Steve Normanton Grass-Fed Beef

Yes, we are farming nerds. Omar and I just attended a grazing class in Missouri taught by master graziers Greg Judy and Ian Mitchell Innes.

For our fellow nerds: the question is how to get the most profit out of an acre of pasture. The Management Intensive Grazing (or “MIG”) school of thought is to graze just when the grass is about to mature. Since grass grows quickly in the spring and very slowly in late summer, MIG requires frequent grazing in the spring (or cutting hay, if you can’t graze fast enough) and infrequent grazing in late summer.

By contrast, Greg & Ian advocate the Holistic Management (or “HM”) school of thought. This theory is

1. always let pastures rest as long as possible (90-180 days is ideal),
2. attack the mature grass with a very high density of cattle, and
3. shoot for 50% of the forage eaten and 50% trampled as “litter.”

It seems counter-intuitive that you could make more money grazing a piece of land only twice a year (and trampling half of it!), instead of grazing four or five times plus harvesting hay. But HM claims that this system is so vastly better for soil fertility that the resulting forage a. feeds more animals and b. can be grazed year-round–even through two feet of snow. So you can sell your tractor and never cut hay again.

Greg’s results are very convincing. Does that mean I am ready to sell the tractor? Not yet. The soil in Litchfield is years away from the results we saw in Missouri. But selling the tractor is now my goal. Stay tuned—I’ll let you know if it works.