This morning found the Ninja Cows enjoying a cool 55 degree start to their day and some fog to make things pretty. Here is a panoramic shot of the front pasture and some of the fog that was visible.
The pigs, having their breakfast. Hot food and fresh veggies. They are legs up in the air asleep in the shade now.
I had a genuine farm Princess to help me this morning. She rode in the gator, drove the skid steer, and drove the farm tractor. It’s amazing what having the right headwear does for your abilities as a farmer. Thanks to Miguel for the snazzy hat.
The cows received two pallets of food this morning. Well, more like 1.5. There was a minor issue when Bok Bok was driving the skid steer and we spilled one of the pallets. No worries though. The chickens were on patrol and are picking up the pieces we didn’t scoop up with the tractor. That’s the beauty of feeding fresh vegetables. What doesn’t get eaten just becomes organic matter for the earth worms.
The grass isn’t looking great. The spring flush is backing off and the grass height isn’t as good as I would like it at this point in the season. The fescue is starting to go dormant and the Bermuda and weeds are starting to make their summer run. Right now the weeds are winning. We are mowing early and often this year so the weeds won’t have a chance to dominate. The pasture where we fed hay hasn’t exactly become lush yet but it’s the first to get mowed so we will see how it transitions over the course of the year.
One of the things the kids enjoy, at least for now, is to go and feed the cows vegetables and fruit. They like to hand feed the cows but their favorite thing is to stand in the back of the truck or the trailer and hurl things to the cows. It’s a big game and they are improving their aim constantly. They especially enjoy trying to kill bugs that are bothering the cows by biting them on their backs where they cannot reach. The kids are getting pretty good arms on them, and I really feel for any band that performs poorly in my kids future as I’m sure the tomatoes being hurled onstage will be accurate and forceful.
Yesterday’s paddock on the left, today’ s on the right.
The cows have pretty much decimated the paddock yesterday. The ate 85% of the grass in the paddock, and two pallets of fresh vegetables from the market. Despite that much chowing, they ran into this mornings paddock and are busily munching away at the new grass. It really is amazing how much food they can put away.
The fescue has headed out again this year. Not as tall as last year which I take as a good sign. The seed heads last year were waist-high. This year they are knee-high. I hope that means the grass isn’t finding the need to stretch so far to reproduce. Whatever the reason the cows are clipping off the grain heads and getting their annual boost of grains. They are also getting some more of the stalks which is helping with the scours. Their stools have firmed up mostly except for the occasional loose stool.
We are well and truly in grass now, with basically unlimited grass for the cows. The only reason we keep the paddocks small at this point is to make sure each area gets the attention it needs. It may make sense to make the paddocks a bit bigger than we are now, just to give the grass a chance to be a little taller post grazing.
Overall the cows look good. We are having trouble with our young bulls fighting each other and we have decided to end the non-castration experiment and to cut the bulls the week after next. The vet is coming to help since we haven’t castrated this late before.
This morning when I moved the cows I found Curious had dropped a beautiful little bull calf. The calf is up and moving about and we’ve already tagged him, #32. Normally we get higher and higher in numbers but 32 had been missed accidentally previously. SWMBO has informed me that we already have a name picked for our next bull calf so this one will be named Boyd. (Hello Boyd and Ava!)
Curious is a pure black Angus and so is the dad, Benjamin. I was planning on castrating this little calf but Spork pointed out he would make a good bull. Benjamin is already having his first year of calves so in two years when this little calf is ready, Benjamin will be ready to sell so based on Spork’s advice we are going to leave this little bull uncut and see how he develops. If he looks and acts right he may be our next bull. If not, he might be someone else’s next bull. Either way all he received today was an earring.
Here is a little closer shot of the new bull calf. Sorry he has the sun behind him.
We had a visitor this weekend, Miss Katie, and of course we took her out to see the new calf. We walked the paddock twice, a group of 5 of us, and we didn’t see the new calf anywhere. Just when I wondered what had happened to the calf, Katie looked over and found him in the grass outside the paddock. Leave it to the new kid to be the calf whisperer.
