
first crossbred generation. Repeatedly crossing crossbred animals for subsequent generations does
nothing but create inferior mutts. Linebreeding is essential to maintaining a pure gene pool that will
produce uniform, predictable first-cross meat animals.
I believe that you can single-trait select females for one thing: the percentage of her weight that her calf
weighs at weaning. I regard this as the ultimate measure of a cow’s worth. It is a defense against the
trap of selecting females based on simply having the largest calves, and ending up with a bunch of
massive females that will eat you into the poorhouse. By now most people know that more revenue and
more pounds do not automatically equal more profit. As the weaning weight percentage of your herd
goes up, all other traits will fall into place. High-percentage cows will automatically have correct udders,
great reproductive performance, desirable milk output, high feed efficiency, structural soundness,
longevity, strong maternal instincts, clean bills of health, and moderate frame sizes. All of these traits
are rooted in proper hormonal function.
Stop running a petting zoo.
Your cattle must be given two choices: thrive under your rules or be culled. This philosophy puts the
workload on your cattle instead of on you. The alternative is to make excuses for inferior animals and
break your back trying to prop them up. Straying from your ideal management scheme to accommodate
even one problem animal is a slippery slope. Before you know it, you'll be wasting money and running
yourself ragged. Your cows will be the ones calling the shots, and you will be working for them. This isn't
a business, it's a petting zoo. It’s an expensive hobby.
When an animal violates your rules (for example: needs calving assistance, requires veterinary attention
or comes up open), do whatever is necessary to get it healthy and relieve its suffering in the short term.
Humane agriculture is an ethical responsibility for all of us. But that cow must be sent to town! Don't
give her another chance to cost you money and make you miss dinner. Producers often lack resolve in
this area if the animal was expensive to buy, has a great parent or production history, or has sentimental
value.
If any calf causes you to step outside normal whole-herd management boundaries, its dam needs to go
as well. Sometimes blaming a cow for a calf's problem can be a stretch. For example, arguing that a cow
is directly responsible for her 3-month old calf dying of coccidiosis might be a hard sell. However, why
did her calf get sick and no others?
Someone is bound to comment that research has not proven the heritability of many things I’m
recommending be culled for. But just because a theory hasn’t been proven as true doesn’t mean it’s
automatically untrue. Do you really want to gamble on the possibility of propagating genetic weakness
in your herd? I definitely would rather be safe than sorry. Another Gearld Fry quote: “I’ve sold a lot of
good cows, but I’ve never kept a bad one!”
Regardless of where the blame lies, a calf with a short term problem will lag behind its herdmates for
the rest of its life. A study published in the Veterinary Ireland Journal (Vol. 4 No. 5) reported that calves
sick for 11 days had still not compensated for the missed gain by 5 months of age. Taking that low
paycheck one time should be enough to sour you on the experience.
If a calf dies, it will not give you any paycheck! Therefore, the cow must be sold in the calf's place to
make up the lost revenue. This is a genetic decision as well as a business management one. If being
down one head bothers you, spend the sale income on a replacement. Giving any cow a second chance
isn't worth the risk of history repeating itself. I definitely don’t think it’s worth going an entire year
without income from that cow, hoping it was a one-time problem, while she continues to stuff herself
on your precious feed resources. There’s always a better cow out there. The generation interval on
cattle is so long that you can’t afford to waste a year if you want to make any genetic progress before
retirement.
I used to say that problem livestock must be sold as soon as they are healthy enough. I have since
revised my thinking on the issue. My recommendation now is to sell problem animals at the right time
and into the right marketing channel to maximize their salvage value. Brainstorm all of your options and
push a pencil to see how you can make the most money on your culls. For example, an open cow at
pregnancy check time could be processed for direct-marketed ground beef. You will do a lot better on
her this way than just by sending her to the auction. A cow that gives birth to a dead calf could be kept
for a few more months, rebred, and sold as pregnant instead of open. Planning a high-value outlet for
culls ahead of time is a crucial part of your business plan. No matter what, do not ever keep a
replacement heifer or young bull out of any problem cow or sire. I don’t care how nice they look, they
do not deserve a chance!
Keep the best and replace the rest. Even if you have very few problem culls, I still recommend turning
over a large percentage of your herd annually through high-value marketing channels. Keeping only the
best and replacing the rest will speed up your genetic progress, because each new generation will
outperform its parents in an effective breeding program. The resulting high cash flow is also a huge
benefit.
Listening to the teachings of Chip Hines and Ian Mitchell-Innes has convinced me that true functionality
has been all but bred out of modern livestock in the name of maximizing input-driven performance.
Farmers and ranchers have left their original role as supervisory stewards and been sucked into
backbreaking servitude trying to keep the crutches under weakened animals. Let’s all help reverse this
trend by letting nature do its job and our livestock do the work! Make your rules, start with capable
foundation stock, line breed what works, keep only the best, and cull the rule-breakers ruthlessly.
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Do you make your livestock work for you?
