e78. Positive Disruption with Aaron Prinz

0:00:01 - Cal Hardage Welcome to Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 78. 0:00:05 - Aaron Prinz Just start with whatever resources you have. Whatever problems come along, find a creative solution, and if you just think outside the box, you can generally get most things done. 0:00:15 - 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 show we have Aaron Prince. We talk about multi-species grazing, also doing that in California and then ending up South Dakota Travel across the country. Great episode and I have to say thank you to Aaron. Due to some technical difficulties, we had to record this twice, so we'll talk to Aaron in just a moment For 10 seconds about my farm. Again, we bring up weather. We got a little bit of rain. There's been a light frost around. It hasn't been too bad here, but I know some people's gotten a little bit heavier frost than we have. My parents live in a lower area near a creek and they are always a couple degrees colder than I am. Also, anytime this frost or freezing comes up, gotta be careful with Johnson grass. So you're out there, get a frost. We've got Johnson grass. Might want to get tested. I saw someone on Facebook from Oklahoma got theirs tested and it showed it was high in peruseycast right now and it sounded like they'd got a frost. So I'm not sure. Be careful. Anyway, I'm enjoying the cooler weather. It does make me sad that the growing season will be slowing way down. I'm enjoying the fall temperatures or autumn temperatures right now. Anyway, enough of that. Let's find out what's on the calendar. Let's talk to Aaron. Aaron, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited you're here today. 0:02:05 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. 0:02:07 - Cal Hardage Aaron, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation? 0:02:11 - Aaron Prinz Sure, so I technically am a first generation farmer. My family does have some history. Most of my grandparents all grew up on farms, but they were all kind of the first generation off the farm as well, so there's no family land to return to or anything like that, and I got my my start raising animals with 4-H and I'm working on other family friends farms in Southern California where I grew up. Then I attended Cal Poly, san Luis Obispo, and I got a degree in animal science, and while I was working there on campus, I worked at the swine unit and the poultry unit and no cows for summer at the dairy, and then, once I graduated, I spent most of my career post-graduation in the commercial pork industry. I did have a brief stint with working on an organic dairy farm that had a large pastured laying hen operation as well, and then in 2019, I got the opportunity to get my own sheep, and so that's kind of where Prince Pasture started, and we started in the Sacramento Valley of California and then in September of 2021, we moved to South Dakota. 0:03:21 - Cal Hardage So that kind of is the oh, very good, I want to jump way back. I won't say way back If we were jumping back to days when for 4-H or FFA, for me that would be way back, not near as far. For you, you did 4-H, so what did you do in 4-H and what attracted you to 4-H? 0:03:42 - Aaron Prinz Well, I'm actually I was a fourth generation 4-H'er, so I don't know that I had a lot of choice. My parents signed me up, I showed pigs and poultry and beef cattle in 4-H and I was in it for about 10 years, I believe 4-H is a tremendous organization and always happy to see kids participating in it and all the things they provide. 0:04:07 - Cal Hardage I did not do 4-H. We did FFA Same type of thing except you started a little bit later. But I showed dairy cattle. I was not one of the smarter people because I spent too much time on a dairy farm and sounds like you only spent a little while on a dairy farm. 0:04:25 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, that's true. We do have a family milk cow now, even though I had told my wife I'm never milking anything again. And here we are. 0:04:32 - Cal Hardage Funny how that happens. So you went. So you decided you wanted to get an animal science degree. What made you want to do that? Was it the time in 4-H? Was it your grandparents' farms? 0:04:44 - Aaron Prinz I would say 4-H had a lot to do with it. And then in high school I had worked on our friend's dairy farm. I did a lot more feeding and stuff with hay with them. And then I also worked on a pig farm in my hometown that raised pigs for biomedical research. So it wasn't even agriculturally related at all, but it was still working with the animals. 0:05:03 - Cal Hardage So yeah, still working with livestock. 0:05:05 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, exactly Yep, and so those kinds of things. I knew I wanted to be in agriculture. I wanted to work with the animals and pigs are my favorite species to work with, so those were all kind of the reasons that led me towards an animal science degree. 0:05:20 - Cal Hardage So you got your animal science degree and I have a suspicion Reginative agricultural practices weren't covered in great detail there. 0:05:32 - Aaron Prinz No, at the time there was one instructor and he actually was teaching the only holistic management class at a college level, and so I did get exposed to it there. And then, even before that, in early high school, my mom had come across Joel Salikin's books and she actually had sent me out to Virginia for a week all by myself. I was only maybe 14 or 15 years old, and so those were kind of the things that had exposed me to holistic management. As I mentioned in the beginning, I worked on that organic dairy as well, and they utilized holistic management practices too. So even though it wasn't covered a lot in my animal science curriculum at all, I did have some exposure as well. 0:06:12 - Cal Hardage Yeah, lots of other exposure. Now, when you went out to Virginia, do you go polyface farm and spend a week there? 