e143. Creating a Thriving Farm from Scratch with Cedric Shannon

Transcript generated by Podium.page Help us spread the word by tweeting about us at @podiumdotpage and including us in your shownotes! https://podium.page NOTE: There were 2 speakers identified in this transcript. Speaker separation errors can arise when multiple speakers speak simultaneously. 0:00:00 - Cal Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, Episode 143. 0:00:06 - Cedric Don't get ahead of your learning curve. We always talk about getting ahead of our market. We always talk about all, but don't get ahead of your learning curves. 0:00:14 - Cal You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices. I'm your host, cal Hartage. You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs. You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. The grazing management decisions you make today impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you. That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenitive Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy-to-follow techniques to quickly assess your forage, production and infrastructure capacity in order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts. Learn more on their website at nobleorg slash grazing. It's N-O-B-L-E dot org. Forward slash grazing. On today's show we have Cedric Shannon of Weathertop Farm. We have Cedric Shannon, a Weathertop farm. Him and his wife, sarah have a farm in Virginia which they raise a few different species on. They have sheep, cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys. Everything's rotationally grazed. He makes extensive use of electric netting and he also has a podcast. Can your Beans Do that? It's a wonderful episode. We're going to talk about his beginnings, but we're going to talk a lot about getting started when you don't have much money. That's our overgrazing topic for today, and then we run out a little bit of time so to get the cattle and sheep in. That's over on our bonus segment for our grazing grass insiders For 10 seconds about the farm, my cool season. Perennials are growing, they got some much needed rain and the weather's not been too bad not too warm, not too cool. For 10 seconds about the podcast on our show notes we have a link to a listener's feedback form. We'd love to get your feedback about the podcast and how we can improve. So if you've got some time, click on that link and fill out the form for us. We'd appreciate it. Cedric, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited you're here today. 0:03:00 - Cedric Thanks, Kyle, it's great to be here. 0:03:02 - Cal To get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation? 0:03:07 - Cedric Yeah, so we moved here in 2003. It was some land that was getting all divided, you know, subdivided. It was going to just turn into housing and we bought it as a whole. It was about 54 acres. My wife and I, we had five tiny little kids. There was nothing here. It was crazy. It was like the midlife crisis type of crazy. Everyone was like you should not be doing this. So we really started from scratch. There was a few buildings, but they were like 100 years old. There were some pastures left because people had just thrown some cows on here, so we really started with very little. We had thrown all our capital to the land and so we started slow and we just started with this little infrastructure. You know, we'd read some Joel Salatin, we'd visited his farm a little bit, so we built some chicken tractors. You know we started like with a hundred broilers oh yes, 25 hens, a couple chicken tractors. You know we started like with 100 broilers oh yes, 25 hens, a couple hogs, you know, and I had rabbits too, so I had brought my stock. Yeah, we started very slowly and the market was there. We were in a great place. Here we're in floyd, virginia, so we're in the rolling hills, but there was already a community here that was doing they were calling it sustainable agriculture. At the time found someone who was actually doing like pasture poultry, rotational grazing, and talked to this old codger and he was just really nice and I asked him if you know, would he kind of be there as a resource? When he said yes, I told my wife we can do this, we can do this. So they really there was a couple and they really helped us out through the years. I mean, we started we were like we didn't have any processing equipment so we were taking our birds over to their place and processing. 0:04:57 - Cal Oh yes. 0:04:58 - Cedric And we traded work for that, and so we're really well supported. But started very, very slow. But the market was there. So we might've started with 200 broilers the first year, or a hundred, I can't even remember, but you know, the next year was like 500, you know, and then like 700 and then a thousand, right so? And then we added other things. We did ducks for a while, I had rabbits for a long time, but they're really not very either of those very connoisseurs. So those have fallen away, and in the place we've put in sheep we've put in cattle. We have now access to the farm right across the road. So in total we manage about 200 acres. Some of that is woods. 0:05:36 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:05:37 - Cedric Got a fair amount of pasture, but with multiple species. So we've got just to give you a sense of scale, we do. We order 6 000 broilers. You know how that goes right. It's 5 000 and some by the end. We have flocks of laying hens, 600 at a time. We'll keep two through the winter but then we kind of, as one is phasing out, we'll get another flock. So anywhere from 1200 to, you know, 1800 birds laying. Then we do turkeys. We have like about 600 turkeys for Thanksgiving. So that's our poultry there. And then we do hogs and we rotationally graze them as well. I have listened to a few of your podcasts. People were dissing on hogs and I have a different opinion on that. They're awesome. 0:06:20 - Cal Yeah, actually, just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, one episode was pretty harsh on hogs. They were not fans of them. We do have a few that's hog-based, so that's interesting. We'll have to get into that. 0:06:33 - Cedric So we do hogs, we farrow. We have about 10 sows, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when they're each farrowing twice a year, averaging, you know like nine or 10 hogs. You know that can be anywhere from. You know like nine or ten hogs you know that can be anywhere from, you know, 160 to 200, and it's all direct sale. So, oh, so we, you know, finish out quite a few hogs. Then we have a katahdin flock of about 60, maybe sometimes a little bit higher use, and then I'm just right now, at this point, I'm just bringing in steers. So I might bring in like 25 steers a year and then keep them for about a year and a half and then and then sell them so and we run our sheep and our and our beef together. So we have what they call flirts, right, a flock of herds. Oh yes, flirts. 0:07:20 - Cal That gives you a sense of scale. Yeah, and and so we have so much to cover, as I, I took notes as you were saying. All that, so much we want to get through. But first I want to go back till you moved down there and ask you about your rabbits. So so you, you moved rabbits with you. When you moved them down there, were you doing any kind of? Were you trying to raise them on pasture or were they more in the cage and raising them like a more conventional system for the rabbits? 0:07:48 - Cedric So I had the breeding stock in cages raised up with the wire and all the poop is falling through. I had ideas I was going to do worms under them, which never worked very well I had the same idea. And then we were putting them after we weaned them we would keep them out in the field in these sort of rabbit tractors. Oh yes, we went through so many iterations of that. Put wire on the corners, put some extra bars. I know that Salatin at some point was doing it, where he had lots and lots of slats. By the time I saw that it was like there's no grass coming through, so that's the boy. 0:08:26 - Cal Yeah, yeah, you're not. 0:08:27 - Cedric You're not getting any grass forage consumption there yeah, so then you know, and they were still getting out like every now and then, and I had a great dog, she'd help me catch them and she wouldn't kill them, she would help me catch them. But I was wasting so much time, um, and in the end, right, I might have like 20 rabbits in a tractor. Right, when you can do like 75 broilers in a tractor right, true yeah. Economically. I mean just time, I mean at the beginning I had a lot of time and I love rabbits. I've grown up with rabbits always and I love rabbit meat and I had great stock. Never found stock as good as I did when I the stuff I brought here and eventually it was just a. You know, we had to cut something out. It was just taking so much time because we were like siling grass for them and, like you know, and and you take care of one rabbit, you know, and she might have eight, 10 babies as well, but you're taking one cage one right in each cage at a time, whereas I go out and I can take care of 600 layers with all it was oh, yeah, right yeah. So you can never get the price point. To make that actually economic. 