e4. 30 Years of Grazing Grass with Sheep

Cal: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode four.

Bill: [00:00:02] Understock at the beginning and as you build your expertise build up your stocking density and your stocking rate on your land.

Voice over: [00:00:14] You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, helping grass farmers produce forages for livestock.

Cal: [00:00:20] On today's show, we'll talk to Bill Fosher of Edgefield Farm. We discuss sheep, ElectraNets, and border collies. Sadly, my audio has a slight echo and you learn about a word that I have trouble pronouncing. I guess you've learned two now anyway enough about that let's get to the interview. Bill, welcome to the grazing grass podcast. We're glad to have you here. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation?

Bill: [00:00:59] Thanks for having me Cal. I've been at this sheep thing now for the better part of 30 years. Actually, I guess it's right around, it's not the better part of it; it’s all 30 years now. Started out with four-use and built that flock up to at one point I was managing over a thousand. And I'm doing a lot of vegetation management with that flock and now sort of ramp that backs after a couple of business setbacks and last 10 or 15 years, I've been focusing on a more smaller flock producing grass-fed lamb. I'm buying in feeder lambs every spring now.

I do have a small breeding flock of just about dozen use and you know, we're kind of moving back into the breeding range of things, pretty cautiously for economic reasons. But so far the feeder lamb situation has been doing well for us a conservation planner by day and a farmer by afternoon, evening, and morning.

Cal: [00:02:32] All the other available hours.

Bill: [00:02:34] Yeah. So that's a little bit about me.

Cal: [00:02:38] Well, it's very good. On your sheep, what breed are your breeding use?

Bill: [00:02:45] They're a mixture. The foundation is kind of North Country Cheviots and we've been breeding them to a Dorset Ram that we got from Kathy Yoder actually belongs to a friend of mine and we borrow him. Kathy Yoder is a Dorset breeder in Pennsylvania who you know, produces a pretty high-end breeding stock that has some expected breeding values EBVs that are based on you know a genetic model as opposed to a phenotypic model. And she's primarily a grass-based operation as am I, so you know, looking for somebody who could give us the genetics for sheep that would perform on grass, which is surprisingly hard to find so far, these guys seem to be doing it pretty well.

Cal: [00:03:48] Oh yes. So you have wool sheep, spit that out correctly, wool sheep.

Bill: [00:03:57] Sheep with wool.

Cal: [00:04:00] We don't have many wool sheep around here. All of our sheep are hair sheep.

Bill: [00:04:08] Yeah. Actually, my feeder lambs for the last couple of years have been cotyledons and they're performing pretty nicely for us as well. I like the wool sheep for a little bit better muscling and for a little bit better survivability in the winter. Because my Fox spends the winter outside and we lamb on pasture outside in the spring. So having the wool is kind of like they're carrying part of their barn around with them.

Cal: [00:04:44] In your area, it's important they can handle those cold winters.

Bill: [00:04:49] Yeah, it doesn't get super cold here. I think you know, the typical winter for us is you know, long stretches of below freezing for sure. But not a whole lot of days below zero you know? We don't have the cruel winds that a lot of people have out in the Midwest. You know, our terrain is broken up enough that we have some pretty good shelter. But what we do have is wet snow and that can make animals miserable. So in our system, we found that the wooly sheep do better than the hair sheep in that outdoor setting. The people that I get my feeder lambs from you know, happened to have a pretty nice barn that they can raise their winter sheep. And so, you know, that works out well for them and, they get some of the advantages of the hair breed that aren't accessible to me as a breeder, but that, you know, works well for me as a feeder lamb producer.

Cal: [00:06:14] Oh, yes. Now, where are you located?

Bill: [00:06:17] We're in Southwestern New Hampshire. The nearest town of any note would be the city of Keene New Hampshire, which is just about five miles from where my farm is. We are about two and a half hours from Boston and two hours north of Hartford, Connecticut, and three and a half to four hours north of New York City.

Cal: [00:06:51] Oh, okay. I just wanted to get that location in there because I knew you were a little bit further North than I am being in Oklahoma. Now you mentioned the hair feeder lambs. I've got a flock of hair used and I thought about using a wool ram on those to try and get some benefit of some little bit bigger lambs on them. What’s your thought about that?

Bill: [00:07:19] Well, it can certainly work but then you know, it works better I think if you're not going to retain any of the ewe lambs for breeding, because obviously if you breed them to a wool breed you're going to have kind of as far as the fiber goes, the worst of both worlds, you're going to still have to share them but you're going to have to throw the wool away.

