2lazy4U Livestock & Literary Company (The ONLY livestock & literary company known to theIRS) My videos cover;
Low stress cattle handling methods which allow holistic and regenerative grazers to follow grazing plans in large paddocks without being continually herded.
This makes so much sense...instincts are how all beings operate as thats how we are still around today. Great to see how regenerative ranching adapts to not need fences...and the grass grows and the water stays and the soil regenerates....and the rancher makes a better living with less work. Love the profit per animal increase...
Incredible case study here in the importance of animal impacts on improving grassland forage/ecosystems. Thank you so much for sharing! I'm curious to see how adding beans/legumes to the banks above the eroding areas ended up working out
Hi Bob, a Shaun Overton convert, interested in arid country farming. Formerly a South African engineer, living in the south Pacific in New Zealand dairy country. Great info; all the best. Charles
Very neat. It reminds me of Monty Roberts watching horses when he was young and learning what their body language meant and then communicating to them in the same ways.
I agree sound very important, close up content. Watch #gregjudy or #naturalgramma We do very raw video that tells a story, sorry you are so dry. #aluminumchickentractor At #naturalgramma we grow & grass weeds. Natural Gramma LLC RevHank and Laura Reid
try get a camera stabilisator on your phone and put a bit more effort into the quality of videos, then you could expand your audience alot because u got stuff to show.
Was this project primarily using the penning method of bonding animals to each other plus working them together as a group on a daily basis? e.g., onpasture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Fredrickson-2001-bond-sheep-14-days.pdf
Gustav, they weren't spread out. They were bedded down for their afternoon cud all within about 70 acres. I pulled the 200 or so that were still grazing on the periphery off and started them toward the gate. The other 1100 cows voluntarily joined the movement. I'd been working with this herd for 3-4 months at this point taking them to a fresh pasture every three days with alfalfa hay laid out previously for their winter protein. It might seem like they were spread out, it's just that 1300 cows take up a lot of space.
@@chrisjorgensen8736 I guess it depends on what you are happy with, I like to see them so tight that you cant see the ground like they talk about the big bison herds counting in the millions, but for that you probably need to do constant herding or fencing.
Gustav4, there is actually a lot of misconceptions about how tightly the bison grazed. The ultrahigh density everyone talks about was only during the breeding season. They also tend to ignore the fact there were similar numbers of antelope, elk and deer migrating at the same time as the bison. When they weren't in mega herds to breed, they broke into sub groups and practiced highly selective breeding based on plant nutrition, which was based upon the stage the plant was in. During the growing season, the most nutrition is in the top third to one half of the plant, so that was the part of the plant they grazed, which for th emost part allowed for full plant recovery. The next group of animals through would graze the next plant species which was sat its nutritional peak and ignore those plants still recovering, or not yet at their peak..
Hey Bob, thanks for uploading these videos, it gives a good insight in proper way to handle stock. It is very sad to see all the soil that has washed away, almost makes we wanna cry. At the same time the West has its water reservoirs drying up. Both are due to a poor water cycle on millions of ha. in the West. We need to combine herds, pack them tight and plan the grazing with the intend of improving the land, otherwise, the Western ranching culture will soon be history.
Having taken the clinic this video makes a lot more sense! The start looks pretty smooth even without the lateral movement...at least compared to driving!
As long as your horses are quiet and know how to use their body angles without using too much direct pressure it would be easier. A horse that is always wanting to get to the head and pressure things will blow them apart
That was cool Bob. They sure seem to respond a little differently than cows. Good work bud. We would like to run some sheep with our cows in one herd if we could get by with a grazing animal for a guard animal. I would be interested in visiting with the feller you were working the sheep for.
As clumsy as I am, it may have been easier horseback. Other than the speed, they respond just like cows...Once you get them settled in they won't react as fast. This was the first time in a month that he'd tried moving them without the bell.
Over half the cattle in this country are in herds of fifty or under. Makes no sense for these people to keep a horse around to work cattle twice a year. Its the people throwing money away using machinery to gather cattle that bother me
To me it looks like they should run 10 times the amount of cattle, since more cattle create more feed. Have they increased the herd size? What is the potential?
I don't understand how they avoid cattle returning to the same plants when they only have 17 paddocks, that would be way to long for them to be in the same paddock before moved.
Several reasons behind why it works Gustav. First the cattle are migrating around the pasture so they are not exposing themselves to plants they have grazed in the current rotation. Second is that they have a lot of plant diversity both within, and between the paddocks. This means that there will be times the herd will be grazing non-selectively, and times they will be grazing selectively, balanced between the nutritional needs of the cattle and grasses or browse which is ready to be grazed at that time. Having an average paddock size of over 1,000 acres helps this process. Cattle will ignore grass to browse mesquite leaves as it greens up, as they do the mesquite blooms, and immature beans. They will forgo grass for yucca blooms. It as all balancing act between cows and soil
My understanding is as follows: HPG usually forces livestock into high densities using fencing. While this works as far as land regeneration goes, it can make a mess of the land (with temporary or permanent fencing), and often the livestock suffer in terms of their performance due to the stress of being forced through technology into confinement. I'm new to this concept of IMG, but it excites me a lot because it offers the possibility of getting the land/ecological AND livestock performance by using stockmanship that awakens and maintains the livestock's innate herding instinct, so they *choose* to stay together in high densities. At those densities, they foul the ground and don't want to return until the ground is no longer fouled because their dung and urine have been fully re-incorporated back into the nutrient cycle as fresh, new growth. At low densities, the cattle can eat this plant here, and poop and urinate over there, and then return immediately to (over)graze the new growth before it can recover. Not sure if there are other elements in play. But it's the difference between humans a. removing all predator pressure (herd instinct atrophies), b. set stocking cattle, c. forcing cattle into high densities using technology ("traditional" holistic planned grazing), and finally d. allowing the cattle to choose to herd again due to providing appropriate predator pressure.
Actually Rose, most all of the Chihuahuan Desert was a described as a "sea of grass" as recently as the late 1800's. A friend of mine has his great grandfather's journal from when he started the family ranch in the 1880's. The grass was so tall they had to clean their cinches daily from the grass that became stuck in it. The grass started slowly degenerating in early 1900's when herding cattle to seasonal water sources was replaced by windmills, barbed wire, and set stock grazing. Even here in far west Texas grass was abundant enough that there are people alive today who remember putting up native grass hay when they were children...on areas today that are nothing more than bare ground and brush. This video by the Bird Conservation of the Rockies will give you a better idea of the amount of soil regeneration being accomplished by some of the Mexican ranchers. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XsmoJsRWK0Q.html
