e75. Giving Back to the Land with Grant Estrade

0:00:00 - Cal Hardage Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 75. 0:00:04 - Grant Estrade It's very important to motivate yourself and surround yourself with people who are going to motivate you. 0:00:09 - Cal Hardage You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, helping grass farmers learn from grass farmers, and every episode features a grass farmer and their operation. I'm your host, cal Hardeech. On today's episode we have Grant Estraud of Local Coolings Farm and Laughing Buddha Nursery Very interesting episode. We go a little bit different on the overgrazing section and talk about composting. One of the interesting points of today's conversation is the change happening in the Laughing Buddha Nursery. It's not going to be the Laughing Buddha Nursery. Listen to it and find out. Very good idea, I think For 10 seconds, about my farm. We traveled out to Albertville, alabama, this past weekend to this outfold field day. It's the largest one I've been to by far. Great weather out there I don't know that the weather could be any better. Great cattle, got to see a lot of people and those people who said hi to me. I appreciate it. Thank you, teddy Gentry and Greg Judy. Both spoke. Excellent job on both parts. And a couple observations that I take from Alabama. Or Alabama they drive a little bit more aggressively than we do here in my part of Oklahoma and the parking spots are a little small for my pickup. Otherwise, it's a really great time and so glad we got to go out there. Enough of that, let's talk to Grant Grant, we will welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited you're here today. 0:01:48 - Grant Estrade Yeah, thanks for having me. I've got to listen to a bunch of your podcasts in the past week, knowing that we were scheduled, and they're very informative and so, yeah, so I'm excited to be here, thank you. 0:01:59 - Cal Hardage Well, thank you, I appreciate that Grant. To get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation? 0:02:05 - Grant Estrade Sure, my wife, kate and I operate. We kind of go under two brands. One is Laughing Buddha Nursery Soon to be rebranded Laughing Buddha Market and local cooling farms. Our store, laughing Buddha Nursery is in Metterley, louisiana, which is a suburb of New Orleans where I'm born and raised, and I started that up as a retail gardening supply store 20 years ago, which is crazy. I think that's been that long and about seven years ago. Eight years ago we decided, through a series of events, to start a livestock operation, and that is a 60 acre farm 60 miles north of New Orleans, in Bogalus, louisiana. So I'm pretty much at the farm full time and we live here now and Kate kind of emutes four days a week and manages our retail store. The reason that we're going to be rebranding to market over nurseries is because Kate has shifted it towards a local food grocery store or a farmer's market, and so not only did we sell our products but we work with oh geez, like 30 local food you know value ad producers or farmers reselling their products as well. So we've got a lot of partnerships with the products that we're selling at that store. 0:03:23 - Cal Hardage Oh wonderful, Giving them an avenue to get to the consumer, hopefully a little bit easier. 0:03:29 - Grant Estrade Oh yeah, there's no bureaucracy with us. We get calls and we're asking to send a sample or tell us you know we bet it. You know there's a process and we talk about pricing and then we just say, you know, if it's something that we're excited about, it's like all right, let's put it, let's just buy it, let's cut them a check, put it on the shelf and if it doesn't sell, we'll eat it or, you know, or use it or whatever. So we have a pretty easy entry into our store for sure. And it's been a lot of fun working with those other producers, you know, with getting no supplies to folks, because we're, you know, we're operating as a normal brick and mortar shop. You know, tuesday through Saturday we've got hours, we've got staffing, so when folks are trying to find local supplies or local food items, they're not, they don't have to go by the checkered pattern of a farmer's market and those hours, and so that's been a real, real cool experience to offer the consumer for sure. 0:04:25 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, that's that sounds like an exciting model. To be honest, Could probably be its own show to talk about that model and how you're doing that, yeah you know, and this one thing I really stress, you know I talk a lot about. 0:04:37 - Grant Estrade You know, in order to achieve independence you have to operate in an interdependent way and we are not shy about partnering with other people. And it's pretty powerful when you know we may not be processing beef that month but we can call it our other. You know cattle friend and say, hey, can we buy? You know a bunch of acts to ground beef or whatever, and they go yeah, we'll have them see you next week. And they have those kind of relationships, relationships and partnerships. You know, just very powerful. You know solving inventory gap issues or just make and again it's making the consumer happy. You know, because when you set up a shop like this, you're you're kind of selling the products and the and the outer circle for the grocery store. You know grocery stores, you go to the outer circle. It's like produce dairy, your proteins, it's not all the junk food and the aisles. And so we we started with that base. So we said the consumer can get eggs, some dairy, you know seasonal produce, some staples, and then they feel like it's a better shopping experience and so it's a. It's a win-win-win across the board for everybody. Sure. 0:05:46 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, sounds like a wonderful model and I'm excited to see more about that. But here we usually talk more about the livestock. So let's, let's jump back seven or eight years ago. You said you, you got livestock at that time. What? What brought you to that point? Why did you decide to get livestock? 0:06:03 - Grant Estrade Well, I'll jump back even further. I mentioned I'm from New Orleans. So I grew up, you know, eight miles from downtown New Orleans, in Metory, and I was into snakes and reptiles at the time and I worked at a pet store and my first business was in the backyard. I was worked to eat 50. And I started a rodent breeding business. I was raised mice and rats for my own snakes and then, because I worked at the pet store, I had the unfair advantage of my foot in the door there so I started selling mice and rats to the, to the owner there, and that became my little business. And and that was really my introduction to business, my dad was an accountant so he told me how to do a basic spreadsheet. You know your expenses, your income, you know to get to net that. You know your gross and your net and I would divide that by the hours words and I was by per hour. On per hour basis. I was very proud that I made more money. You know raising rodents and I did, actually working at the pet store. But that's where I really got into, you know, kind of geeking out over the natural cycles, because you know we'd bring feed in, we'd feed the mice, and then I would compost. I didn't know what I was doing. I just pile, you know, a pile of all the shavings and their manure, and my parents had always had a corner compost pile, you