e84. Lynch Linebacks and Calf Sharing with Glenn McCaig

00:00 - Cal Hardage (Host) Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast episode 84. 00:04 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Never get complacent with what you're doing. At the same time, stop and actually look at what you have achieved and really be proud of what you have achieved. 00:12 - 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 episode we have Glenn McKeague. Him and his wife operate fine line farm and Perry's Corners Farm. Listen to the rest of the podcast and you'll know why there's two names there. They are in Canada and while they do a diverse range of livestock on their farm, we focus on their Lynch lineback cattle and how they manage those in milking. A Lynch lineback is a rare breed. That's very interesting that I had not heard of until talking to Glenn. It's a great episode. I think you'll enjoy it. 01:07 Before we talk to Glenn, 10 seconds about my farm and carrying on the topic from last week, we're going to talk about the Noble Research Institute's essentials of regenerative grazing. On last week's episode I had just finished day one. After that episode I completed day two and three. I think it was really beneficial. I enjoyed the activities. On day two we got out in the pasture and we measured forage and we calculated consumption, how big an area to give the cattle, and each day we moved cattle and we estimated how much we needed, how much forage, how much space to give them. Then the next day we were able to go out and see that, which was really nice. So that carried on through three days. We also put a million pounds of beef per acre to see what that would do and left them in that for an hour to observe, which was a wonderful, eye-opening experience Just the aspect of being out in the pasture and seeing those cows move and how we calculated our density and moving them forward and how much forage was available out in the pasture. On the last day we had a printed out picture of our farm that we could start designing some stuff there, with input from our other people in the class, our table mates as well as the instructors. 02:50 Overall, a really good conference. I encourage you get an opportunity. You should attend one. As for them, they will be announced when they are starting back up in 2024. And when they do, we'll let you know. Let's talk to Glenn. Glenn, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited for you to be on here today. 03:12 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Well, it's great to have the opportunity to be on here and tell our story. 03:17 - Cal Hardage (Host) Glenn, there's a couple of things coming up today that I am excited to talk to you about, and I'm not going to spoil it for everyone else. They're going to have to listen to figure out what those things are. Let's start out with Glenn. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation. 03:33 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) I grew up on a very small conventional dairy farm. We were a 30-cow herd. Around 2004, my parents made the decision to sell the dairy cows and we started a traveling petting zoo in Pony Ride. Prior to that my father had done quite a bit of breeding of exhibition quality poultry. So I grew up with a background knowing that there was more than just a whole steam cow or a stock or corn or a soybean out there. I kind of knew the other side of farming and had a lot of exposure to that and the traveling around the petting zoo. I mean I got to work with all kinds of animals, from yak and fallow deer to lambas and alpacas and all sorts of different breeds of goats and sheep, and also learned how to interact with the public. 04:23 And then the year I finished high school I found a man by the name of Robert Lynch and he was the founder of the Lynch Lineback cattle. And I had read about the Lynch Lineback cattle in different articles here and there, mainly through the magazine that Heritage Breeds Canada. At that point it was Rare Breeds Canada. My father was subscribed to a magazine when I was a kid so I would see them and grow up as a kid exposed to so many different breeds of livestock and we showed quite a bit of livestock and I showed 4-H dairy calves and jerseys and that you know. I just thought this was a breed of cattle like any other and they always interest me. So I always kind of was on the lookout for them. And nobody if you talk to somebody, that seemed like somebody that they should know something. They knew nothing about them. So when I was 17, I found an article in the Genesis magazine and Robert had left his phone number in it and I phoned him and that just started. Well, that was back in 2007,. So we're how many years is that now? But yeah, it started from there. It intrigued me. 05:37 Robert Lynch was the only man like breeding them. A few herds had started up at one point from his cattle but they had kind of fizzled out. So here is a breed that had no herd book, no registry and only one breeder. It just seemed it didn't make sense to me. Almost it was hard to wrap my head around. I went to go look at them with the idea that I was going to go look at them. My mother knows me quite well because when I came home from that trip. She said, well, how many do we have to go pick up? I said, well, just a bred heifer and a heifer calf, but they're unpashed and we'll pick them up in December. And by the time we went back in December, the order had changed to three bred heifers in a bull and then the following year, following spring, before the heifers calved, I think, I went back and bought the remaining two bred heifers that I'd left behind and then that fall bought, I think, another four bred heifers. So the herd kind of took off from there and for the first almost 10 years Robert and I would trade bulls back and forth. He never had more than about 20 breeding-age females. Now our herd is up to about 20. Robert's still alive today. He's in a nursing home now, but we bought his last cow and bull from him last fall. They were call cows, like a call cow and a call bull, but all the linebacks out there today are descendants directly from his herds. So we have 10 to 12 herds throughout Canada. There's a herd just about in every western province a couple of herds here in Ontario and one small herd in Vermont, and I think there was approximately 50 calves born in the 2023 year. So we're floating somewhere around 50 breeding-age females in the entire breed. 07:22 So that kind of kept me at home at the farm. I had a herd of cattle there, so I stuck around working with my parents for a few years. After high school I ended up going to agricultural college, came home and spent another two years at home and just decided that I wanted to be a farmer and not a carny and not be on the road all the time. So I ended up moving to Eastern Ontario, which is where the linebacks came from, which is where Robert Lynch lived. It was about a three-hour drive east from where I grew up in Quebec, but that land just spoke to me. It was home when those cattle belonged, and it was just home to me. It was rocky, it was like a little piece of Scotland really. So I farmed there. I had a rude awakening when I actually had to start paying my own bills and paying for my own feed. 08:08 Oh yeah, that's so weird, and so up to that point I kept the cattle as a cow calf herd, but they were originally an old dairy breed so I started milking them to try to bring in more income and my goal was to be a dairy farmer. So you do what you want to do. So in Canada we've got a supply management system of quota and the sale of raw milk is illegal. A lot of hurdles to jump through to become a dairy farmer and I don't think I ever will become officially a dairy farmer per se. I started milking the cows and feeding veal calves and dairy goat kids for extra income and I worked on a 400 cow dairy, managing the Heifer program and the feed program there, and then later on I switched to being a health technician for a local semen company and worked in their isolation barns there with all the young sires and there I got to work alongside federal vets and learn why some of the policies we have in place are there and so on. But the harder I worked to get my cattle to work for me, to get my farm to work for me, or the harder I wanted my animals to work for me, the harder I had to work to pay for it. It became very obvious to me in my late 20s that I was never going to have children if I just kept up the way I was keeping up. You worked a full-time job, and then you came home and worked a full-time job and it still wasn't enough. 09:36 So in 2018, through YouTube, I stumbled onto a video. It was a webinar that Dr Elaine Ingham had done and in there she talked about soil health, which we'd learned about soils in college. It was the most boring thing, and all that was was how to balance fertilizer and nutrition was the most boring thing. In fact, I opted out of my nutrition course because I said, well, and the professor was mad at me and I said, but I don't need a nutrition course. That's what the nutritionist at the feed stores for, and even when I managed the feed and program for a 400-cow dairy, that's what the nutritionist did. I was just there to consult with them and follow the recipes they followed. So it was all very boring. 