
It’s basically two local land owners, neither of which wanted to expand their operation, or couldn’t expand their operation on their own. They just didn’t have the human resources or the facilities to pull it off and so in order to expand their ranch capacity, they partnered together. They pooled their resources and it’s working out fantastic.
– Justin Enfield speaking about Tyler Moore and Dave Grassel
In this 7:02 video you’ll meet Tyler Moore and Dave Grassel, and learn about how their partnership is allowing them to expand their individual ranching operations. They also talk about how landowners choose them, even when they might pay less than other potential lessees, because they like their rotational grazing practices and what it does to make healthier landscapes. You can enjoy the video and the visit to their operation, or read the transcript below.
I hope it inspires you to look around and see what kinds of relationships and partnership you might have or develop as you build your business.
Transcript
So it was a little bit different. It was east of Watertown and it was way further away than we run cattle – normally 10 miles or closer. So that was kind of a big change. But you know there’s not too many opportunities where you can have cattle 120 miles away and trust the guy to care for your cattle and do a good job doing it. And this was a case where I didn’t think twice about it.
So that kind of opened my eyes. We were running 200 head together. Opened my eyes to we can run bulls together and cows together. We had run kind of similar style cattle, all black Angus and trusted each others genetics and bulls. And it worked very, very good.
The only issue was maybe a little too far away from home.
So the next year rolled around and an opportunity for some grass came up a lot closer to home. Neighbor was – I knew he’d been getting out of his cows. I called him in April, again, very late. And guessing for sure that this grass was going to be gone and he said, “No, it’s still available. I had several guys interested in but haven’t been real interested in the guys that were asking me about it. When do you want to come over?
So me and Dave came over the next day. And again, it was a pretty good chunk of ground and I knew that I wouldn’t have enough cattle to fulfill this amount of grass. So that’s where Dave came in. One of my better friends and a guy that runs the same style of cattle and does things the same way we do, and that was after running that groip in Watertown it wasn’t really even worth thinking about whether that could be done or not.
Tyler Moore: It’s a pretty intense deal we run. We have 12 paddocks on that piece we picked up last year. And then this year we picked up another good chunk of grass. So I guess the benefits are there’s a lot of moving, a big group of cows. So we need extra bodies. Another benefit is spraying. We do a lot of spot spraying – cover a lot of ground with two guys. Maintaining fences, spraying, moving the cattle, it’s there’s a lot of work and moving cows. It’s one of them deals when you set it in motion, that moving cows, you don’t stop because it’s the weekend and your wife wants to go on a trip. You’re moving them cows before you’re doing stuff like that. (Editor’s Note: Troy Bishopp might have a suggestion or two for being able to do things with the family and still doing a good job of managed grazing.)
Dave Grassel: It is unique and we do have differing ideas every once in awhile. We butt heads every once in awhile, because I’d say we’re a little more like brothers than we are like friends most of the time. When he thinks sometimes that we should be moving, I think maybe we ought to leave them another half a day. It always tends to work out pretty well I guess. This is our second year doing it together so we’re learning how to do it just a little bit better and everything’s going pretty smooth.
Last year we ran 100 head together and this year we came upon some more grass another opportunity. We were also approached by the landowner because of our rotational grazing practices. And we’re running 180 pair together right now. So we just about doubled what we’re doing together. It’s pretty time intensive. I would say at certain times cause a lot of times we’re doing the first pass through the grass we’re doing every two days. So when you’re trying to cut hay and spray crops and stuff like that and you have to move cows every two days, it can be a handful. But I think it’s going to be very beneficial in the long run.