Boyd, just discovered in the grass
With no mom around everyone was able to take a turn petting the new calf. You can only do this for the first day or so. After that the calves will run away if you approach.
The kids, petting Boyd
We had enough time with the new calf that we were able to get some video of the kids and the new calf. Too cute.
The new calf, ready to take a nap after all the attention.Spork, fishing with dad. Note he stole my hat.
Also this morning I took some of the kids fishing. Bok Bok and I fished first, then Spork and I took the paddle boat out and did some more fishing, after a stint on the bank.
Home made chilaquiles
So after feeding the animals, taking the kids fishing, planting 54 tomato plants, and various and sundry other things I worked on today, I was fairly hungry at 2pm. After working 6 days a week for me, Miguel decided to save my day by bringing me a kit for home-made chilaquiles (it’s pronounced like Chilli-keel-As). I’ve had these in a restaurant before, they aren’t much to talk about. Miguel’s however? Oh man are they good. After this huge plate of food, I wasted the rest of the afternoon with a big siesta which I much enjoyed. Now the sun is going down and I’ve already slept too much. I guess I’ll put the kids to bed and maybe head back to the shop to work on the apple press. It’s too nice to stay inside for long.
Yesterday, cow #24 had what should have been a beautiful little calf. However this calf was still-born. On our farm we do not employ hormones, drugs, or a veterinarian unless someone is showing signs of distress. This little calf was born normal in all ways and everything was progressing as we’d hope during labor but when he was delivered there was nothing we could do to save him. He’ll be buried on the farm, just like many other cows who’ve died, mostly of old age.
Death is a part of life, both in the harvesting of animals when they reach their prime, and in the unfortunate circumstances we come across like this one. It’s never easy but there are only two ways to not experience it.
1. Pretend bad things never happen. Meat comes from a grocery store. Grandma went on a long vacation. The little lies we tell ourselves and our kids that turn into big lies when the truth hits us in the face and we cannot look away.
2. Skip off of the mortal coil yourself.
For those who chose to stick around and hope God lets us stay, and to not lie to ourselves and our children, facing these things is another part of the job. It doesn’t make it any easier though.
Today the cows move out of the front pasture and into the main pasture again. They still have not completed the loop as the have their overwinter pasture to go through before they get to where they started.
Art, lost as usual.
Todays move is one of the trickier moves because I have to move the cows through the barnyard which opens lots of areas for them to take a wrong turn and get adventurous, especially moving them single-handed as I was this morning. Fortunately I has a box of sweet corn husks to entice the cows with and moved them without a hitch, mostly. While the cows are fairly easy to move, young calves, not so much. Hence the above picture of Art. He’s our winter baby, born just before the snow. And like most kids, he’s kinda stupid. Always turning the wrong way, running when he should walk, left instead of right. This morning was no exception. Art watched every cow in the herd quietly walk through the gate into the new pasture, then turned around and went back into the old pasture. After getting him out of there, I took him two laps around the barnyard and finally got him into our corral where I locked him in so he couldn’t get back to the barnyard and opened the gate to the pasture where the cows are. 15 minutes later he was still standing in the tiny paddock and not about to find the one and only way out. His buddies Birdie and 37, who are both younger, were standing on the other side of the open gate quietly mocking him.
Ahh spring calves. They are exceptionally cute but stupid till about summer.
We were fortunate to have a new friend visit the farm with her two kids for a tour. During and then after the tour I was asked some questions about our milk cow that I promised I would answer and the best way to answer is probably here on the blog.
Gwen had lots of questions about food and health, as most new parents do. In fact, one reoccurring theme I’m noticing as I give tours of the farm is that people are coming to natural food when they have kids. It’s interesting that we’ll cram most anything in our own mouths, but once we have a little bundle of drool and poo, oh wait, I meant bundle of joy to take care of, we change our habits. As the father of three I can say it’s exactly the same with us. I was so bad taking care of myself but for my kids I work my butt off.