10:22 But what Dr Elaine Ingham was saying about soil health and when you've got the proper biology and your soil's healthy and your plants are healthy and your animals are healthy and you're not always worried about the next disease, the next fertilizer bill, the next big thing. Then you have time to be part of your community, raise your young ones and look after your elderly. And that was just the light bulb moment for me. That was just what I wanted in life. I grew up on a farm where both my parents were employed off the farm and didn't work off the farm I mean, they were employed solely by the farm. So that's what I wanted for my family. So that started me down the journey of regenerative egg and a lot of rabbit holes you could fall down once you start looking into that. 11:11 And then my wife's journey. She had no farming experience, grew up here just outside the city of Kitchener in southwestern Ontario and in university got her master's librarian and information science. But she had health issues and she started to look into nutrition and she applied the knowledge she had from her master's degree of how to actually do proper research and conduct proper research and read between the lines and she ended up taking a nutrition course and it was completely opposite of everything she'd been learning. She found the Westinay Price Foundation and was looking more holistic and traditional ways of cooking and eating and she realized just how wrong our system was. So she ended up dropping out of that course and just started trying to source her own food, which she 15 years ago that wasn't easy to do to get proper grass-fed beef. 12:10 So there was four acres here. She started at market gardening and raising pigs and chickens and then in 2014 her parents helped her buy 50 acres and then in 2019 they bought another 55 acres. I guess there's 110 there total now. The way we actually met was she had bought some lineback cattle and had leased a bull from Robert Lynch. I was there one day. He owned a small slaughterhouse at the time and I was there having a coffee with him in the front room of the slaughterhouse when Megan showed up to pick up a bull. So that's how that all began. 12:45 - Cal Hardage (Host) Robert helped you get started with your cattle and introduced you to your wife. 12:50 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Not sure if it was that day or if it was another day we were talking, but I do remember a conversation when you know, in our eyes as much as Megan didn't grow up in the city, anything when you live in Ontario, anything west of Toronto is Toronto. She was a city girl in our eyes and he said, oh, do you think that city girl's going to make it in the cattle business? And I said, oh, not likely, but if she does, I should marry her. And here we are, you are. Yes, In 2019, I sold my farm in Eastern Ontario and made the four hour move here to Southern Ontario and now farm with Megan and we're married and we have twin girls. 13:29 - Cal Hardage (Host) Congratulations on the twins. That's a lot of work right there for you. I have not had twins. I don't know that personally, but I know each of my kids. If I had a duplicate of it it been a lot. 13:39 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah. Some people say yeah, I don't know how you manage, but we don't know anything different, and it's sink or swim. We don't have a choice. 13:48 - Cal Hardage (Host) Actually, that is so true. Just whatever you're doing is the normal. Is the normal for you and you just make it work. Yeah, yeah. My wife is a kindergarten teacher and a lot of times people say I don't know how she does it. Well, that's what she loves and she just does it, you know yeah. 14:08 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Well, it's like breeding lineback cattle there, maybe not the smartest business decision. We make a work for us and I don't know anything different. 14:14 - Cal Hardage (Host) There you go. Yes, so Megan was on a kind of a regenerative path before you got there. 14:22 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah. So we often joke about this because we knew each other for four years before we actually started dating. So we were both in our 30s by that time and I often say why did we wait so long? Why didn't we figure this out sooner? But we realized I was still too conventionally minded and she was still reading Joel Saladin books and still give Megan a lot of credit. I think that's why I became so fond of her. 14:52 She went and got jobs with neighboring dairy farms. 14:55 She worked on farms so she ran her farm. But she went and got that dirt under her fingernails, experience and you know, don't want to use antibiotics, want to feed all organic feed and then have to start paying your own bills and end up with sick animals and realize where you know there's the ideals you have in your mind and then there's what you actually have to do. So we kind of realized we both kind of met in the middle. I started kind of changing my ways and she kind of changed her ways a little bit and met in the middle there. But yeah, what Megan realized was you know how wrong we were about nutrition and fat's bad for you but really fat's healthy for you and you know all these different things that are wrong with what we're taught about basic nutrition. She was able to realize that all the stuff we were doing and farming is wrong. And you know, now even the most conventional grain farmers around here are planting a bunch of cover crops and they don't even really know why. They're just doing it. 15:54 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh yeah, yeah, which is a great step in the right direction. 2018, you were still at your place and you had a SoHealth webinar. Did you immediately change what you were doing or how did you you process or go through that journey right there? 16:13 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) So I was always big on having cows outside. I I hate it having cows in the barn, and all my Careers within farming involved working on dairy farms where it was total confinement. So I grew up on a farm where our cows pastured. Instinctively. Organic should work, but we had. We grew up in Quebec. There's a language divide there. We had a French separatist neighbor that you know we were English scum and and he was an organic farmer, and Organic at that point just meant you just stop Spraying and you stop spreading fertilizer. So he had horrible crops that never mounted anything. There was always dead cows out by the bar, and so that was that was the poster child for what organic was for us. 16:58 Oh yeah, so it wasn't hard to get me to switch because in my bones, my instincts told me it should work. The only reason why I wasn't doing it was because that just wasn't what you do. You do what everybody else does. You do what they teach you at school. Oh yeah, so I was already kind of going down that path and then, through that in 2018, I was trying to have four or five cows quarterly. 17:23 I stopped breeding cows at that point and held them all back to start on seasonal calving in 2019. By that point I had had a better handle on some of the credit card debt. I'd accumulate it and wasn't accumulating more bills, and that was the great thing. There was a light all of a sudden at the end of the tunnel just a year later and you know thought I had it all figured out then, and now I'm smart enough to know that I've only just scratched the surface of all of this. But yeah, in 2019 I did own the farm with a previous relationship and and that whole idea of holistic management and I never took the course, but just the idea of it and trying to manage things differently then finally got me to the point where, within a year, I was able to look at my life and say, hey, I can, I can live now. Well, you know, I I could actually possibly quit my job one day. 18:19 I could actually do this, I could actually raise a family and yeah then you start having those those conversations and the one I was with just Wasn't gonna have kids, so we ended up. You know, it was completely amicable and and we sold the farm and got settled up. But that's kind of how holistic management sold my farm for me. Holistic management was supposed to save the farm and instead now it's sitting vacant because an investor from Toronto bought it. But yeah, things happen fast. I didn't expect anything to happen. 18:55 All of a sudden my life was in turmoil and next thing, you know, one thing happens and another thing happens and Megan and I were talking and I said all the farm has to be sold and Real estate was kind of iffy then, but I didn't ever realize we were just right on the cusp of this real estate boom. Oh, so how do I know on that, maybe I wanted to sold the farm so fast. But we put the farm on the market and we had an offer the next day with a 30-day closing, and all of a sudden it's when do you move tractor, trailer, load of cattle and sheep and and keep your life going? And it kind of turned some heads when all of a sudden I said, well, like Megan had just bought the extra 50 acres. And she said well, we, I need more help, I need more cows, and that's just good how it all happens. So it happened fast and then, a year later we were married and Following year we had twins. 19:46 So it's always interesting or funny how life events Take you to wherever you need to be life can throw you a curveball, but it can also throw you Everything you want, and reaching and grabbing that as far scarier than dealing with the curveball, but I don't regret any of it. Looking back, it all happened the way it did and yeah. So from 2018, sitting there scratching my head wondering how I'm ever going to get my life together, to Sitting in the hospital a family of four by the spring of 2021 was pretty, pretty big difference. I don't suggest any human go through that. 20:24 - Cal Hardage (Host) So when you hold your cows over there to the the new place, how did you get started over there? What did you do? 20:32 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) I think that was a big eye-opener for me because up till then I mean, my father always said there was a bit of gypsy in us. We always like to kind of buy and sell and make a deal kind of thing and and I was always buying and selling calves and raising veal calves so and I'd board cattle out here and there was still at my parents. And then it was the same when I had to rent a farm. Actually I had a 17 year old cow was the first linebacked cow I bought and I just called her this year and butchered her. But I Realized I think she had been on something like 10 different farms by the time I got here. So I never really realized the toll it takes on cattle, moving them around. 21:15 But by the time I had been in Eastern Ontario is the town of Toledo, so Toledo, ontario often gets confused of Toledo, ohio. But I'd been there for almost four years of the cattle at that point and they were a pretty good herd and I guess because I had always moved them from stressful situations to moving them there where it's quite tranquil, there was no crops around us that were being sprayed, there was no noise pollution, there was no anything and they moved there as a herd. It was when I moved away and came here and the farm is the north border of the farm is a six lane highway, so the whole farm is noise pollution. I mean, we're an hour from Toronto. The population in southern Ontario is pretty dense, so we've got a railroad track on the south side of us, we've got a solar farm on the west and we've got radio towers on the east or 5g radio tower on the east. So the noise pollution, everything. 