0:06:19 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, I did Like I said. I think I was only 14 or 15. I can't believe. My parents just sent me across the country by myself, but it all worked out. Here I am. I'm still here. 0:06:30 - Cal Hardage So I'm sure you were thinking I am plenty mature enough to do this and I'm sure as your kids get to that age, you'll be like what were they thinking? But that was an amazing opportunity for you to go out there and spend a week out there. 0:06:46 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, yeah, I learned a lot and it was definitely a good experience. I've been, you know, 14 or 15 years I don't remember every little detail, but it definitely was a positive thing for sure. 0:06:56 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, I can totally see that it would be. So you got out of college, you worked in the pork industry for a number of years and then, in 2019, you got some sheep. 0:07:09 - Aaron Prinz Yep, it's kind of a unique way that I got started. My wife was brand rep for that farm that I used to work for because they were launching their own milk line. And somebody came by through the table and she started talking with them and he said, oh, I've got all these sheep and I had been thinking about getting into sheep at that time. So she mentioned it to him. So he said your husband needs to give me a call. And so I did, and he had about around 10,000 head of sheep and goats that he used for the service grazing. And so I gave him a call and we talked it over and he had a really unique way that he was trying to support young people getting into grazing, and so he essentially gave me breeding females and then, instead of having to pay him with cash or money in a certain amount of years, I had to pay him back 20% interest in breeding females, so he had to get his initial group of used back and he needed to get some new lambs back as well to equal that 20% interest. So once that opportunity was presented to me, I didn't think there is any better way of getting started with low capital, and so we just went for it. 0:08:16 - Cal Hardage I would love to talk a little bit more about that, if you're open to it, because that is a very novel approach to help a young farmer get started, because having the capital to buy breeding stock is often one of the hindrances, one of the hurdles a young farmer has to come across. So he provided you breeding stock and then you paid him back with you lambs you had raised until you paid off the original investment plus the interest. 0:08:48 - Aaron Prinz Yep, that's correct. And then, because of us moving to South Dakota, we paid him back in all one big chunk, which was kind of the way he wanted it. He wanted to keep in annual records of how many lambs I paid him back. He wanted me to grow the herd as flock as fast as possible and then pay him back. So that was. We basically kept every single female that we had, just to make sure we could fulfill our end of the agreement. 0:09:12 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, so he didn't want a percentage or anything of each lamb crop, he just wanted you to build your herd till you got to the point that you could give him, or return to him, a certain amount of breeding stock. Exactly. 0:09:28 - Aaron Prinz Yep. 0:09:28 - Cal Hardage Very interesting, and how many youths did you get to do this? 0:09:32 - Aaron Prinz So the first year I only had 20, and then he kept pushing on me to get more, so then the second year I got an additional 25. So then I had ended up having 45 youths, and so then we got going with that. So we had over a hundred head of sheep, total youths and lambs combined. Once we kind of got going before we moved here to South Dakota. 0:09:52 - Cal Hardage Very interesting. I love the creativity of that approach, excuse me, and the desire to support young farmers getting started. There may be complaints that well, the interest rate or whatever, but people have to make money and I think that was a great way for you to get some animals and get going with good breeding animals. Now, what land were you running them on at that time? 0:10:17 - Aaron Prinz So we had found a leased farm and it was the part we were on was a 20 acre walnut orchard that had mostly been taken out of production essentially, and so it was really overgrown, really weedy, but it was perfect for feeding sheep and so that was kind of our home base and then we also would go and do a little bit of the service grazing on a much smaller scale. So generally we did just private landowners. So a couple of examples of projects we did One was basically a hayfield at this one house and it had been hayed for years and it was also getting overgrown with yellow starthistle, which is an invasive plant out there and sheep will actually eat that, especially in the early growing stages of that plant. And so we brought our sheep over there and we timed it right so that we could knock back that yellow starthistle, and so they wanted that controlled and they also wanted some fertility put back into the land there. And then we also did one that was an in-production walnut orchard and we it was another walnut orchard actually and they had planted cover crops in between the rows of the trees and they wanted sheep to come in and manage that so they didn't have to mow it, and so that was a really good opportunity for us and it was great feed and it gave us a chance to rest our leased farm after we'd irrigated, and it worked out really well for us. And then one of the other projects we did was a whitewater rafting camp and they had a this huge island and it was about 70 acres, and they were very concerned about fire risk and so we got to graze that property as well. So we had our home base and then we also would try to get out and as mobile as we could for a small operation. 