know corner compost pile. So I grew up around that very familiar with it. But the rodent shavings got really hot and I remember being so fascinated by the heat that those piles put off. Then I made a vegetable garden out of all that compost. So I had, you know, I had mice and rats going out and I was producing compost and I was growing vegetables in there and I was eating the vegetables and to see all of that happen, a lot of things started clicking for me as far as you know, nutrient cycling and just observing all the stuff, and so that was just kind of really cool to experience. I absolutely love doing that and, you know, when you're growing up in New Orleans, it's a party town and that is part of the culture. But I remember high school going home early on Saturday night, you know high school parties and things being like no, I got to, I got to go home because I got to get up early to work my rodents, because I love, I love that getting up early and doing that agricultural activity. And so that's where I kind of knew that I was very attracted to that sort of a thing. And then fast forward in about 2003, when we opened up. When I opened up Laughing Buddha quickly I was we had a yard area that was about the size of the residential backyard as part of the store, and so I started to get some chickens and started doing a couple of things and we got some pigs back there, some guinea hogs, and so I was like that was my first introduction to pigs and selling eggs and things of that nature. And then I was like, oh, I really need to get into this stuff at some point. And I knew at some point I wanted to get into it and that. And then, and then we had the opportunity to buy the acreage to get our foot in a door. And then, you know, kate and I just kind of like looked at each other and were like, hey, do you want to do this farming business? You know, and we're like sure you know so. So that was kind of like my background, with an introduction to it. We definitely did decide to jump in, for sure pretty hard. It was stressful a little bit, but it's paying off for sure. 0:09:08 - Cal Hardage So what did you originally start with for your livestock? You mentioned some hogs earlier, but when you all had access to more land, I was really comfortable with the pigs. 0:09:17 - Grant Estrade That was a kind of a really cool Pigs are great, I mean they're. They're super smart, yeah, I mean they're, they're as smart as dogs and so they're just great to be around. So we started with pigs and then we started selling to four. We got some layers over here. Yeah, we started pretty slow just to kind of see how the predation was, because I'm coming from an urban area and going out to a rural area, you know. So things like you know coyotes and and those larger predators, and just you know your hawks or whatever. I knew that I didn't know what I was getting into with that, so. So we started slow, just kind of like testing it how it would go. You know, we got some net fencing and started playing around with that and started understanding electric beds and so yeah. So that was his very, very slow thing. We definitely started with pigs and the layers. Those are pretty easily jumped into those animals, you know, pretty quick. And then after that we we had a lot of underbrush, as most people who buy land have. So we ended up getting some goats later on we still have goats today and then beef and and now beef is a big focus bar, so the growth area for us as well. So we're, we're, in fact we're to finish on the pigs, so we're sticking. We stuck with the pigs. We've changed up that quite a bit. We're still, you know, we're in in year seven and a half right now on the farm. So we're we're still a couple of years away from really streamlining it, but they're starting to be light at the end of the tunnel. But yeah, so very focused on the farer finish on the pigs. Our goat herd we keep about 25 does at any point. They're mostly now for pasture, you know, clean, clean up their meat goats. So we have, you know, the goat meat sales as well. And then the layers will walk. Right now we've got about 1200 layers. That's going to be a pretty steady thing. We've got three flocks of 450 approximately and our egg sales are very strong. Being right outside of it, you know, metro area, you know we kind of have that advantage. And then, like I said, the the beef cattle. We're just doing stockers. That is an area that I'm really excited about, as we're, you know, getting the pasture health. You know which. Actually, you know you can't, you know you can't fall very far off the floor. You know what I mean. So the the, the path, the land that we got was row crops forever, and so it was brum sedge and bear dirt and so that's. It's been a lot of fun seeing those fields come to life over seven years. It's been a an awesome part of it. But but now that we're actually starting to have, you know, forage out there and some things are really happening, we're really focused on increasing the number of stockers that we're, that we're bringing in every year for sure, and so so, yeah, so we're doing all livestock, it's all direct to consumer. We do have some wholesale restaurant accounts with the eggs, but all the other protein is sold, you know, by the cut. You know direct, direct to consumer retail. 0:12:08 - Cal Hardage Oh, very nice. Now one thing going back to to your progression there. You added goats after pigs, and if you talk to anyone, I'm sure I've said it on this podcast goats have a notorious reputation for being difficult. How did, how did the goats go, and what challenges did you have there, and were they as hard as you anticipated or were they easier? 0:12:32 - Grant Estrade You know the goats were. I tell you what, when you cut your teeth on goats, as far as the ribbon it goes cattle or easy. After you know the goats, I have a love hate relationship with the goats. If it wasn't for Kate, I think I I probably would have gotten rid of the goats and then like, regretted it later and it got more goats again and got rid of them. Where our goat herd is right now we're in a really good spot because they're just so well trained and I think, out of the original group of goats that we got, I think we only have a couple of the does left and they're probably going to be with us maybe for another couple of seasons. But yeah, the goats, as you know they're, they're super smart, they have the way they need to eat a lot more than cattle need to eat. You know they're just not, you know so they're, they're. They're like everywhere, they're browsers, they want to be near you, and so it's been a combination of training ourselves on how to deal with the goats, knowing that we kind of have to be like three steps ahead of the goats. It's been really getting our fence in where it needs to be. We use a combination of high tensile hot perimeter fence. We have three five strand perimeter fence. We have three strand internal fence that we're actually putting a bunch of the internal fence in right now. We do utilize a premier, you know one goat sheep fence but the goats now are through training and we do supplement feed with alfalfa the cattle and the goats, because that using the alfalfa as a training tool is is kind of like priceless. I mean it's literally like having another employee here. You know, if they, if they get out and I call them, they're going to come because they know that there's a supplement, but you know there's that alfalfa