e83. Learning the Ropes with Nathan Smelser

00:00 - Cal Hardage (Host) Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 83. 00:04 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) No amount of off-farm income could replace the benefit and the joy that we have of working together as a family on this. Yeah, we're just very thankful to God that we can do this. 00:13 - Cal Hardage (Host) 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 Nathan Smelsher, pa Lam. We talk about him getting started with no experience in sheep and his journey to where he is now, some of the hiccups he's had along the road, as well as some successes. Really good episode and I think you'll enjoy it. 00:46 Before we get to Nathan, 10 seconds about my farm, and we're going to not talk too much about the farm. This week we're actually going to talk about the Noble Research Institute essentials of regenerative grazing. Been able to attend that class and really enjoying it A big treat was when I got there. Jim Garrish was one of the facilitators, so that was very exciting. I will have more information how that went in coming weeks. Right now is where recording it. Day one is finished and I've got a couple more days and I've really enjoyed day one. Looking forward to the next couple of days. I think this particular course is the last one for this calendar year, but as soon as they get them scheduled for next year we'll be announcing them. Let's talk to Nathan. Nathan, we're excited to have you on the podcast today. 01:41 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Thank you, cal, good to be here, and thank you so much for all your work in producing this repository of information. It's been just very beneficial, thank you. 01:50 - Cal Hardage (Host) Well, thank you, I appreciate that and I think this episode is going to be one of those episodes that's going to be a resource for other people. But this episode almost didn't happen. 02:02 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) That's right. As I told you, I was considering backing out, and the further I get into grazing, the less I know. And as I considered what to discuss today or how to answer questions or whatever might come up, I just told my friend Jordan Snyder I was thinking of backing out and he said really I hope you do it, because in 10 years you can come back and listen to it and laugh at all the things you used to think. Good advice, I guess, but in all seriousness, no, I benefit from people of all different experience levels who you have on, and there's so much good out there, so it's hard for me to see how anything I offer here will be that useful. And yet, at the same time, five years ago I knew a lot less than I know now. I hope it's of value to somebody. Thank you for having me on. 02:50 - Cal Hardage (Host) I'm sure it will be sharing our journeys and what we're doing. Someone may connect with your story and you may say something everyone else has said, but the way you say it or your journey connects with them and it causes them to take that next step and that's what we're hoping that each of us just implements one more regenerative practice, just as we're working forward to make this earth a better place. One thing you mentioned there was about in 10 years. I think Jordan was being kind of optimistic that that'll happen in 10 years, Because I have episodes that I we started this three and a half years ago now, which is crazy. 03:29 And I listen to some of those early episodes and I'm like, Cal, just be quiet, quit talking. So you know, and I one of my early guests, I was talking to him the other day and I was saying, hey, I need to get you back on because we're planning some catch-up episodes and we'll cover what's happened since then. And he's like, oh man, he says I said some crazy stuff on that episode, Catch-up and mustard, or just catch-up, yeah, just catch-up. It may be a little mustard too. We're all learning. It's a process. I hope no one thinks I have it figured out, because I surely don't, but I'm trying to do better each day. 04:12 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, we'll talk probably about a lot of mistakes that I've made in my short time doing this. And then, when we get to the overgrazing section, if we go where I think it's gonna go, that's stuff that I changed my mind on within about the past week. So this is real time, it's live. 04:30 - Cal Hardage (Host) It is wonderful. Well, Nathan, let's get started by you telling us about yourself and your operation. 04:37 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Okay, thanks. Yeah, so in 2016, cal, we moved to Pennsylvania and bought a 100 acre farm, my wife and I and at the time we had two children. I had been an engineer with an oil company in West Texas and they were a great company hard times in the oil patch about that time, so they were offering severance packages and this fit our goals, our longer term plans, holistic for the family. There's some brethren who are up here who we wanted to be close to and as closer to both my wife's parents than my parents. 05:06 So I'd not lived here before, actually, but we took the leap and moved up and I had some exposure to cow calf prior to that to a beef cattle stocker operation in Wyoming, and so really I had not been exposed to sheep but reading Stockman Grass Farmer probably a Jim Garrish article in particular, that influenced me to think really, up in this part of the country above, at this latitude, with the rainfall we have here and the damage cattle would do to the sod, potentially in this area, you know sheep were a good option and it also fits the East Coast ethnic markets. So we got up here and dove into sheep Boy. It's been a little bit of a roller coaster. In one sense there's been steady growth, but in the other sense, boy, we've made a lot of mistakes. 05:55 - Cal Hardage (Host) You know, we've had her sheep for a number of years now and I guess I might as well admit this I've probably said it on the podcast. Before we got those sheep the first time, or when we got them, we thought they were gonna be miniature cows. We clicked quickly. No, I'm a slow learner. It took me a little while, but I figured out they weren't. So yeah, that sheep. So how did you know what breed you wanted? Did you have any ideas? Did you reach out to someone to help you get started on that? That's interesting. 06:26 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Probably again influenced by the Stockman grass farmer. We chose to go with Cattadins, and they're a popular breed, so they're one that anybody would discover who was in our shoes. Not only do they behave differently than cows, the markets work differently than a lot of the things that we've really accepted on the beef cattle side. As compared to cows, so they behave differently, they're obviously more susceptible to some diseases. They flock very well, we enjoy handling them, but then on the market side I came in with some false assumptions. I can go there now or we can go there later. 07:05 - Cal Hardage (Host) We'll come back to that and let's actually just talk about you getting started with sheep. Just the aspect of getting sheep. Did you go to a cell barn and grab them? Did your farm that you purchased? Were they ready for sheep? 