Cal: [00:07:45] Yeah, I would see it as a terminal cross.

Bill: [00:07:48] Right I mean, I've seen some really nice crosses between like Katahdin ewe cross to a Texel Liam can produce an awfully nice lamb. Because the Texel provides the loin depth and the muscular hindquarter and the Katahdin is you know, good mothering ewe, and sort of prolific, but not overly. So, that's a really nice cross provided that you don't give in to temptation and say, oh, I need to keep like a half a dozen of those ewe lambs, just because they're so nice.

Cal: [00:08:36] That's a difficult thing. We ended up keeping more than we should of everything it seems. On our flock, we're at the size we want to stay. So I've been looking at that or some other options there. So, very good information about that, tell us what time of year do you buy your feeder lamps, and then what do you do with them?

Bill: [00:09:09] So I buy them in May, which is about when our pasture really gets going here. We can usually kind of count on being snow-covered here until sometime in early April ground thaws out sometime late April. Then by the beginning of May, the grass really starts to take off. So I try to get the feeder lambs on the pasture before the end of May. Of course, we're also trying to make sure that they're large enough to have the room and capacity to process pasture, which really needs to be you know, 55 to 60, 65-pound lamb when it hits the pasture.

Cal: [00:09:57] Oh, yes.

Bill: [00:09:58] So you know, usually the 1st of May, they're a little bit shy of that. So they usually end up coming, you know three weeks later into May. The first week of May, they're lighter than that so we get them on the grass basically as early as we can in May and then they graze all summer. And at the end of September, I usually take about half of them to a local processor. I'm selling the whole lambs to private customers. So I truck them into the processor. I get them slaughtered, cut, and wrapped and I deliver boxes of meat to my customers. So it's a direct market.

Cal: [00:10:51] Oh, yes. And did you say about 50% of them or do you do all of them?

Bill: [00:10:55] So the first batch in late September, or early October, I bring about half of them, and then the other half goes usually in late November, or early December.

Cal: [00:11:10] And is that the end of your growing season or is your growing season-ending a little bit earlier than that?

Bill: [00:11:16] The growing season and grass stop growing usually sometime in October depending on the weather earlier or later in October. So I'm grazing stockpiled forage basically from somewhere around October 15th until you know, either until we get too much snow cover or until the lambs go, which is, you know, the end of November, like right around Thanksgiving. That a couple of years when I was able to do stockpile grazing, pretty late into the winter one year, actually we went all the way into February. That was very unusual and that, you know, typically I can manage it so that I have stockpiled for about six to eight weeks after the end of the growing season. And usually what stops me is cold wet snow that then freezes hard and becomes ice and they can't dig down through to gets to the grass. So I usually have grass that I can't graze.

Cal: [00:12:28] Oh, yes. And what kind of forages are those that you are stockpiling?

Bill: [00:12:34] A little bit of everything. For grasses, it's orchard grass, timothy, brome you know, your typical cool-season grasses. There is some Reed Canary grass in there, but that doesn't stockpile very well. Once it freezes, it kind of turns yellow and gets bitter and they don't like it. Let's see, what else do I have? There are red and white clovers. There's some Forbes but really the mainstay of the nutrition in the stockpile would be those big three grasses, the orchard grass, the Timothy, the brome, and then the red clover and the Latino clover.

Cal: [00:13:22] Your forages are varieties you have all summer as well?

Bill: [00:13:26] Yes. I don't do any planting of annuals at this point. I've tried it, I've messed with it a few times, and unless they solve some other problem. In my overall farming system, they're not economical for me to plant just as sheep feed if you understand what I'm saying. The amount of gain that I can get on you know, say turnips or kale or something like that I could plant to extend my grazing season. Just isn't worth the expense of tillage and planting and so forth because I'd have to take land out of production in order to do that and I don't have extra perennial pasture for that.

Cal: [00:14:17] Right. And you get all those trips over the pastures and stuff. Have you tried broadcasting any seeding in, or not?

Bill: [00:14:26] I have messed with that a little bit and with pretty mixed results. So one of the things I tried to do at one point was to trample in some oats and peas into a really sparse area of the pasture where permanent pasture seating had failed on me the previous year. What sort of happened was that the sheep ended up eating a lot of the seed instead of just trampling it in. So we weren't super successful with that. We did get some catch, but not really enough to take home and I've done a lot of frost seeding of clover and, birdsfoot tree foil in the past. I mean it, either works great or it doesn't work. It's been my experience with it and the variable there is just going to be how the freezing thaws cycles go. We are trying to broadcast it on days when it's going to be frozen at night and thawed during the day so that there's a ground movement that opens up little crevices that the seed can roll down into and then get good seed to soil contact that way.

