Silvopasture

In 1839, a bumbling inventor named Charles Goodyear left a gooey mixture of raw rubber and sulfur on the stove while he took a nap. The result was Vulcanized rubber, a material that revolutionized manufacturing around the world. Was he a genius or a nincompoop? Who knows? I had my own brush with unintended discoveries […]

Lately I’ve found myself looking back, back to the early days of my ranching career. Clearly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I’d had no business training of any kind and I was saddled with a weighty bunch of paradigms and bad habits, mostly inherited from people who thought a few […]

Don’t you sometimes wish it was spring year-round? As I write this, snow is coming down towards the tail-end of February, and it feels like forever ago since I saw green grass or a tree in leaf. The long winter almost makes you forget what it’s like to just sweat during the summer. Then again, […]

“And all trees bear an awful big crop which the stock like so well that they will break down the fence to get them.” -J Russell Smith, Tree Crops (1929) If you’re a grazier in all but the most frozen regions of the country, or perhaps the most sweltering parts of Florida, the honey locust […]

“The tree grows in a Bermuda pasture and is always loaded in the fall with luscious fruit. The cows and hogs stand under it, always ready to devour every pod that falls. The tree is very large and very, very beautiful. The cows improve in milk and the hogs in weight when the locusts ripen, […]

Do you know how much forage you have stockpiled for this winter? What would you do with 2,000 extra pounds of high-energy, self-harvested feed per acre? What about 4,000lbs? What would that do to your feed bill? How would that change your bottom line? Having that much extra winter forage doesn’t have to be something […]

I was at a pasture walk some time ago, when the farmer pointed to the few scraggly trees strewn throughout his paddocks. They were close to death, and the grass around them had long been trampled into nothing over the course of a long, hot summer. These trees were the sole relief from the sun, […]

When you think of Italian food, what pictures come to mind? Scrumptious spaghetti. Luscious lasagna. Perfect pizzas. What do they all have in common, other than the ability to send you into a carb-induced coma after a heavy lunch on a hot day? Tomatoes. They all use tomatoes. When Julius Caesar wanted something to go […]

Last week we started a discussion about how to go about stockpiling in the coming months. This week we continue with some thoughts from Greg Judy. Greg is always innovating, and in this case he’s looking at stockpiling a bit differently. In Part 1, we talked about one of the hardest parts of stockpiling: it […]