22:15 A lot of the cows fell out of the herd those first two years. I don't have a lot of those original cows left. So yeah, that was a huge eye-opener to me and that's where this past year I kind of got more into the migratory grazing side of things, because I start looking more at the cow psychology of things and I think that's maybe the greatest sin in regenerative ag is everyone keeps Hushing, custom grazing or running stalkers and what we're doing is we're developing the linebacks. We're considered a landrace breed, we still maintain a closed herd and we're trying to keep them as a landrace breed. So to me that means if they don't breed they get out and they breed and function and do their job, then they get to stay and every generation gets better and better. And you just don't do that If you're custom grazing or buying in stalkers right that that breeding program there. 23:12 - Cal Hardage (Host) I love cow and cow cap because that's the you know I get a hand in developing the next generation. I love the genetics aspect of it and stuff. Because you talk about the lynch lineback, I Didn't. I was unaware of that breed until just a day or two ago with them. I've heard of Randall linebacks in the US. Are they related to Randall linebacks? 23:40 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) So they were developed in the same manner but completely different genetics. If you look at North America, when cattle first came over of the settlers they came from wherever the settlers came from all over Europe, england, the channel, I but nobody kept anything pure when they came here. I mean, you needed a cow to milk, you needed an ox to pull a plow, you needed something to eat and that's all you really cared about. So cattle became kind of a mongrel group of genetics and then it wasn't till about the early 1900s herd books were established and then they brought people, brought purebreds in from the original countries, but the the native cattle running around were still just mostly crossbreds. That's basically what the Randall family had kept and they kept the type of cattle they liked, which were those speckly lineback looking cattle. They just kept the linebread herd and and when that herd dispersed then a few Dedicated people kind of picked up the remaining animals and kept them. Going. From there the story with the lynch linebacks is quite similar. 24:39 Robert's father was a, a cattle drover. He bought and sold. So like Robert said they they milked about 50 cows by hand and he said every cow in the barn was for sale and he said there were some days you might milk 60 head and he said the next day you could be milking 40. Because his father was always buying and selling cattle and his father was always leasing bulls. He would drop yearling bulls off at a farm in the fall and pick the two-year-old bull up off pasture and Say to the farmer well, if you don't feed that bull this winter, he won't breed your cows next summer, kind of thing. And so he was always dropping off yearlings and picking up two-year-olds and three-year-olds. And then Robert tells the story of the one year they drove 60 mature bulls, two cattle car loads of bulls, five miles up the road to the train station to put them on the train for Montreal. So he said you brought them all home and you put them in the barn yard. And he said there's quite a bit of fighting for a few weeks until you got all the bulls home and then tried to drive these on foot. 25:39 So these lineback colored cattle which we thought originally came from the Gloucester cattle over in England, but the lineback gene is Instead of, you know, of zebras. We always wonder are they black with white stripes or white with black stripes? A lineback cow is actually a white Cow with black sides and it's the color side at gene. So if you think of a charley cow, anything you breed her to, she's going to dilute the color because she has that dilute gene and so red will give you a cream calf and a black will give you a smoky. But different types of short horn and a few different types of breeds have more of that color side at gene. So when you breeds, breed them, say, to a black animal, you're going to get a white animal, black sides. So we don't actually know if our cattle share any Genex with the Gloucester cattle in England or the now extinct Glamorgan cattle. 26:29 So these lineback colored cows were around, like Robert said, there was herds of them when he was a kid and by the time he was farming on his own he realized there was really not that many left in the countryside. So he kind of bought up the few that he had and actually he said you, there was a lot of cattle that looked like the Randall cattle. They were all gone. He couldn't find any of those but he he could just find the black and white linebacks and so he kept them. He closed the herd. 26:59 He just always kept back his own bulls and he developed them over a 50 year span of really not doing anything special, other than If they had horrible luck and errors or temperament or disposition. They went to the slaughterhouse. So he basically bred every heifer and If she didn't do what she was supposed to do after the first calf she went and and he just kind of Would keep a bull off a different cow every year and just kept the herd going like that. So there, the color was what the color was the motive that made him do it. But the genetics are. They're just basically the run-of-the-mill Cattle that people were living off in area, in that area of Ontario. Like I say, it's, it's rocky and it's swampy. Or Robert said there wasn't many herds that could support more than 10 cows at the time. 27:47 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh yeah, and I would assume the original cows or the cows he was picking up, were used more in a dual purpose Purpose. Dual purpose purpose in a dual purpose way. They may have a milk cow or two, and then they the raising calves as well, yep, and that was exactly it. Yeah, before all the dual purpose breeds got bred to be specific to to one lane or something. 28:14 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) So the linebacks considered considered dual purpose, which just means they're not really good at anything. 28:21 - Cal Hardage (Host) Well, you're making them work for your situation. So it sounds like. Sounds like they're good at something. 28:27 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah, so currently I'm milking them. I no longer milk them twice a day. We now run a calf share program so they they raise their calves. We bring everything into the barnyard at night while I'm doing chores and locked them up and Doesn't take a newborn calf very long to get in the routine, it knows. Oh, mom's about to leave for the night and she'll go have one last nurse on her mom and then lie down and at the end Of chores the cows are normally lying in the barn. 28:55 I could pull the door, shut open the barnyard gate and let the cows go and then they're full of milk in the morning and I milk them and then return their calves back to them For the day and then they get all the benefits of being with their mom on pasture. They're on milk for 10 months. We wean at 10 months. They learn how to graze with their moms and yet they're. They're better handled than any of the bottle calves I'd ever raised. These are now the quietest Cattle I've ever owned, are the ones that were raised in the calf sharing program. 29:27 - Cal Hardage (Host) Now, with that program you you mentioned right there, you bring them up in the evening and you do your chores and the calves sort themselves off, basically, you know, which sounds completely crazy to me, to be honest, but I did watch your YouTube video with it and it was amazing what I saw on there. So if if someone's, like me, a little bit skeptic about wait, you've got some Videos on the YouTube channel. For is it fine line farm? 29:57 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Fine line farm, yes, fine line farm yeah to To that point. 30:03 I would have never believed it either and actually I'm not even really sure how we came on to that. I think kind of stumbled on that by accident. To tell you the truth, it was kind of a rodeo every night my, my wife was very big on. She didn't want cabs separated in the cows and I really, coming from a dairy background, didn't see her point at the time. And there was there. There was some heated discussions over at the first couple of years, but some point last year I think I stumbled on by accident. 30:32 The barn door wasn't open and it was only open about a foot and the calves just. I came back to let cows go and realized, oh, the barn door is not open, but then realized oh, all my calves are inside and and what it is is when you crowd cows into a yard. If the calves nursing as mother, it's happy. But once it's not nursing on his mother, it doesn't want to be standing next to those other Orinary cows that aren't its mother, it wants to get away from them so they know where their safe space is. And it this year then was the first year we started right from newborn calves of that and it really only took about a week for a calf to figure that out. So the first couple of calves, you know you, it maybe takes a bit to separate them and cut them off at the gate when the cows heading back the pasture and then, like the cows, will kind of stand by the gate and pine a bit for their calves. So we drive them back to the pasture and lock them in. But this year we had very little of that. That maybe lasted, on the cow side of things, for maybe two or three days. All the cows have now done a delactation or two, or they were first calf heifers that grew up in that system, so they were used to being separated from their mothers and because they're out with cows that have newborn calves and those cows are grazing and not Balling, looking for their calves, they put their heads down and graze alongside those cows. So it really is something this is our third summer doing. 