Back to Gwen, one thing she was particularly interested in was raw milk and its different forms. Is organic milk close enough to raw? What about raw but from grain fed cows? How much pasture is enough pasture to not be an issue. These are all good and intelligent questions, ones that aren’t made any easier by the misinformation provided in our marketing systems for food.
I had taken some time to write-up my thoughts to try to help Gwen and was half way through a blog post about it when I opened my latest issue of The Stockman Grass Farmer and found an article by Kate Yegerlehner on grass-fed raw milk. By the way, you have to love a family that holds on to their old world spelling of their name and doesn’t Americanize it. My wife’s name (no not SWMBO, that’s what I call her) is very German and she’s quite proud of it.
So rather than write up my drivel for Gwen, I wrote to Kate instead and asked her if I could reprint her article here on our blog with a link to her own website, which you should definitely visit because she’s been gracious enough to post all of her very good Stockman Grass Farmer articles on her website along with a blog she maintains. Kate was very gracious and gave me permission to use her article. I was going to simply link to her article but they are files that you have to download to read so I’m going to reprint the article inline below so it’s easier to read. If you find value in what Kate has to say, she has a lot more on her website linked above.
Before I get to the article, I’d like to point out a few things. In the fifth paragraph, Kate notes that research has shown that it takes quite a while to have a “healthy profile” in a cow, but only a short time to loose it. 25 days vs. 5. This matches research I learned about in a grazing school on backgrounding cattle during the winter. Backgrounding is when you bring them into a feed lot and off of pasture when there isn’t any forage available, usually in the winter. Technically the cows are still grass fed (marketing, eh?) but the research shows that the various measures of health like Omega 3 vs 6 change significantly during the backgrounding time and not for the good. And like the research that Kate references, it only takes a short time for the metrics to worsen and quite a bit longer for them to return to “pastured” beef quality. So your grass fed cow you purchased in April, if it was backgrounded from January to March 15th, it has the health profile closer to a grain fed cow than to a grass fed cow. That’s why Sam won’t be going to Chaudhry’s until June, because he’s been on hay all winter and I want a fresh grass cow. Plus they are all eating spring onions right now. Onion flavored beef, yuck.
All of this goes to Gwen’s question on Organic vs. pastured raw milk. Which is better? Based on the below article, and what I’ve learned over time, I’d try to get pastured milk over Organic as Organic still can mean grain fed and grain has a measurable difference in the health profile of the milk. So once again, it’s better to know your farmer than it is to know your brand.
The Big Deal about 100% Grass-fed
By Kate Yegerlehner
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I have consumed raw milk for most of my 34 years of life, because I grew up as the daughter of a dairy farmer. There is no doubt in my mind that having access to fresh milk is one of the things that has contributed to my overall health, although saying so as a seller of said milk probably is illegal (Just ask Diamond Foods how the FDA felt about their walnut health claims).
Since the fall of 1999 our cows have been 100% grass-fed. Before that, our management strategies had been through several changes. In the 1980’s they received a total mixed ration, aided by all the expensive equipment necessary for such a diet. Harvestore silos, choppers and wagons, feed mixers…a beautiful collection of things that rust and break down. When we implemented MiG in the early 1990’s, we continued supplementing the cows’ diet with some grain until 1999 (we also grew corn and soybeans until 1999). In 2000 we ventured into direct marketing (we chose this route as opposed to expanding to remain viable selling in the commodity market), and decided that converting our dairy to 100% grass-fed would put us in a more specialized niche market.
I drank our raw milk during all of these stages. It hasn’t always been 100% grass-fed, but I have no recollection of ever being sick and attributing it to tainted raw dairy. I do know that as a kid I had some recurring bouts of things like tonsillitis (never had the tonsils removed though, and I’m fine now!) and strep throat, as well as the occasional bug that was going around. Yet I’m pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually been ill in the past 12-14 years since we converted to 100% grass-fed and I moved back home from college. Coincidence? Could be multiple factors involved of course, but I am certainly willing to give at least some credit to regularly eating grass-fed dairy and beef.