Cal: [00:15:56] Oh yes. We've tried broadcasting some things and we've had mixed results with it. I keep thinking one day, we're going to figure it all out, but it's not happening yet.

Bill: [00:16:09] No, I think it would be pretty boring if you ever got it all figured out, you know, my father-in-law used to say you never, you'll learn something new every day if you're not careful.

Cal: [00:16:21] Right. That's true.

Bill: [00:16:23] I just assumed to keep learning things.

Cal: [00:16:26] I agree. Okay usually you get pretty confident in your ability or I do and I think I've got this figured out and quickly something tells me I do not.

Bill: [00:16:40] Yeah, or you had it figured out for those sets of circumstances and now it's different.

Cal: [00:16:45] And it's all-new yes. So when you're managing your livestock on your pasture, how do you manage your livestock? Do you have them all turned out there and you're rotating your pastures?

Bill: [00:17:00] The farm that I'm on now, I guess I should probably start by saying I don't own any of the lands that I farm. Well, that's not a hundred percent true. I have about two acres at home that I will occasionally add into the pasture rotation, but most of my farmland is about four miles from home. It's a cluster of fields that belongs to three different landowners. It totals about 26 acres. There's no permanent fence. There's no water plumbed anywhere so I'm doing it kind of all the hard way. But I use a portable electrified net and I moved the flock every day to a new paddock. Sometimes if I'm in particularly rough forage I might actually move them twice a day. But generally speaking, I'm doing a daily move. So for example, right now, it's a total of 46 animals so you know still a pretty small flock. They're in a paddock that is one hundred and sixty-four feet long by about thirty-seven and a half feet wide. That's enough grass to hold them for about 24 hours. They're going in at a grass height of about right now, about 16 inches and they're leaving behind you know, somewhere between four and six inches of residue.

Cal: [00:18:55] Is that your typical goal for your residue?

Bill: [00:18:59] Yeah. I don't like to get anything below four inches. Sometimes I'll cheat that a little bit at the end of the grazing season when I'm grazing dormant grass. But basically, if it's got a chance of re-growing, I want to leave some solar panels there for it to be able to capture whatever last lingering sunlight we might have in the globing days of October. So right now if anything, I'm cheating on the long side, because I would really like to have this grass that I'm grazing nowhere at the beginning of September, have enough residue left to actually do a good job of re-growing and providing me with good forage sometime in the middle of October like it will be the tail end of my stockpile.

Cal: [00:19:59] So you're moving your netting once a day. How's the move going with the netting? I've never used the netting personally.

Bill: [00:20:10] I've been using it since the first day that I got sheep, so I'm kind of used to it. I have a way of doing it and I have certainly had muscle memory on setting it up and taking it down. So the way I do it as I set up kind of a laneway where two fences are running parallel to one another, about 164 feet apart, the length of a piece of [inaudible 00:20:40] is 164 feet. So you know, then I set up two nets across that and about three posts apart are thirty-seven and a half feet. Right now that's how I'm setting them up and then I leapfrog that back fence in front for the following day if that's making sense.

Cal: [00:21:07] Right. Okay

Bill: [00:21:09] Every day, the first thing I do when I arrive on the scene is you know, I give kind of a quick cursory overview of the sheep, take a quick look at them, make sure that you know, nobody got their feet in the air Xs in their eyes or anything like that. Turn off the Energizer and open the fence up and let them go into the next paddock. Then I take down the fence that was behind them and I moved that forward for the next day. So I'm never setting up a fence in front of hungry sheep. They're never running around yelling at me. It's time to go that stress isn't good for them, and it's also not good for me. So that was a trick that I learned, I don't know, a few years back to just always make that your practices to make sure that you're setting up whatever you're going to be moving the sheep into the following day. And I did that when I was raising beef as well. I always had the next place that they're going to set up while they were busy with their heads down the next day the first few minutes of the move.

Cal: [00:22:31] So do you have four links to the netting or five?

Bill: [00:22:38] At any given point, I would probably have at least five in.

Cal: [00:22:46] That gives you the way to set up the next day’s paddling and then you turn them into it until you take down that back fence. That was the back fence on today's package.

