There is some kind of calcium copper bolus you can force to a cow goat or sheep to ingest. It adhears to the stomach and slowly releases. Calcium negates the worry of overtoxicity. Copper kills parasites on touch. Raising the animals copper level makes them poisonous to the parasites... There is also the threat of co]er toxicity harming the animal which i have heard is a huge issue in the dairy industry as they need lots of copper i imagine to prevent their cows feet from rotting away.

Please please please try green pastures farm

They graze on fescue but their management is second to few, they move cattle to fresh pasture as often as every hour.

They are looking for an intern this fall.

Simply refrigerating raw milk diminishes its health giving qualities.

All my livestock were pretty much friends. The goat kids would climb on the cows as they were napping. The goats could eat the seed heads on the grass and the shrubs and cut branches, the sheep ate all the weeds, the cows ate all the grass. Every day I would move the fence to new pasture, all of the animals would immediately tromp into the new fresh pasture, all of them except the donkeys who were content to much on the stems that were left behind. Studies show sheep and cows raised together yield the farmer 20% more than either alone. Approximately 10% of that was estimated to be because of superior pasture utilization, while the other 10% was estimated to be as a result of "unknown factors" that cause sheep and cows to grow faster on average when raised in conjunction on pasture!

Get the bull.

I live in Southern Oregon and I am doing some amount of farming.

Sabertooth, I am not at all trying to say fescue hay is ever suitable feed however in certain growing conditions even kentucky 51 endophyte fescue can be pretty much the best perennial forage that is actually still green in most of the United States. Now if you are planting pastures, you could instead use meadow fescue which is more palatable and does not have endophyte as well as endophyte free fescue and even "friendly" endophyte fescue which has a special endophyte which does not produce the toxins associated with regular endophyte Kentucky 51 tall fescue. As far as I know there are few other perennials that can replace fescue in quality for a winter forage in the midwestern united states. In order to do better I know of two ways, one would be to plant a crop of winter rye, winter wheat or triticale for winter grazing which produces some of the most nutritious grass possible on earth and two to have some kind of a grazing vineyard of honey suckle, which retains it's leaves and protein content long into the winter.

Bison are adapted to eat native stockpiled forages. Buffalo grass, big and little blue stem, indian grass and switch grass all make excellent winter feed for bison but are inedible to cattle after they grow too tall and throughout the winter. As well, bison's metabolism in winter slows down more than cattle, deer and elk, even more so, lessening their dietary requirements to make it through harsh winters. This is the biggest advantage of native livestock in the Americas.

It is extremely difficult to displace fescue once it is there. It is basically the hardiest cool season grass because of the symbiotic endophyte and because of it's spreading and crowning root system it is difficult and sometimes impossible to eradicate without use of harmful chemicals or great effort in machinery and cover cropping. Using Holisitc Management, fescue can literally be clobbered so hard by cattle hooves and manure that diversity is naturally forced onto fescue pastures. It is possible with one heavy grazing to increase biodiversity many times over. Fescue toxicity stops being recognizable after fescue is reduced to a smaller proportion of fescue domination. Traditional grazing as well as MIG encourages fescue. Fescue LOVES MIG, if you use MIG in the fescue belt of the midwest and southern united states I bet you will end up with a field of at least 90% fescue in less than ten years. Using HM, native grasses are able to compete against fescue and start to naturally establish themselves, the seeds somehow brought in by birds or stored in the ground, waiting for the right conditions.

You can base your beef farm off of fescue pastures, but that doesn't mean your finished product has to ever have personally eaten any fescue. How much will feeding a beef cow fescue harm her calf if her calf only ever eats improved pastures lacking in fescue?

I think it's important to remember why we grew beef cattle in the first place. Beef cattle are probably the most or second or third most economical source of meat on the planet. A beef cow can live off pasture that would starve all but the hardiest animals. A beef cow can survive and raise a calf where little else can be grown. Over 70% of beef cattle are in the tropics or sub tropics where grass grows incredibly lush but low in nutrition. There are parts of Africa where most livestock and humans die within months of living there in the wrong season due to a particular species of fly, but native cows can survive there.

I think there is good beef grown on fescue pastures. I raised my livestock for 2 years on fescue based pastures, their meat and milk was incredibly delicious, my cow in August in the middle of a drought was in better condition than most of the jerseys I visited that year at the Ohio State Fair.