07:23 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So the farm was bare land. It had a little bit of old barbed wire fence on it. It's on a slow bottom elevation. It's about 1,400 feet. The top of the pasture is about 1,700 feet, so it's pretty good elevation, really. Really poor soils, very, very poor soils. Very little top soil with rocky clay underneath that it had been grazed. The rougher sections were just grazed with cattle nonstop, continuous set stock. Better still, sloped areas were just continuously hayed. Probably nothing ever put back for years and years and years. 07:55 When we got it. So the fence that was in place, there's no way it would work for sheep. We moved up here and so I'd left a job. We got up here and coming into it I thought, even if I can't line up a job up here and I had a tentative possibility but nothing nailed down we'd make a run with livestock and just take off rolling and be livestock from the get go. And once I got up here and started cutting locust posts and then trying to plant them, and boy, I had a friend that we made up here came down and brought his post pounder and they hit the rocks in that clay and just go all kinds of crooked. And so it was more daunting that I had anticipated getting the infrastructure in to be able to even bring sheep onto the place. 08:46 - Cal Hardage (Host) So were you going with. You're putting in locust post and woven wire for exterior fence. 08:54 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) At this point I don't even remember what I was thinking for wire, whether woven or high tensile, but I was gonna do locust posts. There's still a line of my original locust posts that I'd basically just abandoned. They're a monument to a early. But it got to a point where I said okay. And so at the same time I was a little bit paralyzed because we had no cash flow coming in. We had some reserves, had no cash flow coming in and I'm realizing the expense of getting the infrastructure in, and so I was scared to do anything, scared to move on that. And so, for me, jumping into an all-farm job that I was blessed to be able to jump into really got us off of high center. And then we got moving and I ended up paying somebody to put in fence. 09:40 But I will tell you, I have so much respect for the guys and many of many that listen to your podcast, I'm sure that do it with livestock from the get-go and fund everything from their farm operation. Sage askin' if anybody's not listen to some of his stuff, he was on Kit Ferro's Herd Quitter podcast and just what a guy, what a guy getting in there with all his heart and doing people right and taking the hits. I don't think, from the way I started, that I can ever be where he is in the livestock game because of what he's endured to do what he did. So my hat's off to everybody who just does it with livestock. But I went off-farm to get the capital flow, or get the cash flowing. Then we started spending the capital. We got the fence in place and that allowed us to bring in the first sheep. I think I bought a trailer load of 40 head from a guy about 25 miles away, brought in you lambs and threw them out there inside the fence and boy, it just worked like a dream at first. 10:46 - Cal Hardage (Host) So did you, just was it one big pastor. You just put them in. 10:51 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, so initially we just perimeter fenced it, so everything was fairly overgrown by that point. We didn't get the lambs till late summer, maybe late July, right, so everything just needed to be knocked down. The perimeter fence was really all we had at that point. I had ideas of just using a polywire or netting on the interior. But boy, on that slope and early on I didn't even have any kind of an ATV and boy, I really overestimated my ability to carry posts and wire up and down a hill and really manage the sheep right. So I didn't manage it all. 11:26 But I tell you what we turned a ram in in December and come May, I think that first year with those lambs they had 1.8 lambs per year, very few issues. They raised them and I thought, boy, this is easy If I can do 40 head, if I can do yeah, I'm good at this and if I can do 40 head, I think I can do 4,000. It's just not an issue. You throw them out there and they do it. So, yeah, a lot of hubris and is that how you say that word, hubris? But all those big words, that's in pride. I've learned more since. 11:59 - Cal Hardage (Host) So you got that first lamb crop out. What would you have done differently? Well, on the first lamb crop. 12:06 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So because of the way the place was overgrown. Obviously, it would have been better if I'd have rotated the animals from the get-go and then we could have made more progress faster on the place. So those are fairly small headcount and at that point, working off-farm up until 2020, in fact we retained all our U-lams basically all of them, I don't remember exactly and we tried to grow the flock pretty fast from there and 2019 was just a disaster. Things had been going so well that I brought in more U-lams to grow faster and that was a wet year. My management game was not there and boy the barber pole worm. We had some real losses and I was working a lot of hours off-farm and then coming home and running animals through a very crude working chute and it was ugly. Now, there can be good that comes from those things, but I should not have let it get to that. 13:04 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, we lost a lot of animals and that barber pole worm and you see a lamb or a U that's just not doing as well, not as thriving like the rest of your flock. You've got to get on that. You weigh a day, two days. They may be dead out there. 13:23 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Right and we tried to go for some parasite-resistant genetics or genetics that we thought were parasite-resistant, but ultimately you've got to manage them. I mean, sheep need a shepherd, they've got to be managed. You've got to manage your grass and graze properly and we just weren't doing that. But that was a real wake-up call, cal. I mean, really it's a very small scale, I mean, but for us that was a real wake-up call. So we ended up I think we had enough animals at that point and the timeline's a little fuzzy in my head that if we were going to grow I needed to do better management. But we also needed access to more grass. So we did pick up some more acreage that year. We had some permanent interior fencing put in and had the other acreage fenced around the perimeter. 14:03 One of the good things that came from that there were two Ram Lambs that every time we went through the animals, those two Ram Lambs had bright red eye membranes. Now there's better ways to look at this right. Like guys, the producers that do fecal egg counts on all their lambs and there are some they just do a tremendous amount of work in data collection to really prove up parasite resistance Not merely resilience, but resistance, true resistance. So the dark red eye membranes doesn't prove true resistance, but they were rugged animals and they performed well when everybody else was suffering. So you know, that's one bright spot. We kept them. Our management game improved. We grew from there. After I went off-farm or quit off-farm work in 2020, you know, at this point we're really able to rotate daily. We don't rotate daily year-round, not even for all the grazing season, but often we're doing daily animal moves and that makes more difference than anything. So at this point, I actually think management is a much bigger factor in managing parasites, more so than animal genetics. 