0:11:59 - Cal Hardage Right, and that's a very creative approach to provide that service to other landowners so that increases basically your land base so you can run more animals. I assume with that, aaron, that in California that that service is more common than maybe here where I am. 0:12:20 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, it's definitely becoming common and probably the main reason would be to try to reduce some of the fuel loads for wildfires, which would be the main reason and I think most of the crop farmers in California are fairly progressive, I would say but I think you're starting to see a lot more livestock integration into crop fields as well. 0:12:38 - Cal Hardage Now, when you got those first sheep, did you start regent-y practices of rotational grazing them, or how did you get started? 0:12:49 - Aaron Prinz Yep, so we did rotational grazing. That leased farm had no perimeter fences since it was a walnut orchard, so we started out with electric netting and we just rotated them every day or every couple of days depending on the season, and then we would sometimes have to get them out of there when we irrigated, since we did flood irrigation for the most part, and so we didn't want to have the sheep on, you know, with the water running and the sheep being in there and soil compact and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, we definitely did rotational grazing right from the start. 0:13:20 - Cal Hardage Yeah, utilizing electro netting, which works out really good for that. Did you, at the time, use any livestock guardian animals or did you rely upon the electro netting to provide security? 0:13:33 - Aaron Prinz We did get a llama and we were in an area, I think, that actually didn't have a lot of predator risk, but at the leased farm, and so the llama worked really well for us for the most part. That one island I mentioned, at the Whitewater Raffling Camp, we were in the middle of a drought when we grazed there, and so eventually I think it was the county or maybe it was the neighboring Indian Reservation that actually dammed up the creek and then that made it so that predators could get across and we found we're pretty sure it was a mountain lion, because lambs were just disappearing and the llama wasn't very effective against the mountain lion, obviously. So yeah, but the llama definitely did a great job against any sort of canine. We never had any coyote pressure or dog pressure or anything like that. 0:14:17 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, yeah, and I'm sure the llama looked at you very judgy every time he saw you. 0:14:23 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, he wasn't the. He did his job, but he was not very friendly. 0:14:27 - Cal Hardage I have a llama with my animals and he just, or she just, cracks me up and whenever I, whenever she wants to, she can be tame and she'll come up and eat all my hand and stuff. Majority of the time she doesn't decide it's worth her time and she just kind of looks at me judgy. And I have moved her with the pickup before because sometimes she's just somewhere else so she doesn't like the pickup. So if I want her to come up to me I have to be away from the pickup. She's interesting, it's just interesting animal and I think in fact continue on that. I have a friend, a coworker, that comes in fishes at our ponds here. He refuses to come if, as he words it, that animal is out there. So he will tell me and I'll have to tell him. Well, the llama is here or here, and he is not going to a pasture that the llama's in. I would say I have been impressed with my llama on coyote. With coyotes I wasn't sure for a long time but I've seen her in action a time or two. I was impressed because I wasn't sure she was even paying attention to the sheep and everyone else. But she is, she's always alert. The biggest problem with her she is worse than a horse or donkey about knowing when a gate's open and she will get through it. Yeah, that sounds about right. In fact, I thought about I thought it would be funny and I'm not going to do it because I don't have enough time but I thought about you know TikTok's all about crazy stuff. I thought it would be great for every time I go through a gate, to video it and see the challenge between the llama and myself, because part of the time I win, part of the time she gets out and I've got to put her back in. Anyway, enough about llamas. So you had your door fur crosses in 2019, and then you decided to move to South Dakota. 0:16:35 - Aaron Prinz Yep, there was a lot of reasons why we decided to move from California, but kind of the more agricultural reasons. One would be that we want to be able to afford land, and that was not really something we could afford in California. And then also was the lack of water we had been through. Some of them were really good wet years and we had plenty of irrigation water. Some were dry years and then in California there's lots of politics involved in water and sometimes the supply isn't reliable for that reason, and so as we were looking at places to move, we wanted to make sure that it rained during the growing season. That was kind of one of the requirements. And, yeah, a lot of things kind of shook out the right way and we ended up in South Dakota. 0:17:16 - Cal Hardage Did you look at a variety of other places or were you like South Dakota is a great choice. 0:17:23 - Aaron Prinz We had almost bought a chicken farm in Montana like a cage-free layer operation. We put in an offer and that didn't work out. We had kind of looked a little bit at Oklahoma and Tennessee, I guess, looked online only at Kansas, and then things kind of worked. I needed to have a full-time job, and so things worked out. Here. Come to South Dakota. 