Every cattleman and woman we've ever met wants to take care of their land and their cattle to the best of their ability. Effective land management saves money, retains water, produces more grass, and thus can increase stocking density. So to learn more about tips to consider for improving land management, ABB intern Lindsey Sawin and host Kasey Brown sat down with Hugh Aljoe, with the Noble Research Institute. Regenerative ranching isn’t necessarily new, but it’s certainly become a more popular topic, and as we learned, for good reason.
Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org.
Every cattleman and woman we've ever met wants to take care of their land and their cattle to the best of their ability. Effective land management saves money, retains water, produces more grass, and thus can increase stocking density. So to learn more about tips to consider for improving land management, ABB intern Lindsey Sawin and host Kasey Brown sat down with Hugh Aljoe, with the Noble Research Institute. Regenerative ranching isn’t necessarily new, but it’s certainly become a more popular topic, and as we learned, for good reason.
Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org.
Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work. We're so glad you're joining us today. I'm your host, Kasey Brown. Every cattleman and woman I have ever met want to take care of the land and their cattle to the best of their ability. Effective land management saves money, retains water, produces more grass, and thus can increase stocking density too. So to learn more about tips to consider for improving land management, our fantastic intern, Lindsey Sawin and I sat down with Hugh Aljoe with the Noble Research Institute. Regenerative ranching isn't necessarily new, but it's certainly become a more popular topic, and, as we learned, for good reason. Before we dig in, I do want to recommend, after you listen to this episode, of course, our sister podcast, The Angus Conversation. It's put on by the Angus Journal team and combines tailgate chatter with boardroom banter and mixes in some deep conversations with old friends. Angus at Work gives you the how to make Angus work for you, and The Angus Conversation digs into the why. So let's dig into regenerative ranching.
Hello, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about your background in the beef industry.
Hugh Aljoe:
I began my career as a ranch manager for a ranch in East Texas. We started at about 150 head of purebred Brahman cattle, grew it up to about 1500 head of breeding animals, both purebred and commercial. But our focus was trying to utilize high stock density grazing on these properties. And it was a perfect segue for me to move into position here at Noble Research Institute as a pasture and range position with my focus around our grazing management area. And over the years, then it's kind of evolved such that I've been a part of Noble, became a manager with some of the consulting teams, now I'm the director over the consulting teams as well as the ranches themselves.
Kasey Brown:
And so I take it... Did you grow up on a farm?
Hugh Aljoe:
I grew up on a little farm in West Texas, and it's in the middle of cotton country out around Roscoe. And I did not like farming, so I always tried to help out some of the guys that had cattle on the side. And so when I went to A&M, all I wanted to do was get into the ranching business. And then after receiving a master's, I had the opportunity to move out to an East Texas ranch and was there for 10 years before coming to Noble. And I've been at Noble for 26 years.
Kasey Brown:
Oh wow. So you're coming to Noble with plenty of practical experience. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Noble and how that practical experience helps inform your decisions that you make now.
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, at Noble, with the activities that we have there on our farms and ranches, what we want to be able to do is to provide information for producers themselves. So we're trying to track everything that we do. As we moved into this regenerative focus, we're able to track... Not only are we trying to track revenues, but also the cost of everything that we're doing. Not only just from the operational side, but also as we look at infrastructure changes, as we begin to put investments into these operations, what's the return on investment? So be able to try to test some things before the producers really have to. And fortunately, at Noble, we're able to go in there and attack things in a big way, where most producers are going to have to move forward into kind of a planned action such that they can take on what they can really afford to take on at any given time. But our benefit is then we can provide answers early on in the process for producers that we can tailor to the individuals on operations.
Kasey Brown:
You mentioned regenerative focus. Tell us a little bit more about what that is in a nutshell.
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, for the Noble Research Institute, regenerative really means rebuilding the soils. We want to be able to put our emphasis on soil health. And at Noble, what we've defined as our focus is regenerative ranching. And for us, that is the restoration of degraded grazing lands, using practices based on ecological principles. And what that really means is we're really trying to focus on soil health and pay more attention to what's going on below the soil, not just what's going on above the soil. Economics is always going to be important. The livestock are always going to be important. We're always going to take care of the land. We can always see what's going on out there visibly, but we don't always look and see what the changes are below the surface. And what we've learned over the last decade is that your true litmus test of whether you're really improving the soils or not is the soil itself.