0:09:35 - Cal Did you find there was a fair market for rabbit meat? 0:09:38 - Cedric There was plenty of a market. Oh yeah, it was either like an older generation, because, oh, I love rabbit, I grew up with rabbit. 0:09:46 - Cal Or through the. 0:09:46 - Cedric Depression or a lot of ethnic. So we're close to a couple bigger towns. We have well roanoke, and then also blacksburg is a town that we go to a lot. That's where virginia tech is oh and there's a lot of international people there and so they a lot. You know, most, most places love rabbit. It's a little different here, this generation now right people used to eat rabbit all time here as well, so yeah, I grew up eating rabbit. 0:10:14 - Cal We went through some phases as I was growing up, different times when rabbit was the main protein we had, and I say that we always had beef, so always had beef, but rabbit replaced chicken for a number of times because we we started raising some rabbits and rabbits multiply like rabbits and we we had way too many. They're one of my favorite animals. I have them off and on and I just really struggle with it. Right now I don't have any. I told my wife the other day I want to get a few more and she's like well, are you sure? and you know I'm always there when I want to disease, but but I know the the issues. I would. I would love to do them in a, in a rabbit tractor or something. But I just look at it and I'm like that is that much more work I'm creating for myself when I don't need to create more work. So it's that love hate relationship with it. 0:11:10 - Cedric Yeah, not so much the rabbits, but just trying to figure out that system yeah, one of the best things about rabbits, though actually we started we put some, a bunch of our our rabbit hutches. You know we have sort of four man's hoop house oh yeah, so we have like pvc, 20 foot pvc, and we just put them, you know, and it's so. It's like a 12 feet wide, 96 long, it's about seven feet high, and then we had all our rabbit hutches in there. We have shade cloth over, oh, yeah and over the winter we we hook up our hen houses to it so our hens can get into those hoop houses. So we don't do lights and they still. They get all that heat from the hoop houses and they just lay all through the winter oh yes, but when we had the rabbits under there it was like even extra, like a bonus for them. 0:11:57 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:11:58 - Cedric They just loved it. They would go through all the manure and the bugs. Oh yeah, they were happy as could be. So all the manure and the bugs? Oh yeah, they were happy as could be. So there's a lot of pluses to rabbits you know, and if I was doing more of a homestead and not a business, I would get rabbits in the bleak of an eye. 0:12:13 - Cal Oh yeah. Yeah, I do have a couple disadvantages for rabbit here. I can't convince my wife to eat it. She hasn't had it made by my wife and she refuses to. Well, actually, if, if I fix it for her, she's much closer eating it. She doesn't want to be in the processing portion of it at all. And and to say she has came a long way. She grew up basically in town in Hawaii, so this is all pretty foreign to her, so she's came a long ways. You know, not having the meat come to her on a, on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, was a shock for her. So of course it's been over 20 years, so another 20 years I may have her convinced. It's been over 20 years, so in another 20 years I may have her convinced. We'll see. 0:13:05 - Cedric There's a good life goal there. 0:13:08 - Cal Yeah, right. So I always think I know we had an episode where a lady she started with rabbits and then it's expanded way beyond that. But I love rabbits as a potential protein source for people with limited land or just getting started. 0:13:27 - Cedric It's great there. 0:13:28 - Cal And a lot of times we don't want to talk about rabbit, because it can, it's, it's I hate to say the stepchild, because I think that's just the Rome connotation for stepchildren, but but sometimes it's not looked upon all that greatly. 0:13:46 - Cedric Well, I grew up overseas, in Africa and in places like that, where agriculture, you know, is less business and much more, you know, subsistence. 0:13:57 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:13:58 - Cedric Rabbits can be like just essential right. I mean all kinds of climates, right. 0:14:03 - Cal Yeah. 0:14:04 - Cedric Like they're so synergistic with garden and other animals oh, yeah, you know, so like it's hands down one of the best animals, just not for a business. 0:14:16 - Cal So so, with the business in mind, you all, once you moved, you took some rabbits down there, but you quickly found some other species that worked a little bit better. So let's so. First you got chickens, I believe. Tell us a little bit about your beginning process with chickens and how that went. 0:14:33 - Cedric So I basically built two pens. You know, I sort of took a Salatin's model and sort of tweaked it. you know I'm a carpenter, so I tweaked it in ways that made sense for me. And we did a round right. And already the couple that I mentioned before the Brights, they were doing broilers and they had I don't know how many, they were up to maybe a thousand at that point it was just the two of them and they said, well, just come to the brochure, we'll see if we can sell it. And we just sold everything. So then I bought 100 more and we were able to get two in that season just because of that right. so it was just very minimal infrastructure and, just like you know, a chicken tractor, especially back then, costed very little, oh yeah, by the wood and I can. I even bought aluminum back there, oh yes, so that there would be lighter and it was like affordable. Then we I built a little chicken coop for the hens and it's like this one that my, my dad, had, like backyard poultry stuff, and that one there and I I literally like I didn't have a tractor, I didn't have a truck. We moved here the grand caravan, dodge career caravan, and I pulled this chicken. I could house 100 birds. I pulled this little chicken thing on skids with my dodge caravan around the pasture and and since we're telling kind of embarrassing stories about beginning we would move our hogs around and this is hilarious, just thinking about how far we've come. Right, I got two hogs but I wanted to move them. Right, the whole thing is, I wanted to move them. So, there was this shed that had fallen down and so it was this triangle of the roof. So I just cut that and we put it out on the pasture and they'd be under that. And then when we wanted to move it, I literally said, hey, I'd get my brother or somebody around here and we'd go under it and we'd put it on our shoulders and we would lift it up and we would walk it like a hundred feet. So so yeah, I mean we started with nothing. 0:16:41 - Cal And so I mean it's it's pretty funny to think about it, but you know you do what you got to do. My grandpa, his favorite saying was always poor people have poor ways. And I, well, I hauled some goats off in my little homemade goat toad on the back of my pickup just the other day. I actually have a really nice one, but my dad and nephew decide they need to borrow it. I'm like I got to sell some goats so I made one out of a panel and stuff. I was telling the people at the place where I actually bought some goats and I said, yeah, poor people's got poor ways, it'll work, yeah. So you expanded into all those species chickens, layers, hogs and you started out really small scale. Did you just grow as the consumer as you found the market, or did you just grow as you had money? Or how was the growth process? It was? 0:17:38 - Cedric all together, right? So the great thing about broilers is you get your investment back within two months, right? Oh yeah, and we absolutely had to have that. We, we did work off farm. My wife and I took turns working off farm for the first like five years, oh yeah. So it wasn't until after that that we cinched our belt, said we're going to try to do this full time. But yeah, no, I mean, I think actually the one thing you didn't mention is that also the learning curve right. So like, yeah, we didn't have the money, but we also needed to do our market. We also needed to grow our skills of how good we were doing this without like, oh, I'm going to buy 50 hogs and do it and then just completely, you know, we didn't have sort of the cushion to do that. So the market always seemed to be there, and sometimes we'd have to work to find it or to get the people there, but always in the end we ended up always selling everything you know and it helped you know and then you know we've always been really high quality. Even though we may be poor and have poor ways, we've always been really high quality. Just the taste right. People are just like. 0:18:50 - Cal Oh, this tastes. 