0:17:43 - Cal Hardage On that front, and are you working in South Dakota in the pork industry? Still yet. 0:17:48 - Aaron Prinz Yep, yeah, I manage a swine teaching and research farm for university out here. 0:17:52 - Cal Hardage Oh, okay, very good, we don't have too many hog farms around me, but I know if you go to Western Oklahoma there's a fair amount out there. Okay, so you moved to South Dakota. Before you moved, you paid back your breeding stock loan, kind of. And then you moved to South Dakota. Did you move any sheep with you or did you get new sheep there? 0:18:16 - Aaron Prinz We got new sheep but we also did do a little bit of a different direction too. So, yeah, I paid back my original loan on those breeding stock used and then I had, I think, about 30 lambs left, and so I sold them to somebody else that was kind of had a similar arrangement with me, with the same growing at the large number, but he had quite a few. He was a rice farmer, I think. He had four or 500 heads of use and he was trying to diversify and grow his herd. So I sold the remainder of my flock to him. And then we moved South Dakota in fall of 2021. And we bought our farm here in December of 2021. And we decided we didn't want to overwinter animals in our first winter here, anything like that. And so we waited till spring of 2022 and we bought seven bred youths and a ram lamb, and then we bought an additional 20 open youth lambs as well, and so we lambed out those first seven in May of 2022. And then we carried those ULAMs all the way through to December of 2022. And then we started breeding them at that time. So our first lamb crop out of our ULAMs was this year. 0:19:24 - Cal Hardage Oh yes, how did you find that first winner in South Dakota? You've been in Southern California, so it's a big change, I'm sure. 0:19:33 - Aaron Prinz I guess I didn't mention my first job out of college was in iOS, so we at least had a little bit of experience with winter, but it was very, very cold. We didn't get that much snow altogether, but there's weeks at a time where it never got above zero in January and February, so that definitely was still an adjustment from California. 0:19:52 - Cal Hardage I'm sure it was. I think for me even going to South Dakota would be a big adjustment, and we're not as warm as Southern California. So yeah, I have family up in the Dakotas, but they usually come down here to visit rather than us going north. Sure, especially in the winter. When you got the sheep in South Dakota, did you go back with doppers or did you go with a different breed? 0:20:15 - Aaron Prinz We actually couldn't find any doppers, and so we went with katatans, and I have heard I don't know how true this is, since they haven't raised doppers in South Dakota, but we've heard that the katatans do better over the harsh winter. They have a thicker hide and so they just tend to do a little bit better. People do have doppers here I just haven't raised them here in South Dakota yet but katatans have been fairly easy to keep over the winter. 0:20:38 - Cal Hardage So when you got that property in South Dakota, was it set up with water for sheep, or do you all have to do any infrastructure to get it ready for sheep? 0:20:48 - Aaron Prinz We didn't have to do very much. The people that had this before raised show sheep, so most of the infrastructure was kind of already set up. We have a little bit of limited water infrastructure, I would say, for being a mobile operation. And then the other challenge we've run into is we have really good five wire barbed fence that keeps in cattle, but the Ark-katatans seem like they will still manage to get out of that even if they have plenty of grass. And so we've kind of, even though we have great perimeter fences, we still have to run the netting because they just seem like they won't stay in anything else. 0:21:22 - Cal Hardage I have been pleasantly surprised by Ark-katatans I mean over time I have here lately. I haven't been too impressed because we have five wire barbed wire fences for part of our perimeter fencing as well as interior fencing and while they go between interior pastures on their own, they have additionally, or for a number of years, stayed inside the perimeter fence. Now I say that just the other day I was leaving to go down my dad's. We had some ram lambs down there and they'd gotten out because we would put them into a new pasture and it wasn't tight enough. I go to pull out and I look over on my neighbor's property and there is 150 head of use, so headed over, got them back in and they'd found a spot on that fence that they're going under. So we've got to put another wire there and that's typically what we've done and it works reasonably well for that. But there's not a lot of pressure. But they had no reason to get out. They just saw the opportunity and took advantage of it and with the katatans you guys started with that. Did you introduce any other livestock to your farm? 0:22:36 - Aaron Prinz Yep, so we did. We also did some custom grazing on some beef cattle we had the first year we had eight pairs come graze and we had had so much grass that first year we had a very wet spring in 2022. I felt like we had way more grass than our sheep could handle, so we brought in those cattle. And then we also got some laying hens as well, so that first year we didn't have very many. It was just enough for our family essentially, and then we've added quite a few laying hens since, and so I think we're up around 70 or so laying hens. 0:23:08 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, and do you have them in a mobile coop or stationary coop? 0:23:13 - Aaron Prinz Mobile yep. So we moved them every three to four days and we built two of those Darby Simpson kind of like the hoop house mobile hoop house ones. I also built another one this year that's much bigger and I think I'm going to convert that into my laying coop, just because it's