15:10 - Cal Hardage (Host) Genetics matter, but you've got to manage right, you do, and you really have to get animals that are resistant. But even if you take those animals and you throw them in a pasture and leave them there and you graze that too short, you're going to lose animals to parasites, it doesn't matter how resistant they are. So, yeah, that management's a key portion and as you're learning, or learning through that, you know we talk all the time on the podcast about getting started and that first year you had tremendous luck with that lamb crop and it caused you to keep going. And then you ran into some hurdles. We all do that, so learn from it and moving on. Wonderful, what caused you to? I know you're reading a Stockman grass farmer during this time, because that's kind of what led you to hair sheep. What caused you to take that next step to start rotating them? Was it the barber pole incidents or what caused you to take that next step? 16:13 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So really I should have done that from the get-go and I knew better. But you know there's a lot going on and the sheep took lower priority with the off-farm stuff going on and family and all that, and so I knew we needed to and at that point we just had to right. And also, as time has gone on, so we've gotten better at putting in infrastructure to make and figuring out how to manage our daily moves. I mean it gets hard. 16:41 So the North acreage even at this point I've only got it's 87 acres and it's only divided up with permanent fence into two pastures. So that's what I started doing and it's going in and running high tensile wire permanent fence on the inside and disconnected from even from the perimeter fence. But it gives me something solid to run a polywire to and so I can very quickly run polywire ahead of the animals. Maybe I'll back, fence them and within 30 minutes I've got animals moved onto fresh grass. So just figuring out a system that works, that makes it efficient, to get it done, has been the biggest thing for us. How did you? 17:20 - Cal Hardage (Host) decide so well. Actually, let me jump back. You put in some of the high tensile wire. It gives you a nice feeding place off of to build your paddocks. You didn't go in and divide up your pastures all that great. You just gave you a feeder line that you can work off of and do your paddocks. 17:39 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, so actually what I'm doing is it's not even a feeder line, so, oh, okay, yeah, so rather than keep thethe permanent fence is really nice Tangential point here. Or Austin Troyer did a podcast, I don't remember for whom. He's a guy in Ohio grazing a reclaimed mine. 17:58 - Cal Hardage (Host) He was on here, I think episode 24, and then I think he's been on another podcast as well. 18:07 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Great, okay, one of the points he made that I heard was that most people over fence and our exterior fence I'm a little embarrassed, it is over fence but for interior fence. So a two or three wire high tensile is plenty. That's a lot. That's more than I think Austin was running generally, but I'll run a span of two or three wire high tensile within my pasture where it's not in the way of anything else and it might not even be connected to the hot wire on my perimeter fence. This on top of my box wire on the perimeter fence. But I found that for me it's easier to just keep the fence hot close to where the sheep actually are. 18:47 So, I might charge up a segment inside a pasture and then run my poly wire off of that and not have the whole farm hot If a branch comes down or a deer jumps over the fence and gets the wire twisted or whatever. It just doesn't cause me issues where I'm grazing my charger's mobile. It'll speed right. 3,000 on a 100 watt solar panel. I just move it around. So that's what I'm doing for now and are you doing? 19:10 - Cal Hardage (Host) I believe you said all poly wire, two or three strands. 19:14 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, so for the permanent stuff I put inside to make the poly wire moves easier, I use high tensile wire on timeless T posts. What I actually move daily would be poly wire just on the cheapest reel you can get from, like Premier 1 or something. 19:28 - Cal Hardage (Host) I think I'm good. Let's jump back just a little bit. Okay, yeah, Let me go. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So when you're doing your paddocks, how are you doing those? You're doing two or three strands of poly wire. 19:38 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So I just move a single strand of poly wire daily. 19:41 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh, okay. 19:41 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, I keep them behind a single strand. It's not 100% reliable by any means, but as long as I keep them happy, it's any 5% reliable problem. 19:51 - Cal Hardage (Host) How did you get to a single strand? Was that just you just start using a single strand? 19:56 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, probably just laziness. 19:58 You know why do two if I can get by with one which can backfire, because then you can train them to jump one and train them to jump two probably. 20:03 But we had some failures with it and in fact when I was spring out my poly wire too far and have way too many step in posts and try to move that whole system around, it would be hard to keep everything tight and keep them to where they felt contained. Again. Once I have, you know, box wire on one side, metal high tensile wire on the other side and then I just run two single strands of poly. I think really what it is is it's a lot easier for me to get in there and just do a good job, put it in, move it frequently, and that's what keeps them happy, if that makes sense. When it gets too complex and I've got 200 T posts or 200 step in posts out there and poly wire strung out every which way, it's hard to get it all moved and get it set up well in the next spot and we're just too far off of anything permanent for me to have a way to do it efficiently. 