So we've got to be able to look at the soil and see if our management practices are having the desired results. And it all gets back to are we focusing on the ecological principles that are there, the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the energy flow, as well as community dynamics? Is our management really having a benefit to those different cycles? And if we understand that, then we go back to what those soil health principles are and then address issues or the weak link within that ecosystem. So a ranch is just an ecosystem. It's just that we're trying to use the agriculture commodities in order to derive a profit.
Lindsey Sawin:
So the word regenerative sometime can be a little bit scary because it has a lot of science behind it. So tell us how you're helping producers maybe take that scientific step out of it and just put into practice what you guys are doing.
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, and to your point, regenerative can have different reactions. Some of them really like it and some people really don't. And you get to a certain segment of our agriculture community, they don't want to label, period. What we really want to do is take the fear off of a label. Regenerative is just trying to improve soil health. And if you ask people, or ranchers, what do they really want to achieve? Well, they want to leave the land better than they found it and they want to make a profit while they can. Well, that's what we're really trying to do, except our focus is on improving the soil. And everybody wants to improve the soil. Everybody wants to improve the land. So our focus is regenerative land stewardship.
And if they don't like that, then we're going to tailor our answer to them. It's land stewardship to improve soil health using grazing animals for lasting producer profitability. Who doesn't want that? If you're really into the ranching operations for profitability, you want all of that. So that's what our focus is. And back to the point that you're asking, how do we take kind of the science out of it and really get back to applying it? Well, we get down to what does it take to change the landscape? And we always know it takes rain to grow grass, but it takes grass to grow grass. And the more grass that we can manage at any given time, knowing that we're going to graze a portion of it...
But there's other organisms that we've got to feed as well, which we've ignored for a large part. We've got to feed the organisms that are going to be in the soil as well as the soil surface. So if we can take half or less and then rapidly lay the rest of it down to where you've got that mat of organic material at the soil surface, there's organisms that'll put it into the soil, and then all of a sudden you begin to build a biology. You build a biology, you build the organic matter. You begin to build the organic matter, you increase your water holding capacity. You increase your water holding capacity, you increase resilience. So that's what we're trying to draw toward, and everybody wants to be able to get through a drought a whole lot easier than what we're doing right now.
The people that have applied these practices for the last two or three decades are the ones that are coming into this drought going, “it's not affecting me that that much.” The people that went through the 2011 to 2012 drought, they're looking at it and saying, “okay, the adjustments that I made then, I know how to better manage for the future because I've gotten more water holding capacity in the soil. So the rainfall I do get, it's effective.” And you begin to talk this type of language to the producers. Everybody wants to be able to capture more rainfall. Everybody wants to be able to grow more grass.
You grow more grass, and over time you build up the capacity of the land, you have an opportunity to increase your care capacity. It builds upon itself, but you've got to get started. And where you want to start is on your best opportunity, which is always your best soils. Most people to think about I need to start on the marginal ones, the ones that are kind of not very good. No, start on the ones where you're going to have your biggest impact, and those are the ones that'll return your investment more quickly. And then the next step is then you move it out, radiate that out towards some of the things that are not as productive naturally.
Kasey Brown:
So how do you tell which are those soils that you need to work on first, the ones that are performing the best but need some help to make them even more efficient?
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, your soils are never as good as they could be. So inherently, if you're on an operation, you pretty well know what's your best soils, which ones tend to grow the most forage. Whether you're applying fertilizer on introduced pasture or whether it's a native pasture, you end up with the most production because, more or less, it's the best soils that are there. If you're not sure and you want to see, go to the Web Soil Survey. You can look on the map of your property, and it'll tell you the ratings in either AUMs for introduced pasture or in pounds of production on your native range, on your most productive soils. Which inherently, if you've been on your properties, which ones are the better ones. And then what you want to be able to do is start with infrastructure that makes sense, because ultimately we want to manage the grazing more effectively.
In order to do that, you may need water. Water and fencing are the two key infrastructure components in order to really begin to emphasize your grazing management. If you get strategic water, you get, I'm going to say, low-cost fencing... It's going to be costly, but you may not need a whole lot of infrastructure. And if it's temporary, it's even better. But if you get that fencing to where you can manage that grazing for a period of time when you've got forage... And that's the key, is what you want to be able to do is grow it up. Most people, that's in the spring. Take that window of opportunity when you have the surplus, take the best, lay down the rest, and then build some rest and recovery into your overall system. So that's where we really want to be able to start is with your best soils. You know where they're at. If you're going to put an investment, that's the first place you start.