more room to walk around and it'll have a lot more space and instead of having to move two coop side by side I'll just be able to move one with the same amount of birds. So next year that'll make us more efficient. The Darby Simpson coops have been good. They've been durable. They've stood a direct show that we had with 90 mile an hour straight line winds. They didn't even flip over, anything like that. So I've been pretty impressed. They're a good, solid coop. 0:23:54 - Cal Hardage Yeah, very good, and you also did custom grazing with some pairs. How did the custom grazing go for you? 0:24:01 - Aaron Prinz It went really well. We enjoyed having the cattle other than one cow that sometimes liked to go under the polywire. They all stayed where they needed to. And then that first year we were able to even run the sheep in with the cows. So we did the flurred, you know, and that worked really well. And then this year we brought seven yearling bred heifers back and they did not like the sheep at all and they ran them off the one time. We tried to put them together. So this year we didn't run a flurred just because of the animal behavior that we saw, but it's been good to have multiple Very good. 0:24:36 - Cal Hardage It was very interesting. You were able to do it one time, but not so much the other time. Do you have a preference for the heifers versus cows? 0:24:46 - Aaron Prinz You know, the years were so different. So the guy that we bring the cows from, his cows are really tame and even his heifers were a little bit squirrely, but not bad really all things considered. But we had so much less grass the second year, with a much drier spring, that I'm glad we had bred animals as opposed to lactating cows here. So I don't think we would have been able if he had said he had bred or lactating cows. I don't know if I would have actually brought him on this year, just because of the difference in forage, the amount of forage that we had. So and he's pretty flexible on when he brings them and when when they need to get picked up. So it's a good arrangement for us. 0:25:24 - Cal Hardage Oh, it sounds like it is because you know that spring flush or grass, when you get all that coming on and stuff, you need more animals. But you have to be careful that you don't have too many animals or you're hurting yourself later in the year. 0:25:38 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, exactly. So that's been kind of a balancing game that we've been trying to learn, and that first year we'd never seen a spring flush like that before, since our growing season is so short here in South Dakota, so that was a big learning experience for us as well. 0:25:52 - Cal Hardage Definitely so. And with the jumping a little bit back to the sheep and chickens, what's the plan and how's it going for marketing with that, with those species? 0:26:06 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, so the eggs are definitely been our best part of the operation so far. We have quite a few families that buy eggs from us weekly and we recently got into the farm store. I had to get my candelars and dealers license, which was actually very simple. So now we can sell anywhere retail. So we need to. As we try to grow the laying hand operation, hopefully I can find other stores and different customers that I could sell to that way. We've been told that there's a very strong demand for lamb in our area. Last year we had 10 lambs and outside of one or two of them I wasn't comfortable putting my name on them as a product, I guess, when I'm direct to consumer marketing. So we did sell one. The customer was very happy with it and then we just took the remainder to the sale barn and sold them that way. So we're going to aggressively market this year for lamb shares, I think, and we'll see how that goes. So we're kind of in development on that. 0:27:03 - Cal Hardage Oh yes. So what's your plan there? You mentioned lamb shares, so you're selling a whole lamb, half lamb, or tell me what you mean by that? 0:27:11 - Aaron Prinz So, yeah, we would sell either a whole lamb or a half lamb and with lambs just the way they cut the carcasses and things you can't really get into quarters or anything smaller than a half is what we've learned. So we did quite a bit of direct marketing in California so we kind of learned what works and what doesn't work out there and we'll see how that goes here. We're also kind of kicking around, maybe trying the farmers market next year, but we'd need more than just eggs to sell there. So maybe we'll try to sell some cuts that way if we do decide to use the farmers market. 0:27:42 - Cal Hardage Now, have you started any pastured chicken or you just focused on the layer part? We? 0:27:47 - Aaron Prinz raised broilers just for ourselves. If somebody wanted some, we might sell a couple, but it's definitely not just personal use mainly and I'm making the assumption here. 0:27:56 - Cal Hardage you know you'd mention pigs are your favorite, but because you work on a pig farm, you're limited by what you can do on your own farm with pork or pigs. 0:28:05 - Aaron Prinz Yep, yeah, I'm not allowed to have any of my own swine, unfortunately. So someday I'd like to get to that point, but not right now. 0:28:12 - Cal Hardage I know we I say we. My dad put in chicken houses late nineties and I had a home flock of chickens that I had to get rid of because I live on the same farm. We now use those barns to store hay in, which gives us a tremendous advantage on our quality of hay. During that chicken time I couldn't have chickens. Now, when you you mentioned something earlier that really doesn't probably fall into too much of our conversation, but something that makes me always curious. You have a family milk cow, so how are you managing her and how are you using the milk? 0:28:53 - Aaron Prinz Yep, so the milk is mainly just for us. So