Fat Cows, Fat Wallet! Podcast

Real Wealth Ranching has created different online courses to help livestock owners improve their land the fastest while they maximize their productivity; we concentrate on following nature to maintain our costs low and create real wealth in our properties.

The Total Grazing Academy offers these 4 online courses as they are much more effective when implemented together:

• the Total Grazing Program
• Adapted Genetics and Selection
• Optimal Birthing season
• Nutrition

In nature, implementing these 4 pillars together, the results are amazing. I'm sharing some of the case studies in this episode.

This is another myth most people believe which I want to explain and debunk.

The first thing is to remember that the Total Grazing Program is a program, not an isolated grazing event. It considers the whole year, multi-year, and every day of the year.

It doesn’t make sense to have your livestock consuming overmature grass when everything is green and growing right?

Most grazing programs that use selective grazing tell ranchers to try to keep up with the excess growth by only grazing the tops.

What will happen when you follow their advice?

This is a myth I hear and read about all the time: "If I graze too hard I will degrade my land”, which is one of the most common reasons people don’t move forward to implement the Total Grazing Program.

What type of grazing will produce more leaves in the regrowth?

A selective grazing where they leave the stems behind? Or total grazing where your livestock consume leaves and stems entirely?

In this episode, I will debunk this myth and show you how fast and high harvest efficiency grazing or nonselective grazing as close as possible is the best way to manage your pastures to achieve the highest profitability and the fastest improvement of your soils and pastures.

Is it really true that “Total Grazing doesn’t leave residual behind to protect the soil surface from heat or cold”?

Some think that the residue protects the soil from erosion caused by water or wind, others think that the residue protects the soil from the sun and high temperatures, and others think that the residue protects the soil from low temperatures.

Let’s remember what residue or residual is… it is what the cattle DID NOT want to graze… so what is it mainly?

So let me ask you a question: what is going to protect the soil better?

Sticks and stones or well-covered soil with strong fat roots?

What avoids erosion? 

Let's bust this myth in today’s episode. 

You see, when I’m out in the world and I’m speaking with other ranchers or farmers and they ask me what type of grazing I do, and I explain to them, the looks I get from them are very entertaining and show a lot of confusion.

Sometimes they just change the topic or they’ll say something like, “Oh that’s cool”. But all in all, I usually have to explain what I mean. And I thought, you know, I bet others of my Total Grazing students deal with the same thing. So why not share an episode to help all of us better explain what we do, this grazing program goes beyond an isolated grazing event.

It’s more advanced than that, it’s more detailed than that and it’s part of a bigger picture. So in today’s episode, I talk in detail about what exactly Total Grazing is and how it works within a grazed livestock business. And I’m going to give examples of ranchers practicing Total Grazing and so much more.

It is imperative to know the possibilities or outcomes you can achieve early in your journey when starting something new.

For this, you need to have a road map, and you want to see what others have achieved in a similar situation to you, where they have met similar challenges that you will encounter.

Let me tell you about how your life will be when you implement Real Wealth Ranching's four pillars.

I want to address one of our deepest fears when deciding on a grazing style and a grazing program.

I will go into overcoming the fear of overgrazing.

I remember that my grandfather made his fortune with cattle, buying cheap land and getting high stocking rates along with good daily gains on his cattle.

Why were we not getting the same results? Why was the land degraded and continued to degrade?

You see, overgrazing happens anytime a plant is grazed before full recovery which resulted in shortened roots and weak desirable grasses, more woody shrubs invaded, and the control of woody shrubs and replanting grass was taking all the fun out of the ranch.

The ranch was losing money due to the low stocking rate and the pasture maintenance costs which went up much faster than the price of our cattle.

It took me years to understand what was happening and now I would like to share it with you in this week's episode.

We can regenerate our land with the correct grazing of our livestock, where forage plants, along with our livestock grazing them, create soil, living soil that is high in humus or slow-cycling carbon content.

Livestock forages and soil form a symbiosis for the betterment of them all, but we need to include in that symbiosis our monetary or economic needs.

We have been working, me and my team, on creating a new and affordable membership program for people who really want to start regenerating their land with their livestock at a low cost.

This plan is designed for livestock owners of all types and livestock species, larger ranches, farms, small acreage, low numbers of livestock, or huge numbers of livestock.

Our goal is that you start changing your paradigm and visualize what is possible when you understand how your livestock can be efficient at converting your grass while improving your land at a very low cost.

In some cases, we need to educate or convince our parents or our partner on something that while new to them, is working beautifully around the world and just makes sense.

And still, even though it makes sense, does not mean your parents will wholly agree.