Kasey Brown:
That's great. Talk to us a little bit about some of the big research projects that you're working on right now.
Hugh Aljoe:
One of the big research projects that we've got underway right now is with Michigan State and University of Wyoming as well as at Noble. At Noble, we have two different properties. One is introduced pasture site and one of them is a native range site, and what we're looking at, studying is what we call our metrics management and monitoring research. It's in conjunction with the Foundation for Food and Ag Research. That's part of the funding that went toward it. But we're really wanting to see is we go in and we begin these management practices and what we're looking at is how fast through these management practices can we detect changes within the soil health, the metrics that you would typically expect within the soil, going anywhere from the organic matter to increase in biology, looking at the different nutrients as they begin to increase, as well as the greenhouse gases.
We talk about carbon and the carbon flux. There's different types of carbon. You've got carbon that's constantly in flux. How does that change within different types of grazing? And so we're looking at what we call the adaptive grazing where we're using high stock densities where we have forage, and we're monitoring. Typically, at least in our sites, they're going to be somewhere in greater than 15,000 pounds of live weight of animal per acre at any given time. That's on our site. It'll be different at other sites. But then on what we call more of our prescriptive grazing, which would be more similar to what most producers would have on what I'd call a simple grazing rotation, something around 1,000 pounds of live weight per acre or less, so that we have this differential, and see if we can detect the changes that occur within the greenhouse gases under that type of management. And then, of course, everything else along with the soil is what will be monitored as well.
Kasey Brown:
How do you measure the amount of greenhouse gases between, you mentioned adaptive grazing and prescriptive, right?
Hugh Aljoe:
Yeah. Well, the prescrip... No, no. Keep in mind the adaptive and prescriptive are some terms that we're using for the project. To study the greenhouse gas piece of it, we have what we call flux towers. They're special units that I couldn't tell you exactly what and how it works, but it's constantly monitoring the atmosphere right there within what they call the veg of the tower. So within, for example, 30 yards out, within that diameter, they're constantly monitoring what's going on with the gas and with the animals as they come in and graze. Does it impact the grass? I mean, does it impact the carbon and the other gaseous components like methane with the animal as well as the land itself? So they're trying to monitor it over time. I can't tell you how that all works. It takes somebody a lot smarter than me.
Kasey Brown:
Does that play into carbon credits and how cattlemen can help find solutions?
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, and that's part of it, our interest. And it's not that we're here to say everyone needs to go out and investigate the carbon markets. We at Noble, we feel like it's an immature market right now. But before producers get too carried away within these marketing strategies, we want to be sure that the thing that they understand is what's really capable on the land itself. So we're doing this monitoring at this point in time, and at some point in the future we may have better recommendations. Right now, we just don't know enough to say what a producer should expect. Now, a producer that's interested in these carbon markets, if they need the money and it's right for their program, get with a good attorney, read the contracts, be sure that it's something that they fully... they're going to enter into with full knowledge. But what we really want to be able to do is to verify what's that science that needs to be, at least on his grazing lands, about how this carbon can accumulate and it can be tracked over time.
Kasey Brown:
I heard you speak a couple years ago at NCBA about intentional management and-
Hugh Aljoe:
Yes ma'am.
Kasey Brown:
... intentional grazing. Can you talk to us a little bit about how that plays into the research you're doing right now and how that helps soil health and your operation as a whole?
Hugh Aljoe:
Yes ma'am. As we are looking at intentional management, one of the things we want to be able to recommend to producers going forward is have a plan, whether it's with the land, with the forage production, the grazing management, the economics. You've got to understand what you're trying to achieve, otherwise you're just operating. What we want to do is be intentional about what the direction. If you want to make a profit, be intentional. Be able to factor that profitability in your margin before you ever start, and then begin to work backwards toward the system that's going to work for you. What we like about regenerative management is that we're trying to take out or help producers take out some of the cost that continually occur on an annual basis, because that's just what...