we've kind of at the beginning, when she first calved, we did calf sharing, so every night we would put the calf with her or no, we switched it in the morning I'd put the calf with her and then overnight I'd milk her in the mornings and we basically just keep running grass and I only give her a little bit of grain while I'm milking. So we're not trying to maximize production in any way, and we were able to do once a day milking that way. And so then over the last winter we completely pulled the calf away from her and we were feeding relatively low quality feed to the sheep, and she was in there with them as well, and so we were able to actually maintain once a day milking because we were pushing it from a nutrition standpoint, and so we've basically been able to continue to do that. And then I, instead of getting up real early in the morning before work to milk, we ended up kind of flipping it. So now we milk in the afternoons, which has been much better, I would say. Getting up at 4.45 in the morning and Miller winter didn't really appeal to me, so that's when we decided to switch the afternoons. 0:29:57 - Cal Hardage So Brian, are you the milk hand? 0:30:00 - Aaron Prinz Yep, I do all the milking Somehow. My wife wanted the cow and I had stuck milking and I had. Like I had said before, I said I'd never milk anything again after my dairy experience. And here I am. 0:30:11 - Cal Hardage So I would love to have a few milk cows or milk goats or milk sheep, dairy sheep. I played with the idea. I don't think I have time, so I'm not. So it's not something I'm pursuing at this point, but maybe I have a goal of having a few milk cows later on to make cheeses. That's something I dream about, and every once in a while my wife will be, like you, buying some heifers, because I see what you're looking at on your computer. I'm like, no, not yet, I'm just daydreaming. So, getting out there, getting started with your farm, what was some of your challenges you had? 0:30:50 - Aaron Prinz Yes, I mentioned the spring flush, and so that was kind of more of a good problem to have. But that was definitely a learning experience. Probably the biggest challenge that we ran into was just learning how to keep animals over winter, and especially a really harsh winter this past year. We had so much more snow we were fortunate enough to have several blizzards as well, with one of them raining in air temps with the windshot like negative 45 to negative 50 and blowing snow all around. So one of the things that I had initially thought is I don't have any heavy equipment. So I thought I was limited to small square bales, and we went through those a lot faster than I anticipated, and so I looked at the economics on buying round bales and then, once I realized how much more cost effective that was, I decided I would just do it and then figure out a way to move the bales once I got them. And so why I ended up doing was taking a T-post and driving it through the center of the round bale, and then I put tow straps on my four-wheeler and then wrap those around the T-post and I was able to just drive that bale almost anywhere I needed to. We had some limitations, where with some of the deep snow, I got as far as I could, and then that bale just had to stay where it was. And then the other challenge we ran into was I was a little bit late on protein and not as consistent as I should have been throughout the winter. And so towards the end of the winter probably February, march we started noticing the youths were losing patches of their wool and it wasn't warm enough for the hair sheep to be shedding. And so after a little bit of research turns out that we're 99% sure that was wool break, and so that is one of the main things that you see with wool break would be a protein deficiency, and so it ended up not being erect, thankfully, and we still had good, healthy lambs and all those things. But we definitely learned a lesson there that we got to have some sort of protein supplement regularly throughout the winter. 0:32:49 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, monitor that. Yeah, and that's a very creative way and low-cost way of feed hay Very good out of the box thinking to get that going. 0:33:00 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, sometimes you don't have a lot of options, so you just use what you got and hope it works. 0:33:05 - Cal Hardage I tell people all the time I can remember I've got a trailer or I used to have a trailer with a sliding rack to hold my sheep. We get to the cell barn and the people would be like you're going to have to open this, we don't know how, just tell them. My grandpa always said poor people have poor ways and that's just the way it is with me, with those were your challenges. What were some successes you've had? 0:33:30 - Aaron Prinz Well, we've had a good lambing crop. We've had about 150% lambing crop this year, so that's been encouraging and they've been growing really well this year. The laying hens and the customers we've gotten through that has also been very successful. And I think the other part that I would say is a success is that we're starting to see some warm season grasses already establishing themselves just in this first year since we've been doing it. I don't know how much of that is related to management or to the amount of rain that we got this summer as opposed to last summer, but I know that we're seeing grasses like Cytote Scramma in a big blue stem that we didn't see at all last year, so that's been encouraging. 0:34:12 - Cal Hardage Oh, very good. Yes, yeah, as you think about the future for your farm, what's your plans? 