e76. Grass-Finished Beef and Custom Hay with Tanner McBride

0:00:00 - Cal Hardage Welcome to the grazing grass podcast, episode 76. 0:00:05 - Tanner McBride Don't buy more than you can afford. Start small and build up. I learned that the hard way multiple times and at some point I just had to sell, get rid of a whole bunch of things and, pretty well, start over Because I hadn't built my operation correctly. 0:00:22 - 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 Hardidge. On today's episode we have Tanner McBride of STK cattle and hay. They sell all natural grass finished beef as well as run a custom hay and hay sales business in Northwest Oklahoma. They also have a YouTube channel you'll want to subscribe to. But before we talk to Tanner, 10 seconds about my farm. I moved the two mobs together for a couple reasons. I want the herds together just so it's easier for me to get around and and move them. And secondly, I wanted to Combine the mobs so I had more bull power in case I had a bull that wasn't Shooting as good as he needed to. If I had a bull not doing as good as he needed to. I have them on a property I have a lease on, kind of a lease. I'm grazing it, excited. It's got lots of growth and I think cattle do really good there. One thing as I was getting ready for this podcast was like we have not been doing our review of the week so I went to various podcasting platforms to see about review and we do not have any current reviews. We've had a lot of people get on there and leave how many stars. But if you would get on there and leave us a review, we would greatly appreciate it because it helps get the word out about our podcast and when someone's out there looking and thinking, oh do I want to listen to this, they read the reviews and your review may be the one that causes them to subscribe and we greatly appreciate that. The older review that I don't think we've shared on the podcast is from cheaters 10. I Absolutely love this podcast and the farmers that have been interviewed on it. Well worth the follow. So much knowledge is shared on here. Thank you, appreciate it. So if you haven't left a review, please do. Also, please share this episode with someone you think will enjoy it. Tanner, we won't welcome you to the grazing grass podcast. We're excited You're here today. Thank you, good to be here. Tanner, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation? 0:02:44 - Tanner McBride We did custom hay growing up and we had. We had quite a few cows. I got sadded attractors, I think, as soon. As soon as I could hold down the buzzer for the seat, I was sitting in something and I wouldn't swear that they didn't put a sack of feed under me a couple times. Anyways, I grew up in in agriculture and going through high school, I never knew what I wanted to do afterwards. I always knew I wanted to do some kind of farming, but wasn't sure how that would ever fit in. After I graduated high school, I I went to college. I got a associate associates in Psychology like the idea of helping Teenagers, kids now that I have some, you know, I think they that's about all I can help. After that, went to OSU and Was still a psychology major. It took about two days of classes to realize those weren't my kind of people. Oh yeah. So I transferred into the College of Plain and Full Science and Animal Science as a double major, graduated from. Still water would be Oklahoma State University for those. Yeah, go poke. Exactly. I graduated from there in 2011. In that time, in 2011. We were in Oklahoma, we were in a flight drought, I think that's what you'd call it. I think it was hundred and hundred plus days of a hundred degree temperatures and I was a crop consultant straight out of college and did did seed sales and Walking corn circles in the middle of the hundred degree temperatures for that long. I decided there's probably something better to do and I bought a tractor and a baler. I'd already bought a quarter of land and it was in alfalfa and that's what I grew. 0:04:25 - Cal Hardage I grew up with a bunch of alfalfa, just second, tanner, when you say a quarter of a quarter of land, tell our listeners what you mean. I bought a hundred and sixty acres which is a quarter. I got an interesting story about that, tanner. I went to OSU get down down there. I'm from northeast Oklahoma, so land areas here are a little bit smaller than your area and I met one of my friends from was was from Western Oklahoma. All the time he didn't talk about acres or anything. He talked about quarters. I figured it out Well, I probably asked him, but I figured it out. But no one up in my area, or no one that I know up, refers to it as quarters. But I've heard that and known it for years. I just thought it was interesting. That's the way you've referred to it, right? 0:05:09 - Tanner McBride Yeah, that's yeah, in our area were quarters, half sections, sections. I'm in northwest Oklahoma so I wouldn't say we're more open. It's pretty rough and hilly in places out here but a lot of the land was has stayed in pretty big tracks, tracks, the land I'd say, oh yeah, we've got, you know there's. I've got a neighbor that's got an 80 and I rent an 80 here and there. But that's about as small as most most acreages go. 0:05:35 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah. 0:05:36 - Tanner McBride I do understand what you're saying, though that's in your area. That's like, well, I've got 20 acres and all kinds of weird weird numbers. 