You have fertilizer, chemicals, and some of the things that we've come to just expect that we're going to have to pay out annually... How do we get more of that out of the system. That's not to say that we don't need it or won't use it sometime, but we want to be able to use less of it and increase our margins. Because too often, we try to correlate profitability with production, and it's not just production. It's about the profit margins. And if you've got big cost, we need to pull that out as best we can. And then knowing it may reduce our revenues, but typically what we find is that the margin increases pretty dramatically. And then if you're going to take that money that you're pulling out of the operating cost and reinvest it into overhead costs that will actually pay you money like water and fencing, that's a one-time cost.
And then it's depreciable, so you get a double benefit out of it, and then you don't have to pay it again. And you got a little maintenance on it, of course, but it's a whole lot less than all the heavy equipment that we tend to operate with currently. So you're just looking at ways to be more cost effective. So about being intentional, the grazing management, I see the biggest benefit is that during those periods of time when we know that we've got excess forage, how do we convert more of that into the soil to where we have that added benefit to the soil to build the biology? That's the part that's missing in the soils.
We spent most of my career knowing more about the physical and the chemical aspects than we ever knew about the biology. But the biology is what is the big difference between dirt and soil. You've got to have biology for it to be alive. And we've got to be able to feed those organisms in the soil in order to have any type of population to do to ourselves any good. And what that is, is the same thing to the cattle. It's just the component that the cattle typically don't prefer. So we're trying to do more of it during that period of time. And then, of course, in order to maintain your stands, you've got to have rest and recovery.
It's not about just having the animals there, but we also need to make sure that the plants has enough recovery after being grazed so it gets to full expression before it's grazed again. So it takes a little bit of time and management. You just can't let the cows do what they want to do because they're going to go back to the most choice forges that are out there, and it's usually the one they just grazed that just started growing again. We don't want to regraze if we can, until that plant has been able to fully express itself and gets to the point where on that full to synthetic scale, it's becoming too mature, so what we call... begin to die back. At that point, it's time for it to be grazed so it'll stimulate the growth of another leaf.
Lindsey Sawin:
We talked a little bit about drought earlier, but what are some grazing management practices that producers can do in the middle of the drought that they're going through?
Hugh Aljoe:
Okay. You begin to look at the drought, the first thing that you really need to know is what's your rainfall compared to where you are today? If you go back... And I use a table called the water year. That begins in October because that's when the recharge begins during the winter season, the cool season. And then when you get to the spring, how far have you deviated off of what you normally would expect? And if you'd have been tracking it this year, we were about 30% before we ever got to what I call that spring quarter. And then when you got to the spring quarter, at least where we are there in Oklahoma, we still didn't get above average rainfall until we got to May. And then May we were about average. But we're still 65% to 70% below where we should be.
Knowing that by the end of... Well, let's say by the middle of July, you're expecting about 75% of your total forage production to have accrued by then. So if you haven't accrued that much and you know how far you are off from your... what I call the variance from normal, say if it's 30 or 35 percentage points, then you need to be thinking about we need to destock. And to what extent? Well, you kind of have your timeline or your production line there in front of you. First off, you need to know how many reserve herd days you have in front of you.
And that's easy enough if you've got one or two herds and you go out there and say, “okay, this is how much pasture is going to last us, or how long it's going to last us.” And right now, we just did that assessment there at Noble, we've got about 80 days. I expect to be about 120, so that already tells me I'm about a third overstocked. So now, we're beginning to go through the mechanism of what do we need to destock first? But it all gets back to knowing what your forage production should be by the time you get to this point in the year, which should be the end of the second quarter. And then what's your variance from your rainfall? And that gives you some pretty good numbers to work with to begin to understand how much you might need to destock before that next rainfall event.
Lindsey Sawin:
Is there a way that producers can keep track of their forage capacity every single year?
Hugh Aljoe:
They can. There's different ways to doing it. The old scientific method is you go out there and you have these enclosures, grazing enclosures, and you clip and weigh how much of that's out there? Well, you and I both know that there's not anyone really going to do that. The best way to do it is to be able to measure your grazing days, herd days, what I call animal grazing days, and you put it onto a basis that you can measure consistently. So if you know that over the course of time that this one pasture that they're grazing in typically gives you X number, and then you are somewhat greater or less than, does it truly reflect the rainfall that you've had up to this point? So being able to track that by pasture, especially if you're doing some sort of rotational grazing, or over a period of time, what have you run over time, number of cattle that you've carried over time, and then how much residual do you have at the end of the season?