0:34:19 - Aaron Prinz Well, we're trying to decide kind of what our main I think the chickens is going to be our main operation, I would say. So we're trying to decide if we want to cut back on the amount of remnants we have, so whether that's where we keep sheep only and we don't bring back the custom cows and maybe I'll be able to stockpile some more grass for it in the fall and maybe we won't have to feed quite as much hay. So I think that's kind of the way we're leaning right now is using the lambs to just manage the grass for us and then kind of making the chickens the main operation, the laying hens. So I think that's kind of the direction we're leaning for kids and we homeschool and so we've been very busy and we just know that we need to cut back in some certain areas. So we're trying to decide what our best plan of attack will be for next year. 0:35:02 - Cal Hardage So oh, yeah, yeah, are you all looking to expand your land base? 0:35:07 - Aaron Prinz I'd like to eventually come across some least opportunities. Things are fairly competitive and I need to get into some maybe some local grazing schools and things like that to make some more contacts with local producers and see if there's some opportunities. But I would like to. I mean, we're surrounded by crop land without fencing and so if we could come up with a plan to try to get on some of that, I think there's definitely opportunities. 0:35:31 - Cal Hardage You know something I've thought about that I don't have it figured out and maybe our listeners can help with this. When I look around, there's not much crop land where I am in Northeast Oklahoma. You can go to the West and find some. You can go to the East and find some crop land, but none. Right here, where I am, it's all pasture land and everybody runs a beef cattle and I've often thought if I could figure out a model that I could, you know I'd have to convince them first that it's not going to hurt their beef grazing. It's actually going to help them because sheep's got a little bit different of a diet. But I haven't ever figured that out well enough to approach anybody about doing that yet. This is something ruminating in my mind. Maybe one of these days I'll figure it out. 0:36:19 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, I've had the exact same thoughts and Someday I'd like to be self-employed and I have to work off the farm anymore. I think if you can get the right model with that type of operation, I think that's the way to go, if you can make the right connections and find the right Producers that want to collaborate. 0:36:35 - Cal Hardage Yeah, yes, I agree, aaron. Before we get to the overgrazing section, is there anything else you'd like to add? 0:36:43 - Aaron Prinz that I could think of no. 0:36:44 - Cal Hardage All right. Well, it's time for us to switch gears just a little bit. We're going to go to the overgrazing section, where we take a deeper dive into something about your farm, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about multi species grazing and disruption. 0:36:59 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, so I guess we've been talking. I have three different species here on the farm and I first got kind of introduced to the idea of disruption with that Dr Allen Williams article in the Stockman grass farmer and so he had kind of talked about all the different positive disruptions that you can do, and so some of the ones that I've tried to implement is starting Brazing on different parts of the farm at the beginning of the year and so like. For an example I had one of those beef cattle came in the first year they started at the far northeast part of our farm and then this year when they came in they came all the way to the the southeast part and then we kind of worked opposite directions of last year. And then the sheep. I this year with the sheep I ran the sheep across the entire farm before the cows got here and just kind of clipped all the plants to try To manage that spring flush a little bit better. Before I was managing the sheep Kind of I did in California that all they can stay here for another day or two days or something, and with that spring flush the whole farm completely got away from me. And so, yeah, trying to do different things as a positive disruption Different sized paddocks, different directions of paddocks. From last year I did more back fencing this year, just making alleys back to water for the cattle as opposed to Trying to move the water station. So I've done several different things in that regard. And then kind of some other parts of disruption. I don't know if they're necessarily an article, but sheep and cattle are dead and host for each other's parasite, so that's a way we're disrupting the parasite cycle. And then also same thing with with the chickens If we rotate them behind the cattle they scratch those cow pies and they get the fly numbers down eating those larvae and those types of things. I'm hoping next year We'll see the the positive results from all the chicken manure on the pastures. We haven't really seen it this year, but it's gotten very dry here lately so we're not getting rain and so that manure is not getting washed into the soil. But I'm hoping, with All the different species we have, will start seeing some even even more progress than we've seen so far now, how close are you to your first freeze? We're probably just a couple weeks away. It won't be too much longer, usually kind of mid-September or maybe that third week of September we can get a freeze. 0:39:17 - Cal Hardage Oh, yes, yeah, were you able to and I'm sorry I'm going off, I'm jumping away from the disruption just a little bit but were you able to stockpile some forages for winter? And we didn't? 0:39:29 - Aaron Prinz stockpile quite the way I would have wanted to. That really dry spring. We had kind of limited our growth. So we will be buying hay and my plane is to bail graze. But this year, instead of Waiting till the snow comes and trying to move the bales, I'm gonna preset them and On the pastures and kind of the spots that need the most help, and then I don't have enough netting to deal with Moving it throughout the winter. And then the other problem we're gonna run into is with the frozen ground. I won't be able to get the posts out anyways, but I think what I'm gonna try to do is Set up just mobile posts with polywire and maybe run three strands of polywire and try to contain the sheep around the bales that I want them to graze and then try to move that throughout the winter, because once I set those posts and it freezes it, they're just gonna be stuck there until spring. 