Bill: [00:22:56] Right. So actually the total setup, you might need as many as seven because there are going to be times when you need to extend those two long sides past, like the math isn't going to work out perfectly for you know, maybe your pastures are a little bit more regular shape than they are in, you know, out there in Oklahoma than they are here in New Hampshire, but we don't get rectangles here. Oh yeah. If we have rectangles it's because somebody has gone to great time and expense to create them.

Cal: [00:23:34] I do think your terrain is much more rugged than ours is right where I am. At least we have some areas that are pretty rugged, but where I am pretty flat and pretty much where I want to put a fence I can't.

Bill: [00:23:50] So just to give you an idea, these fields that I'm farming the over 26 acres, they're not all contiguous there's, some woods in between them, but the lowest field is about 900 feet above sea level and the highest field is about 1,250. And there's about a little bit less than half a mile from one to the other. So it's, you know, it's rolling. It's not like we're farming on the sides of cliffs like they do in Scotland and Northumberland, but yeah, it's not land that you want to drive tractors over every day.

Cal: [00:24:40] Now, when you're moving from one parcel of land to another parcel, do you just have the sheep, they follow you with a feed bucket, or how do you move them from one parcel of land to the next?

Bill: [00:24:53] One of the challenges of raising grass-fed sheep is that they don't get bucket trained.

Cal: [00:24:58] Oh, well, you know, you're exactly right. Yes.

Bill: [00:25:01] So I have border collies that move the sheep with me and to be honest with you though, about the second time they've done a move on a trail, they know where they're going. So you know, it gets easier each time. It's kind of hard when the lambs are little but you know, the few lambs that were having born on pasture in May when I have to move them, you know, I try pretty hard to make sure that's a pretty confined move. I try not to do any of the long moves with lambs that are less than say 45 to 60 days old, but sometimes I have to.

Cal: [00:25:48] Now, do you have any livestock guardian animals with you your sheep?

Bill: [00:25:52] Yeah, I have a couple of Maremma dogs. I have one that is going to be 12 this December, which is quite old for a livestock guardian dog, but she's a trooper she's still actually really working and really effective. But then I've got a five-year-old coming up behind her because she isn't going to last forever. I wouldn't do this without that kind of dog. I did for a while. I've had livestock guardian dogs now for 20 years and between the ElectraNet and the livestock guardian dogs, I'm pretty comfortable with you to know the predator situation. I've knocked on wood. I've never lost an animal to a predator when it was inside ElectraNet with a guard dog. The only time that I've lost animals to predators is when something has gone wrong with the fence and they've broken out or something.

Cal: [00:27:02] Now, what kind of predator pressure are you dealing with there?

Bill: [00:27:07] We have this thing called an Eastern coyote, which is a hybrid red Wolf and the kind of coyote that you'd have out in the Prairie.

Cal: [00:27:20] So it's going to be bigger than what we have.

Bill: [00:27:23] Right, these are, you know, your typical one is probably 45 to 50 pounds. I've seen them go as big as 70 65 is not uncommon. I mean, they really look more like a Wolf than they do like a coyote and they hunt in packs. So they are very much like a Wolf. They don't cover as much ground as a gray Wolf will. We are on kind of the very Southern and Western fringe of timber Wolf, Gray Wolf territory so we do get occasional dispersers that come through. I don't plan around that because it's such a rare event. Bears are an issue, black bear. The Eastern coyote and the black bears are the ones that I worry about the most. There could be some pressure from you know, bald Eagles and Hawks and things of that nature as well, but that's really only on the very newest lambs. And usually, they'd have to be kind of abandoned in the first place in order for a Raptor to go after them.

Cal: [00:28:56] I want to jump back to your border collies for just a second. Do you buy them to train? Do you raise them?

Bill: [0029:04] I usually buy puppies from people who I know have good working parents and then I for better or for worse train them myself. It would probably make more economic sense for me to buy a trained dog. But I really like the challenge of working with a young dog and I like seeing a young dog coming up and you know, kind of being able to know the dog that well to bring home a little eight week old. They're never a blank slate, but they're not far from it at eight weeks. And then, you know, sort of working with what's there and molding it and, you know, really kind of knowing the dog that well, which you can't really do with a dog that you buy that's trained. . But on the other hand, if you buy a dog that's trained, you've got to a trained dog.

Cal: [00:30:11] Right. I thought about getting a Border collie and I lean towards getting a puppy because of the reasons you stated, however, my limitation there, or my fear there is I don't have enough time to train them adequately and my knowledge of training is lacking. So that makes me think, well, maybe I should get a trained dog, and thus far I've done neither.