0:18:52 - Cedric I don't. I can't believe. Is this really chicken? Like I haven't. I guess I haven't eaten chicken all my life and that spoke for itself, you know. So it's all been kind of word of mouth. We've never like we don't do anything like shipping whatever, but like now. We have hundreds of families that we for a lot of them we are their only meat source. 0:19:11 - Cal Oh, yeah, yeah. 0:19:13 - Cedric And yeah, no, it just has grown. And then in 2012, we also branched out to the human species, had our first intern oh, yes. And that was one of the things we were hearing had our first intern. Oh yes, and that was one of the things we were hearing. We were going to conferences and stuff. One of the biggest needs is a lot of people want to get into regenerative agriculture but they don't have an entry-level sort of way to start. Right, people are looking for managers, which I too. I get that I'm looking for a manager to help me with the load. Yeah, but we kept hearing this need of like. People want to get into it, but they don't know, especially with animal husbandry. So we started an intern program and so right now we do have a manager and we do about three or four interns on top of that oh yes, so you have quite the crew because you mentioned earlier, I think you had five little kids when you moved yeah, we have five kids too, but they've all left home. 0:20:07 - Cal Oh, have they all left home, because I'm thinking they turned into quite the workforce. 0:20:13 - Cedric They were, I mean, they were also very active. But they all know how to do everything on the farm, right, right, unfortunately, the sustainability aspect of getting your kids to take over I haven't learned that one yet. They all want to go off and do their own thing. 0:20:29 - Cal Oh yes, which is? 0:20:30 - Cedric probably understandable. So yeah, actually now I'm into the stage of being a grandpa. Just had my first grandkid and they're coming back to the farm for that, so they're here right now for a few months. Oh yes, we get to hang out with our grandkids for a while I have another one on the way. So, yes, they've always been a big part of it, but no one's taken over or anything like that. Yeah. 0:20:54 - Cal Well, I complained to my dad. My wife and I have, we have five kids and we'll be out there doing stuff and I'm like dad, I'm the young one here providing labor. There should be another generation out here doing the hard stuff. Now we do have. I do have a nephew that is helping us quite often, which has been really nice, because that means I don't have to run and do everything. I'm like, hey, michael, go do that. 0:21:19 - Cedric Yeah, what does the Amish say? You invest in your kids for the first seven years and then you get your investment back the next seven years. 0:21:28 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:21:29 - Cedric And then they leave. 0:21:30 - Cal Yeah, yeah. Well, my siblings ran from the farm as quickly as they could, so I was the one that stuck around here for my generation, but the next generation? Yeah, we'll have to see. Yeah, we'll have to see. So when you started processing, you started with chickens. Did you have you always used cornish cross or have you tried anything else? 0:21:54 - Cedric uh, we started with cornish cross. They just yeah sure they have a bad mortality rate. That turnaround we tried every now and then some Freedom Rangers, and they just can't compete. They just can't get as many rounds in, they just don't grow as much. And we put it to a taste test. We were giving all our customers sort of blind taste tests. We would do these samples and people couldn't tell the difference and it wasn't like oh my goodness, the Cornish grass isn't as good they were getting enough grass and bugs and sunshine that it was doing what it needed to do nutritionally to make it taste so good. So we've just every time we've tried a little something like that we're going back just because economically. Again, if I was homesteading very different story. 0:22:42 - Cal Oh right, but you've got to manage this as a business. 0:22:46 - Cedric They still are probably our biggest cash crop, so to speak. 0:22:49 - Cal Oh yeah, I would say, summarizing everyone I've talked to, majority of the people go with the Cornish Cross. It's just hard to compete with us and in fact when we get off here today I'm running to a post office. I've got some Cornish cross chips to pick up. I pastored, I raised some I don't know like 10 years ago, and my wife didn't like them as much as she thought she would, so we didn't do it anymore. But I took them somewhere to get processed and the processing et cetera. So I just bought a small batch to try it again. I'm going to do it all in-house and we'll see how it goes. 0:23:30 - Cedric Well, you know, even if you don't make money on them, they are unbelievable. You know cyclers of nutrients. So to jumpstart a pasture, like we got access to this pasture right across from the road four years ago from us and there's nothing like broilers to just kind of jumpstart things wake things up. 0:23:52 - Cal I completely agree. Get grass. I agree, we had broiler houses years ago. We put in broiler houses and grew for a company. So we had 80, 90,000 broilers, four houses, a company. So we had 80, 90 000 boilers, four houses. You know that complete conventional system which worked great for money flow. And the other thing it worked great for was we spread that litter on our pastures and then it'll make rocks, grow grass, and you can do the same thing with a chicken tractor and raising some pastured poultry. So you you use Cornish cross for your broilers. 0:24:27 - Cedric What are you? 0:24:28 - Cal using for your hens. 0:24:30 - Cedric It's the red sex link. 0:24:31 - Cal Oh, okay. 0:24:33 - Cedric I think you know it's some F5000. I don't know what it is, but you know, originally it was like a Rhode Island red rooster Right. 0:24:43 - Cal I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're fantastic birds. 0:24:47 - Cedric Yes, they're, you know, really bad mothers. 0:24:50 - Cal Oh yeah, Well, that's not what they're bred for. 0:24:52 - Cedric They forage and they will lay you beautiful eggs and they're I mean, they're great birds. 0:24:58 - Cal So they're a brown egg layer, correct? So you're just you're selling all brown eggs. 0:25:03 - Cedric Yeah, we get this thing. By the time they've been laying over here. They get whiter and whiter. 0:25:08 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:25:09 - Cedric So we do sell some white eggs, so you have a nice variety in there. At times there's a variety. 0:25:13 - Cal Yes, Do you get any feedback from consumers that they'd like a different color egg or anything in there? 0:25:21 - Cedric At Easter. Oh okay, yeah, but otherwise no. 0:25:26 - Cal Well, I grew up, we raised, we always had Rhode Island reds, so we always had brown eggs. Yeah, my wife doesn't understand why I'm fascinated with brown eggs because she's like just white eggs, just white eggs, so brown eggs. But I know pot. It seems pretty popular in the homestead community right now for the green or blue eggs. 0:25:47 - Cedric So I was just wondering yeah, yeah, no, I mean I have in my life, but that's not for, not for the business yeah, right, right, yeah. 0:25:57 - Cal And then you started turkeys at the time, or you start turkeys pretty early in your journey yeah, very early yeah, you're growing. 0:26:07 - Cedric Broad-breasted white Broad. So they're wonderful foragers. I mean, they get a hard rap. One time Barbara Kingsolver came through and she was promoting her book Animal Vegetable Miracle and she was harping on the turkeys. I went up and talked to her afterwards. I said you can't do that, come to my farm, I'll show you you. They're great foragers. Uh, they're so happy they. They're much funner than the broilers and they're just much more active and they forge. I mean, they they graze. Okay, that's the thing people don't realize. Like hogs and poultry and all they're like grazing. It's not just like a pick here, pick there, it's like you can. There's a line from where the fence was to the next day, right. So anyways, she kind of backed off a little bit on her being quite so harsh on the turkeys. After that, um, and I even read her book and she had taken some of that out so that was kind of cool. But they're great, you know, and we've done some. We've done some heritage breeds before, but again you'd have to like quadruple your price to make it worse. And that's just doesn't make sense. So let the other people worry about for us. We just worry about the heritage breeds. You know more power to them, but as a business it's nothing compared to the broad-breasted whites. Yes. 0:27:24 - Cal Yeah, that's good to know, because I've thrown around the idea of raising a few turkeys. I don't think I really want to do this as a business, but I wouldn't mind raising a few because my wife gets tired of me talking about how I want my meat to be cleaner my food made from scratch. So she gets tired of my little speech on that. Are you growing one set of turkeys a year and are you shooting for processing October? 