0:40:18 - Cal Hardage Oh yeah, yeah. Sometimes I don't have to worry about too much. Here we get freezing. Weather stays below freezing. It's only usually for a few days and then we're good. So the post freezing to ground really not a issue I would even thought about yeah, definitely something that we have to contend with here. So and then jumping back to the disruption, I think that's Really smart to change up your rotations. I know I try and change up my rotations but so we have my dad's farm and we have mine. My dad's farm, we have permanence divisions, so we have a lot of small pastures and I don't narrow them down with electric fence, partly because running electric fence is kind of a headache with all these permanent fences Because I gotta make sure it doesn't ground out somewhere and then I spend. I rotate my cattle a little bit Faster, not a little bit faster, a lot faster, and I do my dad's. So my dad's are are more weekly rotations, but we we don't ever get that opportunity to change that paddock size very much Because we've got those permanent Divisions in place. Now on the lease lands I have the ability to change it, but I notice I get in habits really quickly. I just put in the fence back in the same In the general area as I'm the largest larger division. So I'll make a division to know I'll chop it up. But that one fence I know right now on that on 75 acres I have just here not far from the house I know I put that first Fence. I'll do it 10 acres in. That's what I always do, so I probably have to keep that in mind a little bit more, as I'm out there doing stuff and not do it always the same way. 0:42:08 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, it's definitely easy to fall into routine and remember what she did last year and, depending on the land, maybe there's some limitations and how you can set them up to begin with which. Some of my pastures are that way there's a, there's a creek and pretty, some pretty steep hillside. So I do have some spots where I have to do it the same as last year, but if I can do it different than last year, I really tried to. 0:42:29 - Cal Hardage So so, aaron, it is time for us to go to our famous four questions. Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our Our first question what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? 0:42:44 - Aaron Prinz Well, our local library doesn't have very many books and I haven't ponied up the money to buy any of the regenerative egg books, but I do like this document. Grass farmer. I get that every month and then I listen to I don't know five or six probably regenerative agriculture podcasts while I'm working In the hog barns and on my farm too, so I definitely think those are a great resource. 0:43:06 - Cal Hardage I think, obviously I think podcasts are a wonderful resource. What are some of the ones you listen to? 0:43:13 - Aaron Prinz Let's see. Besides this one, I listen to the herd quitter Working cows ranching reboot raised in America. Those would be the ones I regularly listen to. There's some other ones that I kind of hop in and out of depending on what the topic is, but quite a few. 0:43:29 - Cal Hardage Like I said, I'm pretty bad about hopping in and out, as I find on topics I like, there is a pastured pig podcast I really enjoy. It's gonna be totally different than your line of work, but it kind of follows the same model as we try to here. So I I find it really interesting as well. 0:43:49 - Aaron Prinz Yeah, that would be interesting and very different way of management, but I sure I could learn something. 0:43:54 - Cal Hardage So oh, oh yeah, very different. I know we had hogs when I was a kid and and we didn't manage them like hog farms manage them, but we did manage them more intensively than we Then. What I would try and do now I kick around the idea of doing some pastured pork but, as you've already heard Just through this episode, I have lots of ideas of what I want to do, so I have to really calm down and put the brakes on stuff. Our second question Aaron, what is your favorite tool for the farm? 0:44:26 - Aaron Prinz No, I think it would have to be the four-wheeler like we talked about. I use that to move my my round bales. I use that to use the mobile coops and move the mobile coops around. I don't think I could do anything on the farm very efficiently without that tool very good. 0:44:41 - Cal Hardage Thirdly, aaron, what would you tell someone just getting started? 0:44:44 - Aaron Prinz just start with whatever resources you have, whatever problems, come along, get, find the creative solution. You probably have a A solution that you haven't thought of, that with whatever existing infrastructure, equipment or resources you have, and if you just think outside the box, you can generally get most things done very good advice, and Aaron. 0:45:07 - Cal Hardage Lastly, where can others find out more about you? 0:45:10 - Aaron Prinz We just have our Instagram page. So that's at Prince underscore pastures and for our listeners out there. 0:45:17 - Cal Hardage We have to say thank you to Aaron. Aaron came back on and re-recorded this episode Because my technology did not want to work right. So, aaron, I appreciate that excellent conversation. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me a lot of fun. 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.