there for them. So so, training them with that, that supplemental feed, along with the hot fence, along with culling problem animals, and then understand, trying to trying to look at things from a goat perspective, they're, you know, they're. We kind of honestly, we have them at the point where they're that they're kind of pleasurable to have around. They. They are a little frustrating every now and then, but it's just so easy to to deal with them. If they, if they aren't a place where we don't want them, I mean it's literally like open up the gate, call them, get them over, and so yeah, so we're, we're really happy with goats and the biggest thing that they do for us I mean they, they pay for themselves and services, right, cause we have so much blackberry and blueberry and goldenrod and things that the cattle are not going to eat. They really keep us from having to cook pastures during the year, which ties in some of our our wildlife quail goals that they're. They're kind of like priceless as far as services render. You know, the goat meat sales are pretty strong and so just because we're not processing that many animals every year, we pretty much sell out of goat meat every year. So all in all, it is a good, a great animal to have. But if I'm at the proverbial cocktail party and people ask me when I do and I tell them that it's like I don't know why, but the first thing they say is, man, I really want to get some goats. And I tell them you really don't. I try to convince them not to get any goats as their first animal because they, they are pretty challenging. You know it's an audible thing too. Then the one, a one, a yell, it's like a baby crying. So it's like. You know, it's like the. It's just the. There's so many weird things with goats that get you going. That yeah, you got to really understand what you're getting yourself into for sure. But yeah, so so very heavy calling on the goats. Electric fencing has been absolutely priceless. Training now with that supplemental feed as a tool, have been both priceless strategies that work very well for us, you know, for the goats. 0:16:16 - Cal Hardage I have just a handful of goats and I told my wife I spent a couple months. I said I've got to be more efficient with my time. Goats take up a lot of my time because I'm using electronetting with them and I'm having to move them. I'm amazed with what they do and, to be honest, goats are probably my favorite animal on the farm, just because of their curiosity and their personalities. I told my wife. I said I think I'm gonna sell the quail, or sell the quail, sell the goats, I'm gonna get rid of my honeybees because I just don't have time. And she says, no, I need to make more free time in my time because I've got a lot of things going on. She's like, no, she says because you do, next month you'll be saying I miss my goats, I need some more. 0:17:00 - Grant Estrade So yeah, I was about to say. I agree, that's when I get frustrated. It's when, all of a sudden, you're yeah, there's 45 minutes, I just got eaten up by the goats, because they're being knuckleheads for sure. Yeah, it can eat up some time very quickly, and then I just, you know, one thing that we started doing that has saved us a lot of time with the net fencing is we've been, we've been letting them in, we've done the three strand internal fencing on the paddocks and we're just letting the goats have that whole paddock, but we're just putting them up at night behind the net vets, and so we just and that's where we feed them the alfalfa, and so we don't have any livestock guardian dogs, and one reason we down is we have so many red, you know, goats that live around the farm. We just don't want them jumping over the fence and killing their dogs or anything. And so, yes, so putting them up at night, and then that way we only have to set up the electric net vets, like once a week, and then we can move them and then and it's not a daily move or every three days dealing with that net fence, it's just so once a week deal, yeah, and so that's been very helpful. But you're right, you know they take a lot of time. But you know, whenever there's moments happen I get reminded about how much time they save us with dealing with the weeds and stuff in the pasture. So it ends up working out pretty well. 0:18:19 - Cal Hardage Well, and just the amount for me, that when I put them into an area that's overgrown and they go through and clear it out or clear it as high as they can reach, and then you know, in six weeks I'm running some cattle through there to graze some grass that's coming up. It's amazing and the cows wouldn't have gone in there and got much out of it before I put those goats in there. So it's amazing what they can do. They do require a little bit more management, but they're such a essential tool. 0:18:48 - Grant Estrade Now with that they have really created like literally have created pasture for us. That has been more cattle runly. I mean that is glaringly obvious that it was not for the goats running them through fields of goldenrod and stuff that they actually do really pretty well on. You know their manure load and everything else. You literally see the forbs in the grass that start coming up. They open everything up, real nice, and so now they're a very important tool. I mean I can see folks having goats for 10 years and then getting rid of them at some point into sticking with the cattle. Or you know, getting goats and then getting some cattle and then get rid of the goats and get some sheep to where they're just doing sheep and cattle. So yeah, all that transition makes perfect sense and if you've got the patience and if you've got the time it's definitely a good strategy. But just the patience part is key. 0:19:41 - Cal Hardage And just one thing on that transition I had goats for a number of years before we got hair sheep and I end up selling the goats because I had no more. I wouldn't say no more, I didn't have ideal brows for them. So my pastors were in the state for hair sheep and cattle and I sold the goats off and then I was able to lease some more land where actually goats are helping me out there. So that's when I purchased more goats and got through there. So I agree with that cycle. Goats really open it up and provide those opportunities for other animals in the future. 0:20:19 - Grant Estrade Yeah, for sure, We've seen that. And then I don't really see an end to the berry and the blackberry coming up in our fields, and so that's going to be a pretty constant food supply. And then we're doing a lot of hedgerows on the interior perimeter of our paddocks for wildlife purposes and stuff, and they can get access to those hedgerows. They're always going to be shrubby, so we're trying to set everything up to where the goats are always going to have a little bit of brows out there. But with our climate yeah, with our climate and this reminds everybody, we're a golf post. We're like semi-tropical, we can get, you know, we're going to count on except for this year, we're in a drought, but we normally get like 60 inches of rain every year, very mild winter, and so we've got a lot of stuff growing very fast out in the fields for sure. So there's an endless supply of things coming up for sure. 0:21:12 - Cal Hardage Now you mentioned hedgerows and I want to come back to that, but so I just want to put that note like dying a string on my finger. I want to come back to that and ask you a few