0:27:52 - Cedric So we, we do this, so we have 600 out there and we start processing. Actually, end of October, that's like next week we start processing, we'll do like a hundred. So those will be the birds that are like 10, 12 pounds. 0:28:06 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:28:07 - Cedric And then, like a week or 10 days later, we'll do another group. Those will be 12 to 15, right. And then we'll do three days, like right at around Thanksgiving, and those are the 20, 20 plus birds. So we get the different sizes that way. You just have to freeze it if you want. Oh yeah, you know so that. So it's all one flock. 0:28:26 - Cal Oh, okay, yeah, and you all have. You have a processing facility set up so you all can do it right there. 0:28:33 - Cedric We've grown up a little bit, built my own processing, bought my equipment. It was an investment. You know, but you know, it was we. We processed at the brights, I think, probably seven or eight years, oh yeah, before. We were like, okay, we have a little bit of extra capital here. We can, you know, build a shed, crunk heat pad, buy the equipment which is not cheap At all. Yeah, so we have a scalder and we have a plucker. 0:28:59 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:29:00 - Cedric Well, rest is just done by hand, yeah. 0:29:02 - Cal Yeah, is there in Virginia, are you? You have some limits to how many you can process on farm. 0:29:09 - Cedric Yeah, we get exemption, but it's very, very reasonable. It's wonderful right oh okay If you do under 1,000, they don't care what you do, you just can't sell it. Resell or you can't go across state lines, but you can even sell it to family friends, whoever you want, as soon as you get over 1,000, it's like 1,000 to 20,000 units, oh, wherever you want, as soon as you get over like a thousand, it's like a thousand to 20,000 units. Oh, yeah, right, which, like a turkey is three units, a chicken is one, whatever. But we've never even gotten close to the 20,000 units. But at that point we can't go across state lines. We can't do wholesale, but we can do everything else. Oh, yes. So what we do is we'll Thursday, we'll kill about 300. We do rounds of 300. So we'll kill it. And Thursday, we'll kill about 300. We do rounds of 300. So we'll kill it's usually not 300 because some of them have died, right, right, right. So we'll do that and then that afternoon we might sell like 150 of them. People will come pick them up that afternoon. Then we'll put about 100 in the walk-in cooler for the next day to cut up. Oh yes, and we'll cut up into pieces and that's all under the exemption. It's perfectly fine. So we get your breast, you get your legs, you get you know we'll cut up about 100 of those and then we might have like 40. We save fresh and then I take fresh on Saturday to market. 0:30:17 - Cal Oh. 0:30:17 - Cedric So during broiler season, almost every Saturday, I've got fresh whole birds and fresh cuts and people are spoiled rotten. So fresh cuts and people are spoiled rot. So yeah, so that's how we do that. 0:30:28 - Cal Now you mentioned 300. Is that how many fit in each tractor? 0:30:32 - Cedric Well it's, it's half a brooder, okay, and it's two tractors no four track, four chicken tractors, right About 75 each, or I. I have developed my own houses. And so it's two of these other houses that I actually pulled by the tractor Cause. I have developed my own houses, and so it's two of these other houses that I actually pull by the tractor. 0:30:51 - Cal Because as I get older, I don't like to pull them Right. 0:30:52 - Cedric Right, I understand, I can get a lot of interns to pull them. But I like the tractors. Everything's built on skids, everything's moved all the time to fresh pasture and then 300's a good amount for us to process Because we got to get all the chores done. Then we kill and we got to clean up because we sell from the processing shed where we just killed oh yeah, we got to clean up we try to be done by like noon or noon 30, and then everyone we eat lunch together and volunteers will come and do this and they love it. They're like work hard, and then we give them this great lunch, oh yeah, and then by two o'clock two to four people are showing up to pick up their bread. 0:31:29 - Cal Oh yeah, so 300 is just a good number. Is that like they have pre-ordered them, or they just you're saying two to four, show up, we will have fresh bread. No, no. 0:31:37 - Cedric We set our dates at the beginning of the year, like in March. We send out a newsletter, say here's all our processing dates, so all our poultry dates, all our, our broiler and our turkey days, and people just sign up and then we close it out when it gets too full and people come crying yeah. 0:31:53 - Cal Yeah Well, and that's a good problem for you to have. Good problem. Yeah Well, let's. Let's move off of poultry and talk some about your hogs. Yeah, dogs. You said you have 10 sows and I know a lot of times when I talk to people they're not doing the farrowing and finishing. Few people I've talked to are doing both. But you've got 10 sows and you go farrow to finish. First question I'm going to ask right off, so it's out of the way, what breeds? 0:32:25 - Cedric are you working with? So we started out with Tamworth right. My mentor, larry. Bright was working with Tamworth. Out with tamworth right. My mentor, larry bright, was working with tamworth great and I and I started off just getting feeder pigs from him just finishing them off, for years and years it wasn't until we had grown quite a bit that he's like. I think it's time you have your own sows, you know, and oh yeah, we can share more, you know. I think you know it's kind of like my second father and stuff, so it was great and he was pretty solid tamworth for a long time, but I think the breed really has deteriorated it's getting harder and harder to find because he just brings a bore in. We're not saving our own oh yeah and so a few years ago we started bringing in other bloods. So berkshire or just Duroc or whatever you get this sort of cross, whatever you can kind of get your hands on, Right. But again, now I'm all into the epigenetics right, oh, yeah, so that's part of having the sow. There we rotationally graze. They get a fresh strip of grass every day. 0:33:24 - Cal So you're moving your hogs every day, our hogs every raised yeah, and they get a ton of it's right. 0:33:30 - Cedric So if mom is doing it and her biomes got it all and the piglets, you know right, they're gonna learn from her, right, they learn from her. And they got the biome going. And so we have picked and we've sold some you know some pigs before you know some little shoats, and people are like I, I thought I didn't. I, they didn't realize. They opened their fence, thinking, oh, I'll do their thing, I'll go feed them. They'll be interested in the feed, and then I'll open the fence and I'll do some work over here. Well, as soon as they open the fence, they left their feed and started coming to the grass. Oh yeah, and they were like, oh, this is a different breed, so all right. So yeah, and I'll put a plug in too. I think another player of the species is right. I'm all into the soil as well. I'm well sold on the soil being there as super important and all that diversity of species and all the moving hogs are amazing. I'm going to tell a little story that I've. I tell a lot, but I think it's really. I think it's really telling. We had sent the hogs down. We, I mean, we layer our pastures. Just we get oodles of different species going right. We might get the sheep, have the sheep and the and the steers might go through there three times, but I'm also getting the hogs, maybe going twice and the chicken's going twice, right. So you just layer and layer, you can use your land so much more. So we'd had this area where the hogs had been through half of where the sheep were going, and it had just been a month or so ago, and to me, to my eyes, the grass looked gorgeous. The whole thing looked exactly the same 100% of the sheep and cows were where the hogs had been a month ago. Oh yes, ate all that grass first and then went over to the other stuff. So clearly they're cycling something. The bricks levels gotta be up higher. There's more nutrients, whatever. I don't know the science, and I don't, I don't even need to know the science, but for me the science is watching those those sheep go. Okay, this stuff's much better. And it was like a hundred percent. My wife and I are just looking like this isn't just like, oh, their favorite. It was like a hundred percent. My wife and I were just looking like this isn't just like, oh, they're favoring it. It is like a hundred percent on this half, yes, yeah, just chowing down. And when they're done with that, they're like okay, we'll go over and eat this other beautiful lush grass that you couldn't tell the difference at all. You know it's just at the perfect stage, but where the hogs had been, that's where they wanted to eat. So something's going on there. 