The Cow and Her Grass - Andre Voisin

Classic: The Cow and Her Grass, a Manual of Grass Productivity - by Andre Voisin

This book by Messrs Voisin and Lecomte comes at the right moment. It is a synthesis of M. Voisin's important study, Grass Productivity. This manual presents the chief ideas of two specialists. Since they are also excellent practitioners, they have applied these ideas before recommending them.

Their evocative picture of 'the meeting of cow and grass' poses the true problem of the management of grazed grass.

For the farmer, the production of meat and milk is an act of industrial conversion. The 'machine' is the animal that converts raw vegetable matter into finished food products which are rich in calories and easy to assimilate. This 'machine' is complex because it is a living being; it can be improved--within limits. But its yield depends basically on the quality of the raw materials offered to it for conversion. 

Our farmers bring a jealously guarded care to the cultivation and harvesting of their cereals and commercial plants. Too often they rely on nature to develop their pastures and let their animals use their instinct to get the best harvest they can from them. 

M. Voisin, an experienced chemist and biologist, has applied foreign studies of grazing on his Norman farm for several years. He has removed the errors and, above all, has looked for a more specifically French application that could be adapted to our traditional farming practices.

M. Lecomte, a Veterinary Surgeon, has studied the complex of forage feeding and its influence on yield and animal health, from observation of grassland management, even that of his clients.

Messrs Voisin and Leconte have drawn on the fruits of their conversations and experience and, in this manual, have succeeded in producing a popular version of the fundamental ideas of their studies.

I hope that their words will be heard and followed.

[From the Introduction]

- - - -

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This book by Messrs Voisin and Lecomte comes at the right moment. It is a synthesis of M. Voisin's important study, Grass Productivity. This manual presents the chief ideas of two specialists. Since they are also excellent practitioners, they have applied these ideas before recommending them. Their evocative picture of 'the meeting of cow and grass' poses the true problem of the management of grazed grass. For the farmer, the production of meat and milk is an act of industrial conversion. The 'machine' is the animal that converts raw vegetable matter into finished food products which are rich in calories and easy to assimilate. This 'machine' is complex because it is a living being; it can be improved--within limits. But its yield depends basically on the quality of the raw materials offered to it for conversion. Our farmers bring a jealously guarded care to the cultivation and harvesting of their cereals and commercial plants. Too often they rely on nature to develop their pastures and let their animals use their instinct to get the best harvest they can from them. M. Voisin, an experienced chemist and biologist, has applied foreign studies of grazing on his Norman farm for several years. He has removed the errors and, above all, has looked for a more specifically French application that could be adapted to our traditional farming practices. M. Lecomte, a Veterinary Surgeon, has studied the complex of forage feeding and its influence on yield and animal health, from observation of grassland management, even that of his clients. Messrs Voisin and Leconte have drawn on the fruits of their conversations and experience and, in this manual, have succeeded in producing a popular version of the fundamental ideas of their studies. I hope that their words will be heard and followed. [From the Introduction] ....

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It's Time to Stock Up On Grass Fed Meat While Our Prices Are Low...

Do you seriously have enough beef to last through the winter?

(photo: Cowgirl Jules)

Check your freezer, because ours is full.

Of course, maybe the problem is that I'm simply not charging our Buyer's Club members enough...

I haven't seen any reason to increase our prices, as I covered earlier.

Unfortunately, this also means that I'm tempted to simply take these steers to auction instead of offering them to you.

Here's the deal: I've got three quarters still in our freezer, as well as about 33 pounds of steaks, roasts, and every cut except hamburger.

So while I'd like to keep it to quarters, I can fill in some extra for Buyer's Club Members. (We also have liver and other cuts not so demanded.)

Right now, the quarters we have are about 70 lbs. each and have all the cuts possible, as they're mixed.

So - while they last, you can get these for $280, which comes out to $4/lb - that includes the processing fees. Since regular supermarket hamburger is approaching this, you can see that is quite a bargain - with the free farm tour.

All you have to do is come to the farm to pick up your meat.

Sign up if you haven't, or email me if you have.

I don't see processing another steer this fall unless there's more requests - so the time is ripe to pick up some beef at below market prices.

Let me know...

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Next Step: Building a Buyers Club For All-Year Beef Supplies (and More)

Our predicament is your gain - "from each dilemma, a new opportunity is found."

(Our latest calf - "Ears")

The story is that we had two bulls at the home place, and some heifers and cows we didn't want bred. Bulls fight over females, so we couldn't turn both out with the cows and heifers - yet we also didn't have three places we could keep everyone happy and well fed.

So our youngest bull is slated to be processed. But no buyers lined up.

Which means we have to stock an empty freezer - in spite of everything we already have in there.

The solution is to re-implement our Buyer's Club.

What this means is that the Buyer's Club itself buys the animal, and any member may share in the purchase. That falls within the custom-exempt law for processing.