I also fed my livestock kelp and they ate a lot of other things besides fescue.

I did feed my livestock fescue hay one year because it was almost impossible to find hay that year and I will tell you I will never do that again however, that year I also managed to only feed hay for a month and three weeks and my jersey cows grazed and dug through snow and grazed all winter long that year.

I think what eric said about high sugar and protein forages being lower in overall nutrition. Now those crops can be extremely nutritious in ideal conditions however, if conditions are not ideal those crops will be inferior quality. A better solution to building a better diet would then be to plant a higher diversity instead of trying to rely on a few high yielding and superior nutrition forages. What people forget is that these "superior nutrition forages" generally can only match but not surpass many of the "weeds" growing in their pastures in nutritional quality. However there are some super nutritious crops that have ludicrous quantities of sugar, protein and minerals. Most of them are weeds and as I am trying to explain, many that have excellent soil requirements, so often fail to meet expectations.

I think there are farms that produce good quality beef on fescue pastures, but perhaps you wouldn't like their quality either, you should try Polyface beef and Green Pastures farm and see how their beef tastes if you can.

You should also probably go to NZ because their whole beef production model is basically grass fed beef fed so well that the meat is so tender you can cut it with a butter knife.

I think the best compromise would be to buy a really quality piece of land, raise the best economic beef business you can that earns you money, which will also allow you to feast on your retired bulls and cull cows.

I have mostly heard 4 different influences on flavor and eating quality of beef. 1 the faster the animal is growing the more tender the meat will be and as soon as growth slows toughness onsets. 2 a mixture of forages is important for a balanced fatty acid profile and improved flavor and forage quality throughout the grazing life of the animal. 3 the way the animal is killed and the way the meat is stored and preserved after slaughter 4 the older an animal is the more flavor it has. The best tasting beef according to the editor of the stockman grass farmer was from a 20 year old cow. this is my experience as well, the best hamburger I ever ate was from my friends beef farm (which happens to be fescue based) from his 20 or 30 year old cull cows!

Finally, you may find this hard to believe but before he died, Bob Evans had a 2000 acre permaculture farm. Yes Bob Evans from the restaurant chain that serves breakfast foods and sells sausage! He was even quoted to say that if had learned about managed grazing when he was younger he never would have gotten into the sausage business!

Bob Evans managed to graze his cattle in Rio Grande Ohio all but 2 days out of the year. He was working on a system to utilize honey suckle for winter pasture when he died.

Something else that's been on my mind:

For a dairy farm (whether it's cows or sheep or goat or all of the above), if you're roating your herds along different areas, it seems to me that if your grazing area was big enough, it could make some sense to have a mobile milking parlor, rather than a fixed one where all your herds have to be dragged to every day, as they go back and forth from the grazing lands to the milking parlor.

Also I've seen a documentary once where they showed dairy cows willfully entering the milking parlor and hooking themselves onto the automatic milking machines (the hooking was automatic with the movements being controlled by a computer) without being led there. I found that very suspicious. Do you think that happens with organically raised cows who have to be kept constantly pregnant or with a young calf, or is it something that just happens with cows that are given huge amounts of hormones to increase milk production?

These exist in several forms including massive trailers that cows actually load up into to be milked. Yes some organic farms do use robotic milking equipment. These artifacts allow cows to milk themselves whenever they desire. I'm not a big fan, especially since those units run about a million dollars per one, however there are some advantages.

Salatin no longer uses MIG. I don't know exactly what he does but it's pretty much HM. MIG tells you to graze grass in it's most rapid growth spurts. HM says exactly the opposite. HM says allow forages to reach sexual maturity before grazing them and if you don't allow them to reach sexual maturity before they are grazed a second time. Do not graze one field more than once before allowing every desired species to reach maturity. HM utilizes STOCKPILED forages (tall yellow grass generally with weeds growing up in between).

HM is not always more healthy for livestock than MIG, MIG is generally healthier for your herd, however in the long run, HM will produce superior forages and superior animals and superior yields. Using HM allows pastures to evolve in the most similar way to natural probably still possible in most parts of the world today.

The first 5 years of HM perhaps Sabertooth, would be inferior to truly free range wilderness. But after those 5 years of good management, most farms will surely be superior and produce superior produce to most of the wilderness left on the planet.