questions. With the goats, did you go with a particular breed, or just what was local to you? 0:21:29 - Grant Estrade We started buying some goats from a gentleman who had been building up a herd of myotonic fanny, so Kiko or kind of crosses because of our rainfall worms here they don't do very well and so he ended up getting hurt and so and then he gave us kind of a deal on the whole urge. We kind of start, we kind of continued his program for a while with that myotonic Billy and then we started. Then we started keeping some bucks back from that and then we got some Kiko bucks and really focused on influencing our, our group with that Kiko. And then we were able to get this Kiko's locally from a guy who had also done a lot of work. He goes and did a lot of culling and so that really brought the herd, I think, where where we have it. So that the Kiko has been a great influence for us and now we're kind of like line breeding, we're keeping some bucks back from ours for the next couple of years. But yeah, so the Kiko has been really a really good influence on that herd. 0:22:25 - Cal Hardage Sure, oh, very nice, very nice. And in addition to the goats you have stockers. Tell us a little bit about your stocker operation. 0:22:33 - Grant Estrade Yeah, so you know, being from New Orleans, you know the beef has been the cattle. It's definitely the big learning curve for me, for sure. You know we started with like two head and then processed something. I got like three head and processed them and then got like five. This year we've had the most. Today I think we're up to about 24. We're buying, you know, some younger, you know true finisher steers, stocker steers from the local grassbed operation. We've also done some stuff with some older cull cows. Everything is kind of like working out because, you know, because we're selling direct to consumer. If we bring in an older cow, you know, we can work with our processor, who they're actually very good butchers. We can talk with them by the car quality and sometimes they say, hey, this, this cow is like super old. You know, we're grinding the whole thing, you know, and we're okay, let's do it. Um, and so we're. We're kind of dabbling with a couple of different things. I think we're going to continue doing a combination of getting some younger stocker steers so we can have a carcass where we can get better quality cuts from. We're going to get some cull cows to where we can really count on, uh, the stew, me and the ground beef, uh, and tenderized steaks that our customers like, and we're we're getting rid of everything over the winter. So, like the last year, with winter and they're you know not to go to, not to go down the road of like labor issues. But every farm has a little bit of labor, labor challenge or sort of like I said, we're starting to streamline a couple of things and tweet that and hate prices and our wet winters. I was like we're we're putting everything in the freezer by the end of the year and then we're going to take a break and then we're going to buy again in January, february, and so you know, this upcoming January and February, I think we're going to do a combination of the younger stalker steers, some cull cows. I'm even thinking about maybe getting some pears in and just you know, letting her you know we not calf processing her and then keeping that calf back or selling the calf off. So we're, we're taking her with a couple of different things. We're definitely going into a very open minded. I'm still learning the economics and the commodity market of cattle and how to buy it and when to buy it. I think it's absolutely both fascinating and unbelievable on how the commodity cattle market works. So, yeah, so we're we're very much in the process of learning more about, you know, buying cattle in. You know we've learned, definitely, that you make your money when you buy the cattle and so you have to be pretty savvy about when and where and what you're purchasing, and so that's a big learning curve for us right now. 0:25:15 - Cal Hardage But, yeah, we're really looking forward to learning more about it and that'll be interesting as you, as you go forward. You know that that thought you had there of buying pears and and then older pears, and then you keeping the calf and using the cow to be processed. That's an interesting, a little bit of out of the box thinking to find a lower cost item that you can add value to. 0:25:41 - Grant Estrade You know, just looking at the numbers of it, I'm just going by the numbers. You know it might be a weird strategy but I'm following the numbers on it. You know, if we buy a cold cow the healthy cold cow that we can process for you know, just argument sake, a thousand bucks, and we buy a pair for you know 1200 bucks, and we're getting a calf that's worn out of it and then we can process her or keep the calf back. Calf is worth probably at weaning, you know three, 400 bucks or so, and it kind of like the numbers work out, you know, and so it's of course it's contextual, that's in your operation, your cash flow. But yeah, we're strictly looking at the numbers on it for sure. And it is interesting when you start having these conversations with people. Sometimes, when I ask questions about this with other cattle guys, I think they may get irritated a little bit because they, they, they, they're like you're trying to game the system and I'm like, yeah, I am trying to game the system here, I'm trying to figure this out, and so I and I, and I think everybody needs to look at that with an open mind and look at the numbers, because if it doesn't make money we're, we're not going to do it and make sense for us. And so I know you had Jordan Green on podcast before and he's he's a buddy, and so we talked a lot about the stuff and you know he's done really well with buying those, those open cows you know for as as as stalkers. To finish, it makes perfect sense. They put out great beats and it's just a winner. Some people might think that's a crazy, a crazy thing, crazy idea. But what allows us to do that again is that we're direct to consumer, you know. So we we've got a lot of flexibility on how we market that, that carcass. 0:27:17 - Cal Hardage Yeah, it does give you a tremendous amount of flexibility there, just figuring out what works for you and you know gaming the system profitability comes in and it matters to your farm's sustainability. If you're not making a profit, you're not going to stick around very long, right? 0:27:33 - Grant Estrade Yeah, you're exactly right, and, and so you know, with with commodity pricing of cattle, unless you have generational land, generational herd, you know, for somebody like us it doesn't pay for us to buy, to have breeding cows, and all the numbers tell us absolutely not to do it. And it's like with the, you know, going with the pigs, the farrowing, you know, to finish with pigs. If we had a reliable source of piglets in our area, you know we probably would not be breeding the pigs, but we want to have consistent batches of the quality pigs that we're looking for. You know we kind of are in the corner and we have to do our own farrowing on that because, again, the numbers don't work out. You know the numbers don't encourage us to do the breeding, we're kind of doing it out of necessity. So it kind of depends, it depends on your situation. But you know, for us, like most areas, we've got, you know, four different, you know, cattle auctions that we can go to not far from us and so there's plenty of cattle in our area and so there's no reason to become a cattle breeder if the, if the inventory is there. And so, yeah, everybody needs to look at their context and their pricing and their climate, and absolutely ask themselves like, hey, what's going to work for, what's going to work for us, and and how we're going to go about this, and kind of like the blinders on comes to what other people are doing. It's very important to do that Exactly right. 