20:55 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, one of the goals I have for 2024, it sounds crazy to be talking about it, but one of my goals. I've just started a project. I weaned a few calves and I put a few lambs that I just weaned in there and the lambs are. That was six months old, because we don't wean our U lambs, we just leave them on the U. I thought I want to try this because I'm wanting to do or putting some sheep on leased land. We run all of our sheep on my dad's place here. It's all nicely contained and works well, but I'm wanting to branch out. So I have those dozen U lambs with some weaned heifers and I'm hoping my goal is they bond and become a single unit. Well, I'm going to leave them end up pretty tight and just feed them hay in the cruell and get them hopefully bonded so that I can put them out there and do a single wire, because I think about doing two wires and I can do it, but I don't really want to. 22:02 Labor is a labor is a factor. It is, I was. So I got some meat goats earlier this year, just a handful, and I was running those in electron netting. But man, that's just. That is a lot of work moving that and and when every plant's got a hook on it or a thorn on it to grab it, it's just awful to deal with. Now, if I was doing it out in the open and I did do some out in the open, that wasn't a problem. I could put it in without a problem. It just it was a little bit more work for this lazy farmer. Wait, I'm not lazy, I'm an efficient farmer. You know what efficiency is. It's it's laziness with good PR. 22:47 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So I need a PR person. Maybe you can help me out on that. Yeah, there you go. 22:51 - Cal Hardage (Host) So my goal is I'm going to try that single wire and work them towards that. So it's exciting that you're having decent success with that. I can see how, if you try to hold them in a spot too long, that's not enough to keep them in place. If you're not giving them enough forage. 23:10 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I think your your summary of netting is exactly what I found as well. A little more on the single polywire man. I hope that works for you. We in the summer of it was last summer In fact we were exceptionally dry here in northern Pennsylvania and I mean it. It rained that year, I think it. It rained in April and I don't think it rained again till September. So no, maybe August, I mean it just unheard of dry conditions here. So there's some other learnings I could mention from that. 23:45 But long story short and to what you're talking about neighbors opened up their hayfields because nobody was making any second cutting and so we took our sheep onto the stubble and that's all there was, but took sheep onto the stubble and we were putting eight or nine acres a day behind a single polywire and had the whole flock behind that and no other fence. And for the most part now I did not sleep well with the sheep out there like that and I didn't feel comfortable putting a dog out with them either, you know, with the fence like that. But for the most part, you know, in that kind of desperate circumstance they stayed in and if we moved them every day it was good. I think a time or two. I pushed it maybe to the third day and that was too much. You know, one one goes through and then they're all coming through. 24:29 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, I heard today you know joke where teacher asked little Johnny, you've got 17 sheep and six get out. How many sheep do you have? And little Johnny says zero. And the teacher's like no, that's not right. And Johnny says Johnny says you don't know sheep, johnny's right, yeah, yeah, they. They find a spot and they're, they're through. It's amazing how small a spot they can find that a whole flock can fit through. 24:55 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) It's also amazing when one gives that first man and they know the difference, they know the kind of math that means hey, I found an outlet, and the whole flock, whether they're with inside or not, just immediately begins to flow that direction. 25:08 - Cal Hardage (Host) Talking about what's amazing with sheep, their consensus model on the way when you drive them and the direction they're going. It's like you hit a certain point in that flock. You know if you're moving cattle and if you're working with bud Williams some of his handle, livestock handling you're using that shoulder as a point of reference. What I have not figured out is a point of reference for a flock, because at a certain point they all immediately turn the other way and I'm like who? Who decided that? How'd that happen? So I have found you can't drive sheep in a straight line. You know they're different in cattle, but it's just interesting that flock and how they all know at one time. It's it's like what you said One makes the right sound, they all know there's an opening, we can go somewhere else. 25:58 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, it is really fun to to herd them and move them. I'm glad you mentioned bud Williams. I mean that I'm so thankful for people who introduced me to him, not to him personally but to his material. Of course he's past now but boy, I've got someone gave me actually his 18 hour hard drive, the video of a lot of his trainings and material. Oh, that, that is. That's fantastic stuff. I would say. 26:24 If you're doing much moving of animals, it's, it's easily worth it. Yeah, so between our two farms we have the two acreages and they're two miles apart, and then we frequently hit a third acreage, that's two, about two miles from both of those. So like a two by two by two triangle. And we just heard the sheep between farms. We don't trailer them or anything. I don't even own a stock trailer. You know, if there's anything that I think we've done better than some other things, I'm not going to say we've done it perfectly, because we've certainly had some train wrecks, but but it's been. It's been so much fun and it's been good for the kids hurting sheep back and forth and it's it's good for the sheep. You know, it's fairly low stress. The neighbors have been very patient with sheep on the road 700 head, blocking our little back roads, and somebody comes along and slowly eases through them with the car and it's just a lot of fun for everybody. So far we'll try to keep neighbors happy with us, but so far they enjoy it. 27:20 - Cal Hardage (Host) How does that work with driving them between places For one? How are you doing it and I'm assuming you're using multiple people to get that that completed? How's it working for you? 27:33 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) We do. It's working great. Some days we get careless and fail to anticipate things that might happen and then we have, you know, a little bit of a train wreck. For instance, if lambs are too young, yeah, we try to land one place and then we're kind of stuck there for the better part of two months when we try to move a flock with really young lambs and the disorder and the cacophony is the dams are looking for their you know, little twins everywhere. We can't keep them going the same direction. But once the lambs are almost two months old we heard them. It's a lot more fun when the lambs are even older. 