31:55 We didn't milk cows the first year I was here. We just went back to just Suckling the calves on the cows. But yeah, every year it gets better. Every every year we figure out something. It's definitely not an easy system. It's a lot easier than feeding calves twice a day and milking twice a day. But you start to understand why dairy farmers don't do it. It is tricky and it is. We learned a lot these last three years doing it. I think we have it Mostly figured out for the most part. 32:27 - Cal Hardage (Host) Now, what are you using? The? 32:28 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) milk for so in. In Canada we have a supply management program and there's dairy quotas, and I'm just not in that program and probably never will be so currently we are feeding the milk to pigs, so that we Finished approximately 60 pigs this past year and we now have about 65 piglets out in the yard for next year. So by feeding them milk we were on just a non-gmo conventional hog ration, but we are trying to gear the farm more towards going corn-free, sunflower and soy-free. There's different reasons for that and it's the Mostly driven by the consumers, but then our own health conscience is taking us there, and for me it was really. I Really got on board with that after listening to Steve Campbell. Have you had him on the show yet? 33:23 - Cal Hardage (Host) No, I have not, but I'd like to get him on here. 33:26 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah, he's a must. So after listening to him talk about minerals and sea salt, that was. I will read things and listen to things and maybe hear about ten times before I try them, unless they align with my instincts. And when he started talking about the impurities and minerals and just going back to the basics, I the next day and bought a bag of sea salt. 33:51 I pulled the bag of mineral away from my cows and oh yeah, I looked back and that kind of kind of got me going down the well I want it to get. You know, our hog ration had a mineral premix in it and it had a lot of soy meal, a lot of synthetic Ingredients in it. I just want it to. For me it wasn't so much about the soy and the estrogens and the Omega 6s, it was more about just getting that byproduct away from them and getting them back on on whole grains. So what people don't realize about pigs and chickens is there's this huge push to go soy free on them. 34:24 But pigs and chickens prior to the 1950s ate a lot of meat. If you were homesteading, your pigs and chickens were out rooting around the yard and getting Bugs and grubs and eating scraps, and if it was on a commercial scale, they were eating a lot of byproducts from abattoirs and slaughter hoses. And then Soy beans became popular and this last 20, 30 years is big push for grain fed chickens. Everything's grain fed. Well, we've we've turned pigs and chickens they're mono gastric, the same as you and I. We've turned them into vegans. And now People want us to pull the soy away from. 35:00 Well. Now that's so. There's a lot of people around us starting to do soy free poultry and when you look at their numbers you say you're well, okay, you're doing it, but you're not doing it well, so we're not there yet with the poultry side of things. I'm working with a nutritionist right now to try to figure that out. But on the pork side of things, I thought well, I love milk and cows, I've got the equipment to milk cows, I've got the cows of the ability to milk. There's my protein, my amino acids and my fats that we're not getting from corn and soy. And Start there. Great literature on feeding milk to pigs prior to a world war. 35:39 Oh yes you talked to a nutritionist today about it and they tell you it's the worst thing in the world. 35:43 You can do and that you're just feeding them water, but you, on a dry matter basis, milk is about in the high 80% moisture. Yeah, it's surprising how, talking to a modern day nutritionist, they want to sell you feed and they don't really want to work with you on that. They'll tell you that you're basically feeding your pig water, but milk is over in the high 80s for moisture. But that means it's still in the low teens for dry matter, which is actually not far off of what pasture grasses are in some cases. And on a dry matter basis, milk is in 30% fat, 30% protein range, and all your lactose and sugars are then in there too. So milk is actually a very good feed. So it's allowed us to switch our pigs over. 36:38 Oh, the other interesting linebacks is they're all A2. There was some A1s. We had done a bit of a study on them a few years back. We had tested across section of the breed in a few different herds and about 80% of them were A2, a2. And when I tested my herd, I only had one cow that was A2, a1, and I actually never kept the bull off of her, and so when I tested her daughter, of course it was an A2, a2 sire, and she was the calf was A2, a2, and I called the cow that had the A1 gene in her and now the herds all A2. 37:12 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh very nice. 37:14 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) So we're feeding our pigs a raw grass-fed A2 milk. We're probably producing some of the best milk in the county and then we're feeding it to pigs. It hasn't lowered our cost of production. The commercial hog grower was pretty cheap because when we went to the soy-free, corn-free diet then and we were going to hit that market for our customers but we were also then going down that path of trying to take as much synthetics out of their diet then we went to organic grains, so oats peas or oats barley and wheat is what is available to us. So the cost of our feed went down, but the cost of our feed went up. So our cost basically stayed the same, but it allowed us to produce a much finer product. 38:06 - Cal Hardage (Host) Now for your pigs. Do you have them out on pasture or are they pinned up and receiving the milk as part of their diet? 38:15 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah, so we really don't have any barns on the farm. We've got a couple of run-in sheds, one barn that we insulated, a corner for my milk hosts and then the other corner is the milking parlor. So I freeze my fingers out there milking cows in wintertime and we don't really have a lot of shelter, so our pigs live in calf huts, those white plastic calf huts. I think we're on the fifth or sixth generation of pigs this year that's been bred and raised on this farm in the last 12 years and they've never seen a concrete floor in their life. Oh yes, so when I moved here we were a pretty diversified operation cattle, sheep, pigs, broiler chickens, player hens and all very much separate. We had all the detriments of diversity and of every enterprise had its own set of overheads, its own logistics of chores and managing and all that stuff. 39:13 Since then I was a big driver of we're going to graze the sheep with the cows. I remember my wife saying that you couldn't do that Sheep didn't stay in an electric fence and that Greg Judy did it because he has hair sheep. And I had to tell my wife that the reason why people say you can only do that with hair sheep is because people that raise hair sheep love hair sheep. But sheep are sheep and there's good and bad in every breed. So you can make parasite-resistant wool sheep and have really good electric, fence-trained wool sheep. So we started putting the sheep and the cattle together. 39:54 The pigs were still always just grazed in the summertime in the wood lots that were further away from the yards. Then there was some wintering yards where we would winter pigs. That worked for the first five years and then by the time I moved there we were starting to produce more pigs and we were getting parasite issues. There was a lot of that the first couple of years where I came here, where my in-laws would say, well, we never had that problem before. I think I kind of ticked them off when I would just say, well, it's because you hadn't been farming long enough. I didn't mean that in a mean way, it was an honest way. It looked like I was kind of the culprit. But I mean we doubled the land-based theory. I came here, we doubled all the livestock. We changed a whole bunch of things. 40:35 Somebody had told my wife at one point when she was a market gardener give it five years, your problems start to show up in five years, pests and parasites and the unbeneficial things they start to work their way in. You show up it's a clean slate that probably hadn't been a pick on that farm in 100 years. After five years we were starting that problem. I ended up and one of the other things I remember Megan saying well, we have no shade on the farm. I looked around and said but you've got more trees than I have on my farm. You've just fenced them all off. Because that's just the way we do it as farmers. We have a hay field. We don't cut into the trees, we cut a hay field. Well, when we go fence that field, we manage it. The same way we manage a hay field, we fence around the edge of it. They had fenced around the edges of all these fields. The woodlots were all fenced off from the fields. That's where they ran. Pigs Then always had trees falling on fences and everything else. 41:32 I went and took all those fences down and opened them all up Much bigger paddocks. Now we have trees. I'm not criticizing the way they did things, because the way they did things was all the way I had been doing things too. A lot of the things I tried on this farm I wasn't bringing a lifetime of knowledge with me A lot of the things I tried on this farm I was trying for the first time myself, but it was just very clear to me that we had the change. 