Today, we're opening this up to new members. 

There will be a free membership, which will be informative only. A mailing-list, actually.

A paid membership (which is credited on first purchase) will be required to be part of the beef distribution.

Anyone who has already purchased from us is already a Buyer's Club member.

Too simple:

1. Sign up on the form to the right and give us your email.
2. We'll send you regular emails with what is currently available and upcoming, as well as related offers when we find other farmers with goods for purchase, and also what our processors have available. (Just one email a month as long as you stay subscribed - and you can opt-out at any time.)
3. You buy what you want, or sign up for an upcoming beef-share. 

When you buy as a member direct, then you'll need to pick your beef up from us directly (we do not ship, as it's to expensive.)

If you buy a share in a beef, then you'll pick it up directly from the processor.

Of course, you can also get several people join in and a single member can pick up the order for everyone.

This gives us considerable leeway in distributing the various cuts. (Some people like liver, tongue, and heart, for example.) As well, when we have a "hamburger" cow, we can deal with that more easily - as a quarter of a large cow might be too much for some.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Sign up and let us know. 

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• It's Alive! Successfully Made it Through Re-Design!

It's Alive! Successfully made it through re-design...

(photocredit: Digital Wallpapers)

Don't look so surprised - I've been doing this type stuff for years...

Owing to recently being told we needed new web-hosting, I pushed forward on a design and back-end re-build I knew was coming anyway.

Now we have a much more accessible (and better looking) website with all the original data, as well as better links. 

Some of the things we improved:

• You can access all the pages on the side now - in nice-looking and functional drop-down menu's. 
• The menu's at the top now go to additional areas of interest which gardening, farming, and homesteading types will find interesting.
• We've revived the concept of a "Buyer's Club" so you can possibly (in the near future) be able to buy grass-fed hamburger by the pound - for members only - nearly any time you need it. You'll have to come to the farm, though.
• And the whole thing is much easier on the eyes, since we've gotten away from the limits of the old backend.

Hope you like it.

Another great change was being able to add more labels/categories to each post and also to add in related pages (courtesy of Zemanta.)

Which means you can more readily find related materials, either on this site or others, so you can find all the data you need for anything you want to read about.

That might take you into some rabbit-holes, but on the other hand may give you some exciting new concepts to think about - and improve your life with.

Because that is the sole reason for this site - to help you improve your life and eat better. We aren't here to make a lot of money selling grass-fed Missouri meat. We well our beef direct in order to keep the farm sustainable and help you live a better-quality life. Also, we can only raise so much beef on the acres we have, which means only so much beef is possible every year. Once we get enough regular clients, we'll shut down that list (so contact us today!)

As long as you are on our mailing list (yes, I updated that old form and now it's easier than ever to sign up - see the "Contact Us" page) - then you'll get an email notice every spring about our up-and-coming beef for that year.

What else is new...

Otherwise, since I otherwise make my pin-money writing and publishing books. (That site also had to get an update/upgrade.) I've found a great set of books which have wound up in the public domain, but simply need to be polished up a bit and made re-available for your use. Natural Diet, Preparedness, Sustainable Farming - all of these things. Also some great books on gardening and raising beef, plus others...

I hope to have them up for you within a few months - but there are a few earlier books in the queue. They'll also have ecourses you can take (some free) and probably videos to tell you whats in the book that's useful for you - and why I took the time to republish them for you.

Those are for the other sections across the top of this page (although the books on raising beef will show up in this section somewhere.)

Lots of work still remaining.

But I wanted to update you on how and why this site is now so great-looking and full of content.  Better than ever.

You're welcome!

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Farm Income Solution - Wholesale Grass Fed Beef Bought Locally

Finding the Simple Profit in Wholesale Grass Fed Beef

For grass fed beef, you really have just two major profit points – as long as you’re feeding hay:

1. When they’re weaned.
2. When they’re yearlings.

Anything else gets eaten up in the winter hay cycle. While a grass fed beef is only about 22 months old at harvest, it’s gone through at least 2 winters, usually 3. Because you have to add in the 9 months of gestation to the cost – which takes it up to nearly 2 1/2 years.

Cost of hay isn’t just baling it, you also have to fertilize the land it came from, or it won’t produce as well for you the next time (and eventually, you’d only be raising short, unpalatable weeds – or sand.)

So working to finish cattle actually takes the remaining profit out of that last 8-10 months. They are going to put on their final weight, but this is also where they lose their efficiency of gain – each pound of gain takes more and more pounds of forage to achieve. And so the relative efficiency of grain-fed beef, who are harvested at about 14 months. That is, if you have the cheap grain to feed them.

Trying to finish cattle on grass usually means another winter of hay, which is additional cost. Auction prices for beef gets you paid commodity prices, which are as low as buyers can get away with. So your fertilizer cost, plus equipment and fuel, eat up any profit from those last few hundred pounds.