0:05:43 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, and the shapes are odd. You know a narrow 40. I got a neighbor, they've got a 60. It's gonna be a 30 because a brother and sister have it and one wants to sell on, the other doesn't. So you're gonna have a narrow 30 there, right? It's just interesting, not to me quarters in my now, just where I am, I'm almost on the dividing line. I'm just Craig County, which borders Kansas, and Rogers County, which runs south to Tulsa. Almost County line is a mile from me and you go from that County line north you can start talking about quarters, you can start talking about sections. It gets into big pieces. There's ranches north of me, okay, south of me, and I say that relative. There's hit and misses. I mean, there's a lot of small stuff around here still yet, but you go five miles north of me and it's all big stuff. You go south of me and then you're really into two and a half acres, five acres, ten acres, whatever it may be. There's still a few large pieces. There's a guy two miles south of me that still owns a section, which I think is it's so cool, he's got a section. I'd like to put it all together in one place, that's for sure, right? 0:06:53 - Tanner McBride Yeah, I might fill up with a section, but it's gonna be ten miles from one end of the other, from where up my most of my stuff is I. If you go a mile north, you lose the section lines and it's, oh yes, big. It's bigger tracks of land, couple thousand acres at a time. If you go about a mile north of me, there's a lot of canyons there and they've never divided it up. And that's my family's ranch that my dad runs about 1,800 acres Just continuous ranch. 0:07:23 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, nice. 0:07:24 - Tanner McBride So it's. I can't remember the exact. It's almost two miles wide and three miles long, if I remember right. 0:07:30 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, but it was continuous. It's just amazing, right well and that ranch. 0:07:36 - Tanner McBride I Really like history on land. Just kind of learned where it came from and that ranch used to be. I think it was 20 miles long and 20 miles wide, oh wow, and they sold it out piece by piece over the years. But you know we have oil wells on the property and it has the name of the previous owners and it's it's got the ranch name on some of the locations. Oh yeah, it's kind of cool. 0:08:02 - Cal Hardage It is interesting just as a point of interest. My great grandparents came from the Panhandle of Texas. I've been out there and I'm not real sure why they were out there, because you know they're talking acres to run a cow. I like where I am much better. But we still have. We still go to frame frame. Oh boy, we still go to family reunions out there. Still got a lot of family out there, right? 0:08:28 - Tanner McBride I'd say I think it was my great great grandparents homesteaded in this area. I've still got I got an uncle that lives on the old homestead. 0:08:37 - Cal Hardage Would that have been a land run time? Yes, yeah, that was 1893. 0:08:43 - Tanner McBride Oh wow, very nice. Yeah, they've kept that in the family. There's been other. A lot of my family was brought here to or came through the land runs. Some of the properties have been sold just due to family selling off land and so it passes away. It just didn't stay, yeah it happens. So the ranch where my dad that my dad operates, that was purchased in the 90s, that's not a not part of, wasn't set. You know, obviously we didn't settle that because it was a bigger ranch than previously. 0:09:13 - Cal Hardage Well, now, tanner, you mentioned you were crop consultant and you decided you need to do something different. You had a quarter of land, you went out and bought a tractor. 0:09:22 - Tanner McBride Yes, Then I partnered with my dad. He was still doing custom hay at the time. Partnered with him, he had all the other equipment plus his own tractor and baler. We made it by the end of the first season of baling hay together. He said I don't think there's room on our family operation for two of us. So, oh yeah, at that point I had to find make the decision which I'd stopped the crop consulting, stopped my seed sales business and had to make a decision on what I was going to do. So I ended up buying all my own hay equipment. Another swath I bought a swath there in a rake and decided that was what I was going to do as well. But we never. Since then there hasn't been much of a what you'd call family operation. We, oh yeah, we'd both do the same thing, but we do it in the same area. It's not together. So I don't know, I don't know how that's going to look in the future. I always liked the idea of having a family farm, but at some point you just got to do your own thing and make it work. 0:10:18 - Cal Hardage And that family farm. You know generations. It's a tough thing just to work the multiple generations. And, like your dad said, you got to be able to make a living there and then you've got to do it for two families, I know with my dad and I I work with my dad and then I have my own stuff because, well, his farm's not big enough. So while I do a lot of the stuff here he's still. He's still in charge here and tells me what I should be doing and then I go out and do what I think needs done. But then I try and cover those things too. But it's tough for multiple generations to do it. I've got a daughter that she's told me she wouldn't mind coming home but and working on the farm. But right now we can't afford that. I'm hope, hopefully we'll get there in the future. 0:11:08 - Tanner McBride And that's my goal is to have something to pass down generationally. And, like I said, I don't know how my family stuff is going to work because the ranch my dad operates is still owned by my grandpa. Oh yeah, so I've heard I don't know which podcaster said it first but ranch is move on one funeral at a time. So it's true, my grandpa is 83 years old and he still makes a good share of the decisions. 