I miss spots with long grass and flowers. Piles of old wood and branches, which provide a natural balance for insects and a living ecology. Just a little bit. But it is a lovable beauty.
Being blessed with having such an awesome property and the desire and drive to make it much better is a wonderful thing. Hats off to to the commitment and success .......👍
Your a blessed man. I grew up on over 180 acres and had access to over 1200 I could roam and doa as I please with and have a river running by it all. If I had 100 acres I would be unstoppable! Truly you are blessed!
Hope you can get a chance to come visit once we're up and running. We'll show you the more remote areas of the ranch that are cool to go explore. You could spend all day out there.
What a great great video you did, you guys should be very proud of yourselves of what you’ve accomplished so far. I can’t wait to see how you finish the ranch.
the first course i ever did after school was ai of cattle. i wanted to go pro hunting in season and ranching but after c.7 generations in africa my family lost everything in the post-colonial years. i envy you your place in this fubar world. 🙏
This is an inspiring video man, kinda takes you back to when family and time were a thing. Oh and memories, memories oh gosh those are just priceless. Thank you guys for sharing 🙏 😊
Just came across your channel. Watched you in your first episode. Amazing. What is a dream at a younger age you have going and the opportunity with family and friends I’m 65 living here in Northern California up in the hills, but I watched this video and just was amazed. God bless beautiful job and look forward to seeing a lot more.
Mr Sheppard you don’t sound that far from us as we too are in the Northern California hills. Send us a note via our email address and if you’re game we’d love to have you out to visit the ranch!
My biggest question was answered . . . from the comments - you're in Northern California. May I suggest you include that in (all?) future videos. Knowing the relative climate and conditions based on location really helps viewers understand the context of your situation. Otherwise, good first video. Congrats and looking forward to more. P.S. Thanks for using tripods and smooth camera footage. I see a lot of vids with shaky camera work and have to move on.
Great comment and advice! Point taken. We will take all these things in to consideration. Location has been a common question. Future videos will be shorter and then we’ll focus on more specific topics. Thank you for watching and commenting!
@@lowerleftranch I appreciate it! I was tryna say I’m a broke college kid as nice as I could 😂 but! I do have an agricultural back ground and a bachelors degree in ag so if I can ever be of assistance please shoot me message!
Hey guys. Wondering when the next installment of your life is coming out. Loved your vlog and so looking forward to the next. Peter, Wollongong, AUSTRALIA.
You could easily have significantly more water on the property simply by creating swales & berms on contour which would reduce water runoff, inducing large amounts of water sequestration into both the land and the underground aquifers. If you also planted a (variety) of tree species onto the berms, you'd stabilise the berms, create additional water sequestration and add carbon to the soil. As an added benefit, you'd eventually end up with more grass for your cattle.. Although you allow your livestock to roam freely, you'd actually have more grass for them if you introduced a fenced rotational grazing system. This is because they would be forced to eat what's in front of them, not just the choicest bits & the grass would have more time to regrow between grazing periods. Additionally, the dung & urine would more efficiently fertilise the pasture. Moving livestock every 1-2 days has been shown under regenerative agricultural practices to work best. There are more intensive grazing management practices but since nobody lives on the property, the aforementioned is simplest. I'd also seriously consider installing a rooftop rainwater harvesting & (in-ground concrete) water tank. Having grown up on a farm whereby this was the only water source for the house, I can't recommend it highly enough. A lot of people use a plastic water tank because they're cheaper & easier to install but they tend to eventually leach chemicals from the plastic into the water and that's not good for anyone, or anything, drinking it. Besides, an in-ground concrete H2O tank with an expansion/contraction joint in the base to prevent cracking & or leaking due to ground heave during prolonged rain periods or drought lasts much longer & means the water is kept in the dark, avoiding algae and bacterial growth. Sprinklers are a MASSIVE waste of the wet stuff since huge amounts of its simply evaporate straight into the air or off of the vegetation before ever reaching the root systems. But since it seems you're determined use them, put them on a timer set for between sunset & sunrise to reduce evaporation, conserve H2O & increase effectiveness. If you ever intend/need to reseed the grass near the barns again, try taking a trick out of domestic container gardening;- water retention gel crystals. You can buy it from Amazon in bulk, mix it well into the soil & sow whatever it is you want to use. Water well, the crystals will swell up & gradually the surrounding soil will absorb the water as needed. This will mean less overall watering is required. Climate change is going to need far more careful water management & the above suggestions should help a lot.
Thanks for the perspective. Most of these things are not needed nor practical at this time but definitely will consider some of the ideas for the future. Thanks for watching!
@@lowerleftranch You're welcome. Most of the suggestions were for the future as I can see from the narration in the video that you all have a lot of other things on your plates. If you ever do decide to go down the swale & berm on contour route, the digger used to bring H20 up from the well will come in mighty handy. Only a mug digs swales by hand on a property your size....😄 Beautiful farm. Good luck with the restoration work. P.S. Swales can turn a dry farm like yours into something that's almost permanently green & lush, especially if their designed to overflow into a series of descending ponds. Geoff Lawton of the Australian Permaculture Institute took on a typical knackered Aussie cattle farm that had almost no trees, water or that much grass for that matter. Using permaculture design, the whole thing is permanently lush with vegetation, trees, water etc & even during Australia's recent severe drought & massive bushfires that you must have seen on the news, they never had any problems whatsoever. I realise that this (isn't) the type of thing you're looking to do, but permaculture designs are varied according to landscape, climate & desired outcome. Geoff Lawton RU-vid channel is an eye opener, including the Greening The Desert project they're running in Jordan which is basically from near bare rock to super productive & the neighbours are copying what they are doing. All the very best for the future.
Take a tip from other old cattle ranchers in Texas. The cattle need to be restricted from grazing in some areas and you need to plant new trees. Look around, you have aging trees with little to no new ones, that's why they are dying, the drought doesn't help either. My place all the trees are over 75 to 80 years old and are dying, and no young ones coming up because if grazing. Creek banks are caving in because the surrounding trees that held them have died. Plant trees now. They take a long time to grow. Protect them from the hay burners with fencing, barricades.