42:01 The other big thing was the pigs weren't highly profitable animals. All that feed is important feed. That's important nutrients. When they're pooping that out in a lot that we winter them in, all that phosphorus and nitrogen is gone. All just runs off into the watershed. We're actually polluting here. We are regenerative ag trying to save the world. In some cases we're polluting just as bad as our conventional neighbors next door. 42:32 The other thing was we were grazing pigs. A group of pigs would go to a two acre woodlot for the summer and that's where they stayed. All that manure was being dumped in the woods where the trees don't necessarily need it and they were possibly being detrimental to some of the trees. The goal and two years ago I ended up putting pigs back in the trees just because it is hard keeping pigs on pasture. This year I did a little bit better, rotating them behind the cows. I think next year I'm just going to put them right in with the cows. They do root up pastures, they do get in the way, and when I say I'll put them in at the cows I'm going to change my grazing strategy drastically next year. So I'll be running two herds instead of one. I'll have a herd of steers and bulls and then I'm not bringing those cattle in every day to be milked with the dairy cows so the pigs can stay out there. Because it's kind of hard when you go out to bring in a herd of dairy cows and you have 60 pigs looking for a pail of feed. So there is a logistical nightmare behind it. But I will say we've done a much better job now in the last four seasons of taking those three separate enterprises and actually it was four because the pigs was kind of the farrowing side and the finishing side taking those four enterprises of grass-fed beef, lamb, pork and farrowing and just making them a pasture-raised beef or a pasture-raised meat enterprise and integrating them better. So they're not three separate enterprises but one. 44:06 And then we changed the way we breed and manage our pigs. So we just basically have one group of pigs now. So we just farrow in the fall and then we butcher the gilts. So we just farrowed this September. We actually just started butchering gilts this week. We sold some piglets, but we'll retain back about 60. 44:26 In the spring we'll pick out about 12 gilts to breed and we retained four or five of our own boars. We will put those gilts in with the young borlings and we did this last year. We bred 12 of the hopes that 10 would conceive and that eight would raise litters and that they'd average seven apiece and give us approximately 60 pigs. And we had about 75 piglets born and raised off of 11 gilts and we had nine farrow within six days. So it gave us a really good tight group of about 64 pigs that we can keep back. And then we sold. 45:02 I should have pulled the boars out, actually, and then I could have butchered those gilts earlier, but instead I'd left them in. So we had two that were a whole heat cycle behind. They farrowed three weeks later. So we just sold those piglets because there's no point in trying to merge them in now and compete with the older piglets. But what that does for us is now we have one group of pigs to keep through the winter, so they'll actually bale graze with the cows and sheep and I'll dump their feet out on the snow. We shut our sheep in at night so the coyotes don't get them, but then the cows. They bale graze during the day of the cows and then we put the calf huts out in the field and the pigs sleep in the calf huts at night and they get all the benefit of rooting around in the hay and the cow manure. And then if we have a nice frozen winter, I will start bale grazing different fields. 45:53 But if we have a very mild, open winter, I say we live in the banana belt of Canada. Down here in the southern part of Ontario we don't get near the weather that we did back home. We're just that little bit further south and we seem to get. I think the cities around us have a lot to do with the climate here and then the Great Lakes, but it's a fairly open winter with a lot of mud and ice. We don't see a lot of snow anymore. 46:18 So I was very much against working up perennial pastures, but last year we ended up. We had too much mud in these yards and I said enough is enough. We put the pigs out in one field and then this spring we worked it up and we replanted it. But it was also a field that was predominantly just ryegrass and I wanted to get more diversity in it. But it's hard to intercede grasses and actually get them to germinate when you already have an established stand of something. 46:46 So our land is very depleted. It was 40 years of just chronic row crop, corn and beans, no, just completely devoid of life, and we're on sand and gravel and our soil is just a dry year. It's really dry. And then this year was a really wet year and our grass was. We had all kinds of it and it was like eating popcorn. There was just no bricks in it, it was just water. So we really need to get the nutrients and the organic matter back. 47:14 So by doing this now every year the pig manure is higher and has a higher potassium and phosphorus ratio than cow manure, and so does the sheep manure. So the pigs and the sheep help balance the cow manure. We always talk about biodiversity and, oh well, the cows will eat grass and sheep will eat some more of your forbs and goats will eat even more of your forbs, and we always talk about it in terms of what they eat, but we never talk about it in terms of what they're putting back. And I think that's the greatest synergy between cows and sheep is they're actually balancing that potassium and the phosphorus ratio. We don't happen to have enough sheep and we've got a market for pigs and I'd love to. I have a love hate relationship with pigs and I'd love to get rid of them, but they're here to stay and I am learning to love them. 48:04 So, yeah, we bail grays intensely with the dairy herd and the sheep and the pigs on one paddock and then, like I say, if things freeze up and the pigs aren't going to destroy the ground, then I could open up the gates on real cold days when there's a lot of frost and bail grays on some different paddocks to move some of that nutrients out there. And then this summer we moved the pigs behind the cows. We were on three day moves this summer and then we tightened up and we were on no sorry, we were on daily moves. Last year was three day moves. This year we were on twice daily moves at one point and I was moving the pigs then behind the cows. 48:40 Every three days I would put the back fence for the pigs and they would be at a pretty dry year start now and they would kind of go out and scuffle up a part of the field and you would kind of cringe, but then it never got any worse than that. So you know, the damage was quite minimal. But then we had a really wet week and they just destroyed the field they were in and I just decided well, that's the field you're going to winter in this year, that's where the bail grays is going to go, because you worked it up to the point now that I have to work it and get it replanted. So that's the field. So yeah, I'm just kind of winging it as we go. But the more we keep the pigs out on the pasture, that's added fertility that we're bringing into the farm and we buy all of our hay for the sheep and cattle as well as a means of trying to build fertility on the farm. 49:28 - Cal Hardage (Host) Very good. Now one question I have about the sheep and the hogs what breeds are you using there? Do you have a preferred breed or is it something you have just brought in some breeds and you're working with genetics? You have in your flock, the? 49:44 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) pigs are English large blocks. They're not registered, they're just grades, but we keep them pure, we like them and there again now they're a closed herd. We Megan had Tamwarfs when she started. She had some Tamwarfs and some large blocks and the Tamwarfs are extremely violent when they have piglets and the large blocks can still be very violent when they have piglets, but they weren't anywhere near as bad. They were far more manageable than the Tamwarfs and the Tamwarfs were gone by the time I came and I said to Megan one day did you see a big difference between the breeds? And she said I could see more of a variation within one litter of pigs than I did between breeds of pigs. And it's true, every litter has got strong ones and weak ones. So she never saw a difference there and just temperament wise. And then she just decided she wanted to focus on one breed and she had a large black boar and large black sows and they were working for us. The Tamwarfs got butchered off and we just stuck with those. 50:50 Prior to that I had Hampshire's on my farm in Toledo and there was only six registered Hampshire's left in Canada and now I don't even know if there's any left, but they were such a commercialized pig. 51:02 They are considered a rare heritage breed but in Canada. But they were being bred by commercial producers and the Hampshire's are still pretty strong in the US and these were mostly imported genetics and they were a conventional commercial pig and I just don't know that they would do what we want them to do on pasture. The English large black are very fat pig. They put on a lot of fat and they become very problematic for people that are feeding a lot of free choice grain. But we limit feed them twice a day. They're allotment and that's it, and then they go and graze and they have almost perfect pork off of them. In fact, the other day my mother was in visiting and I was going to cook my parents pork chops on the barbecue and I was taken by the package and my mother said but you said we were having pork, why are you getting beef out? 51:53 I said well, that is pork, but it's as red as our beef. Now, do you have a? 51:58 - Cal Hardage (Host) preferred sheep breed. 