0:11:35 - Cal Hardage So well, just so, I'm, I'm here and I'm I'm running cattle on Leastland and I actually live on my dad's place, so dad's running cows here. We go up. This is kind of funny. We go up the road two miles and my parents live on my grandparents place and it's actually it's their little five acres now, but grandma and grandpa is still running cattle up there. 0:12:01 - Tanner McBride Well, that's. My dad owns 15 acres in the middle of my grandpa's ranch. I own five acres in half section 320 acres. That is my parents, and I rent that from them. So that's it. It's the kind of a messy situation, but I guess it is what it is. 0:12:18 - Cal Hardage Yeah, I'm not. I'm not very knowledgeable about ranch succession. I think at times I need to know more. But yeah, it's. It's an interesting deal, especially on these family places where you get multiple generations going and then you know my grandparents place, the way that's going to spread out. But yeah, that could take up a whole time talking about it. We need someone more knowledgeable than me on here, right? 0:12:44 - Tanner McBride I like listening to podcasts about it and trying to get ideas. I've tried talking to family about it and they said, no, that's not how it works. Everyone gets you know three kids, it goes in the third, four kids, it goes in the quarter. 0:12:58 - Cal Hardage You divide it into fours and like whoa Right, and that's really the way my grandparents and parents feel they they have divided it. So my grandparents farm and I'm far enough East. We call it a farm. Some other people might call it a ranch. It's big enough. It's not huge, though it's going to be divided among their four kids. And then I've got two siblings and my parents say it's going to be divided among the three of you and that's, that's completely within that. You know, I tell my parents whatever they want to do. If I get none of it, I'm good, I'm happy. I just want them to enjoy whatever they're doing and what they want to do. Right. When you look at it from a different direction, of keeping the ranch viable for future generations, that becomes a different conversation. You chop land down one generation, chop it down another generation Pretty quickly. You don't have a sustainable operation. 0:13:57 - Tanner McBride You know, in my area I think that claim we need somewhere between 10 and 20 acres, dependent on the land land that we're using. But we need 10 to 20 acres per cow. Oh yeah, it gets really hard to make a living. I mean, on 320 acres if I went by the FSA, whatever, suggesting that's not a whole lot of cows. I mean that's 16 cows. I mean I don't think that that's going to pay anyone's bills long term. 0:14:25 - Cal Hardage Yeah, it's an interesting dilemma that I don't have the answer for. I'm trying to lease land so I can be running more cattle, and at some point I hope I have enough cattle I can retire from my day job. Right now I've got a nice herd, but it's not near big enough to to fund what I want to buy. You know that's right. 0:14:49 - Tanner McBride And well, I guess that that probably leads into all the next step of my journey, somewhat, because I started leasing land. I had that quarter, the 160 acres that I owned. You know, I got out of college and I was I was dead certain it's an irrigated 160 acres, 120 acres under irrigation. I was certain I was going to have alfalfa mate, still hated dairies, fertilized, rung water, spray every cutting. There were no cattle on that property. So I went to another 160 acres and it was what you'd call a fixer upper. There were no fences. Land was. They wanted it put to grass. It was 60 acres of the skeet trees and native grass and 100 acres. That was in Milo. That farm, from what they told me, had not been fertilized in 50 years. Oh yeah, and they said well, we want part of the unit. Is you're going to plant this to grass, build fences and kill the musket trees? I did all that along the way. I'm like you know, start thinking about stuff I'd done in college as far as, or read about that a rotational grazing, and I didn't know how to do it, but I knew it was a thing. I took the 100 acres and I divided it into 30 acre tracks, started rotating. Then I had the 60 acres is kind of where I'd wintered the cattle on, I'd say in the end I ended up with a really nice blue stem field. I was still cutting that for hay and selling some hay off of that. That was before I had fully set with me that bailing hay takes a lot out of your land and I hadn't started a regenerative journey at that point. I'd fertilize, I'd spray and my cattle were getting. Like I said, I had a field of alfalfa, so my cattle got alfalfa. Hey, they got cattle cubes, they got protein tubs. I never the most overfed Heard a cows you ever saw. But that's what they tell you to do. Finally, one year I had, I was started reading on my kind of doing a oh, I don't know what you thought about sheet or just checking where my money was going and coming from on that property, and I was. I was upside down in every calf, hundreds of dollars. Well, I could have been selling that hay and could have you know. So I started changing everything and I still wasn't a hundred percent on the ridge of journey. But I decided my cows were too big. And there were. They were around 1400 pounds, but oh yeah, good sized cows. So I started buying buying Aberdeen Angus bulls so that I was using those to reduce my herd size. I guess I should back up. I bought my original cows from my grandpa, who has the herd with