Grazing Plan

With the change in weather this week, we feel spring in the air.  

What a welcome change and relief from the unusually cold winter we've enjoyed.  

The cows are still eating hay; the fields are still winter-frozen brown; the chickens and pigs are still in hoophouses. But you can feel the change in the air. 

And going outside without a coat is always welcome.

With grass green-up a mere few days away, I've been doing one of my late winter chores: creating a 2025-26 grazing plan.  

With nearly 1,000 head of cattle and a dozen properties, putting the right number at the right place for the right period of time and moving them all every day is quite a logistical puzzle.

How do we know how many to put on a place, when to stock and when to destock on the various properties, and how to schedule all these moving parts?  

Like any huge project, it's like eating an elephant: one bite at a time.

The first thing is to write down the various properties and their available pasture acreages:

HT:  70   

GG:  125                  

BM:  240                  

SU:  40                 

and on and on.

Each of these properties has a different fertility level, which means the acreages vary, sometimes significantly, in the amount of grass they can grow. Just like some parts of your lawn grow thicker grass than others, some acreages grow more forage than others.  

Because we know the history of each one, we know which ones are more productive and which ones less so.

The key to everything is a standard measure. 

Allocation of animals is based on a way to measure forage production. That standard is the cow-day.  Carpenters use inches.  Electricians use volts, watts, and amps.  Bankers use dollars.  

The point is every vocation needs some kind of measurement standard. For us, it's a cow-day: the amount of grass one cow equivalent will eat in one day.  Obviously a baby calf is not a "cow equivalent".  A just-weaned calf (called a stocker) is about half of one "cow equivalent".

The whole herd is divided into roughly four groups:  mama cows (and their calves once they start calving at the end of March), stockers (year-old calves), finishers (two-year-old calves approaching processing), and the hodge-podge (a mixture of final finishers, called fats, bred heifers, and perhaps some struggling calves that need some extra care). This last group is always kept at Polyface central--the farm hub.

Each herd is then assigned a cow equivalent number.  For example, 300 stockers would be 150 cow equivalents while 300 finishers would be 230 cow equivalents.  

Now we have a standard measure of the group that we can match with the cow-day production of the various pastures.  

Lots of nuances enter into the plan.  

For example, grass doesn't grow consistently throughout the season.  It starts slow, then speeds up, then might slow down if it gets hot and dry, then speeds up again if we get rain in the fall before things get too cold.

By keeping records from year to year, we have a historical production record, or average, that we can use to guide us in this year's plan.  

For example, if property HT yielded 150 cow-days a year on average, we can be pretty sure that by the first of May it'll offer 50 cow-days, then by August first another 50, then another 50 at the end of the season or even into the winter. That's like three mowings in the season.

So if we have a 150-cow-equivalent herd and HT has 50 cow-days on 70 acres, that's a total of 3,500 cow-days divided by 150 is roughly 23 days we can feed that herd at that location at that time of year.  

Yes, it's a lot--a lot--of math.  

But the formula is the same across all properties; the mastery is in knowing a ballpark cow-day forage volume at a certain time of year and plugging the right herd into that spot.

Lest anyone think this is normal planning for cattle, it's not.  

Probably in the U.S., not 2 in 100 cattle farmers do this, think about it, or know how to do it.  They just have their herd in a pasture for the year very little real planning or management.  

At Polyface, this level of management is the key to mimicking the migrational choreography of the wild herds that traversed North America 500 years ago and bequeathed to us the rich alpha soils modern chemical and grain-based agriculture is still mining.

We don't have the wolves and fires of yesteryear to move the herds around; what we have is electric fence and water lines:  those are the steering wheel, brake, and accelerator on the 4-legged forage pruners.  

By moving them around, we can let the grass rest and regrow between prunings, enabling it to get stronger, healthier, and thicker.  

This marries today's high tech control and water infrastructure with ancient wild patterns.

The reason Polyface beef tastes and handles beautifully is because this management stimulates lush forages and lots of plant diversity: hence our term, SALAD BAR BEEF.  

It's as close to antiquity's ecology and nutrition as you can get with today's domestic livestock.

What's on your plate starts in late winter, with vestiges of the last snow melting in the road ditches, with a calculator, lots of paper, figuring, and head scratching to get all the animals at the right place at the right time throughout the year.  

While I'm poring over these formulas and figures, I'm thinking about the cook-outs and family dinner tables that will enjoy this labor of love.  

Thank you for partnering with us in this great land healing and nutrition-satisfying endeavor.  You know you're always welcome to visit our--your--cows.

Joel