They may need time to understand, then to interiorize, then to see results, and finally to embrace anything new. It is in their DNA! 

Listen closely as this may change the way you think about convincing your parents or partners of something new.

I hope you had a happy Christmas and I wish you all a very good 2024, full of hope, blessings, health, and joy!

Let’s talk about goals, let’s talk about goals for this next year.

As the year draws to a close, many of us may reflect on the past year and start thinking about setting new goals for the upcoming year, 2024.

Here are some tips that may help you in setting your goals for 2024.

Fear of success - sounds strange, right? Who wouldn't want to be successful?

It turns out that fear of success is real and makes it very difficult to achieve our goals. 

Is your fear of success sabotaging your success on your farm? 

It has happened to me and it has happened to a high percentage of the people I deal with.

If we analyze why some people are more successful than others and without those persons trying too hard, it is because we all have something called fear of success.

Many times we cannot see it and we think that this business is very difficult or that the concepts are complex when in reality it may be a much simpler explanation, the fear of success.

Know how to recognize this and be aware of what can happen to us in this week's episode. 

In Real Wealth Ranching, our goal is to help you maximize your productivity while improving your land faster. Today, I want to talk to you about our mission:

What does it take to achieve real wealth?

We need to have: money, time, and health to be truly wealthy. Creating harmony in our lives is of utmost importance; harmony in our family, harmony in our work, harmony on our farm, and harmony between our livestock, our pastures, and our soils. 2023 is almost over and I think it is a good time to reflect on our lives and our farms. We must seek harmony in everything, nature always seeks harmony and we are part of that nature. Let's stop thinking about ourselves as detached from nature and seek to achieve harmony WITH nature.

Let's consider what it takes to achieve this harmony and thus create real wealth in our farms and our lives. 

Have you ever seen the high productivity nature achieved when left undisturbed?

We all know that our best soils were created under grasslands with herbivores grazing, right?

But how can you achieve that at a low cost?

What are the biological low-cost methods you need to implement to get better results without contradicting nature?

If we really want to improve our soils as nature intended, we need to understand how the best deep, fertile soils of the world were created, and when were they created.

Let us delve into what is limiting your land’s potential and why your actions or lack of them affect how fast your land improves and how much it produces.

We know that we can use our livestock, hooves, and grazing to improve our grasses and our soils by creating lush and leafy pastures in their regrowth, which by allowing them to grow to full recovery will create strong and deep roots.

But, we also need to be conscious of plant and soil succession. 

Plant and soil succession can be defined as an ecological process of change in a plant community that occurs over time in response to management.

Let's understand why this ecological process is important, how it can help us make the correct management decisions to improve our land and how we can prevent our land from going back to its formerly degraded condition.

Most people feed hay, even though the price of hay wildly increases in price in a drought.

Standing Hay is grass that is left to grow, ungrazed, for a long time so that it accumulates in your paddocks, to be used when needed.

Let me share with you in this episode the benefits of feeding your livestock through winter or the dry season on standing hay.

Farming without livestock becomes dependent on costly inputs very fast!

If we are serious about improving our land’s natural productivity we need to include livestock in our land, and livestock that have their grazing managed by us in the correct way. 

In this blog, I will detail the 3 rookie mistakes we all make when starting to implement a Grazing Program.

How do you make management decisions as if your livestock numbers were already as high as you plan on getting? 

I will share some valuable insights with you. In this podcast, I'll reveal three powerful strategies to reduce your workload while maintaining excellent results on your ranch or farm. 

Once we stop doing unnecessary tasks we can concentrate on where our efforts give us the best results.

Many times, we unknowingly dilute our efforts across an array of tasks, including those that, while important or enjoyable, don't substantially accelerate our progress.

We need to ensure our efforts are channeled where they matter the most. 

It is very important for our well-being and to have a happy life to identify the most important parts of any endeavor we might want to start. By identifying the activities and chores that give us the largest part of our results we should become efficient in doing them correctly.

I wanted to share a personal story with you, my personal journey on grazing. 

Since I was a 12-year-old kid, I have been fascinated by living things and God’s creation. My Father and my Grandfather had ranches with beef cows and for me, it was love at first sight: I wanted to be a livestock rancher so I went to college to become an Agronomy Engineer in 1984.

And you might think that at university you are going to get the best and latest knowledge on the subject you are studying right? The truth is that after those 4 years it took me to graduate. I didn't know that I didn’t know many things:)

If you're curious about what exactly grass stockpile is and how it can reshape your ranching practices, you are in for a treat. Come on over and let's take a deep dive into the world of grass stockpile! We will break down all the important details and check out the many things it can do for your land.