my dad in In 2011, whenever we were in the drought, he was selling, introducing his herd, so I bought I think it was around 16 red heifer prices were low because we were in a drought and got Me in in. The cattle at least was familiar with yes. And, like I said, I started using Aberdeen bulls to reduce this herd size. Then then, somewhere around 2018, the cattle market was up. Well, I've made the brilliant idea to buy bred heifers and Leverage my others half of my herd against it, and all that was a wreck. In 25th, I looked real dumb. 0:18:16 - Cal Hardage You know hindsight will make you look that way, but when you're, when you're standing there trying to make that decision, it's not as clear cut as hindsight makes it. 0:18:25 - Tanner McBride No, but you're looking at taking hindsight and they care in the cattle cycle. Right now we're we're coming back into high cattle prices. I'm not going to buy any. 0:18:35 - Cal Hardage Yeah, it's gonna have to be the right deal to buy any. 0:18:39 - Tanner McBride I paid three thousand dollars ahead for some and thirty four hundred for some others, and they weren't even registered. 0:18:45 - Cal Hardage I don't know what I was thinking back then, but I've seen prices, people getting that now so it'll be interesting. I bought a just a handful. Six had no, seven had a Korean day heifers. I got them pretty cheap. Of course I'm watching, I watch Craigslist and stuff and it's amazing the prices on Craigslist. For those people that's not familiar with Craigslist, it's just a marketplace on the web and I I Watched that and it's always very interesting to watch those prices. I got these Korean day heifers I thought for a decent price brought him in. Everything since then has been quite a bit higher than what I paid. So I'm I may have just lucked out on my timing there. 0:19:27 - Tanner McBride Yeah, no it's, and I at that, you know, up until 2020, I was running nothing but a herford and Angus mixed herd using an Aberdeen bull on them, but my Aberdeen bulls kept falling apart, kept getting hurt. I'd only get one or two seasons out of them. The country was, I don't know, country was too rough or what, but you know the genetics. A lot of them were used too much as show cattle then. Oh yeah, rather than you know, hardy, hardy cattle, they've they've been pampered a little too much. There's what I came to learn and that led me on to Fero cattle company. Oh yes, so I started buying bulls from them. But in 20, in 2020 it was before I think it's before all the COVID stuff I I've partnered with a neighbor of mine because I had at that time I had lost my lease on the grass that I was running my cows on. I sprigged my alfalfa field to Bermuda, so I had a Bermuda. I took my cows down to that and At the same time, was able to rent the 320 acres that I, so it all kind of rotated right then. I guess you'd say oh yeah and I needed more cows. I went from having 160 acres of grass to 300 and a circle of Bermuda. So my neighbor had Corey and he cows. I'm good friends with them. We've I. Whenever it comes time to Gather and work calves, I go help him. He comes, helps me all the time. So I said, hey, just bring me about 40 of them. And so I started custom grazing his cows, and that was an. I had heard about it. I had just started watching Greg Judy in 2020. Oh yeah, and which? When COVID hit, I had nothing better to do than watch Greg Judy. Yeah so you know, I started, you know, doing a little work on this custom grazing stuff. We made it work until the strout hit. But in 2020, our youngest son passed away, at two years old in an accident. 0:21:35 - Cal Hardage Oh no, sorry to you, and thank you. 0:21:37 - Tanner McBride But at that point things started changing. Our family priorities changed. I completely changed our cattle operation to. I was fully invested with grass bed at that. After that I haven't fertilized since 2018. I think because oh yeah. I decided that that doesn't pay me any money and so I was trying to figure it out and researching options back then. But I'd say at that point my whole operation took a kind of mate, took a completely different track than it had been on. But now we grass finished in in the drought. We sold out the partnership on the custom grazed cattle and I threw that deal. He paid me in half Korean heifers out of no Baylor Red Angus bulls. I Provided the bulls for the for the custom grazing, because he we just mixed them in with my perforated Angus herd. We ran my bulls. He had been running charlay bulls in which they'll make a great calf mixed with Korean he's. So you can, you can tell her part, they're crossbred, but they go out those. Those calves get bigger than the cow. So I mean it's, it's a if for a terminal cross. I really like it. But I was keeping heifers out of the red Angus bulls I had and that's kind of the foundation of our herd is. I've crossed down to mostly red Angus, red Angus cross cows that are starting with fairer genetics now oh yeah. Then we grass finished the steers on our Bermuda field that really gives you a nice way. I give them a higher plane of nutrition it bads, but along in there, somewhere my irrigation system quit and the prices of a new irrigation system due to COVID went from. I could buy a new new system for $50,000 five years ago. Now they're around 120,000. So the one you I make, you know, while you're making land payments, that's a hard pill to swallow. I don't think I could pencil that out on corn. I don't think I could pencil it out on anything. I haven't fixed the irrigation system and my cattle or I can rotate them into. Every time I move them they're in belly deep Bermuda grass with no fertilizer and no irrigation. That's all that that's been in the drought. I had to destock some, but we've got close to 40 steers out there right now it's it's holding them, holding them pretty good. 0:24:05 - Cal Hardage Oh well, good, good, now have you had pretty good rain this year, decent rain this year. 0:24:11 - Tanner McBride We have. I think all the rain we lost in 21 and 22 came in May or came in June and July this year and that's the way it works. 