I don't even think it's just a problem of farmers wanting more money. Like you guys say, few of them make much money. I don't think this is because farming isn't profitable. I think it is because humans in general are kind of stupid and aren't very good at making their own decisions. They watch what their neighbors do and they follow suit. Organic farms typically largely resemble their conventional neighbors and can only be told apart from a distance by discerning eyes. Farmers who have trouble running their business generally shoot for a better quality of life, so they make farm decisions based on whatever it is that suits their needs. Like only buying a farm with a really nice house, getting some horses to ride around on, buying a great big tractor and a bunch of new hay making equipment. How about a SILO. All of those things could by themselves make a farm unprofitable! Joel Salatin calls SILOS "bankruptcy tubes".

HM is different. Practicing HM forces the farmer to create a grazing plan. It forces the farmer to learn everything he can about his farm and how to improve it. It forces the farmer to think about his farm and ever way it impacts the earth and the local community. Using HM allows the farmer to know when to sell animals or when to buy animals to manage the available forage on his land. Generally utilizing HM, land can support as many as twice as many animals in the second year and as many as 5 times as many animals or sometimes even more in as little as 5 years.

Holistic management forces you to consider things that almost no one ever does. It forces you to consider everything involved in your life and your environment. Similar to Permaculture, many claim holistic management but fewer truly practice it. Most are limited by land space like you said. When you graze for grass instead of grazing for cattle, really amazing things start to happen. Diversity and pasture quality skyrockets. Turns out cows and grass were meant to be together.

Fascinating posts, sabertooth, RogueFarmer and Eric.

I wonder what you guys think about rotating herds in the way Joe Salatin suggests, which is to allow the grasses to spend the most time growing at their maximum growth rate, which seems to be somewhere around the middle of the growth cycle, as when the grass blades are too short, they grow slowly as they can't capture much sunlight, and when they're long, they spend more energy flowering and developing seeds and so stop growing as much. But maybe those later stage processes are useful to feed your herds some more protein.

That's old stuff he doesn't do that anymore.

Eric I do not understand how I disagree with you so much. Honestly I do not know exactly what Salatin is doing, but he was doing MIG nearly 40 years ago. He is on to bigger and better things. They haven't planted a pasture seed on their farm in over 50 years! The cows eat mostly grass because that's what cows naturally eat mostly and that's what naturally grows back there. They no longer use MIG (which they sort of invented) they are much closer to HM, Holistic Management. They have always sweat their crop diversity.

Eric I disagree with your northeast assessment. I think your condemnation is an omen to anyone who lives in the North East that they should gtfo because there is no other sustainable agricultural model to replace that industry. Sure grazing livestock evolved in the dry lands so they do better in the west, but they do much worse in the south and not much better in the mid west.

I fervently disagree with your idea that plants that are high in sugar or protein are not nutritious and cause nutritional shortfalls. That is exactly the total opposite of the truth. Perhaps they are growing the wrong forages for the stock they are raising. Perhaps their methods are not sound. Protein is not a problem in the North East, if you are having a protein problem on pasture in the north east, there is something seriously wrong with that pasture. There are only energy problems, carbohydrate problems. Protein problems do not happen to ruminant livestock on decent pasture. Never heard tell. Plenty of decent pasture in the north east, it's only problem is it's low in sugar, over watered and the season is short.

The problem with grazing operations in the North East is that THEY FEED HAY. Hay is the biggest economic factor on the majority of beef farms in the U.S. But making hay is generally highly unprofitable in the U.S. Make the animals do the work and then you have profit. Animals that work for a living are profitable. Animals you have to haul feed to are probably not!

Young cattle is not a new problem. This started back in the great depression. It used to be you raised a steer for 4-5 years and local farm beef was almost always an old cull cow, 4-5 year old steers were marched into cities. So farmers were eating meat that was usually 8+ years old and city people were eating 4-5 year old. This is what they used to call "aged meat" back then. Then the great depression came along with the dust bowl and STEERSMEN (an old somewhat extinct type of farmer) could no longer afford to keep their cattle for so long, while grain was plentiful and cheap, the tradition of feedlot and grainfed took root in America.

This is exactly what I am always trying to talk about, you can only imagine the possibilities for the future of this planet. The arrogance and hubris is oozing out of the ground. Swing batta batta swing!

Maybe an aquaculture operation, that is exquisitely well-designed. A dirt farm? Doubt it.

What do you mean by dirt farm? You mean a farm made of dirt? In nature there is no such thing as dirt. Dirt just means a substance which makes clothing dirty. Dirt farms don't exist.