Bill: [00:30:39] I mean, I was really fortunate when I was first starting out to be able to kind of glom on to a community of people who were not far from me, geographically, who were happy to help me train my first couple of dogs.

Cal: [00:31:00] Oh yes that would be beneficial.

Bill: [00:31:00] And I learned a lot from them and we also would get together and hire you know, sort of internationally known dog trainers to come and give us a real intensive weekend of lessons, or we called them a clinic. Where they would, you know, work through with a whole bunch of different dogs. You work on a specific problem that the trainer was having or that a dog was having. So those things are, you know I still carry the knowledge that I obtained in those early days. I got my first Border collie in1994. So you know, and I still go back for refreshers every now and then when I can. I'm not a great dog trainer my second taught are almost always better than my first. And so it takes, you know, it takes a certain kind of dog to work with me. There needs to be mutual patience. But you know we get it done. I haven't had a dog wash out on me yet. I've had some that I liked better than others, but I haven't had one that was a total wash-out. So that's not a bad track record for over twenty-five years.

Cal: [00:32:40] Yes. I don't think so either. And I appreciate you humoring me going on that tangent a little way away from our topic.

Bill: [00:32:50] Well, I don't think so though, really, because, I mean, I couldn't do what I do without border collies it would be unfeasible for me to think about renting the kind of land that I rent and you know, operating the way I operate without having, you know, at least one good dog all the time and you know, ideally two.

Cal: [00:33:17] I've heard that if I had a good dog, I'd never go back. So jumping back to the equipment, you use the ElectraNet, what kind of Energizer do you have and what kind of voltages does that run?

Bill: [00:33:31] I am using two or three Juul energizers one brand name that I have right now is speed rate. I also on my little flock of laying hens, I have a smaller half a one Juul rather that's a Patriot model. I mean, it varies. We're having a really rainy day right nowhere. Thank goodness because we haven't had very many of them. But because that ElectraNet is in contact with a lot of wet vegetation, my voltage is down around 4,000 volts on the fence certainly plenty enough to keep them in and keep coyotes out. But when everything is dry and running, as it should be, I'm usually running you know, 5000 or 6,000 volts on the ElectraNet.

Cal: [00:34:37] Oh, very good. Now, are they battery-operated or solar-powered?

Bill: [00:34:42] Well, they're battery operated and I use a solar panel to keep a trickle charge on the deep cycle battery.

Cal: [00:34:54] And, do you have a cart that makes that easy to move when you move your pins? Well, let me jump back. Your electro-netting, you set up your long lanes, so you can just set it there and it's going to stay.

Bill: [00:35:05] Well, I do have to move the thing a lot, and it is a pain in the butt and it was better if I had a cart, but I don't. I have a hand dolly that I move it around with and it doesn't work really well, and I need a better system. It's one of those things I've been telling myself for 30 years now and it hasn't quite gotten to the top of the to-do list.

Cal: [00:35:29] Yes and sometimes you look at those things or solutions that are pre-made and the price scares you.

Bill: [00:35:38] I mean, this setup, I could just put it in an in a little wagon, kid's wagon and drag it around. Better than what I'm doing now. So, you know, right now I move it on a two-wheel hand truck, and usually about halfway through the move you know, one of the wheels falls into a gopher hole, and the whole thing tips over. So it's a little bit of a pain, but you know, it ends up where it needs to be eventually.

Cal: [00:36:11] And that's the important part.

Bill: [00:36:13] Right.

Cal: [00:36:13] Get it from point A to point B. It may not be pretty but get it there.

Bill: [00:36:18] Yeah, and I probably only move that Energizer every week or two during the grazing season. If it was something I was doing every day, I would have solved this problem a long time ago. But it's one of those things that another two weeks have gone by and I have to move the Energizer again and I still haven't figured out how to do it well, but oh well, we'll get it done this week. And then we'll think about it and we'll figure out how to, you know, and I never do.

Cal: [00:36:48] Well Bill, we are to the part of our famous four-part of our show. And I steal that famous four from the BiggerPockets podcast, because what they do, they asked their guests four questions, same questions, every episode. So we have four questions for you. Our first question is what's your favorite grazing grass related book or resource?