0:24:22 - Cal Hardage I was watching Sunup other day and they were talking about, due to the rain, the corn in Western Oklahoma Didn't develop the roots like it normally does, so they're concerned about it toppling over. We get later in the year, gets taller, we get wind and stuff, and then also we've got kind of a little bit of a dry period and those roots just aren't going down as far to get water right then that's as a crop consultant I've I've had to deal with that and I know exactly what you're talking about. 0:24:56 - Tanner McBride You've got to stress the plant a little bit to you, make it push those roots down into the profile, and when you're in a Conventional tillage system you don't have a whole lot of soil profile to use. So I think it's a kind of a compounding issue. 0:25:09 - Cal Hardage Now you started with your Pharaoh cattle four or five six years ago. 0:25:15 - Tanner McBride No, I bought my first one in 20, just 2021 actually. 0:25:19 - Cal Hardage Oh, okay, but do you have half first Kevin, out of that that are out sired by that bull. So my first first year. 0:25:27 - Tanner McBride Right now I've got half first out of the first bull getting bread. Right now. I, the first year I turned my because I didn't know what to make of the whole deal. So I turned my Red Angus Faro Bullion with my Aberdeen Bull that I was using with my Heifers and wouldn't you know the Faro Bull only through bull caps. That first year I every cap I had was out of my Aberdeen Bull or every Heifer I had was out of the Aberdeen Bull and my. I have five steers out of my Faro Bull. I sold some steers or some Heifers that year. That guy said that he got a bunch of Red Heifers and in 2020, when I started renting this 320 acres from my parents. The agreement was I bought my, bought my dad's caps from him. He has around a hundred head and he selects his top 15 Heifers every year to keep. So I was breeding I guess you'd call this Cole Heifers and that was to help justify paying paying for an extra bull. That because you know, at that point I was wasn't a hundred percent bought into the Faro cattle, but I wasn't. 0:26:38 - Cal Hardage I definitely was finally in that way Enough to buy a bull, at least Right and and to be honest, I've. I've looked at them. We have not bought one, but it has crossed my mind, more so for my dad's herd rather than my herd. Of course I say that we share bulls, so his breeding season is different than mine, which works out really good, but I'm using South Pole bulls right now. But those Faro cattle, they intrigue me. I don't know if I'll do it, but they intrigue me. 0:27:09 - Tanner McBride Well, last weekend was the Texas bull bull working day for Faro cattle company and I went down there and I I went. I was down there for the bull working. I've been down there the last two fall season bull workings, oh yeah, and they have some really nice South Poles in there too. I I've started running the. I've got two Red Angus bulls right now and a Rob Pierce, which he's he's up by Tahlequah, northeast Oklahoma. I'll just leave it at that. I don't I don't remember the exact name, but he is running what he calls a quarter quarter, half. It is a quarter Mishona, quarter Coriini and half Red Angus. I bought one of those bulls and this is my first season to use him, but so we're expecting some a little more heat tolerant cattle coming out of our herd. And I think because through the partnership with my neighbor I have a lot of half Coriini's in now, I do kind of, like you said, I, whenever I see a, or whenever I see a load of Coriini sitting on Facebook or someone selling five or eight or something, I I really start getting an itch to go hook on the trailer and go pick some up. I've done that a few times. I see, right now I have eight bull Coriini's that I had bought and they're a bottom last fall and they're in with my. They're in with the bull now They'll be getting bred to start calving in next May, hopefully. 0:28:38 - Cal Hardage I've got. This is the first season I've got any Coriini's with South Pole calves on them. 0:28:43 - Tanner McBride I'm liking those calves right now, so yeah, I have a friend that really tried to convince me to put a South Pole bull over my Coriini's. He's a little further south of me in Oklahoma but he's running quite a few Coriini cows and breeding him up through South Poles. I don't know why, but the four breed composite kind of scared me at that time and now I'm running a Moshona Coriini red Angus bull so I guess it really didn't matter. 0:29:07 - Cal Hardage You bring up a valid point there, you you start running into some cross breads or even you know the composite, rather not South Pole composite or breed. Of course you get all those genes in there. You don't know exactly what's coming out and that's always the scary part now. But the South Pole I feel fairly confident with them. The ones I've looked at I've been very impressed with. My biggest concern is size on them, because I we've traditionally had limousine cross and these are much smaller cattle. Of course we're trying to be more efficient, make more money while we're at it. 0:29:43 - Tanner McBride And you know, as, as soon as I got this 320 acres, I think my dad thought I was going to keep running it the same way he did. It's divided into four 80 acre pastures and 180 was set aside to run 20 to 30 cows year round, and that's what he did. He fed them. They had to get fed a lot to do that, but in that 80 acres is still, it's a weed patch. It's slowly coming around but it's it's pretty tough. The other three 80 acre pastures he had this once or twice every summer. We had planted them to rye and we are very sandy here. So if we don't do any, if we just could field and don't do anything with it, it'll turn into sand dunes. It's, it's fine. I mean I I thought about renting the land out recreation. I could make more money. 