Regenerative Agriculture

Commercial gardeners nowadays govern their spring sowing and planting largely by the weather maps and still more by the daily forecasts of the United States Weather Bureau. Isotherms, or lines of equal temperature, serve as guides to safe seedage and planting. For instance, the isotherm of 45° is the northern safe limit of transplanting hardy plants (cabbage and lettuce) from coldframes to the open ground; and that of 60° for tender plants (tomato and peppers). To have plants ready on the dates when these temperatures normally arrive the seed is sown under glass 5 or 6 weeks earlier. Enrollment is currently open. Visit and Sign Up Now.

ONE of the hardest lessons for a beginner to learn is that cheap seed is the most costly to buy! Why is it cheap? It may be—probably is—not true to name! It may be old—50 to 100% dead or at least weak! It may have been—probably has been—cheaply and therefore carelessly grown and poorly “rogued” (if at all) or otherwise carelessly handled. In no branch of farming is it so true that the penny wise, pound foolish policy is so often or so strikingly illustrated as in the buying of cheap seed. As no one can grow a successful crop of anything from poor seed, the time and attention devoted to the plants will be largely, if not wholly wasted. The difference in first cost between cheap and “costly” seed is so slight that no one who has his best interests at stake will hesitate to pay it; for the so-called costly seed will, or should meet all the requirements of “good seed”; namely, viability (ability to “come to life”) when conditions—moisture, oxygen and heat—are supplied; freedom from weed seed and debris, 100% true to name, disease-, and insect-free, and ability to produce a crop of uniformity and excellence... Visit and Sign Up Now:

ONE of the most striking and interesting things that a visit to a large city market will reveal especially in New York, Washington, Chicago, New Orleans or San Francisco, is the varied assortment of vegetables offered for sale. The fact that many of these are not staples but yet are offered in commercial quantities indicates, first, that they are in demand and, second, that at least some growers consider them profitable because they appear year after year and in about the same amounts. They are bought mainly by people of Italian, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and other foreign descent. Should you wish to grow such crops you will probably have to search through a dozen, a score or more catalogues to find seed because few American seedsmen carry more than one or two each of the more common ones. The others would have to be bought from foreign seedsmen who specialize in what, to Americans, are oddities. In fact, you might have to write to the growers of such vegetables to discover where seeds may be obtained... Visit and Sign Up Now: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

People who think they “would like to have a little farm” naturally fall into two groups; those who are sure to fail and those likely to succeed. This book is written to help both! Its presentation of advantages and disadvantages, essential farming principles and practices should enable you to decide in which class you belong and whether or not you would be foolish or wise to risk making the plunge. In either case it should be worth many times its price because, on the one hand it should prevent fore-doomed failure, and on the other, show you how to avoid delay, disappointment, perhaps disaster, but attain the satisfaction that characterizes personal and well directed efforts in farming... Visit and Sign Up Now: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

All that just above is just to get you to what I've found workable for me, my cows, and this farm during the last few years. I set out enough paddock size so I only “have” to move the cows every three days. Even then, I leave more behind than the herd would usually eat in another two or three. This is completely against the orthodoxy of a minimum one-day moves that is found in most grazing handbooks and webinars. You can see from the above how I started questioning the box I'd been thinking inside... Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

The fourth type of grazing isn't considered so Leaving ground fallow isn't considered to be grazing. But it should be. If you do, then you'll get four types of grazing to utilize over your year. Practically, fallow grazing is being done whenever your pasture isn't being grazed. Because it's opposed to continuous grazing where the cattle just keep trimming off the new growth all year round. Some graziers follow advice to have a few acres left out of their rotations so that they have grass for droughts, or to stockpile ahead of winter. That ground is all left fallow during that time. And the same fallow pastures are worked into the rotation the next year, swapping out for other acres... Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

When you manage your cattle to keep them from over-grazing your pasture, that's the core of rotational grazing. How this differs from Mob Grazing is in intensity. The Management-Intensive Ultra-High Density Grazing model (it's original name) has you mob the cattle up tightly into smaller areas and move them more often. This requires more fencing, more attention (time) from the grazier, and more water access for all those smaller paddocks. Added shelter from excessive weather (too hot, too cold) also needs to be accounted for. Again, that five-legged model is present. In this case the “management intensive” part comes in – essentially, by increasing the attention invested in the herding, the other legs are increased in intensity as well.. Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

