Growing More Grass in North Dakota

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 mix. This helped, but still was not diverse enough. The last seeding that I did, three years ago, includes about 15 species and about 60% of that mix is forbs and legumes.” This gives a better nutrient balance for the soil and for the livestock grazing the pasture. native grass seeding that I planted in 2008 with no diversity, no tap roots, is not doing anything.”

When seeding cropland into grass Jed recommends planting a very highly productive season-long cover crop, essentially a perennial cover crop—that will continue to thrive and create its own balance over time. “I thought at first that I could regenerate these prairies back to the way they were, but that was overly optimistic. We can’t really do that. It will never quite be the same, but we can make it more ecologically balanced and healthy. A person has to also be profitable along the way. The grass seeding I did in 2008 was not very profitable! If you are not profitable with your grass seedings, it doesn’t really matter in the end anyway. I want my pastures diverse and productive and I am not really sure that I care about what kind of grasses or plants are out there, as long as it works,” he says.

Jed’s goal is to graze the cattle through winter. “I always plan to graze for 365 days of the year, and sometimes the cattle can do it, if it’s an open winter without a lot of snow. Some years are better than others. I do bale graze, which is essentially feeding hay and a person has to go through the process of putting up hay. I acknowledge that, but the cows are feeding themselves,” he says.

“When I did the first seeding, with only five species of grasses, I thought that was diverse, considering what we knew about diverse, but it wasn’t diverse enough. The problem is that I thought this cropland would just grow grass forever, but it doesn’t. It was good cropland and that’s why it was being farmed, but the land was actually wrecked from being cropped for so long. The tillage layers really affected it. Unless it rains, the fibrous grass roots can’t get down through those heavy tillage layers.

“If I were to do it over again, or had to seed that same grass mix, I would cover crop first for three to five years minimum. I can’t financially do that, however. I understand the advantages and benefits of the cover crop strategy but it is also very expensive. If you are a farmer and can integrate cover crops, that’s great—because you are farming anyway. If you are just a livestock producer, however, it’s more of a challenge to go out and seed a cover crop. It’s not financially feasible.

“If you are in a region with lots of rainfall and can grow a tremendous amount of cover crops it’s a bit different. Here, however, your expenses are the same to put it in; it costs about $30 an acre to do the cover crop whether you do it here or in a more productive climate.

“After that first try at seeding grass, that led me to thinking I would just seed a cover crop containing three or four different kinds of legumes and about five or six different kinds of forbs and six to eight different kinds of grasses. Essentially that’s a perennial cover crop that I seeded. There was a tremendous amount of diversity, and a lot of tap roots that can get through the old tillage layers so the grass roots can find routes down through those layers. So far, this is working. We didn’t have any snow during the winter and haven’t had much rain yet this spring—less than half an inch since the frost went out. But already those new seedings are growing like crazy because we had a lot of sub-moisture. By contrast, my

“I used to put up hay on some Game and Fish land and haul that hay home to bale graze on my property. That isn’t an option anymore because that Game and Fish land is all under water now and I can’t utilize it. I really did like doing that because it was cheap and was importing carbon to my property. So what I do now is occasionally hay some of my pastures (the ones that were originally cropland—with terrain that haying equipment can traverse). I can hay some of that if I want to, if there is extra forage. I hay certain areas but not every year—maybe every fourth or fifth year on a certain spot. The next three or four years I either stockpile or graze that area. As long as I am not exporting any hay off of my property, I am okay with being carbon neutral.”

Jed simply cuts the hay and bales it, and leaves the bales wherever they drop out of the baler. He also makes the bales much smaller now, for better nutrient distribution over the fields (more total bales, covering more area). He also doesn’t tie the bales, so they are more like hay piles than bales.

“It’s like a hay-bucked pile, except that it’s in a bale. To me this is still grazing, even though I’ve made hay. The difference, to me, is that I don’t view that pile as a hay bale or haying; I view it as capturing those nutrients in those plants at that stage of maturity (with more quality than if they were left to become overly mature with less protein, etc.) which is better feed for the cattle,” he explains.

Some people ask Jed how many bales he puts up for the winter and he has no idea. “To me, it’s just grazing days, and how much it costs me to achieve those grazing days—at a time that I need them. In doing this I am simply trying to keep my costs as low as I can,” he says.