0:30:33 - Cal Hardage But If you can cover liability insurance Right. 0:30:37 - Tanner McBride I don't know how to do that one. But as soon as I started renting it, I of course brought these long horns and coriini crosses and painted up cattle and my dad called me and asked what are you doing? I was like, oh, I'm making money. And he said you'll never make money with those cows. He said I don't think you need those on the property. I said, well, I'm renting it. So well, I guess I'll just figure it out. But we had at that time we were running on this 320 acres, just the cows out here. We had between 100 and 120 cows on the property which, when I decided to rent this property, my dad told me yes, you can rent it. He pulled his cows off. The crab grass out here was thigh high and I thought I really have to bring these cows out. We have, we'll have ample grass, it's going to be great. And he told me he said well, he said yeah, you could take it over first in November and this would have been around the first of September. I came home from Bailing Hay and I was failing at night. I wasn't looking in the pastures I live. In the past in one of the pastures I hadn't paid any attention. He had this. All three 80 acre pastures that were full of crab grass and the cattle were going to be there that weekend. They were a week away whenever he decided he was going to disk it, because I didn't own any tillage equipment because I had pretty well invested in the no till. He thought he was doing me a favor by dishing under that ready, but he was just getting under that ratty crabgrass for me so I could plant my rye. I was like, oh, come on, I was so good, I was gonna get a good two or three months of grazing out of that crabgrass I had. At first we put those cattle down on the Bermuda at that time I didn't have calves on it or anything, so I let them graze off the Bermuda and then we moved them up here in I Do know till a rye mix then into about in on the Bermuda and on the crabgrass. So that gives winter grazing if it rains and doesn't die from, say, no rain for a year. I've seen that happen recently. But so and that that's that works really well in this area. We don't have cool season grasses so I have to plant, plant annuals to do that. We can pretty reliably get crabgrass and I Don't know if all your listeners will know what this is, but we have what we call sandburst or stickers. It's we have about an equal part Crabgrass to equal sandburst. It's not the best in the world. It's definitely definitely not any fun to pick those things out of your paint legs. For any cows lead up. I guess if you got horn cattle they eat spiky things. I don't. 0:33:23 - Cal Hardage I guess. So whatever is working for you, you know you gotta go with right anyway. 0:33:29 - Tanner McBride So that's for the most part. That's the cattle operation Are you? 0:33:33 - Cal Hardage are you still doing custom Hain I? 0:33:35 - Tanner McBride do some. I ended up in 2017 or 18. I started renting, renting land from a commercial pig farm. They do not allow cattle on the property. I bail hay on that and there's roughly 800 acres of hay ground on that. I'd call it Marginally irrigated and it has irrigation on it and they apply pig manure through the irrigation system and Some fields get it once a year manure applied once a year. Some it might be every other year or every three to five years. So it depends on which pig barn I guess it's on that property. But I do do some custom hay. A lot of it I do for neighbors on chairs. Oh yeah and I sell most of the hay. I bail on my rent ground and I Keep my neighbor's shares, usually for feeding my own cattle. I don't know, I don't know if that's the right thing or not, but I almost feel like I've got less invested in it versus planting the seed. Then I do use some commercial fertilizer on that on my hay ground. I try to wean myself off of it, but whenever you're extracting nutrients in a hay operation it's hard to get around, unless I get pig manure, which that's but a great help to keeping that going at times. 0:35:05 - Cal Hardage Yeah, you don't have grazing animals to run across it and help it out. I assume that pig manure is a lot like chicken manure. It'll make rocks grow. 0:35:13 - Tanner McBride It could either make them grow or it'll burn them. Just the high concentration in the in the manure. Sometimes it gets highly concentrated and I think it gets high in salt. Sometimes it will kill a crop. I've ran into that but so far they've worked with me to plan the applications a little better. 0:35:33 - Cal Hardage So oh, well, very good it's been a learning process. I find most things are and, tanner, it's been a great conversation thus far, but it's time we move on to our overgrazing section, and for that we're gonna swing back to cattle and talk a little bit more about cattle, alrighty. 