There are a few old sages, a couple young mavericks, who wrote books that I had the miraculous good fortune to read because of some very dear friends of mine I made along the way who helped to lead me down that road. I believed like many here expressed that humanity was truly bad, irredeemable, polluted, not born sinners but born into a world of endless sin. And I didn't want to be here. but I didn't go against myself because I was curious and I wanted to know what would happen next when I got out of the prison I was in. and then I saw that there was so much more and I started to see this big gigantic beautiful new zeitgeist in my head and it's an endless mural of the most beautiful place you have ever been and looks like nothing you have ever seen or imagined beyond anything that exists but a few places on earth and it's a plan and it's a puzzle and it's probably around 100 encyclopedias worth of accumulated knowledge from when I started studying dinosaurs at the library in the city 23 years ago, exploring nature wherever I was for the entirety of my life, until I started studying organic farming when I was 18 when the seed in my brain for a superior reality first sprouted. And when I was 21 I started out building this reality by myself with just 3 goats and it was laughed at by most at first but I grew or foraged all my own food except every week I bought half a pound of grass fed butter, a small bag of potatoes a small bag of onions and some garlic. Six years later and me and my girls really started rollin with it and we were really started to be making a lot of food and the dream was truly taking form in a big way. But it's really fuckin lonely when you feel like your the only one. When the people in your life appreciate you but they don't see the scars, they don't appreciate what is underneath, they do not even dare to ponder the things that truly matter! They direct their interests in trivia, politics, vice and obscure pseudo talk therapy and giving the bulk of their energy away to their employers. They couldn't see the good works I wrought, they were blind to it or perhaps they wanted to believe, but could not because they cannot peer out into the dark, for it is fearful to peer out into the darkness. They could not see the light for the darkness has clouded their eyes and their brains. Like it was etched in my mind that there would be others... Where are you guys...

What do you want to buy besides food? What are you missing out on in life that 15-20k a year and living a good life and growing the food that you eat can't cover?

A farm can be way more profitable than that, some farms are gangbusters profitable, are you guys even aware of what's going on in the world right now at all? Farming is big business. Organic farming is big business. If organic farming wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist except as anything more than a hobby. Bhutan and Denmark are becoming entirely organic countries. In Russia if a citizen wants to farm but has no assets the government supplies him with 4 acres to grow whatever he wishes in just about any manner he wishes. In New Zealand farmers are on average the wealthiest citizens, more so than doctors or bankers. Is this merely because New Zealand has a better climate than other countries? Only partially because it's really just hard to dispute that Kiwi farmers are a lot better at growing a lot of food without a lot of labor than most of the farmers in most of the world.

I mean did you guys know that NZ was and may still be supplying the majority of McDonnalds Hamburger meat with grass fed beef because they have the most profitable way of growing beef in the world and can thus sell it cheapest.

But then you say, "no no rogue farmer, it is clearly because of their climate that they are able to do that". I don't think so. It is not the climate in NZ that makes Kiwis better farmers, rather it was the climate in NZ that influenced NZ farmers to be better farmers. We can near or even match or surpass their production and cost efficiency right here in the states, we can do it just about as good as anyone else can if not better.

And the really important secret to America being the best country for ecological farming to blossom is that more than almost any country I believe, America is underutilized. America is a feast of a famine, the good has been ushered out of the countryside and while the property values have skyrocketed from the housing bubble, the utilization of the land has plummeted in many large regions and even on the best soils in America, rent is reasonable.


Ugh UGh I feel like this forum is so intellectually limited from what it should be. Like there is a lot more important shit than raw meat, there is a lot more truth out there that has to be learned and invented and there are a whole heck of lies that need to be expunged.

Like just think about how much important shit could be happening right now if people would get off their high horses and their white citadels and their stipulations and fears and actually started working together and healing each other.

I really am a huge optimist and I have believed all along I can overcome my pain, my trauma, but this adventure of healing, this is a struggle.

Going about this, as I have alone, I never meant to and I have been trying to form connections all along. But it's really hard. Sometimes it honestly feels like an evil spirit follows me to spiritually undermine me and those that I love.

From as long as I can remember I believed in Great Spirit and the power of the universe, I am not a christian, and though I follow the teachings of christ, I am not compelled to believe how christians ask me to believe but I'll tell you it really does become hard to believe the devil is not afoot.