0:35:47 - Cal You know, your story reminds me and I really hadn't thought about this in a long time that when we'd spread that chicken litter from those broiler houses it was always a darker green and you could tell where we spread it. And a lot of times we had to keep track of where we spread it and we'd know where it was. Or we might leave a gap accidentally between a couple of loads, but those cattle wanted to graze where we had fertilized, where we'd put that broiler litter. 0:36:17 - Cedric If you give it enough time. 0:36:18 - Cal Yeah. 0:36:19 - Cedric Yeah, it can't be right away. 0:36:21 - Cal Yeah, but yeah, right away, I don't want to be there. Yeah. 0:36:26 - Cedric I hadn't done this as much with hogs, I'd done this with the poultry, but what I, I guess, what I would say is that it's even better with the hogs oh yes they prefer where the hogs have been over where the chickens have been. Oh interesting, I couldn't tell you why. 0:36:40 - Cal Yeah, but there's some sort of synergy or on there, yeah, so yeah. How are you managing shelter for your hogs with moving them every day? And how are you managing water? 0:36:51 - Cedric So again, we're small, right. So our biggest group of hogs is going to be like 40. Oh yeah, right, which is significant. That's a lot of meat when you think about it. Oh yeah, you know, I mean, I hear a lot of your people on your podcast they have 5,000 acres, they have 5,000, this, whatever, but it's still a lot to do. You have 40 hods in a group, right? So you had it's all done with electric netting. 0:37:15 - Cal Oh yes. 0:37:16 - Cedric Right, and then our houses everything's on skids. 0:37:19 - Cal Oh, okay. 0:37:19 - Cedric And then I just have these hex bolts, these half inch hex bolts, and I just throw a chain around it and I put my tractor. And this is a one person job. If you need to, I've done, I've done everything on my farm One person. I mean you can do two people. It's sometimes nicer to have quite a few people, but then I just drag it with a tractor Right and then I have the waters on skids and then we have a chain on them. I go back with the tractor and I throw that chain on the hitch and I just pull the water and we that chain on the hitch and I just pull the water. And we've been. We did get sort of when working on putting the I can't talk the the underground water. oh yeah, you have the plugins yes and so the more of that we can get in in our pastures, the you know. So you're only going to have to need two or three hoses at the most, and you can put the water anywhere. And it was great because we were at just recently. We had this wonderful opportunity. Alan Williams came to Virginia Tech, oh yes, and so I took our whole crew. 0:38:16 - Cal Oh, very nice. 0:38:17 - Cedric My wife and I and the four employees here and great, wonderful. Alan Williams is the best, but one of the things he stressed was, you know, keep changing that water. And he shows his water, like he had, like I don't know, a thousand cattle or something, and he's got one trough on wheels and he's like you know, it's actually important for them to learn not to mob the trough and to learn to, you know, and he's like, and he was just stressing how important it was to just keep that water moving and one of the things, as we've been putting these lines and we've gotten some help from, like in our siesta, what oh yeah and they're like, oh, you gotta put in these permanent water things. And my wife and I have been resisting these resistance because we just like our water's in a different place every time they come through, and we just felt kind of vindicated. Oh yes, yeah. And we were like, oh yeah, well, alan Williams is on our page and yeah, so it's just on skids and we move it and we fill it with, you know, and for the steers we do have like a float valve and so there. But still, it's not that much. It's just like a hundred gallon tub, or we might have two of them out there in one, so yeah, yeah. Or the sheep, it's a 50 gallon because it's a little lower. Oh yeah, and sheep don't even drink as much anyways, yeah, so it's. I mean, I guess it's a lot of manuals, so you're using hoses and you're plugging them in, but, like for us, that flexibility and the moving, that's keyed for us yeah, and so yeah, waste you're, you're moving you. 0:39:48 - Cal You've mentioned this a little bit earlier. I believe that your cattle and sheep may go over an area three times, your hogs may go over a couple times. And you've got turkeys, you've got your layers, you've got broilers. How are you keeping track of where you're grazing everything and how are you moving? 0:40:05 - Cedric them through your pasture. Good question. When we're on top of things, we do have abrasion charts. We always get behind oh, yes, yeah you know. But we, through you know through everybody and everyone's got phones. We sometimes we've even gone back and looked at pictures. When did you take that picture? Oh, okay. 0:40:27 - Cal I love pictures for that. 0:40:29 - Cedric It's dated Okay. It's okay Because we wait, especially for the sheep. We wait 60 days. 0:40:35 - Cal Oh, yes, we have developed. 0:40:36 - Cedric So we know we have. I haven't wormed a sheep in probably four or five years. Oh, very nice and we might lose one, you know, or two maybe a year from from parasites, very much, much higher than anyone who's using worm first. Oh yeah, much, much better mortality rate, I should say right lower and so that 60 days is important. So it's not just the grass what stage it's at, it's also the cycles of, you know, the barber pole worm and stuff like that so yeah, um, yeah no, I yeah no, we do pay attention to that. When we're at our best, we're using a grazing chart. We got it all color coordinated and we got it all marked out. And we do have all our land sort of parceled out in areas, so we know where. You know generally where they were at what time. 0:41:21 - Cal Oh, yeah, yeah. One thing we haven't talked about your sheep or cattle yet, but I'm thinking we may save that for the bonus segment and we can talk about those more, because we've spent this whole time talking about kind of getting started and starting from scratch with little capital, little infrastructure. But that's our overgrazing topic for today, an overgrazing topic sponsored by Redmond. At Redmond we know that you thrive when your animals do. That's why it's essential to fill the gaps in your herd's nutrition with the minerals that they need. Made by nature, our ancient mineral salt and conditioner clay are the catalyst in optimizing the nutrients your animals get from their forage. Unaltered and unrefined, our minerals have the natural balance and proportion that your animals prefer. This gives your herd the ability to naturally regulate their mineral consumption as they graze. Our minerals won't just help you improve the health of your animals, but will also help you naturally build soil fertility so you can grow more nutrient-dense pasture year after year. Nourish your animals, your soil and your life with Redmond. Learn more at agriculturecom and we're going to take a little bit deeper dive. So I wanted to get that in there because I felt like we kind of spent the whole episode on that topic. But let's hone in just a little bit more on that because I feel like so many people's in that position just getting started. How do you get started when you have no capital or very little capital to go First off, just getting the farm? How were you able to get the farm? Did you all have money saved up or how did that work? 0:43:17 - Cedric That was a community effort. We went in with my wife's brother and his wife, which he was actually. I knew him before he was one of my best friends and another couple helped us with like down payment oh, yeah, and then so, and then we eventually we bought them out, but so we've remained, you know, we've remained partners, I guess, with her brother and and wife, and my dad has always sort of been there financially, you know, backing me up if we need. So I've had a lot of support family and that was how we bought the land and then the rest we just had to generate ourselves. 