Considerable scientific evidence has revealed that the milk (and the muscle fat in meat) from totally forage-fed cows contains elevated levels of certain nutrients such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), omega-3 fatty acid, and fat-soluble vitamins. CLA has been shown to inhibit tumor growth. Omega-3 appears to play a role in preventing obesity. Vitamins A, D, and E, which abound in grass-fed meat and milk, play critical roles in immune function among other things. And these are just some highlights.
Ruminants on fresh forages have the highest levels of these nutrients. Depending on where you live, there may be times of the year when you must feed stored forage, but it will have an impact on the nutrient profile of the milk and meat. And feeding even small amounts of grain will significantly alter the levels. The response is seen more quickly in the milk than the muscle fat. Dr. Tilak Dhiman of Utah State University found that it took a ruminant 25 days on pasture to reach its peak CLA level in the milk, but only 5 days after being removed from fresh pasture the levels dropped back down.
In addition to the extra good things found in pastured animal products, another important benefit is what is missing. Milk and meat from animals on a total-forage, no-grain diet appear to have a built-in protection against pathogens. The more starchy grains a cow eats, the more acidic her body becomes. Science has begun to show that disease initiates in an acidic body. A slightly alkaline environment in the body prevents it. I sometimes tell our customers and school tours that a cow eating a lot of starchy grain would be comparable to us eating a lot of sugar. It makes the body acidic and sets us up for a whole host of maladies! Can we handle small amounts of sugar and still be pretty healthy? Most of us can. A cow can handle a little grain too…but what grain would be naturally occurring in the grazer’s diet? The seedhead on the maturing grass plant! If the cow is healthier, it stands to reason the milk and meat would be that much healthier, too, and this is one of the biggest reasons why we choose not to feed grain to our cows.
Raw milk has many enzyme-based pathogen killers (including lactoferrin, xanthine oxidase, lactoperoxidase, lysozyme and nisin), but all enzymes are destroyed at the temperature required for pasteurization. Through the aid of BSK labs in Fresno, Organic Pastures of California had their organic raw milk injected with various pathogens, finding that the pathogens would not grow, and in fact diminished over time. This experiment was with raw milk from cows on pasture. I have a notion that the closer to “perfection” a cow’s diet gets (her God-ordained pasture diet with opportunity to browse on occasion, grown on healthy soils with ample minerals in balance and microbes, earthworms, and beneficial insects abounding), the more likely those pathogens are to either bow in submission or turn and run the other direction!
Jo Robinson, author of Why Grass-fed Is Best!, explains that grain-fed cattle are about 315 times more likely to harbor E. coli 0157:H7 than grass-fed cattle! She says the reason for this is two-fold. First, grass-fed animals have an overall lower count of bacteria. Second, in the grain-fed digestive tract, these pathogens adapt and become resistant to the more acidic environment. It’s not hard to imagine that during the slaughtering and butchering process, the meat could easily become tainted with these disease-causing bacteria. And to put the nail in the coffin, because they are acid-resistant they will be more likely to survive our own gauntlet of digestive juices as well. Get that pH up in your cows and you’ll nearly eliminate that problem!
Some people think it’s not possible to milk cows on total forage and keep them alive. Well, it depends on the adaptability of the cows and the quality of your forages, but it certainly is possible. We’ve not fed a speck of grain to any cow on our farm in 14 years (I should also mention we are seasonal). There have been some hard knocks along the way while learning how to manage pasture quality, soil building, and animal performance at the same time, to be sure. But we have no desire to turn back from this journey we’ve found ourselves on. A journey where our passion for people, animals, and the environment constantly intersect. We’re continuing to learn and adapt. The hard knocks could have been enough to make us question whether we should just forget it and go back to “Egypt”, like the ancient Israelites wanted to when they faced challenges in the wilderness as God and Moses led them towards the Promised Land. But life as a slave isn’t as much of a life as fear of the unknown would have us believe! And so we press on.
So if it’s true that cows are grazers designed to digest forages, and if it’s true that what they eat affects the nutritional composition of the meat and milk, and if research is indicating that an all-forage ration for the cow translates to better health for the person who drinks the milk or eats the meat, but your herd is still dependent on grain supplementation…what are you waiting for? What steps could you start taking to make your product even better?