0:28:55 - Cal Hardage I mean so many, so many of us, so many of the people out there is just doing what they've always done, or or what their neighbor is doing. You really got to take a step back. You know, the ranching for profit does a good job of helping people take a look at those finances and making sure that their farm can be sustainable, which is so very important. 0:29:15 - Grant Estrade Yeah absolutely the. You know the ranching for profit. I've never gone through the course. Hopefully one day I'll have an opportunity and time to go do that kind of getting exposed to a little bit of it. You know they're they're big on microeconomics, you know, and diminishing returns and you know depreciation and and like those things are very important to focus on for sure. I mean, in our area in Louisiana your average mama cow herd is going to be 30 to 40 cows and a lot of those guys love cutting their own hay, you know, and so I'm always baffled by that. You know they've got all the hay equipment. They deal with the stress of, you know, when they're going to cut the hay and we get so much rainfall sometimes you can cut a lot of hay and then it gets ruined because of rain or you're out there just, you know, killing yourself, getting it, getting it up before the rain comes, and so it's unbelievable to me that that people with 50 cows have all their own hay equipment. It kind of blows my mind. But they're not looking at it from the economic perspective and and that's what the ranching for profit and and those guys focus on is that like hey look, if it's not working out. Don't do it, it's just oh. And so it's so important for people not to get caught up into how it's always been done or what my neighbors are doing. It's just so important to look down and look at the black and white numbers for everything. 0:30:33 - Cal Hardage One of my best days on the farm was when we sold our hay equipment. I was quite ready for it to go somewhere else. Yeah, I hear you, yeah. 0:30:43 - Grant Estrade And even last year I realized, because we overwintered the cattle that we had last year and that was the most head we ever had. And I was looking at how much money we had tied up in hay and getting what we had tied up in hay and getting with our hay supplier, because there was drought in a lot of areas, a lot of hay was being pulled out from our, our area, and so it's like, oh, I got to schedule the hay and I got to make sure we have it, but I'll buy it now it's going to go. And then you know you're paying up front for it. And then you know the equipment we, yeah, we've got because of our, our composting business. We've got a bobcat, you know. We've got some tractors, you know, for the farm work. So we've got the equipment to deal with the hay. But it doesn't mean that I, I enjoy, you know, utilizing the equipment you know to to awfully offload the hay and bring the hay out. And so you add up even to speeding hay how much the labor is and the equipment and dealing with it it's a lot. So that's that's what we decide and I do not even to really over winter or anything. Yeah, not only do I not want to make hay, I really don't even want to buy it If I can avoid it, and so so, yeah, I totally agree with you. 0:31:45 - Cal Hardage Let's jump back before we have to move on to hedgerows you mentioned you. Are you establishing hedgerows? 0:31:53 - Grant Estrade Yeah, and because of our climate, like I said, we can actually just not cut an area and let it grow up, and so we'll get safflower, you know we'll get, we'll get. There's a lot of key pushes and stuff that will come up fairly quickly, and so the thing that I'm focused on with our hedgerows is supporting our quail. The quail is a key species that I'm looking at to help determine the health of our pastures. You know, if you watch a quail, if you watch a quail jump out the grass, they only want to fly like 200 feet. You know what I mean. So we're trying to set up all of our fields to where, no matter what direction they need to fly into, you know three hundred feet or so, they're gonna be getting something to be able to some sort of habitat for a state cover Cover, and so those hedgerows are perfect. You know we're only dealing with the forty five, fifty acres of pasture and we have that broken down. It's in nine, nine main paddocks as part of a rotational grazing schedule. It's not very hard to have a head row several hundred feet away from, like, the center of the fields. The way that the farm structure is, we have a road going right down the center of it and so and so the all the paddocks are probably very, are very blocky. They're not like this we're. You know long rectangles are very square and so so anyway, so yeah, so that's been great. I'm always been a burger. I love watching birds, binoculars and creating the hedgerow and that edge effect. You know an edge effect on ponds or or field to where that's where a lot of the why the livestock really like to hang out. So that's just been a real fun thing for us to see and watch that grow and watch a lot of the migratory birds. Bc is actually stay. You know that's not just hang out but nest on the farm, so that's. You know it's really hard to monetize that on the farm and some people don't get it when I try to explain it to them. But when you know when you're out there every day, you're and you're into the wildlife and you're in the biodiversity and as part of your passion and part of why you're farming, it's, it's awesome. You know a really healthy hedgerow. If you've ever gone scuba diving is kind of watching a coral reef. You know you can sit back and let's watch everything kind of like happen and so it has that effect and so I'm a big believer in that. Yeah, there's shade, there's other things that that come into it, that come into play. But yeah, just old school hedgerow along every field, you know, and they only need to be 10 to 20 feet wide. And so we do that, we, we cut along the interior of the perimeter of that, so we always have access to the perimeter of that, and then we leave a 20 foot wide area and we let that that kind of grow up and then the cattle and the goats have access to it so they can kind of go near, do their thing and so, but you know, once they're kind of start maturing out with some of the shrubs, even if they get hit on by the goats and everything, they recover pretty quick. So, yeah, that's been a lot of fun of having that. And then it has an effect of making your farm look bigger, because it's kinda like, yeah, you go in a one paddock, you can't see the other paddock, and so then you have to walk down the road and enter the other paddock, and so it's like it's almost seems like the farm is endless Because you, you, every, every field is screen, and so that's kind of a cool that, yes, cool fact and and I really knew that I wanted to do something like this that I've got to go down the coast of rica twice and they have a lot of living fences. You know they'll