Bill: [00:37:17] I'm glad you included resources and not just books, because I would have to say my favorite grazing resources, the website https://onpasture.com/ that Kathy Voth puts out just a wealth of information on there. Thousands and thousands of articles and you know, new content going up every week. You can subscribe to an email newsletter. So you get the new content pushed to your inbox every week. Really worthwhile and she's unfortunately had to start charging a subscription fee recently, but it's worth every nickel. And I would really suggest that everybody in your audience jump right on that. No matter what you're interested in, there's good content on there about it.

Cal: [00:38:14] We will put a link in our show notes to that for our listeners, so they can go there. Our next question, what's a tool that you couldn't live without on your farm?

Bill: [00:38:28] Probably the border collies would be the top one.

Cal: [00:38:31] As I'm reading the question, I'm thinking, I wonder if he's going to go with the border collie.

Bill: [00:38:36] If I had to do an inanimate tool, I would say my portable handling system.

Cal: [00:38:43] Yes, we didn't talk about your portable handling system.

Bill: [00:38:48] So when I had the larger flock, I imported a mobile handling yard from the UK and it all folds up onto its own trailer. And then you know, you basically drop the trailer down on the ground and the middle part of the trailer becomes the working shoot. You can pull all the panels off and make yourself a really nice very efficient stock handling yard, wherever you are. And you know with the bigger flock, it was worth the expense of importing that. Would not be worth the expense of importing it with the number of sheep that I have, unfortunately, but since I already have it, it's indispensable.

Cal: [00:39:37] Pretty nice to have I could see that. Yes. My pins for the sheep or a little lacking. We are pretty good shape on the cattle, but on the sheep, I've got to figure out a better way.

Bill: [00:39:49] Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things that I think is a real barrier to the expansion of a lot of sheep flocks in the United States is that people can't envision deworming 500 uses. Like that just blows their mind and with a good handling yard, it's something you do before your morning coffee break, you know, with that unit, I was, you know, my throughput was about 400 use an hour for deworming.

Cal: [00:40:29] I just dread weaning lambs. It's basically a wrestling match and I think I lose.

Bill: [00:40:37] Yeah, you do. Anytime you wrestle a sheep you've already lost,

Cal: [00:40:40] Right. Yes. The third question, we're changing up just a little bit this time and I don't have it on your paper, but I think you can handle it. If you were coming across or talking to a new farmer that wanted to go down this path, what would you tell them?

Bill: [00:40:59] This path meaning?

Cal: [00:41:01] Grass farming, livestock.

Bill: [00:41:06] Start with more pasture than you think you're going to need and fewer and or fewer animals. I would say probably the number one mistake that I see new farmers making in my both you know, sort of my contacts with people and in my day job is that you know, you get somebody who moves out from a city says I've got 10 acres. It just sounds infinite to them because they're used to, you know, yards that are measured in square feet. And I got 10 acres, so I'm going to get 30 cogs and I'm going to get 28 goats and I'm going to get 55 sheep, but I'm going to get 10 cows and it's going to be great. And before they know it, they've got a dirt yard, you know, great big dirt, lot, nothing else. So under stock at the beginning, and as you build your expertise build up your stocking density and your stocking rate on your land. So yeah, I think that would be my first advice to newcomers.

Cal: [00:42:16] I think that's excellent advice. I think that's something I struggle with even now, after doing this for years, lastly, where can others find out more about you?

Bill: [00:42:29] I'm very secretive. I have a website at https://edgefieldsheep.com/ and there's a link there to sign up for a newsletter, which is mostly about product that's for sale. So it wouldn't be relevant to most grass farmers. And as far as like my day job I work for the New Hampshire Association of Conservation Districts and we have a website at https://www.nhacd.net/ and I'm not sure we're supposed to be updating that with information about the grazing planning and so forth that I do for them you know, through grant funding. So it's something that's at no cost to the farmer, but it's unfortunately only available to New Hampshire residents so limited audience.

Cal: [00:43:32] True and I don't know if we have any listeners in New Hampshire, but we're working on it.

Bill: [00:43:38] Well, you got one now.

Cal: [00:43:40] Great. And we'll put links to those websites in our show notes for anyone who would like to go visit your website or the other side. Bill, we really appreciate you joining us today. I think it's been a wonderful time.

Bill: [00:43:57] Alright. Thank you very much.

Cal: [00:43:59] Thank you for listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, helping farmers produces livestock for grass. I don't think that's it, but it's close. Thank you for listening to the grazing grass podcast, helping grass farmers produce forages for livestock. If you visited our website at https://grazinggrass.com/ lately, you know, we are having technical difficulties; the website will be back up and running soon. Also, be watching for a giveaway to happen during October. See you soon.