The demand for real, healthy food continues to increase. We as farmers are responsible to the people we serve. We must do everything we can to produce food that is clean, safe, and life-enhancing. We give our customers the right and responsibility to ask questions of us and even inspect the farm. They trust us to provide them with healthy products, and we always seek to honor that trust. The relationships that develop when we interact with each other in this way play a vital role in keeping small businesses alive…and this may prove to be truer than ever as the future unfolds.
Yesterday on the left, today on the right. Gas station in the distance.
Late March we started the cows on paddock shift again at the top of our largest pasture. We’ve been working them steadily towards the other end and today we’ve arrived. When we first started there was just a bit of green, no real grass. We also made our paddocks small, maybe 18 yards wide by the full length of the pasture long. As we arrive at the end, with three weeks more growth on the grass, we are at 39 yard wide paddocks and the cows are still over grazing. About 90% of the grass is grazed and they are still reaching under the wire for more. A good portion of the grass has been second grazed. We have the four pond paddocks coming up, and then the front pasture which Sam and Dottie are sequestered in currently while Dottie dries off, I hope. That means we will be back to the winter paddock in about a week. It’s slowly coming back after all the traffic this winter. Hopefully it will have recovered by the time we get there because I need the cows to stay a while so our first paddock in this pasture will have time to recover. Soon we will be in the spring flush, with more grass than we know what to do with but it seems a long time coming.
The kids helping to feed the cows, Spork is hand feeding one of the cows.
Sunday after church the kids and I fed the cows their daily ration of veggies. As always the cows and the kids both had fun. I don’t always have the kids to help and I certainly don’t get all of them that often. I was happy to have them all yesterday.
Grazing update. Yesterday on the left, today on the right.
As you can see we are getting down to the road. In a few more days we’ll be down to the first pond and beginning to work our way back towards the house.
Close up of grass uneaten. 5% of the paddock looks like this.
The grass is growing nicely. The sun and warmth is really having a great effect. However there still isn’t enough grass to keep the cows from eating more than I’d like.
Here you see that there are some areas that the cows haven’t eaten so it’s not like every bit of grass is gone or even eaten but much of the area has been grazed over not once but at least twice. The grass is recovering nicely after the cows rotate off of it but I’m looking forward to having enough grass that we are trampling the extra grass vs. eating 90% of what is there.
Here is one of our cows, Laser, grazing fresh grass yesterday. I was actually sitting on the mineral feeding, enjoying the morning and typing up yesterday’s blog post when she grazed right up next to me. I spent a few minutes watching her graze and talking to her (she doesn’t talk back, I’m not that crazy yet). I completely forgot I was holding a phone/camera and finally filmed just the last few seconds of her grazing closely. She was about 1 foot from me and munching merrily. It’s amazing what being quiet and calm around the cows does for their disposition.
Notice how when she eats she clips the top 1/3 to 1/2 of the grass stalks. This isn’t by accident or all that she can reach. With enough grass to eat in the paddock, this is all that the cows will eat, just the tops. This leaves the bottom 2/3 to 1/2 of the grass to regrow meaning that the grass bounces back like nothing happened and will be much taller and lusher the next time the cows come by. Also, the root system of the grass sheds some of its root system with this grazing which does all kinds of great things for the soil, but that’s another post. The grass and the roots regrow starting the next day as the cows move off of this paddock and onto the next one. This is what moving the cows every day is all about. If I left the cows on this paddock they would eat the grass right to the ground which is what happens with conventional grazing.
This is our second year of intensive grazing so it’s going to be interesting to see how the grass responds to spring coming into it with a much healthier root system and soil conditions. We built quite a bit of organic matter last year, and we’ve fed lots of hay and vegetables all winter which have added even more organic matter to the soil. We have another few weeks to let the fescue jump up and get mature, then we’ll be back to grazing and trampling for the rest of the season trying to build organic matter with the cows.