The biggest hurdle any cattle-farmer faces is getting and keeping sustainable. Which means those cattle on your cow-calf operation are more than just paying their costs every year. I'm not talking about any feeder-beef operation. The most profitable type of cattle farming, with least inputs, is the grass-based cow-calf operation. This is where a bull and a few cows keep dropping calves every year without any problems. No vet visits. They live on nothing but grassy pastures with water nearby – and shelter for the worst weather. Keeping them another year to put on more weight may or may not give you higher reciepts at the auction. You certainly won't get a higher price per pound. Let others work that angle. Focus on doing your best at bringing new calves along every year... Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

Again, this model in practice is more like “an art based on science” than it is a defined formula or recipe that always produces a specific pastry, bread, or cake if you follow it exactly. Weather isn't exactly the same from year to year. Different pastures of your farm will respond differently, depending on the soil that lies beneath it. No two square feet of a paddock are identical, and aren't even the same from year to year. The underlying principles don't change, though. Your forages will also become more diverse as you utilize this grazing. The natural systems in play will then enable seeds which have lain dormant for a hundred years to suddenly show up when the conditions are right. Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

Differences and profitability Continuous grazing means paying the required overhead in haying equipment and hay. Rotational and Mob grazing both can achieve the same results of improving higher efficiencies and so can more than double stocking rates. The higher profits come in when you've improved your land enough to feed them nearly all year round without having to buy much hay. You can get by on a few bales or none – usually only having to provide in emergencies of inclement ice storms or blizzards, where the underlying grass is completely inaccessible for several days or more. The few comparative studies out there really haven't produced an accurate comparison between simple rotational grazing and high-density (mob) grazing. They both work, once you master them. Overall, they seem to produce the same improvement of grazing efficiency and higher returned profit. The difference between these two methods is in what grazing density you set your “stocking rate” to. Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

The whole point to managed grazing is to rebuild your land using cattle (or other ruminants). The cows, grass, and living soil work together as a system. The manager is the one that learns to get them to cooperate naturally and rebuild inches of topsoil in just a few years, which would take Nature over a century by leaving the land fallow. Managed grazing has several methods. Each method is based on pasture areas which have permanent perimeter fences. .... Which choices or combinations of these you utilize depends on a lot of factors, the biggest ones being your own time and your own experience with grazing. Visit:

Grazing cattle tends to rebuild the soil and make it come alive – if you learn how to mimic Mother Nature. And it can add topsoil in that same way. When a cow grazes, the live biota that survive in the cow's gut to aid digestion wind up back on the ground to rebuild the soil. When you disk and plow and cultivate the soil, you are killing off these biota. Those microorganisms interact with the root structures, minerals and other nutrients to help the plants thrive. The biota travel out through the cattle manure as a natural, ongoing process. Cows are nature's example of the combine. Cows harvest the grass, process it into muscle and fertilizer, and cultivate the ground meanwhile. They are a necessary part of a regenerative trio, along with soil and plants, that work together as a natural team to preserve and regenerate the land. They emulate the wild graziers such as the buffalo, whose vast herds helped build the thick prairie sod. Properly done, the process of regenerating the land can be extremely low overhead, nearly all profit... Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

It took a crop failure to open my eyes. The farm I loved wasn't making enough to pay its own way. Misapplied herbicides had killed the first crop. But the bigger lesson is when I fenced it in with a portable polywire and let my cows graze it off. That was the eye-opener. They got fat and raised their calves on that all fall. So I then started examining the various parts of our cattle farming methods. And learned how to regenerate the land to raise more grass with less inputs - and the farm became sustainable. Visit: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/RationalGrazingLibrary

It took a crop failure to learn my biggest lesson in farming: Row-cropping was an expensive gamble - but raising cattle on grass alone is almost guaranteed income. The next couple of decades proved my observation right. What people think is modern farming can lead them to bankruptcy, but grazing cattle according to Nature's principles makes farming income - and profits - predictable. In this short volume are the condensed lessons on how rotational grazing with inexpensive portable electric fencing has made farming easier, more enjoyable, and completely sustainable. Book with transcripts and bonus lessons: https://gum.co/AvXAV