Fencing & Water Flexibility

Jed prefers electric wire, even for the permanent fences. The perimeter is two-wire electric fence with fiberglass posts. “All the cross-fences are just one wire electric. We also utilize a lot of polywire. To create the different pastures, we started out with a wagon wheel design. It’s not really a bad design but there are many things that I don’t like about it,” Jed says. Now Jed utilizes long lanes, instead. It’s easy to strip graze those by moving the temporary wire farther down the lane, and make the segments as large or small as needed. “I can give the cows just one acre or I can give them 100,” says Jed. “By moving one wire I can change the size of the next pasture very easily; there is a lot more flexibility. We’ve gone to that system and I love it. We are also starting to put a lot of the pipelines on top of the ground rather than burying all the water lines. “I rented a grazing system from one of the ranchers who taught me a lot, and he had learned from Wayne Berry. His system was all wagon wheel design, with buried pipeline and it is such a rigid system. I’m not going to say it’s all bad because you are still providing for rest and recovery, but you are so limited in what you can do with it.” Jed noted if the water is in the center of the wagon wheel, all those pie-shaped segments tend to be overgrazed/beaten out at that small end near the water at the center.

“That design was great for its time, but I would never recommend it now. With all that buried pipeline, there are now a lot of leaks to fix. The material that we can use now is much better than what that rancher used then, when he put in those old pipelines. Things have improved dramatically,” Jed says.

“My first few systems that I put in were pretty similar to his; I modeled them after his grazing system because that’s what I knew. Since then I’ve seen some negative things about it and started making some lanes instead. I really do like putting my pipelines on top of the ground for summer grazing. It’s good to have a buried pipeline to a more permanent tank for winter grazing (so it won’t freeze) but for the rest of the year you don’t need it. So now I bury the least amount of pipe that I can. With the lanes for grazing, this gives me the opportunity to capture my hay for winter if I need some hay, versus a pie-shaped pasture that isn’t as conducive for haying.

“If I am grazing rented ground, this also enables me to go pick up my fencing and water lines and tanks if I have to move to a different place. I keep my infrastructure costs as low as possible, and portable if possible. I move a portable water tank a lot. It’s just a 300-gallon Rubbermaid tank that I set underneath the electric fence and the cows have access to half the tank. One time I lost the water, and cattle can wreck things in a hurry if they run out of water. If they have a good supply of water, however, it works very well.”

For his electric fences, if at all possible he uses a good charger that runs on 110 volts. “I do have 110 power to almost every fence I’ve got, so I am lucky in that regard. I have two big Stafix Speedrite fencers. I use the big ones; they are 36 joule fencers. It’s important to have a good source of electricity. The worst thing to save money on is your fencer,” he says. Cattle can be readily trained to respect a hot wire if it is really hot, and they are very “honest” once they respect it and they know it works.

“I got a lot of ridicule when I went to electric fencing on my place, but I will never go back to traditional fences. I have never dealt with a good barbed-wire fence; all the old barbed-wire fences out here are from the dust bowl era—from the 1920s--so I’ve never experienced a good barbed-wire fence on any of the leased ground. I am almost thankful for that because otherwise I might have gone that route when putting in new fences. Electric fence by contrast works very well and it’s a lot cheaper.” To build a good barbed-wire fence takes a lot of wood posts or steel posts, which are expensive, and the wood posts don’t last a long time.

In places where there are old barbed-wire fences, when they get too bad Jed just takes them down instead of fixing them. “I just use a lot of the old steel posts that the barbed-wire hung on, and use those with insulators for my electric fence. I can even do that on my rented land; I can take that down and put up a one-wire hot wire that is quicker and cheaper than fixing the old fence. The barbed-wire is so old and brittle that you can’t splice it; the old wire just breaks,” says Jed.

Replacing those old fences with electric fence is cheaper than going to the land owner and saying he needs new fences. “This works well, as long as the owner is okay with it—because it costs the land owner $10,000 per mile to put in a new barbed-wire fence, and what will that do to my rent? It will just end up raising my rent.”

Direct Marketing

While Jed focuses on low input production, he is also working on increasing the amount of the herd he is able to direct market to increase his profit margin. “We have a grass fed beef company and direct market most of our cattle. At this point we don’t market all of them that way, but that is the goal. Our company is called Dakota Graz’d,” Jed says.

The cow herd is Angus and Hereford based, with a mix of black cattle, black baldies, red, and red baldies. “When I first started marketing grassfed beef I used a bull that was Galloway crossed with Angus. I bought that bull about 10 years ago from a guy who had crossed Galloway with some of Kit Pharo’s Angus genetics and was having good luck with that cross. The Galloway marbles so well, and the meat is very tender. They are good grass finishers by nature,” he says.

Now Jed uses straight Red Angus bulls on the crossbred cow herd. “These Red Angus bulls are really genetic-dense and linebred, and they work well on my mixed genetics; I am very happy with the results, so far. They are grass-type genetic bulls and Pharo-based from years ago.”

Jed has also learned a lot about cattle genetics from Steve Campbell and Gearld Fry, and their linear measurements to help assess and select the right type of cattle. “Gearld measured cattle at this Red Angus breeder’s place for about 18 years and they selected for animals that would be grass