51:59 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) So the sheep that are on the farm resemble, have a strong resemblance to clun forest, but we don't actually know if there is any clun forest genetics in them. There is some use out there that strongly resemble Rideau Arcott, which was a breed developed here in Canada, and there's a few that have some pretty woolly heads that would suggest a lot of Hampshire in them and I'm just wondering if the Hampshire Rideau Arcott cross kind of gives that clun forest looking head, that kind of clean chocolate colored head with the pointy ears. But that was. There was a family friend here years ago that Megan used to babysit for and he paid her one year in lambs that's how she started her flock and his name was Gideon. He just ran a small line bread flock because she said we're at a ram and he said, well, breed them with my ram and next year keep a ram. That's what she's done and Gideon passed away a couple years back and she bought the remainder of the flock from her wife. So we just call them Gideons and they've been a line bread flock now for almost 20 years and we've kind of taken the approach with them of we've tried tagging them and they rip your tags up and everything else. 53:21 And this year we just had a very simple approach. You lambed and you're in the lambing pen and I realized you had no teeth left in your head. You got an ear notch. And if you lambed and didn't look after your lamb, you got an ear notch. If you were a single ram lamb, you got an ear notch and come fall every year you had an ear notch got culled and all the ram lambs that had ear notches because they were singles or their mothers didn't perform the way we wanted them to. They went on the truck and then we just looked at the remaining ram lambs and picked better lambs out of there and went from there. We only have about 30 this year for the U lambs there's closer to 40, but we had a good year this year with lambs. But then we culled a lot of the old original U's that were getting up there in their teens. 54:14 I have the shears and I've got the wheel, the sharpen blades and I finally just smartened up this year and hired it done. I'm getting a little older in my back, so I used to be pretty good when I was a teenager, but now it takes you all day to do 30 and for five bucks a sheet. You can get the energetic little lommage kid down the road to come over for five bucks a sheet, but he's done in two hours. A couple years ago the neighbor said oh well, the wool depot is right down, it's about 20 minutes drive from you. I used to have to take it into Carlton Place, which is where all the wool in Canada goes, but there was a depot 20 minutes from my door so I just drove it down there and dropped it off. I'd never shipped wool before, and that was two years ago. 54:57 Last year we still hadn't got a check or a statement back, so the wool just ended up getting put on a brush pile and burnt, unfortunately. And then this year I did the same thing and this fall we finally got a check back for our wool, and I forget what it was, but for I think it was 29 fleeces, and it was in the sense that we got and I'm not talking per fleece, I'm talking overall it was hardly worth the stamp they put on the envelope. I found a new woman that's going to come shear for us next year and she said she just takes all the fleece and if you're selling hundreds of fleeces a year. Through them you get a bit of a premium but, like she said, she sells a lot of fleece to get back a pretty small check at the end of the year. It's not really worth anything in Canada. 55:47 - Cal Hardage (Host) Yeah, I think that's the case in the US, unless you're able to find some niche market, someone who's doing some kind of craft with it or something. 56:00 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) And then that's a whole other enterprise on its own. And we do have friends that have lined back cattle and they have Lincoln Loggables and she spends a lot of her time weaving at a loom and spinning and she does beautiful work with it. But yeah, that's a full time job and it's own, oh yeah. 56:17 - Cal Hardage (Host) We've made it over a lot of things you're going, you're happening on your farm. We may not go as deep as I'd like on some of it, but the conversation's been great. But it's time for us to move to the overgrazing section and that's where we take a little bit deeper dive into something you're doing on your farm and I think it was mentioned a little bit earlier but we are going to talk about. I'll let you introduce it. 56:44 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Yeah, I probably won't do it justice, but I started to look into instinctive migratory grazing this year, so we're probably doing this podcast about 40 years premature, because I really haven't had any chance to try this. I've probably been doing rotational grazing to some extent, even before I even really knew it was rotational grazing, for over 10 years now, and then the more I got into it, the more I tried different things. I'm just grazing more selectively, ended up this year trying the more total grazing approach. That was a complete flop, partly on my end but partly because of the. It does require adaptive genetics. Now my cows are adaptive dairy cows Like. They're far harder than the average dairy cow but they still out produce in terms of milk, any beef cow. So they're still a very high maintenance beef cow and the system didn't work. 57:45 But granted, I looked back at it and I did it completely wrong too. There was some nuances in there in that total grazing system that I failed to look at and it just didn't work. But going into this, coming from conventional ag, coming from a conventional mindset, and really just admitting that, okay, everything we've been doing is wrong, and that's not to say my grandfather was wrong, my father was wrong. They were doing what they thought was best with the information that was provided to them at the time. Now here I am, going into regenerative agriculture and we start learning about rotational grazing and everything else, and right from the get-go I thought to myself well, if everything else I've looked up to this point is wrong, who's to say that this is right? At what point do we get 200 years into intensive rotational grazing and somebody realizes oh, we don't need to do it this way and then there's another paradigm shift. 58:47 So I always had that in the back of my head. And then there was a fellow out in the east coast of Canada and you know he mentioned that back in England in the 70s they started this and rotational grazing was strictly an electric fence salesman's dream and that it didn't quite work. But now it seems to be taken off in England again. So I'm not going to sit here and say that rotational grazing or mob grazing doesn't work. It does and absolutely does have its merits. But I started to just ask more questions and one of the things I came to realize is when we get into rotational grazing we come from it either from my own background, which was conventional set stock grazing, or the way my wife came at it, not knowing anything about grazing and then rotational grazing. And when we start learning about rotational grazing then we start learning well, stock your farm to your winter carrying capacity, plant diversity out there, diversified livestock, cabin, tune of nature. You know your water cycle, your mineral cycle, your nutrition cycle. We start learning about all these other things that we either learn after we start practicing rotational grazing or we learn it in conjunction with rotational grazing For a lot of us. You know we were pasturing and making hey and now, as we pasture more, we're turning more and more of our head ground into pasture because while we see the benefits of it and the profitability of it, but so are actually doing better on our pastures, we're pasturing a lot more days of the year but we're actually just making less hay and pasturing more of the ground, so it's the actual ground doing better. So I started to ask myself those questions and just wondered well, what happens if we did all those things but didn't rotationally graze? Would we start to still see some of the benefits? I think you're probably going to ask me later on for a book or a podcast. That was really important to me In this fall. I came across the what is it? The Stockman Grass Farmer podcast and it was an episode. It was three episodes. 01:01:04 That was Dr Alan Williams talking about epigenetics, but really what he covered was what this ecosystem in North America looked like and you know he talked in that about a ranch I believe now it runs something like 300 head of cattle, but when it was established in the early 1800s it was running over 10,000. And what he said in the early 1800s, when they established that ranch, it was already 200 years to grade it, because 100 years prior to that we started shooting buffalo and 100 years prior to that we were trapping beaver and the western plains, as dry and arid as they are, was actually full of water because it was full of beaver damming up all those seasonal springs and retaining the surface water. So we went through. No, he talks about moose and river otter and everything that lived all through the western. So it actually made me wonder if we were able to wipe out the bison in what? Seven decades, almost 30 million If we managed to do that because we took the beaver away first and we took all that water off the lands, maybe we'd already weakened them. 01:02:15 So he really opened my eyes as to you know, here we are thinking we're diversified because we try to plant 10 different species of grass and our pasture, but then you realize they're all cool season grasses and a couple of legumes. It's really nothing compared to those ecosystems and I started to say, well, I got to get more diversity, more warm season grasses in the pasture, we got to start getting more animals in the pasture and more diversity, and that was the real big eye opener for me. And then the other thing. 