Now Missouri has lots and lots of tough, but tasty fescue grass. So this is why it is one of the top beef-producing states. Mostly, it has feeder or stocker (yearling) calves which are then shipped off to feedlots for fattening.

Farmers' Market profits vs. Stockyard Auction prices

What’s becoming more popular are grass-finished beef, locally marketed. This is where you get your premiums and the reason for finishing anything at all. When you can jump the final price up above your costs for that last year, you can then simply be able to make any profit you want that the final consumer will pay for.

Now while cattle prices are surging all over the place, we are still currently (2012) able to get about $1200 for a steer on the hoof (live-weight). This will give you a your 520-pound carcass and will  another $225 processing. While you get about 320 lbs of useful meat from that, you have arount $400 in that animal. Visiting the local big-city farmers' market found that just hamburger from a verified grass-fed beef was bringing $5.50/lb. and sirloin steak was $18-19.00 per pound.

Now, that was individually wrapped, USDA-inspected. (Which nearly doubles the "custom-exempt" fees.) Your break-even would be covering your costs, and then they pay the processing - that's wholesale beef, custom-exempt processed. At farmers' market prices (adding in the high overhead for big-city booth fees), it still shows that farmers taking over their own market can reap the profit harvest to the tune of somewhere around $3- $4,000 per animal.

If you only sell direct at wholesale prices, you can still take your auction price, add in a premium, and get somewhere around $1,000 profit per animal.
Without taking your own marketing into your own hands, you are really stuck with sellling stockers (yearlings) at auction, your next best profit margin.

Our current model is a mix. We turn the bulls into steers and direct market them as wholesale beef when 2 years old. Heifers are sold as feeders (or if they are lucky, picked up as replacement heifers) and we still more than double cost of keeping them overwinter and their shots. An average profit under this model goes around $14-$15,000 for a herd of 22 cows and bull, without other overhead. That's still got about $4200 in winter hay costs.

To create a sustainable farming solution, increasing profit on grass fed beef at commodity prices is to take out the hay costs – which entails something called mob-grazing. By intensively grazing cattle and letting the land recover (one expert at this says his cows only see the same spot twice a year) – this actually make the grass lusher and means you don’t have to feed hay at all, there’s plenty out there if you ration it during the winter.

The other point would be to get a premium above commodity levels – in other words, quit selling a commodity. This means direct marketing all your annual calf crop. With the Internet, this is getting easier.

If we were making $3,000 per steer by USDA inspection and selling to locals on a per piece basis, that would then be a lot more income, but also a lot more overhead in terms of time and expenses.

But I’ve got far more to study on this. A lot more pencils to sharpen and push. I sure would like to move onto finished cattle, but there’s going to have to be some changes in order to “mine them them hills” of grass to see more gold.

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How a Belted Galloway Bull Mean More Grass Fed Beef Per Acre?

Bull Choice Means Higher Efficiency on Pastures

Got this newsletter from Kit Pharo, which sums up some choices we made in a bull (not one of his) a couple of years ago:

"If your ranch can support 100 head of 1400-pound cows, it should be able to support 120 head of 1100-pound cows – on the exact same inputs.   That’s 20% more cows producing 20% more calves. 

Because smaller cows can wean a higher percentage of their own body weight than bigger cows, they will always produce MORE TOTAL POUNDS on the EXACT SAME INPUTS.   I have NEVER EVER found a commercial ranch situation where bigger cows were more profitable than smaller cows."

We went with a Belted Galloway and that turned out to drop our average steer weights from about 900-1000 lbs down to around 700. Of course, with the prices going up, we were able to keep our prices the same and we were still at auction levels. It didn't please some regulars who got a lot less this year, but when I showed them the numbers, they were still grateful to get that quality.

It does mean that we will be getting a scale to ensure we are running fair to everyone.

Even with the drought this year, we haven't been running shy on grass. It's mid August now and I've still got another couple of pastures to get through the first time before I start heading back through some of the others.

So we'll be able to actually put more head on (save back more heifers) once the weather evens out. These will be mixed Galloway-Angus, so will be a smaller frame.

However, the advantage of Galloway is that they eat a wider variety of forage - and so have tended to teach my older Angus a few things about what they used to simply leave as "weeds".  We mostly graze from one side of the paddock to the other now, instead of from "dessert to spinach" as is common.

And our beeves are much more mild-tempered, another factor of Galloways. (Had to herd some of my neighbor's all-black Angus steers today - and was reminded of how much I was missing in anxious running to corral them.)

With a 700lb beef, you are getting around 70lbs. in the freezer. And this is more doable for most people. So I think we are winning all the way around.

If I could get the conventional system to quit raising beef prices in general, my customers would be happier, but to get beef at wholesale prices is still a big bargain, regardless.

And that's what we're here for - to help people improve their quality of life.

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