0:43:52 - Cal Oh yeah. 0:43:53 - Cedric So one thing I wanted to just throw out there is that we never put permanent fencing up. 0:44:00 - Cal Oh yes. 0:44:01 - Cedric So because we're using this electric netting and poly wire and whatnot, I just have just temporary posts with one high tensile wire that goes around the perimeter and that's just feeding electricity oh yes and then when I need to, like, I can either get the fence on the other side of it and get the you know the animals to graze it, or I can just lift them all up and I can brush, hog it, like once a year so you know you don't like, come I. Just one of the things we never sprayed anything right so spraying like poison, ivy or whatever on the post was just, it was just non-negotiable for us. We've never sprayed a fertilizer or a pesticide, yeah, any kind of poisons or anything. Right so, but that also turns out to be, I mean, putting in perimeter fence is extraordinarily oh it is, it is yes and people are like well you're, you know, aren't your netting expensive? but I'm picking it up and moving it right, so yeah it's okay, it's expensive, but I'm just using it all the time and I the flexibility is really important to us, so we didn't have to have that infrastructure and like, like, like, if we go into the sheep or the steers, I don't have a sorting area for them. I have this thing where if I need to work the sheep, it takes me well with another person, it takes me about an hour. I set up some cattle panels, I set up a couple like a guillotine and a sorting thing and maybe something to weigh, and then we use the nemming and shoo them into this thing and it's built right onto, like, against near like one of the walls is the actual house that I pull right oh yeah so it takes like an hour or two to set up and an hour to take down and then we'll work all the sheep. No, it doesn't take an hour to take down. It takes like 20 minutes to take down. 0:45:48 - Cal Oh yeah, so much. 0:45:49 - Cedric It's always easier going that way, yeah, right so, but that's like, so I don't have to, I don't have a big. You could spend tens and tens of thousands on an area to work your, your animals, and I have never. You know, I have cattle panel and some some gates. 0:46:08 - Cal Right. 0:46:09 - Cedric So it does just. And when I want to get my steers I mean, our steers are so used to being worked because we move them twice a day right? So I'll just set up some cattle gates and I'll just slowly work them and I use the netting and I'll just put my trailer there and I'll walk them into the trailer, right? So just as examples of not having to have as much infrastructure as you might think you need to and learning more the animal husbandry part. The more you know and the more you can read animals and work with animals, actually I think the less infrastructure you actually need. So like oh, every every building I have is no bigger. Like my biggest buildings are like 20 by 12 because I buy these? I buy a six by six skid 20 foot long and I might be like 12 foot wide. Those are my houses. So if I need two or three of them for mine, for my steers and for my flirts. Then I put three of them on Right. They're all very easily dragged with a tractor and all very so. 0:47:11 - Cal So none of the the shade or shelter that you're giving your animals are permanent. 0:47:17 - Cedric They're all on these movable shelters with skids that you're able to connect to and move yeah, I mean, the only exception would be, like the brooders, right then the hoop houses in the winter for three months, the hens will hook up to them, but their houses hook up to them and they have access to inside the warm hoop house and they have access outside. Oh yeah, If it's not windy, it can be 20 degrees out there and they're going to go outside because they love to be outside. But yeah otherwise, nothing is permanent, everything is movable and everything is temporary. 0:47:50 - Cal yeah, now, one thing you mentioned there you move them with your tractor were you were your first structures all where you can move them by hand until you were able to get a tractor I did mention that that big, that info was a big one for us because I couldn't move it by hand. 0:48:06 - Cedric I had to push it a little bit oh yeah, I moved it by my grand caravan oh yeah, you mentioned that earlier. Yes, and I still have that building. It's held up and I still use it, but I move it by tractor. Yeah, yeah. So at first it was just all by hand for the first few years, except for that one. And then, yeah, and then I mean we got a tractor. Like about a year in we got a tractor so then I could start building things for that stuff. 0:48:33 - Cal So you mentioned a tractor. Do you use a four-wheeler or utv? 0:48:38 - Cedric I don't. This has been a big discussion. It's extraordinarily expensive. 0:48:43 - Cal They are I? I've looked at them, I would love to get one and I I'm just like I can't justify the cost. 0:48:49 - Cedric So our ATVs are Subaru Foresters. Oh yeah, they have great traction, they have plenty of space to put, you can actually carry people, you're protected from the rain and they're like a fourth the price. Oh, yes, so I've looked into it't, I just couldn't believe the prices. I couldn't believe. And you're not in and my subaru can pull some of those houses oh yeah, these yeah like. So it's like what's the point? Right, and you can buy one for a few grand versus like 20 grand if you wanted to pull anything. 0:49:26 - Cal You know if you want to have anything with power. 0:49:29 - Cedric So yeah, ours are uh Subaru Foresters but I I do. 0:49:34 - Cal I wondered about that. I've looked at some older Jeeps and some other things. I mean I have my, my pickup, but really, to be honest, it's a little overqualified for that and too much money I spent on that. I think if I had something a little bit smaller, just barely do some stuff, it'd be nice. But I look at those prices and especially for utvs, I'm like, oh man, um, they're yeah, they're fun, yeah, well, my parents have one and I use it occasionally, but I I hate to use it every day and put all those hours on it. On you, you mentioned about water and you're getting pipes in ground where you're able to connect into them. How did you handle water before you had the pipes underground? 0:50:22 - Cedric so we just I had when we originally were, I mean, we built our house and while we we were setting up infrastructure I guess it was way before we built our house we got in four hydrants just spread out and then literally we would have 10 hoses that we would oh yeah, because that moving was so important to us, so we would work with 10 hoses to get to the edge of the fields I mean we were working with less acreage at the time, right, and it would just off those hydrants and hoses. Yeah, it was so important to us. Oh yes, that we do that, so we'd have like one close to each field. 0:50:59 - Cal Yeah, so you spend a little bit of money and got some hydrants close that you all could work with and then you utilize a fair number of garden hoses to get it the last mile. Four ways, yeah, but it works. It works. If you want to do it, you can make it happen. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, as you think about someone since we're kind of on this topic of starting without too much and building up, what would you tell someone who's sitting there thinking I want to get started? I know we're going to have the famous four questions. It's going to be kind of like this but it's going to be a little different, just thinking I don't have money to do anything. How do they get started? 0:51:43 - Cedric Yeah, I mean, it's not easy, right. So I would say find an internship right First. Get some experience, because you need experience, and it's not just right, it's not just experience of having some techniques or knowing how much to feed away, right, One of the things. Like we're here, I'm actually think that what we do as much as anything else is change the way people think. Oh, yes, yes they might not realize it right, but like, how do you, if you're not used to working outdoors, if you're not used to working with animals and if you're not used to working with multiple variables all the time in diplomatic sort of tussling, and you know how do you strategize, how do you make judgments, how do you all these things like you really don't know, you might not even know how to work hard right? so like, yes, I, I see that way too often is that work hard is a little bit tougher than I thought it would be yeah, I mean people just haven't done a lot of manual labor and that learning skills of the hands is like learning to get into that flow oh yeah, it's something that people yeah, you just have to do it right. So, like we're changing the way you think as much as anything else, and I think that's worth going on to a farm and learning how they do it. But also, I don't care how structured a farm is, you're gonna have those days where you gotta make some judgment calls oh yeah and something's gone wrong. You gotta figure out. You know, and you also have to figure out what's important, what