01:02:50 I'm not even sure how I stumbled onto Bob Kinford, but I just started looking into this. You know the natural behaviors of cattle and just you know set stock grazing. I just nobody ever researches set stock grazing. All research rotational grazing. So I started looking into set stock grazing and some some algorithm. Bob Kinford popped up with his instinctive migratory grazing and I can't even begin to do justice to what he's teaching, so I'll let you talk to him about that and just on that note, he will be on the podcast next week, so we will have more info on this next week. 01:03:33 So I was very fortunate I got the chance to talk to Bob then this fall. I just sent him an email and said I need to talk to you, so what would you charge me for an hour? And I kind of told him about the farm and he just sent me a. I guess I sent him a text and he sent me a text back and said I really know nothing about Ontario or Dairy Cattle so I don't feel like I'd charge you, but I'll gladly talk to you. So we had a good talk. 01:03:58 But his premise is when we start taking away the stress from cattle that we put on to cattle, when we take that away, cattle start to behave like cattle. And one of the things I noticed with calf sharing was that we feel like we have it all figured out because our cows leave their calves. They go out to the pasture, they graze, they come in in the morning, we give them their calf, they let their milk down and everything's hunky-dory. But I work with my cows every day. I know my cows and I know that they're still not as content as they could be, and that was one of the things I was. I didn't want and I haven't figured it out yet. But that's part of the reason why I'm gone down this path is start to look at cow psychology and how can we work with the cow. So Bob's premise is when we start to not push cows and we don't lead cows, we just nudge them in the right direction, encourage them in the right direction and we encourage them to be a herd again. We don't stress them out of handling, we don't stress them out bringing them in. 01:05:09 Those cows start to graze the undesirable plants because we give the cow all this credit. We say the cow is going to go out there and get the best bite and then we don't give her the opportunity to do it. We say she's going to go out and get the best bite and then we don't let her do it. We corral her up in a little paddock and Bob will tell you that rotational grazing is just a slowed down version of sad stock grazing. You still have all the problems. You're just slowing it down Versus when you have cows relaxed, doing what they should, they will mob up and create that herd. And they will mob up, they'll create that herd and they'll start trying different plants and they're not dumb enough to go re-graze a plant that's started to grow up after three days. 01:05:54 And when we think about that, that cow if she's in your paddock and she's eaten a plant after three days, taking that horrible second bite well why is she doing it? If the cow is going to take the best bite that's what we keep telling everybody. The cow is smart enough to take her best bite. Well then, why is she taking that best bite? It's because you don't have another good bite paddock. 01:06:16 But if your farm is set properly for your winter stocking rate and you've got the proper carrying capacity and you're managing your spring flush either by bringing in extra cattle or calving in sync with nature and retaining some of your yearlings and doing all this other stuff, then if you've got a six month growing season, like we do, that means if we're on feed or cows on that farm all winter which we don't, we're buying in hay. 01:06:41 But if we were to get to that point, then when those cows are eating grass every day of the year, that they're eating grass during the growing season, that farm's growing two bites of grass for every bite the cow is taking. So there should, in theory, be enough forage out there that if we're letting her take the best bite and she truly knows how to take the best bite. She shouldn't be going back to that plant, but that will also. You know, we don't have enough diversity on our farm to pull that off either If we have cool season and warm season grasses. Once you know, end of June, our cool season grasses are playing up and we're seeing a summer slump. Well, that's when warm season grasses would be shining, and then so on and so forth. 01:07:23 So I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I don't rotationally graze. But we've got enough paddocks, permanent paddocks, set up on the farm of high tensile fence and then we strip graze within those paddocks. I would like to get away from strip grazing within those paddocks and not doing daily moves or twice daily moves and you know, maybe doing weekly or three day moves, even if I've got to go out and divide those paddocks in half and every three days. But I'm actually thinking, and where I we have too many open cows this year. Well, too many, I think there's. Only we don't preg check anymore because we wean in the spring and then we can't. We wean in March, we cab in May and then any open cows that didn't have get put your the end of June when they've really put their weight back on from the winter and we retail all of our beef. So there's really no need to preg check because we have a calving season. So your bread or your not, and then if you're open, we make just as much money off you as a call cow as we do with steer. So because of the total grazing approach and I was out there trying to total graze these paddocks and then move to the next. I was pushing the cows too hard and I lost up on all my compensatory gain. This year my cows never got that condition back to where they should be before they calved. Reeling steer has never really took off. My two year olds never really took off. 01:08:47 Next year I'm really thinking it's kind of be a matter of in the spring, when the grass is just growing, that I'm just going to open the gates and let them go and then, as grass starts to slow down, we'll make that adjustment. We'll start to close off paddocks and start to rotate them through the paddocks and if you know if I can do it weekly, or if we end up in a drought, well, I was moving fence twice a day before. I can go back to moving fence twice a day if I have to. But I'd like to start, you know, grazing the whole farm and then just adjust from there. And if that takes me right back to daily moves, well, that's fine, that's what we need. But we were always grazing one herd and the dairy cows. When they would come out during the day, we'd put them in a separate paddock, just so it was easier to get them in the calves up at night. 01:09:35 But what I really realized this year I picked up some rented pasture and I didn't want to put. Well, I couldn't move the cows up there and I didn't want to put the fattening steers up there. So I took the yearling steers up there and then we were coming in the breeding season so I pulled a couple of crossbred heifers out I didn't want to breed this year and put them on the four acres by the house here where we live, and those rented pastures were just set stock. There was no rotation involved of them and actually, after talking to Bob and what he talks about, I was starting to see that happening in those yearling steers. You'd sit back and watch them and they would be all out there in a group. They'd be fanned out a bit more than he would want them to be, but they would all be facing the same direction. They'd all have their heads down, they'd be grazing in the same direction and at one point I went out to bring them in and there's a big tree In this pasture. 01:10:31 I used to work on this dairy farm after I moved here and they used to have heifers out there when they raised heifers and the heifers just congregated under that tree and it was nothing but bare dirt. And when I went out there there was some grass probably about eight inches tall, sparse grass, but you could tell it had been bitten off and it was recovering. And I thought this is a high traffic area and this grass is actually recovering. It's got more than three days regrowth on it. They haven't come back and bit this off. And I was bringing them up to the corral to sort one off and, of course, as we're bringing up to the corral, we came by that spot and all their heads went down and they started eating because they hadn't been back to that part of the pasture. There's plenty of water on this pasture and shade and they'd been working on a different section of the pasture. They were migrating through that pasture and what amazed me was how well those steers had done, because when I turned them out there I was really disappointed with them. And then I came home and I looked at my yearling heifers that I didn't want bred and they were turning around and I went back to the farm. I looked at my yearling heifers that I'd left with the coward to be bred and I'm still disappointed with them and so I've kind of tore the whole paradigm part of run one single herd. 01:11:54 And initially when I first started into this, I remember saying to my wife well, bison, naturally split up, the mature bulls split off cows and they don't come back till the season. But you have your bachelor herds of bulls and then the young stock stays with the cows. And looking at that, I did some reading on that this fall and the theory behind that is the mature bulls are outweigh the cows. And if we look in, jim Garrish has kicked a hay habit book. He talks about the highest nutrient requirements of dairy cows, then finishing steers, lactating use or somewhere in there at the top, and then you get into lactating beef cows and then yearlings. But those finishing steers are actually above your lactating beef cows. They're up there if you're dairy cows. So when we have them in one herd, one mob, those finishing steers are competing with those fresh cows that are calving in the spring looking for that best bite of feed. And those cows are bossy, they're put stress on those animals. So then your yearling steers are out there. They're getting stress from the older cows and the older steers. And then your heifers are out there getting stress from all these as well. 01:13:07 But if we go back to a more natural group of splitting those off males and females. If you watch a herd graze your dominant animals, they do graze in one direction typically if they're grazing properly and those dominant animals will be out front. And what I've realized now, those dominant animals are my cows that are out front with the highest nutrient requirements and the heifers tend to be in the back of that mob when things are going good. You actually have a leader follower system within the same paddock at the same time, without saying well, I got to go move the cows today and then move the heifers into the paddock behind them. So you actually create that leader follower system within your herd. And then it's the same thing on the male side. We keep quite a few bulls back for breeding. So it's two year old bulls and steers and yearling bulls and steers, but those dominant ones get out in front and the lesser ones hang back. So next year I'm going to split farm into two and manage those two separate groups. Just see how that happens. Because those yearlings don't have the same requirements as the cows or the older steers. But those yearling heifers, naturally, are meant to be with the cows. They're meant to learn the social hierarchy and the dominance, but they're not necessarily meant to be thrown in with the bulls and the steers and have to deal with them as well. And the same with the younger bulls they're not necessarily meant to be dealing with the drama of an older cow. So, yeah, so that's kind of another thing. 