cut trees, they'll just post home into the ground and, because they're tropical to a lot of the species that they use for their fence construction, they'll grow so they'll actually intertwine barbed wire With living trees and so all their fences are hedge, are our hedgerows, and so you know they do a lot of cross stunts and actually do a lot of Rotational style grazing. There is pretty cool, and so I just love how that looks, and so I'm trying to kind of recreating that here on our farm. So it's, it's a little bit of a different thing. A lot of people may not get it, but it's, once you start getting it, getting into it and understanding wildlife is doing in it and the type of wildlife that you're gonna attract it, it just makes everything so much more interesting, so much more fun. 0:36:04 - Cal Hardage I love the idea of it. We're not doing that on the farm but I love the idea of it and maybe someday we will, because I love seeing the biodiversity out there. I love seeing the quail and other animals out there and hopefully, you know we we have wild turkeys in our area and keeping it, you know, going around grazing it. Those areas that's been grazed are great for those wild turkey to be able to walk through and get through everything because they're not much on flying. 0:36:35 - Grant Estrade Yeah, I'm. We haven't seen any turkeys yet. I know we've got on the others. You know there's turkey, turkey populations not far from us, like a mile down the road. We see them and so, like I'm like you know, I'm hoping that they're gonna find our place. That's, that's gonna be an awesome day when I, when I see them here. But for right now, I'm just gonna be be really happy with the, with the increase in the quail populations that we can see. So that's been, that's been really Watch for sure grant. 0:37:05 - Cal Hardage We're changing gears just a little bit. But before we change gears, is there anything else about your farm you'd like to share before we start getting into the over grazing section? 0:37:15 - Grant Estrade Yeah, you know the one, the one unique thing that we're doing at the farm is, you know, one thing that allowed us to actually be able to to get to the farm has been the composting businesses that I've been involved in. You know we open up the store 20 years ago. It just took me a couple years to kind of getting into selling all garden soil and compost and a big thing that happened that allowed us to get into farm was that I had partnered with another operation to grow large scale composting facility and then they had bought they bought into buying me out, which then I was kind of like unemployed. You know I was looking for the next adventure and we had already bought the 15 acres or whatever. So I was like I will start, we'll start doing something up on this acres that we had got as like the one day you know project. And so we started coming. When I started coming back up to the farm to dabble a little bit, I told Kate I was like you know, I think I'm gonna start the composting business back up, and so kind of weird, when you get bought out of an operation, you go from going 100 miles an hour to zero. And so I was like, alright, let's start this back up. So we we started composting up here again and then we have to rebuild our customer base and we had started and then and now, especially having more pasture because we have the composting business, we inbound a lot of materials companies that we work with and we actually take in more material than what on the compost that we sell. So we've been applying our compost to the pasture pretty aggressively and that's that's allowed us to speed up the health pastures at a pretty incredible rate. And when I think of probably just coming from the composting world, you know farms have the space, they have the know, how, they typically have the equipment to do some sort of composting operation and I think on farm composting is probably one of the most underutilized activities that a farm could do. You have to be close to some sort of waste stream source to make logistics work out. A lot of farms are not close to something like that, but with us being so close to the New Orleans metro area, we work with a couple companies. One makes a cold, cold brew coffee product. So we take in about right at about 16,000 pounds coffee grounds from them every week. So that's that adds up. You know to be quite a bit. We work with another company that is actually they. They package up one pound bags of like red kidney beans and airbond, so it's a bunch of their packaging facility. So we we take in all of their waste, your waste beads, which are kind of cool because we a lot of them are good, so we'll put them out as a cover crop. So we just end down a lot of these things and so we're composting on farm and spreading that out on the pasture and that is like we're literally building topsoil while we're doing that, and so it's just a really cool process and the numbers of the amount of material that we're bringing in is just like in the billions of pounds. So we're, we're not only making money by selling the compost but we're creating our own soil amendments, so that's our fertilizer program. But we're you know, we're we're taking stuff out of the landfill and so we're a specialized recycling facility and so a lot of the folks in these circles they see the direct to consumer farming movement as a decentralized food right. Instead of having five farms doing all the work, you've got a hundred. I kind of see the same thing as composting operations go. Instead of having, you know, three landfills, you can have a hundred farms that are inbounding. You know, all this material and other thing that we take in is a blue crab shell, a blue crab processing facility, and so there's a lot of cool things that we're taking in. And so you know, when it comes to environmental stewardship, you know rerouting a lot of this material out of landfill is preventing methane, which is another green greenhouse gas. So you're you're taking that out of landfill. You're actually making the usable product out of it, and so that's that's probably one of the more different things that makes us a little bit unique at our facility. And so when we have customers pull up to the farm, you know we're loading their pickup truck with the compost and the soil blends that we make. You know we're involved in bromy composting, so we raise red wiggler worms for worm castings, and so that's something that is pretty cool. Love talking about that, and so so ties into our our business model of, you know, being multi, fast and did several different sources of income. But it also feeds into getting these old row crop fields regenerated so we can actually have up to par for grazing. 