follows what you know. You know and so that's crazy important. Now it is a huge barrier. Land is a huge barrier. So I know there's a lot of people who are talking about you know using leased land. If you have that experience, then you can look. I know how to. I know how to rotationally graze animals. I can make your fields better. There are people who are able to to sell that. So land access is huge, obviously. But the experience is also more than I think people realize. And we change the way people think. Right, I'm, I write a lot, I do a little way. People think, right, I write a lot, I do a little bit of podcasting, I've written a manuscript and everything, and one of the things I try to get across is that we think of things as nouns in a way that's not really right. Right, like I was a philosophy major. So we kind of believe that we describe things well a chair's got four legs and a seat to the back and you know you sit on it right, and you can't look at soil that way. So it's not really a thing, right, it's a thing, maybe, in the way that economy is oh yeah, right like exactly define my like? can you tell me how many ledges an economy? Right, I mean, you can make up stuff, but it's all going to be metaphors right it's this thing in action, right, so it's like these verbs and metaphors, right it's? this thing in action right, yes, so it's like these verbs and so like looking at systems, looking at soil, looking at all these different things. It's all. The interactions are actually much more important, right, and the more interaction and suddenly diversity then makes sense, right, Because if you have more players in the game, you have more interactions. It becomes exponential, right. 0:54:48 - Cal Oh, yes, you have more interactions, it becomes exponential right. 0:54:50 - Cedric And if it's the interactions that's creating soil, if it's the interaction to the rical-risal fungi in the roots, it's the interactions between the manure and the urine and the soil and the interactions between the grasping, all these different actions they compound. That's a word that Alan uses. I've used synergy and I've used different words like that, but he uses compounding effects, which I like. It's a great word Suddenly synergy, and I've used different words like that, but he uses compounding effects which I like it's great work. Suddenly, it's not really a noun, right? What's going on is is an economy, is it's much more verby? Oh yes, right, so you're you that's, and then that's an art, right? So I guess my whole point I'm getting to is you teach people. It's like teaching people like Kung Fu or something, right? You can't just, oh, I learned my techniques on YouTube. Oh yeah, and I did this and I know exactly how to do it, because you even go out there and nature and life is just going to throw you a left hook, right? Right, so you just you got to do it a thousand times. 0:55:43 - Cal Yes. 0:55:43 - Cedric And as you do it you got to learn, and it's an art form, and so it's much more. It's knowledge of the body, it's knowledge of intuition, it's knowledge as much as it is head knowledge, and that can only be learned hands-on, that can only be learned by doing it, by working with someone who's got experience. I'm starting to be that guy who's got more experience. But for me it was working with this older couple. Oh yeah, particularly Larry was my mentor. Just you know, just watched and learned and a lot of osmosis, you know, and you know, now and then I pick his brain just working side by side for him. You know, just that's, that's super valuable. So that's kind of what our internship is trying to do, and it can frustrate a lot of people. I just want to know how many buckets to feed. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, today was colder, yesterday was this, or you know, or they and you read the animals right, right, yeah, how do you read animals? 0:56:38 - Cal But as you think about it, you don't know the questions to ask. Until you're in the middle of it. Sure, you know some questions to ask, but do you know the real questions to ask? And until you've got into it, you may not know those questions. I know, you absolutely don't. I like to think I'm fairly intelligent and at times I think I'm fairly dumb. So either way, but we got hair sheep. It's been a number of years ago and I thought I took a course on sheep. I've been around all kinds of animals my whole life. I thought this is just another species, that won't be any problem. There was. I hate to admit how steep that learning curve was. 0:57:21 - Cedric Yeah, I'm still learning about sheep. 0:57:23 - Cal I'm still learning on everything and hopefully one day I'll get there. 0:57:27 - Cedric Yeah, absolutely, it's like Kung Fu, right, right. It always can get better. Oh, the more you know, the more you don't know Exactly yeah exactly, and I think people who can get into that state of you know well one thing we do is that we do lunch with our interns. 0:57:44 - Cal Oh yes. 0:57:44 - Cedric Monday through Friday, we provide lunch, we sit down and I'm like, look, I'm available here for a whole hour. Monday through Friday, we provide lunch, we sit down and I'm like, look, I'm available here for a whole hour. Get rid of your cell phones. Oh yeah, right First, and I'm right here. And sometimes people take advantage of that and sometimes that's some of the best learning goes on there because, you know, I I can be an academic and I love a lot of that. But when it's not in the context of you know, here's an environment you go out and you work with your hands and you do stuff and then you have a question. It's in this context of actually doing the whole thing. Then you can learn the art, right. And they can get. At first they get really frustrated in my answers because it's always I've always got a caveat and a prelude and this and it depends, and all this right. But they slowly learn and they start needing. So, okay, here are some of the here's, the things that were important, here's the principles, whatever, and so I really think that a lot of what you do and I think this is what agriculture we need to get in touch it changes the way your synapses work, changes the way you think, yeah, and and you start thinking things less like individual nouns that have, you know, properties of red and blue, you know, and weighs this much. But what's it doing? How is it interacting, right? So, oh well, we just had this over here, so now would it be good to have this here. You know, like the, the verbiness of it, you know what, what they're doing, how they're interacting. That becomes actually more important than all their physical traits, so to speak. Oh yeah, so really affecting the way they think, and then if you could take that mentality, that's actually going to be a powerful tool when you start yourself. And I don't think people, I think they underestimate that, because I know plenty of people who I went to Salton, you know, and I learned all this stuff, and now I start and they don't last, you know, and they're not making good judgment calls, and sometimes that's just it. It's a hard thing to succeed at. Sometimes it's just life hits you and you can't necessarily blame the person, but sometimes it's just they haven't made good judgment calls because they jumped in too quick. They knew everything. 0:59:55 - Cal They thought they were black belt already. 0:59:58 - Cedric Yeah Right. 1:00:01 - Cal My wife says I jump in the deep end too often, so I completely understand. It's time for us to transition to the famous four questions sponsored by Ken Cove Farm Fence. Ken Cove Farm Fence is a proud supporter of the Grazing Grass Podcast and grazers everywhere. At Ken Cove Farm Fence. They believe there's true value within the community of grazers and land stewards. The results that follow proper management and monitoring can change the very world around us. That's why Ken Cove is dedicated to providing an ever-expanding line of grazing products to make your chores easier and your land more abundant. Whether you're growing your own food on the homestead or grazing on thousands of acres, ken Cove has everything you need to do it well, from reels to tumblewills, polytwine to electric nets, water valves to water troughs, you'll find what you're looking for at Ken Cove. They carry brands like Speedrite, o'briens, kiwi Tech, strainrite, jobe and more. Ken Cove is proud to be part of your regenerative journey. Call them today or visit KenCovecom, and be sure to follow them on social media and subscribe to the Ken Cove YouTube channel at Ken Cove Farm Fence for helpful how-to videos and new product releases. There are the same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our first question what's your favorite grazing grass related book or resource? 