01:14:31 And then Bob will touch on the fact that herd effect and migration has nothing to do with predators, and that was something else I got looking into this year and I think that was where I really, you know, there again, it was one of those things he was talking and it was just making sense with me instinctively. I never fully believe. I believe that, yeah, predators have an effect in moving the herds and bunching them up, but everybody seems to have this perception that cattle just move in this constant linear movement. But that's not true. Migrating animals will migrate into an area, they'll stop, they'll give birth, they'll graze, they'll probably over graze, they'll probably take that second bite. And if you look at total grazing, what I did wrong was I was trying to graze the whole farm and then come back and then I realized everything was getting too mature ahead of me and I was not capitalizing on the stuff that had recovered behind me. So I ended up going back to it, but by that point it was past its prime. And then all the stuff I hadn't done. 01:15:35 One of my mentors he's a great guy, brian Maloney. He's been doing this for a long time in Quebec and he said well, that's deferred grazing. That field that you didn't touch, you'll graze, that you know late summer and your summer slump and that's going to be a great field for you next year. That's deferred grazing. Well, when we look at cattle, if they move into an area and they over graze a bit, are they actually doing what the total graze system is saying to do? Maybe those plants in the spring are recovering far faster than we think they are. Maybe they've reached that point of recovery. In May that might be 15 days. In August it might need to be 60 to 90 days. But on some of those cool season plants, maybe when our cows are going back and taking that second bite, they are in fact taking it at the right time. And those patches of grass that they leave, that's actually deferred grazing. But when we do it as a management strategy we're brilliant. But when the cow does it, she's a fool. So this is what I want to take that approach next year, monitoring more. I imagine we're going to have some parts of paddocks that get over grazed and under grazed and then the question will just be more or case of why. Why are they doing that? 01:16:53 And we've changed our perception of weeds. In regenerative grazing we talk a lot about weeds and they're not actually weeds. If the cow eats them, well, a weed is just a plant that is growing where we don't want it. And a corn stalk growing in a soybean field is technically a weed. So a patch of goldenrod in the field that the cows aren't eating is a weed. 01:17:14 Well, a patch of orchard grass growing in the field that the cows aren't eating is also a weed. So what are we going to do with that goldenrod? Or clip it, or we want to bale graze on it, or a bunch of the cows up on it. Well then, that's just the same thing we have to do with that orchard grass. But in regenerative we say well, that weed is there because nature put it there for a reason. Its nature is covered crop. Well, it's the same thing with that grass that the cow is not utilizing. So, instead of trying to bunch the cows up on it and move fence every day for the sake of trying to clip some patch of the grass off. Is there a different angle that we could take with that to manage it? 01:17:54 - Cal Hardage (Host) Glenn, that'll be very interesting to see how that works for you next year. And it'll be very interesting for next week, our episode with Bob, and he can shed some more light on that migratory grazing. But, glenn, it's time for us to transition to our famous four questions Same four questions we ask of all of our guests. And our very first question you alluded to earlier what is your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? 01:18:26 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) I haven't read nearly enough of them yet. Everything I've read. A lot of the information is the same, but every book has that one gem that you glean out of it. Or every podcast you listen to has that one thing that makes you go aha. So just read them all, read them all and listen to them all. 01:18:45 One thing I did watch on YouTube years ago and I watch it almost every year. It's a man by the name of Mark Bader. I'll send you the YouTube link and maybe you could put it in the show notes. I think his him or his father's one was responsible for kind of creating the cafeteria style mineral feeding. But he in that it's a two hour long presentation he's doing and it's a long one to get through. But he really breaks down on a molecular level what energy is and how a cow uses it and how she can convert protein into energy, but at the detriment of the cow, and that really gives you a really good understanding of how your cow is utilizing your grass and that really opened up my eyes to a lot of things. 01:19:36 - Cal Hardage (Host) Oh, very good, I look forward to getting that link. I'll have to watch it. Yeah, and we will include that in our show notes. Our second question what is your favorite tool to use on the farm? 01:19:49 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Oh, I've thought about this one because I knew you're going to ask it. So there's two tools, one we can't live of out and one we don't have and should have. Right now it's our side by side. We feed a lot of pigs. Well, all the pigs are fed up in the pasture, especially when we're doing daily fence moves. It's, it's invaluable moving water troughs and moving fence. We use it every day and now with the kids it's so much better than a four wheeler because it's got a cab on it. So you know the kids are safe and it's used every day. 01:20:18 But I, if we can go away from daily fence moves, if I could figure out a good way to have those pigs come back up to the yard to get their own feed and not have to burn gas every day, I we can't live about it and I'd love to live about it. The one tool I wish we had and we just can't seem to manage it because we don't live on the farm and we have that six lane highway that borders us but that would be a good livestock guardian dog, because that would really allow us to change our poultry enterprises and have them integrate it into that pasture setting. Right now they're kind of their own free standing thing chicken tractors and and keeping the layers confined just for because of predators. But if we could manage some good livestock guardian dogs on the farm, that would be a huge game changer for us. 01:21:06 - Cal Hardage (Host) Very good. Our third question, Glein, is what would you tell someone just getting started? 01:21:12 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) Be patient, be patient. It's great to go on YouTube and watch everybody's successes, but they're not showing you the failures and or a lot of people are doing a lot better than they were, but they don't realize how good they could be doing. So be patient. It takes a long time. Listen to everything. I believe it was Alan Savry that said question every damn thing. And you have to do that. You have to read between the lines. Everything is going to work. The principles will work, but not the details are going to work on your farmer range. So question everything, try everything. Try everything once. Listen to everything. Listen to all the podcast, read all the books. Never get complacent with what you're doing. Yet At the same time, it'll be very depressing if you, if you don't stop and actually look at what you have achieved and and and and really be proud of what you have achieved. 01:22:05 - Cal Hardage (Host) So yeah, I think that's great advice and I think at the end you you touch on a very important point that I've I've heard a few times. I actually just read a book called Hidden Potential, by Adam Grant, I believe, which was an excellent read. If you have kids or are working in education, I think you should read it. It but one thing in there that he brought up that I've heard up some other things that other places that you kind of touched on would your cell five years ago, what would they think about your position now? So what are you doing? So if you were to go back to yourself five years ago and you could see what's happening now, what would their impression be? Would they be so impressed with what's going on and the progress you've made? 01:22:54 And and I think a lot of times that's the case, but we don't. We don't ever stop. We're we're looking at other people or what's the next thing we're doing. Sometimes we just need to stop and look at how far we've came. And, glenn, I won't stay on the soapbox very long, which my wife will say is quite shocking, but I won't. Moving on to question number four, where can others find out more about you? 01:23:18 - Glenn McCaig (Guest) I do have the YouTube channel Fine Line Farm. Our website, finelinefarmcom, which will take you. It links to the Perry's Corners page. So Fine Line Farm was my farm before I sold and moved here and Perry's Corners is my wife's farm, so I just kept the social media presence as Fine Line Farm, but all of our marketing is done through Perry's Corners Farm, so you could find us on Facebook at Fine Line or Perry's Corners. I don't post as much as I used to and I don't make as many videos as I used to, mainly because everything I'd been preaching I. I turned that all upside down this fall and and started it relearning everything. So makes you second guess being out there preaching everything when you're not actually practicing it. 01:24:02 - Cal Hardage (Host) So it is a learning process, for it's a journey for all of us. Glenn, we really appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. Enjoyed the conversation. Hope I wasn't too long winded for you. No, no, 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, fill out the form on grazinggrasscom under the be our guest link. Until next time, keep on grazing grass.