28:10 I guess at this point we've got a system. It was intimidating at first but at this point we've got a system that the kids let's see. Titus and Benjamin took my father-in-law and they moved them with no other help, and my father-in-law has no experience with sheep whatsoever or cattle or anything like that, and so you know they've got enough experience to trust them to take a group alone, and that was a smaller group, but they took them the two miles and yeah, so we've gotten comfortable with it and the sheep have gotten trained as well. 28:40 - Cal Hardage (Host) Well, very good, and you bring up about lambing. Tell us how you manage lambing, what it looks like, okay, yeah, that's a boy? 28:48 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) That's a good, good question. So early on I mentioned we had the 40 or so U lambs and they lambed with no issue, and I don't remember at what point, probably somewhere north of 150 head. Well, let me back up. So we lamb on pasture. We originally were lambing in April. We backed that up to May for the sake of weather and the stage of grass growth. Right here grass begins to grow about the middle of April but it's not in that, you know, lay stage two until May. So we backed lambing up to May. 29:24 Most of the sheep lamb out in the first 18 days. Very seldom do to use lamb in that second period. That second gestation cycle, I guess not second gestation. Second, you know what I'm trying to say the second fertility cycle that they mostly, they mostly all get bred and the lamb out in 17 days. 29:42 So, as numbers increase then and this is another thing I failed to anticipate the chaos that comes from multiple use dropping lambs, coincidentally, and five year old dominant use that are five minutes from lambing, next to a you know a U lamb that's lambing, and they'll steal the lamb and they'll box it like a basketball player. 30:09 They'll box that like a center under the hoop, they'll box that little lamb out and won't let her get to her own lamb. And so we've, we've got to be out there. I've got to be out there about all the time during lambing and keeping those things straight. And you know I've learned to pick lambs up by their front legs and, just carrying by the front legs out through a gate, you know, lead the offender through a gate, shut the gate, come back with the lamb and give it back to his mom and use to give us issues beyond that, you know we get rid of. Now I was talking to a fella, aaron Helmick, in West Virginia, and he's been on some podcasts too. He was telling me easy care sheep are a solution to that and if you introduce that Romanov blood in, they are much more faithful to specifically their own lambs and much less likely to steal lambs or have their lambs stolen. So that might be something for some people to look at. 30:55 - Cal Hardage (Host) That is interesting because, I'll be honest, we're not lambing as mean as you and lambing season drives me crazy. When we first started we were banding and tagging lambs Day. They hit the ground just like we do cattle and then we backed off of banding them. We don't even band any of our. We sell them as intact rams now and this year I didn't tag any lambs because I'm trying to to not interrupt that bonding of the mom and the lambs and and I thought I could accept it. But it's drive me a little crazy because I don't know who's out of who and and not that I use that information to great results. I like having that information. So I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to do it next year and I haven't quite got that figured out Because the other thing I I like to do at the end of three weeks of lambing everything that's going lamb has basically lambed and we have the last few years lambing slows down. 32:00 We load up everything that's left and sell it. I know when we do that someone got some bargains because there's probably some use in there that's getting ready a drop. They just didn't do it on time for us, but then we saw there's going to be some use in there open and we've just made it that actually, when it lines up with the next sale, we load up everything that doesn't have a lamb and they go to town and that's worked well, but without moving the use that haven't lambed. Each day I don't know how to tell which lambs don't have use and then you know if a lamb's not doing well, you don't know. 32:34 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) You know. If you find the lamb that's not nursing, you can either sit out there for an hour and wait to figure out. You know what's going on. So I'm the same way. I like to tag them, you know. Within 24 hours have the lambs tagged and identified with the dam, and I think I'll continue to do that myself. But boy, it's tempting to just leave them out there and let them sort it out from a labor standpoint. On the balance, though, I like to know how my individual use perform, and I don't know a way to know that unless I tag those lambs right there after birth. 33:06 - Cal Hardage (Host) I agree I thought this year didn't lamb them at birth, trying to promote that strong bond and not get in there and mess up anybody because I've had use that I go attack their lamb and then they'll use. Then I've got a big problem because that you ran a halfway across the pasture and she won't come back and we get rid of those just just ship them. 33:28 Yeah, that that sounds reasonable on me because I really think next year my, my thought this year was I'll wait till they're Two, three weeks old, I'll run them through the shoot, I'll tag them and then I can figure them out. No, I can't, that's. That's even more work. So, I'm I'm thinking right now. Next year I will tag them first day they're born, just so I have that information and and, and. If they want to run across the pasture, they may be on the next trip to town. 33:57 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, and we've, we've noticed big improvements by getting rid of those use. You know it isn't furiating when you're out there and you go to tag a lamb and the dam, the, the D, a M, the dam, the mom takes off and yeah, sounded like I was saying something else, or but she, she takes off and it goes running through the flock looking for her lamp. Because when you pick people who don't have sheep don't understand, but you pick that lamb up, she completely cannot see where her lamb is and does not even know where it is. When you pick it up off the ground it's like where'd my lamb go? Oh, I think it's a hundred miles east, you know, and she's gone and she's gonna disturb every other new pair of dam dams and lambs is bonding. 34:36 - Cal Hardage (Host) It's like a squirrel crossing a road. Yeah, so we make a note. 34:39 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, we make a note of those because they just disrupt everything and they leave and we Really a couple years of that and we don't have many of those anymore. 34:47 - Cal Hardage (Host) So so when are you so? You mentioned your lambing in May. When are you marketing your lambs? 34:54 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, that's a good question and that's that's a function of how much grass we have left. So, and the weight of the lambs and what the market is doing. So Ram lambs I think we sold our earliest Ram lambs this year in August. They were, they're really nice. We didn't wean them until, I think let's see late. It was August 29th, if I remember the date of that New Holland sale, and so May, june, july, august, so four months. So we weaned it four months and shipped that first load straight out. I want to say there were 77 pound average off the farm Saw quite a bit of shrink. 35:27 I think they're about 72 pounds through New Holland. I thought that was bad. But so this this is I'm getting better data at each year we saw I think that comes out to about 7% shrink and I think we shipped them the Monday of the sale. On that occasion. The next load, or a future load, I shipped lambs out and I shipped them Sunday morning and I had weights on them too and I saw something like an I never actually went back and average average it would just roughly. It was roughly like an 18% shrink on those animals through. 