0:35:50 - Tanner McBride I've got neighbors, we've got you. Look in their cow herds or even in my, my own family's cow herds. There's cows that I just call freeloaders. They have a calf every other year but you know that cap they bring in, they claim it, they wean the biggest calf every other year. Or you got your pet cow or whatever, whatever you want to call them, and I had that for plenty of time and I still. I still have cows that are named and I tell them goodbye when they get off the trailers at the sale bar too. But and that that's been a big change. But we moved from calving in January and February to May 1st calving. My first calf came April 26th this year and I keep three bulls and I run one bull for 21 days. I pull him out and that's usually my youngest bull, my most recent recently Purchased bull, I pull him out. I put my next bull, next oldest bull, in for 21 days and then continue that within 21 days of my oldest bull at the very end, and Most years I will only have one or two cows have after the first 45 or so days of calving season. Oh yeah, that allows, and the ones that don't breed turn my bull back out. I preg check everything the first week in March. At that time all my neighbors in this area have moved to calving in December so and they're still spring calving. They claim, if I've heard my bulls out first of March to cover any opens they meet their calving window found that has been a good way to market my cold cows and that, like I said, my neighbors say you know, I, I, I preg check my cows. There's a second week of August and I've got, oh, I think, two-thirds of the ones that were open. They ended up breeding up to have December 1st and when I took the sale barn, luckily count cattle prices are up. I couldn't argue with it, so I just took them in. But you know, whenever you try selling a Whole cow that doesn't calve until June, you do get. You will take a hit on that price. Where I found for myself and in my area December, january calving idea, I don't like it but it's a, it's marketing. I can't tell my neighbors what to do, so but if they want to pay for it I'll let them. 0:38:18 - Cal Hardage Yeah, if it's working for them. And that's a great way to look at what's your area looks like, what's going on there nearby, and how you can take a product of lower value and increase the value to meet the need right there, close to you. 0:38:35 - Tanner McBride Yeah, some years an open cow brings just as much as the sale barn as a bread cow. If I pet Preg check first of March, that's also whenever I wean my calves. So I'm weaning my calves at the full 10 month, about 10 months of age. So if I find opens at that time I've weaned their calves, I have, I guess, the last valuable thing to me. So you know, you look at the cattle market and if it's not going to pay to To turn a bull out with them or graze them for another six to eight months to Get them into a calving window, that matches, you know, some of my neighbors and what's more common in my area. I have taken some just to the sale barn. 0:39:13 - Cal Hardage All you. All these decisions based upon price are really fluid with what the market's doing, and and another. Another thing is if you're, you're gonna have enough grass to graze them that much longer, and I don't. 0:39:25 - Tanner McBride I don't want to lead people into thinking that doing the same thing every year always works. There's always a dude, something new so there is. 0:39:34 - Cal Hardage You know you got to have a plan, but then you've got to be aware of what's happening and and be willing to change plan. You got to be flexible about it. I still think that's a great way to look at a Potentially lower value animal and figuring out how to get a little bit more value out of it. 0:39:51 - Tanner McBride And in the only other way I see that happening is in one pound packages of hamburger. So I'm not set up to Store that much hamburger meat yet slow Hopefully it's in time. I'll Develop a system for that. 0:40:06 - Cal Hardage Have you started? Are you selling grass-fed beef? Now I am. 0:40:11 - Tanner McBride I am selling mostly the family and friends right now. Due to the drought I had to sell most of my steers for a little bit and I only had four four last year and five this year I but next year I should have 20 steers that I'll be looking to To market and I don't. I won't say every one of them will finish. Some of those go to hamburger. 0:40:36 - Cal Hardage They make high quality hamburger me if it's yeah, you know, I was planning on finishing grass, finishing some or Growing some out this year, seeing where I was in the process, but I ended up selling them last December because we got short on grass here and it was dry. I ended up marketing them and I could have made money holding them to March and marketing them, but I didn't have the grass or the hay to get them there. So you know, all these factors contribute. 0:41:05 - Tanner McBride That was the one thing I had last year is I had plenty of pay. I keep three years of pay, three years worth of pay, on hand at all time, which I guess, being the guy that builds his own hay, I can do that. But I made that a point after the 2011 drought and then following into some smaller droughts we had had through the years, I never let myself get go into a winner with less than at least a hundred. A hundred and fifty bells of grass, hey, on hand, and it didn't have to be good quality, but if it would rough a count through the winter, then it was better than nothing. Well, I know, yeah, I didn't like selling $150 hay to other people and I didn't want to take it. Take a hit on it. My math showed that if I kept all my cows and all my steers Until the green grass came and that is praying and Assuming that the grass is gonna come in the spring at some point or summer, that the drought was gonna break, because I Fed down to the last, I think I had 50 bells of hay left when it started raining. I think I started with over 500. I made the decision that if I fed through the year I would make more on the cows than I would sell in the hay. 0:42:21 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, and that's just something I had to pencil out. Well, tanner, it is time for our famous four questions. Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our very first question what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? I? 0:42:37 - Tanner McBride started with a Greg Judy video and a working cows podcast. I Just went to the very first videos they ever put video or podcast I ever saw and just started there. But I mean there's there's a lot of podcasts that are great. There's a lot of youtubers that I mean that they're doing a great job. I mean it. I won't say every one of them. They're probably got it, got it right for the area, I don't know. But you can learn a lot of stuff from everyone and just take what you need and apply it to your own operation. So I'm not much of a leader. So it's always listen the podcast or watching a YouTube video before I go to bed or something. 0:43:19 - Cal Hardage I am a reader but, boy, I love my podcast. I love Saturday morning when I get up I gotta catch sun up, but then I usually I get caught up on my YouTube videos, so I kind of get started a little bit later on Saturday morning just because I'm doing that. But I look forward to that time and and I'm invested in those farms that I watch on YouTube, that you know I'm like what are they doing now? 0:43:44 - Tanner McBride I like watching those. Will it run videos on pickups? I'm fascinated by that and that's something I want to add to my own YouTube channel eventually. I don't know how that'll work with the algorithm, but I just I really enjoy it. 0:43:57 - Cal Hardage I get a kick out of those my theory on content creation Create something you'd want to watch or listen to. There's gonna be some other people out there that feel the same way as you. Oh, exactly. Our second question, tanner what is your favorite tool to use on the farm? 0:44:13 - Tanner McBride I'm gonna say my family. It's great going out there with my wife and kids and you know I got my my post carriers. Each kid carry in the post. I mean it's that's the one thing that keeps operation going. 0:44:26 - Cal Hardage I debate from time to time about getting a four-wheeler or a side-by-side. I look at prices of things and I decide I'm getting a four-wheeler. But then I remember I love it when my wife goes out and she doesn't have to do anything but ride in it and I'll do everything. I just love her company going out there. So it really, once I stop and think about it, I'm getting a side-by-side. I just haven't done it yet. 0:44:54 - Tanner McBride Yeah, we've got a the Ranger crew so we can get all four of us and a couple dogs in the Ranger and that that's how we go out and take care of cattle good family time. So then the kids get to learn something and but I mean I, I could do it without the Ranger. I mean it'd be a whole lot more walking. I have a old four-wheeler. I could do it without that. One thing I don't think I could do it without his family. 0:45:20 - Cal Hardage So yeah, yeah, we're a good answer, tanner, that that should earn you some points too. I'm brown those and real hard. Now our third question, tanner what would you tell someone just getting started? 0:45:31 - Tanner McBride Don't buy more than you can afford. Start small and build up. I learned that the hard way multiple times and at some point I just had to sell, get rid of a whole bunch of things and, pretty well, start over Because I hadn't built my operation correctly from. You know, on the hanging side I bought a nice tractor and Baylor which the tractor can, you know, pull a drill, everything like that. So I justified that. But I could have got by with about half the swath or I bought and I could have got by with About half the rake I bought and, yeah, by affordable cattle. I mean, don't just spend all your money on that. Save some money to build your fences, save some money to put in water Infrastructure, save some money to live on. I mean you can get yourself in a hole real quick. 0:46:20 - Cal Hardage Excellent advice, tanner and lastly Tanner, where can others find out more about you? A YouTube channel. 0:46:27 - Tanner McBride STK cattle and hay. I try to post weekly. Sometimes it happens three times a week and sometimes I skip a week, so I haven't gotten real consistent there. But I also have an email address if anyone wants to email me. But I give me a second and I'll remember the email address. 0:46:45 - Cal Hardage SDK underscore cattle at yahoocom. 0:46:49 - Tanner McBride So if anyone would like wants to reach out, ask you anything, just talk. I don't care. I sit in a tractor for 10 to 12 hours a day usually, so if you can handle listening to a Baylor beef in the background, I'll talk to you. 0:47:01 - Cal Hardage Well, tanner, thank you for coming on and sharing with us today, really enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate it. You have a blessed day you too, tanner. You're listening to the grazing grass podcast, helping grass farmers, learn from grass farmers, and Every episode features a grass farmer in their operation. If you've enjoyed today's episode and want to keep the conversation going, visit our community at community dot. Grazing grass calm. 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 about the form on grazing grass calm under the Be our guest link. Until next time, keep on grazing grass, you.