1:01:29 - Cedric First, question what's your favorite grazing grass-related book or resource? Yeah, I thought about all her books, but actually I've read some books and they've been great. I read Jim Gersh and Rachel Salton. I've read some others and I haven't gone back to them. Oh, yeah, right, I mean they were great, but right now there's many like YouTubes and there's Scott McGrath's farmer and podcasts and like I'm getting more out of all that and keeping up, and then like going to this, like event with Alan Williams. That was probably one of the most valuable time. I've spent the whole day and we were all at different levels of Kung Fu, so to speak. Oh yes, my wife and I are interns that have been. Some have been there a couple of years, some have been there, like you know, a month and some have been there all got stuff out. 1:02:16 - Cal Oh, yeah, people like that. 1:02:18 - Cedric And we did the first couple hours like a lecture and then after lunch we went out for three hours in the pasture and that, I think, is the most valuable. 1:02:29 - Cal Yeah, yeah. Well, you go, go out in the pasture with him. And I've not done this, but I've been out in the pasture with Jim Garish and just the amount of of knowledge they drop on you is amazing. 1:02:43 - Cedric Yes, I've been with Jim Garish out on a sheep one, yeah yeah, so very good advice or very good resources there. 1:02:52 - Cal Our second question what is your favorite tool for the farm? 1:02:56 - Cedric I I'm gonna go with the old electric netting because we use it for everything. It gives me the flexibility and I know some people absolutely hate it. I I'm not a fan, we love it. I'll tell you why in a second. I'm not a fan, we love it. 1:03:08 - Cal I'll tell you why in just a second. I'm not a fan because I have too many thorn trees and they just reach out and grab it. Now, if I'm not around the thorn trees, it works great, but those thorn trees just give me fits when I'm trying to move it, or do things. 1:03:24 - Cedric You need some hogs. 1:03:25 - Cal Yeah, well, you know, my wife tells me I've got enough irons in the fire. I really would like to get some hogs and and mess with them some. Just something on the electric netting and moving your hogs each day. How many sections of electric netting are you using to to make a pen for your hogs for that day? 1:03:46 - Cedric So if we have a group, I tell people they'll have seven fences for it. Oh, yeah. 1:03:50 - Cal Because everything we do is we do corridors right, oh, okay, so we have like a corridor and they're going down. 1:03:56 - Cedric And you might use four fences for that. 1:03:59 - Cal Oh yeah. 1:03:59 - Cedric And then you have a back fence a front fence, and then you have the next days or the next move and so seven is the bare minimum and then you can just you pick up one fence and you set up the next days and then twice a week we're moving the back fence and the houses and everything. And so you just you open it up, you pull them up, they're all eating grass, and then you pick, you know you can put your back fence, and then so I, you know, I say seven, you could do it with five, but I think with the corridors you kind of need I put, you know, two on one side, two on the other side, that way you know you can have a little overlap and so, yeah, it can be very, very simple and I really like the way you're describing that. 1:04:45 - Cal You can go back to early episode, like three or four, with Edgefield Farm and he talks about putting up corridors for his sheep and grazing them, and this is where I talk about with the podcast. We want people to take that next step, whatever that next step is, and they may have to hear something a hundred times before it clicks for them. I've heard about corridors and I just have never done it with my, my goat. I have four, four nets and I set them up and then it's a hassle because then I have to make a smaller pan. 1:05:17 - Cedric I make it and then I move them all, but just you know, leapfrog yeah. 1:05:22 - Cal Yeah, I don't know why. It just took me longer on that and, like I said, a very early episode and it's been covered other times, but this time it spoke to me differently. Yeah, my wife will be so happy. You're going to buy what now? I just need a few more, but I really do. 1:05:38 - Cedric So, thank you. And I learned the hard way. Man, I was moving hens by the stupidest ways, right, oh, let's make an area for them, let's try to herd hens, oh yeah. And then we would take a fence and we would all hold with all the kids and we would like drag the fence along and man, like, now, I can do it. One person, it was just some of those things. Yeah, those are all all good things, but you, you would learn that at a farm if you went there. 1:06:03 - Cal Oh yeah yeah, our our third question. We kind of answered it somewhat. We took a little different take on it earlier in the overgrazing section. But what would you tell someone just getting started? 1:06:16 - Cedric Yeah, well, first it is super hard Like no. You have a mountain to climb, especially if you don't have family land or whatnot. But my thing has always been it doesn't take the capital that you might think it does. You really can do things, and you know, part of it is my upbringing too. We, we, we make silk purses out of sow's ears all the time. So there's amazing amount that you can do without all the toys and the fancy stuff. So that's probably be my biggest advice. 1:06:48 - Cal Yeah, and just to to um, add onto that it's so easy and and I really fall into this trap when I'm wanting to do something new, I think, well, I've got to have all this to do it. You don't have to have all that quit quit looking at other people where they are on their journey and everything they have. You can get by with less. Just get what you barely need to get started. Get enough to get started, but get started and learn what works for you in your context. Yep. 1:07:18 - Cedric Start slow, start slow. Yeah, don't get ahead of your learning curve. We always talk about getting ahead of our market. We always talk about all, but don't get ahead of your learning curves, oh yeah, oh yeah, good advice, yes. Get a mentor. Yes, and lastly, where can others find out more about you? Well, we are Weathertop Farm. That's just info at weathertopfarmcom. There is a tab on there. It's called Farmer Sledge. It's got links to my writings. I do a podcast, but I say that with a lot of caveat. I'm a very conceptual guy, I'm not like a how-to guy. So when I do the podcasts I don't do a whole lot of these, but the last one I did, I did three podcasts about scale. So it's like we always talk about, oh, can regenerative agriculture, scale, and I'm oftentimes talking about how we think about things wrong. So I do, you know, and people are into conceptual stuff. They like it. Other people are just looking for some techniques. Absolutely hate it because it's just me talking. 1:08:20 - Cal Oh yeah. 1:08:20 - Cedric It's not fancy at all, and so then I also have writings that you can on that farmer's sledge and I've written a manuscript. I'm trying to get it published. I was talking with Chelsea Green for a bit and they stopped communicating with me, but Alan Williams was interested so he's taking a look at it. We'll see. But it's very much about like how we think. So maybe eventually, if you ask me that question in a few months, I might be able to say you could read my book. 1:08:47 - Cal Oh yes, yeah, we'll be looking forward to that and we will put links in our show notes for that. 1:08:54 - Cedric Oh, I do have an Instagram account. Oh, okay, farmersledge, which I really have not done much. I've been really focusing on writing, but maybe I'll get back into that as well, yeah. 1:09:07 - Cal Well, we appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. Really enjoyed the conversation. 1:09:12 - Cedric That was fun, it's fun. Thanks, man. 1:09:16 - Cal I really hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I know I did. Thank you for listening and if you found something useful, please share it. Share it on your social media, tell your friends, get the word out about the podcast. Helps us grow. If you happen to be a grass farmer and you'd like to share about your journey, go to grazinggrasscom and click on Be Our Guest. Fill out the form and I'll be in touch. We appreciate your support by sharing our episodes and telling your friends about it. You can also support our show by buying our merch. We get a little bit back from that. Another way to support the show is by becoming a Grazing Grass Insider. Grazing Grass Insiders enjoy bonus content, monthly zooms and discounts. You can visit the website grazinggrasscom, click on support and they'll have the links there. Also, if you haven't left us a review, please do. It really helps us, as people are searching for podcasts and I was just checking them and we do not have very many reviews for 2024. So if you haven't left us a review, please do. Until next time, keep on grazing grass. Transcribed by https://podium.page