0:41:48 - Cal Hardage Now, when I when I think about composting, I think about the compost pile that my grandparents had next to their garden shed, where we we threw everything in and then, every once, while we would grab some, some of the some of the compost out to spread somewhere, occasionally, they would go in and turn it and then usually have giant weeds growing all over it. What's, what does it look like? If someone was was driving by, what would they see? 0:42:17 - Grant Estrade when you're talking about composting, you know we're doing a lot of smaller windrows and so our piles may be like 60 cubic yards and so they're not when they're passing our farm they're not going to. I don't honestly, they may not even notice it, they're just going to see these. You know these piles of material, you know, but from like that backyard perspective or that, you know the homesteader perspective that's a big homesteading question that people are getting to this they're like you know it doesn't take long, you know, to come across composting as a topic and it's fascinating. It is fascinating. And so the same thing that somebody would do in a backyard, you know, if they have like, say, a three foot by three foot by three foot or five by five, five by five foot pile, all of the techniques that they're utilizing for that that type of pile are going to be the same that we're doing for larger piles. You know we just use the equipment right. So for us we're using a track. You know, bobcat. You know so we're making little baby piles, you know, compared to like, large scale composting facilities. And so, like the large scale composting facility that I was involved in before, you know we had big wheel loaders with six cubic yard buckets making much bigger piles. Now I've got Bobcat and I'm making. You know the bucket on that is, you know, a cubic yard, and so I'm making like 30 cubic yard piles and so you know same things you know play in. You know you need to have your carbon nitrogen balance, basically your grades, your browns balance. You need to keep it kind of like fluffed and and voice in and kind of like like let it do its thing. The main thing I tell folks with composting is that you have to compost knowing what your end use is going to be. For example, if we, if we work with a horse stable and we take their horse stable sweeping stand, there's a chance that there's some residual herbicide contamination with horse stable, horse stable sweepings and so while we utilize that on far that product, that does not go into the compost that we're using for resale, because I don't want a vegetable gardener getting compost with potential residual herbicide like raisin or something and so. But you know I'm perfectly okay to spreading that on our pastures. If it has a little residual herbicide it may not back some broadleaf. We that field but I can affect our grass production and it's going to the introduction of all the nutrients in that carbon and increased water holding capacity and all things that that does far outweighs the rest of the herbicide and also like weed seeds. So you know whenever, whenever you're getting your ingredients and to make your compost pile, wherever that is, ask yourself, you know, does it have potential bad weed seeds in it? Do I need to get the compost hot to kill the weed seeds? You know it doesn't have a potential herbicide contamination, does it? You know just what are the nutrients going to be after after stuff compost and like, for example, when we compost the crab shell that we get super high in calcium, specifically kite. That's something that we're like capsicum, fruit, tomatoes and eggplant squash, really want because it prevents and blossom rod other things. So the the compost that is generated from the crab shell is going to be used, different than, let's say, the compost that we generate from the coffee grounds, and so you know. So the biggest thing is identify what you want to compost and what the end thing is going to be, because you might have to really compost very thoroughly or you can kind of do just a lazy, bake a pile and kind of like let it want, you know kind of a thing. And so those are some of the biggest things to be on the lookout for when it comes to composting. In my opinion, those are those. 0:46:03 - Cal Hardage those things will kind of guide you in a pretty good direction and if someone's listening and they're saying maybe I need to do some more composting here, is there a resource out there that you would direct them towards? 0:46:16 - Grant Estrade There's a. I don't have it right in front of me, but there's an all-in-farm composting book. There's a couple of universities put together. That's a free PDF. So if somebody Google all-in-farm composting, there's a. It's a book. It's a free PDF that you can download. Rodale has some really good composting information out there, but if you type in, if you just like Google commercial composting, you're going to be inundated with information. There's a lot of really good land grant university. You know PDFs and guides out there. A lot of it's very valid, it's very overwhelming, and so I reassure people by telling them that compost happens. You know, like just like what we had talked about a little bit before we started. You got to start. You know some place and so you know you, you make a pile and you kind of like tinker with it, figure it out, and then you start getting to hang up it a little bit. But yeah, there's tons of online reads from the different universities out there. You'll be overwhelmed. Youtube is an amazing resource for composting. There's so many. Yeah, you can quit your job and do nothing but look up how to compost online, that's for sure. 0:47:24 - Cal Hardage There we go. My wife will be so happy. I have a new topic to research, grant. It's been an excellent conversation, but it's time we go ahead and move on to our famous four questions Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our first question what's your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? 0:47:45 - Grant Estrade I think talking with individuals is probably my favorite thing to do. Having those relationships, seeking out those relationships, even if it's just a random email, be like, hey, you don't know who I am, but I want to say hi. And so I'm really a proponent of going out and finding, like people, mentors. You know, of course there's there's a lot of books, podcasts and different things out there, but I really encourage people to have some direct relationships with some people for that kind of interaction. That's my favorite resource. 0:48:15 - Cal Hardage Which is a wonderful selection, our wonderful suggestion. Yeah, completely agree. Now, one of our resources that gets brought up quite often, the Stockman Grass Farmer. I believe you do a little writing for. 0:48:29 - Grant Estrade That's been a lot of fun, some folks that helped us on our journey. You know we we could spend, we could talk about all these things for you know, for days on end. But we we saw that polyphase, specifically Daniel Salton to help us with getting the farm started a little bit. We ended up hosting a bunch of seminars where he came down and we sold spots and you know we did. We did a couple of events about four events over a year of the farm to speed up our learning curve a little bit and you know they become very good friends of ours. You know that got me talking to Joel a lot about, about, you know, business and things like leadership and the stuff that he talks about in his books. A big component of farming that I'm very interested in is, you know, goal setting, leadership. You know team building, personal and self development. What's a little geek when it comes to that I have personally noticed over the years is that the main reason why farms fail, especially Drets consumer farms, is because they they don't focus on a lot of these. You know quote unquote soft skills. They're very focused on production but they're not so much focused about on relationship building and a couple of different key aspects. And so, through a series of conversations with Joel, I was, you know, very happy. He asked me