35:59 Often I could not believe the way I saw the price per pound and thought, well, that's great. And I saw the check and I said, whoa, that's short. The shrink was incredible. You know, the more, the more data we get, the more we can make those decisions. So one thing is we're not shipping lambs a day in advance of auction anymore, and that was worse than shipping them earlier because we hid we shipped them earlier. I mean they'll have three thousand, you know, you know New Holland, they'll have three thousand. Had a week go through there. And if you ship them late and they have a lot of goats or sheep and no space, they just throw them in the back somewhere and no food, no hay, no water. The boy, they shrink hard. But that has a real cost. So you know, we'll learn some things along those lines. 36:33 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, those weights sound pretty good though. Yeah, we've gotten better going forward. 36:38 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So I see more value right now and I was running numbers this week. I see more value right now and running fewer use and Having the stockpiled grass in the fall, you know, and growth really slows down being able to stockpile enough grass to keep my lambs later. Here's, here's where the sheep not only are sheep different than cattle, I'm learning more and more about the ethnic markets that we sell into and those markets are different than cattle markets. So, coming a little bit, I'm definitely not a. I was exposed to beef. I can't claim to be you know it, to know it a whole lot for sure. But you know kit Ferro's done a good job making the case that rather than run a bunch of big cows I'm making a, making a comparison here rather than run a bunch of big cows to try to have a bunch of big calves, you're better off running smaller cows, having Smaller calves, but they wean at a higher percent of the maternal weight. You have more of them because they're smaller, so they're more efficient. You got more of them per acre and they sell at a higher price per pound, right? So that that's the, that's the beef world and that that all makes sense. So, coming to see if I thought well, you know lamb weight, I'm not gonna chase weights, and so I ended up being pretty content to send lambs off earlier or light. Well, that's really a folly in the sheep markets. For one thing, the, the lighter animals, don't go for more per pound. The ethnic market recently, in past years, in recent years, is just flooded with lightweight lambs. That's not really what they want. So that, yeah, so the ethnic sheep markets are actually unlike maybe the beef markets were, or maybe they still are, I don't know the ethnic sheep markets are paying for the weight. 38:25 So I've got like the New Holland report from Monday right here in front of me. I guess this is a week ago, monday, and I'm looking at the prices on hair sheep, what they went for and for what it's worth the. It's hard to get an accurate report on this market, but the reporter that's there now, the USDA reporter, does a, does a better job than she does a pretty good job. But price on lambs. So you have 45 pound lambs, go on for 235. You've got 102 pound lambs, go on for 235, 100 weight, and and you go up and down between them and what you see is it's a function Not of the weight of the animal. It's a function of how meaty the animal is for its weight. So over on the right and yeah, I didn't use to pay any attention to this finger he's seeing on here, the the. 39:11 This dressing over here is all important and it either says average, high or low and that's what they want. They want an animal that it with a carcass that yields, and the number that I'm told is 52% hanging weight versus live weight. So one of the things and this is a you know we're gonna start focusing more on carcass quality. We hit about the middle of the market but if we'll grow, if we'll grow our lambs bigger, well that's, that's more revenue per you and Our you count is what drives our cost, because that every you takes one hay bale to get through winter right for us. So Fewer use means less spent on hay and if we grow those Lambs out longer, you know, lambs go through like a teenage phase where they get real lanky, especially the Cattadons, and they get real lanky in the that five-month age. 40:04 But if you can get them past that, then they really begin to bulk up and and dress out a little bit and that's where we want to have our lambs. So I don't remember how I got on this, I just started rambling because I wanted to talk about this stuff. But but I do think this was a folly and I think it's good for people to hear, because, especially in the circles that we're in and the grass and the grazing circles, there's a lot of push on low input. Yeah, absolutely low input. Sheep, you know, low cost Hair sheep, you know, bringing some st Croix. But more and more I'm realizing we gotta have carcasses and and the market Signals in the case of the ethnic sheep markets. They're begging us. Please put some meat on these things and if you do, we'll pay you for it. 40:47 - Cal Hardage (Host) So do you think you can get that Carcass quality up just with your Cattadons, or do you think you need to bring in a a different breed of Ram? 40:58 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) yeah, I'd make a lot of people mad if I said I couldn't do it with Cattadons. There are definitely, yeah, and there are definitely people. There's one producer in New York who I wanted to refer people to on here and they are phenomenal and do a ton of data. But they said, no, we make more mistakes than we do things right. And yet, you know, I look at them and I just I so admire them and and so they're. They're one outfit and they're selling Cattadons at over a hundred pounds into into their markets and they yield well. They do loin eye scans on on meat thickness. So it can be done with Cattadons. Certainly. 41:31 Ulf Kinsel is a guy in New York around the Finger Lakes. He's a good resource for people in sheep, white clover, sheep, farm calm and he runs white Dorpers short, thick, stocky animals far stockier than that the typical Cattadon, and so those animals will dress out a lot lighter but with a lot higher carcass yield, even just on grass. So so for us I mean I mean go and look to this anybody who's listening to this go and look at what Ulf Kinsel is doing. Or look at some of the Cattadon producers that are getting them up there above a hundred pounds and getting those yields. For us. What we've found in our operation I think is working is Going with about a 50, 50, 50 Dorper Cattadon or even 25% Dorper Cattadon and getting a Fleshier Cattadon that still has a pretty good terminal size. Some of our animals yield, some don't when we take them in. 42:25 - Cal Hardage (Host) At this point, though, I noticed when I look at my Cattadons. You know, there there seems to be, at least in my flock, two different body types. I get a little bit more compact you that carries more Mead owner, and then I get some lanky ones and those taller, lankier sheep I like because of the size. But to be honest, if I start looking at dressing percentages for that compact you that that would, her lambs would probably dress out better. 