to start writing some articles on this. So the stuff I write for Stockman is not production focused, it's all people focused. It's how do you, how do you build yourself? You know what we were talking about before the podcast started, about you know some of the self doubt you had with podcasts. You know we all experience self doubt and no matter what we do, and if you don't experience self doubt, that means that you're lying, you know, to yourself and everybody else. You know we all, you know we all go into a new adventure being like, oh I, I suck, yeah, this isn't going to work out, and people are going to think I'm stupid, and you know talking about those things, and be like, look, we all feel that way about pretty much everything that we do in life, and so you know it's very important to self motivate yourself and surround yourself with people who are going to motivate you, and so those are the things I'm focused on. So, when it comes to Stockman, a lot of those, that's what I'm very focused on with the articles that I'm writing and, yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And then we're also doing Joel and I are teaching a class in October through Stockman. So that's going to be a pretty cool two day course and that's going to be focused kind of like on home setters who are kind of like looking to get their homestead activities and kind of start stealing it towards the business direction and for those who have existing farms to scale a little bit. So we're really going to be focused on a lot of the pain points that younger farmers or newer farms are experiencing. We are going to talk about production, but I'm really excited by talking about some of these. Some of these other aspects normally are not discussed, you know, at agricultural conferences and things, and so, yeah, so Stockman, yeah, if you don't know what Stockman is, go out and buy it. It's a great publication. 0:51:31 - Cal Hardage Oh it is, it is and it sounds like wonderful things are coming as well. On our next question what's your favorite tool to use on the farm? 0:51:41 - Grant Estrade Right now, I have to say, the favorite thing are my Bluetooth earbuds. So many of us, you know, are working in scenarios. Of course you need to be safe, so don't be silly and do something stupid, but if you're collecting eggs or if you're reeling of fence, for you to have an audio book or a podcast in your ears and just getting educated throughout the day is priceless to do that, and so I'm a big proponent of doing that Again, not when you know equipment is operating that can kill you, you know, but on that downtime where there's nothing running, you know, put your puts of your buds in and listen to some education, educational information. I personally tried to get as many hours of education and be audio books and such as any college, full-time college student would. Unfortunately, most adults, when they get out of high school or college, say they don't read books after that, and I think that that's something that we should change. You know one of my favorite phrases. I did not come up with it, but leaders are readers, and so if you want to be a leader in whatever the endeavor, is that you're involved in education, reading and getting good information. That's super important. So, yeah, I love my earbuds for my education. Get my education on that for sure. 0:53:02 - Cal Hardage Excellent. I, you know, I work in education on my day job and occasionally I will come across the educator that tells me I just don't read and I just cringe. Because I'm an avid reader and one of my recent finds are audio books. I've been kind of slow to that because I've always been focused. I've enjoyed podcasts and I listen to those, but I've started introducing some audio books into my cycle, which is really nice. But love reading and wish everyone did more. And our third question, grant, what would you tell someone just getting started For folks to get started. 0:53:41 - Grant Estrade If you're, you know, if you're homesteading or if you're getting into it as a you know drug to consumer business venture, there's really no difference between homesteading and farming. If you're starting out, so it's very important to pay attention to the economics of it, how much your time commitment is and how what you're doing, how how your farming adventure is going to affect and influence your social life. And so you know what I'm seeing a lot is folks getting into it really hard but they go oh, wait a minute, I can't do this socially. Or, you know, I have to start changing my lifestyle because it is a different type of lifestyle business. And so taking a lot of those things, consideration is very important. And so looking at the big picture of everything that you're about to do is super vital. So, no, ask yourself the important questions say, am I willing to sacrifice? You know, going going out to Friday night cocktail hour, you know things of that nature. So, yeah, and so, big picture, really look at you know what you're about to get yourself involved in to prevent any type of frustration or burnout or things of that nature. That's, those considerations are super important. An example for that is when people want to go out and buy property. I actually had this conversation the other day with somebody. They wanted to buy property like several hours away from any like real town area and and I was like, well, how is that going to affect your social life If you're truly out in the middle of nowhere you know who are you going to sell to, and then how are you know people attract people. You know people like being around other people and so whenever you're about to do it like understand it, you want to maybe get away, you know, and be that rural area. Just make sure you're setting yourself up to where you're not going to get so isolated that your mental health is going to suffer or you're going to have some sort of burnout because you need some work. You know you need good people around you and so so looking at the production is very important, but also looking at you know your, your mental health. 0:55:46 - Cal Hardage Excellent advice. Excellent. And lastly, Grant, where can others find out more about you? 0:55:52 - Grant Estrade Our website is laughingbudanertiarycom, and then our we've got social media Facebook and Instagram and everything for laughingbudanertiary as well as local pulling farms, so you can go, go laughingbudanertiary or local pulling farms and then you're going to come across us in some way shape or form. So we're, we're, we're out there. Very easy to find Well, thank you, Grant. 0:56:14 - Cal Hardage Appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. We've really enjoyed it. 0:56:18 - Grant Estrade Yeah, man, thank you for having me had a lot of fun, thank you. 0:56:21 - Cal Hardage You're listening to the Grazing Grass podcast, helping grass farmers, learn from grass farmers, and every episode features a grass farmer and their operation. If you've enjoyed today's episode and want to keep the conversation going, visit our community at communitygrazinggrasscom. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the Grazing Grass podcast on Facebook, twitter, instagram and YouTube for past and future episodes. We also welcome guests to share about their own grass farming journey. So if you're interested, feel out the form on grazinggrasscom under the be our guest link. Until next time, keep on grazing grass.