42:55 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I would think so too, cal. I'm not an expert on it, but that's what I would think, at least until you grew them out longer, you know, at the lower weights for sure. 43:02 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah so interesting. We try to hold our Ram Lam still January and we just grow, we just grow them slow, but we don't get. I don't know, I'd like for them to get bigger, but there's a certain breakage point in our prices in January that if I'm too big we take a big hit. So we're trying to grow them slow, just on grass. See how that goes. This year has been our wreck. You were talking about barb barb or pole worm earlier. This year. We got more rain in the fall not in the fall in late summer than we normally do and I had a mess and I usually. We have not had that near that big of issue like we did this year. So I don't know. Back to the drawing board on that. 43:51 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I tell you what you know this every time we think we've got one thing figured out, the next thing crops up right, or maybe the same thing hits us again, boy, yeah, that's good though You're keeping them till January, because the other thing is with the sheet market. You know, the beef market, I think, is more steadier seasonally, but lamb market it really comes well, maybe that's not true for the beef. I don't know anything about the beef market, so ignore whatever I said on that. But I think lamb market sure comes up. You know it's starting to come up a little bit now in November and it should continue to come up about to January. So you're probably doing about as good as you can do, you know, price wise, if you can graze them into January. 44:27 - Cal Hardage (Host) If I can graze them into January and they don't get too big. Because they start getting too big, I've got to move them earlier. Yeah, that's right. 44:34 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) So where do your market or where do your sheep end up going? Do you know what markets they serve ultimately? 44:41 - Cal Hardage (Host) We sell them in Diamond, missouri, and I'm not sure where they go from there. I assume east, but I don't know where beyond that. Diamond, it's about an hour and a half east of us and they've got a pretty good market there. They are of the sheep and goat auctions around us they're the best. Most of the others are really small and I've tried a few of them and I just don't think I get good prices there. I think they're picking them up and selling them somewhere else. Diamond, we get a pretty good price or what I feel is pretty good. I've never in my life sold an animal by the pound and thought I got enough money, so that's just the fallacy of my thinking Boy. 45:29 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I understand it's hard to watch them go through auction and feel that way. I do see that too, though, that you've got to take them to an auction that has buyers, and if there's not enough sheep to go through, there may not be sheep buyers or no competitive bidding. One other option that we have available to us that you may have there on a smaller scale, but the ethnic markets have dealers. There's, I think, maybe four primary dealers that service the east coast ethnic markets. It's likely that your sheep are coming into these markets. I know, even in San Angelo, texas, which is a huge market, something like 40 to 50 percent of the lambs that go through San Angelo come here to New York and New Jersey. That blew my mind, but one of the big dealers up here is fantastic. He'll tell you. I didn't take sheep to him for a long time because he would always tell me feed him grain, so I knew he wasn't looking for what I was selling, right? Finally, I took some sheep to him and he still said, yeah, you need to feed him grain, but he gives a fair price. He's a very high integrity man. 46:37 It's Kingdom Livestock, ephraim Stoltz and his son Samuel. They just are extremely knowledgeable. They do extremely high volume. But what's cool there is they know what the meat markets really are looking for and they have to know. I mean, they're moving trailer loads of sheep out like triple-deckers out of there every day. So he really helped me just understand why the animals are valued where they're valued. He gave me market price. It didn't have to pay auction commission and others have good experiences too. There's more benefit going to the private buyer who knows the market for us now, I think, than take them to auction and just get in that price Our local ag teacher at school where I work. 47:22 - Cal Hardage (Host) He has been trying to convince me to take sheep to like two hours away there's a buying station and I don't fully understand it and you got call ahead and stuff, but that's where he's been taking sheep and he's doing show sheep. So he's got a little bit different type of weather to sell than I do, but he's been pretty happy with that. He's been trying to convince me. In fact, just as a tangent, since I brought it up, he's got an old stock trailer in the ag barn that the kids are working on to turn it into a double-decker. I keep telling him you know, this is going to be great, we can use this. He's like yeah, anytime you need it, you can, that's great. 48:06 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, because it seems so inefficient to have 5,000 pounds of sheep in like a 20-foot trailer versus. Oh yeah, that's great. Double-deckers are great. Good for you for selling them on the hoof. I see a lot of that. I mean, a lot of guys sell direct and that's wonderful the guys that can do that, which is a whole separate business, right. I really like focusing just on the production side and really honing the product, the animal on the hoof that's going to then go to a packer and hone that and use the market expertise that's out there to refine our product into something that's efficient for the market. And then if at that point we were to decide to direct market, we'd be going into it with a carcass that was very competitive for our own purposes, right. So there's really value in just being really good at your one enterprise and your one segment of a market. 48:58 - Cal Hardage (Host) So good for you, yeah, well, we'll see. I need to make more money. I'm trying to figure it out. 49:04 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I'll say this we certainly don't make as much money as I could make in an off-farm job and Laura Laura, my wife, wonderful stands by me, manages the household very frugally, raises our children, homeschooled our children. There's just so much value in this style of life for us and being able to be with the children and work with the children, and no amount of off-farm income could replace the benefit and the joy that we have of working together as a family on this. Yeah, we're just very thankful to God that we can do this. 49:40 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, there's, I come home from work. I have dreams of not going to my off-the-farm job and I can just stay here on the farm and work all day, which at times I think is a little crazy. But yeah, there's something I come home from work and it's been a stressful day or something. My wife will barely talk to me. She's like go see the animals. I understand. I enjoy that time out there, whether it's with the sheep or the cattle or the goats or just looking at pasture. I just enjoy that time, Isn't it fun? 50:14 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) in this style of management, just to be able to go out there and sit and watch them for a while. 50:18 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh, I'd gone up other day my goats. I was moving my meat goats with the electro-nating and it got kind of late and I've done something I shouldn't have done. I hate to admit it. On a grazing grass podcast where we try and talk about regenerative and managing soil, health and land, it's only a few had. I thought I was busy so I just turned them out on the pasture. They are currently running on 75 acres to themselves because I have to cow somewhere else and I hadn't seen them in a while. So I went up there other day to see them and I'm getting ready to bring them down here because I'm going to put them with those yews and calves that I'm trying to bond. I'm going to put those goats in there with it and try and see if I can make any progress at the goats as well. 51:07 I went up and I just sat down out there and had a nice little conversation with them. I'm sure they were saying who are you? We haven't seen you in a while, but I would like to get them where. I'm doing a better job rotating them as well. Yeah, there's certain times the great thing for you, without having the off the farm job, you've got time to go out there and do stuff. And even with that, you've got to have freedom of time so you can do other stuff. And that's so great about the when you think about adaptive grit and how you're going to manage it. If you need to put them in a paddock so you have more time, for whatever reason, you can do it Like I just put those goats in a 75 acre paddock for a month now. 51:53 Actually that's what you shouldn't be doing, but it does give you that freedom to do some stuff and you're not being real rigid with your timeframe and saying, every 24 hours I'm out there doing that and if you can, wonderful. I mean, that's one of my goals, I want to do that, but there's certain times, like today. I've been on the go since I got up. When we finish here, I'm going to go do a few chores, but it's pretty dark outside and I'm glad I don't have to move cows or put up a paddock, because I got them situated where they can be, because I knew today was going to be a day with short or a small amount of time for me. 52:32 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Yeah, that's a fantastic point. 52:34 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah Well, Nathan, it's time we move to our famous four. Famous. Four questions are the same, four questions we ask of all of our guests. And our very first question what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? 52:49 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I'm going to go with the bud Williams set that we already mentioned, that that DVD set, and actually plan to mention that before you brought it up. Yeah, we really enjoy the herding and the managing of the sheep that way, and he that he's, he's just been so invaluable at low stress. 53:06 - Cal Hardage (Host) Handling of animals makes all the difference. In my mind, it turns a day of working with animals through the pens and stuff into a pleasure, versus those days that you go out there and you come to a house worn out. You're mad at everyone who was out there. You're mad at yourself a little bit. Yeah, it wouldn't, but I've been through some of those days. 53:32 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I'd me too. Yes, sir. 53:33 - Cal Hardage (Host) And just handling them quietly, low stress. Understanding that point of balance makes a tremendous difference. In fact I want to. We've got our our pens set up really good and I'm not changing them In fact we're. I say we're not changing them. There's a couple more pins that we're we're putting up to have it finished. But we have a tub and I would love to have a bud box, because on my lease land I put up a bud box and I use it and I think it's the greatest thing and I think it actually works better than the tub. But that's my opinion. I just that low stress handling. It just makes it go so much better. So if you're listening out there and you're like low stress handling, what's he mean? There's a few books out there. Search the web about bud Williams. You see lots of examples. It makes a tremendous difference in your quality of your day of working cattle or whatever livestock it is. Yeah, absolutely. Our second question, nathan, is what is your favorite tool for the farm? 54:39 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) I really like my old John Deere four by six gator. Picked up the four by six gator used you know when, maybe the second year, I don't remember how soon after we were here. One thing I like about it on the slope I don't think the kids are able to tip it, so they drive it around doing chores and it is so stable, those flotation tires don't tear up the grass, has pretty good traction. I even put tire chains on it when the hill gets icy. What a machine. 55:04 - Cal Hardage (Host) Thirdly, Nathan, what would you tell someone just getting started? 55:08 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Boy. You know I had an answer for this and my mind has told what would I tell somebody getting started? I would tell him to go ask somebody else. What would I? What were you telling Cal? I'm supposed to have an answer here. 55:22 - Cal Hardage (Host) I don't have all the answers. I would like to think I have all the answers, but I don't, and just when I think I do, I don't. So I think a couple of things that you probably are thinking of. I think you've contacted a couple people that's doing a great job and you're learning from them and using them to gain valuable insight to save you time from learning that all on your own. That's one thing. I would say Boy, yeah, that's a good one. 55:48 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) That's a good one. I also like what you said a few minutes ago about you're not always going to move the animals once a day, every day. That's just life and we need to be okay with that. And we need to do the more important things when we need to do those things and then manage the grazing the best we can and get better all the time and get more efficient at it and, yeah, go from there. Excellent advice. 56:10 - Cal Hardage (Host) Nathan and our last question Nathan, where can others find out more about you? 56:15 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) We do have a presence on Facebook on wwwfacebookcompalamfarm. P-a-l-a-m-b-farm Wonderful. 56:26 - Cal Hardage (Host) Nathan, we appreciate you coming on and sharing. I'm so glad you didn't back out. Been an excellent conversation. 56:32 - Nathan Smelser (Guest) Thanks, cal, really enjoyed chatting with you, and thanks again for all your work and all these podcasts. 56:37 - Cal Hardage (Host) 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 communitygrazinggrasscom. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to the Grazing Grass podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube for past and future episodes. We also welcome guests to share about their own grass farming journey. So if you're interested, felt the form on grazinggrasscom under the Be Our Guest link. Until next time, keep on Grazing Grass.