And if I'm monitoring my grass and giving some sort of estimate across all my pastures, yield by each pasture, you give the average for the pasture of what the total forage production would be. And if you've done very much forage assessments, you can do that really well. And if you don't, there are people at your extension office, your NRCS that can come out and help you do that. So if you can be able to get those estimates as you're going at what I call at the end of the growing season, then you count your grazing days, you get an ideal of your forage production. And then when you get around to the spring or the onset of spring, how much reserve do you have at the end of the winter? Because you'd like to have... At the end of winter as spring is accruing, you'd still like to have 30 days of grazing remaining, at least not at zero when spring begins.
One of the little things that I've used in the past is when people have asked me and says, “well, how do you know if you're overstocked or not?” And I said, well, the thing that I look for is based off of how many months you're planning on feeding hay or how many months that you expect the cattle to hustle... And typically when people say, I'm making the cows hustle, that means they've already eaten all the leaf out of it and they're going to make them eat whatever's left. Technically, they never should have to hustle. That part that they're trying to graze really ought to be kept there with the land itself. But for every month that their cattle have to either hustle or you're feeding more hay than you had planned or budgeted for, and it's assuming that your budget is cost-effective, but that you budgeted for, you're 8.3% overstocked at least.
Now, how do you come up with that 8.3%? You divide 12 into 100, it's 8.3. So if you're a month over, then you're... That's 8.3% of the year, that's 8.3% overstocked. So if you come in there and say, well, I tend to try to feed hay for three months, but last year I fed five months, well, okay, you're at least 16%, almost 17% overstocked. And I don't even have to show up to tell them that. If they make the cows hustle for an extra two months, they're about 16% overstocked. We already know that right up front. But being able to use that type of information so that you better gauge your stocking rate relative to your caring capacity is the first place you've got to start. If you get that right, then you can begin to have greater impact on the land itself.
Kasey Brown:
Wow, that's great. You've given us a lot of great practical tips. If cattlemen want to learn more, where are some resources they can go?
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, specifically, there's other entities that are out there that have been on this regenerative effort even longer than what Noble has. I mean, we've always helped people wherever they were. We've just only recently really began to focus on the regenerative side solely. Understanding AG has some really good resources. The Ranching for Profit is another entity that we really like because it marries the economic piece of it really well. The Holistic Management really good information on how to plan and begin to manage those land resources around that ecological focus.
And then the Noble Research Institute. We have a wonderful website where you can actually see some of the articles that we're writing. We've got a publication, an e-newsletter that you can sign up for called the Noble Rancher. We tried to push that out every week. We may begin to push some more information out more recently. Most of it centered around regenerative focus, but we also, during this period of time, there's some information coming out about drought, drought management, what are some of the tips that you need to be focused on. Back in the spring, we were already talking about getting ready. You just know how these cycles occur. You know how we're tracking based on the water year, lack of rainfall, that we should have already had contingency plans in place. We did. Others, they waited until now, and now they're asking about contingency plans. And it's hard to pull a trigger on the contingency plan when you don't have one written.
Kasey Brown:
Right. Yeah, those are best made way, way ahead of time.
Hugh Aljoe:
Yes.
Kasey Brown:
But that's a great way to wrap this up for us. But before we end, we all know the cattle business is really the people business, so we like to end on some good news.
Hugh Aljoe:
Yes.
Kasey Brown:
Would you mind sharing with us something good that's happened either personally, professionally, or both?
Hugh Aljoe:
Well, a little bit on some of the work that we've been doing there at Noble. We converted all 12,000, really close to 14,000, acres of ranches into this regenerative focus. Half of those are very much focused on introduced pastures, so heavily weighted on inputs. But over the last year and a half, we have saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $70,000 in fertilizer, and that's on about 7,000, acres and then another $50,000 on chemicals that normally we would've applied prior to being regenerative.
Kasey Brown:
Wow.
Hugh Aljoe:
And we did not destock.
Kasey Brown:
Oh, wow.
Hugh Aljoe:
Yeah, that's the exciting news about it, was that we didn't destock. And if you'd have asked me, I'd have sat there and said, we're probably got to destock, because I know that 50% of that stocking rate was based on applying nitrogen fertilizer, because I did it. I'm the one that said it. So you're looking at this and you've got these guys that are going in there and managing, of course, now we're going in there and we're managing moving those cattle every day or every other day. So we're building temporary fences, moving the cattle, but we're not having a weed spray, we're not putting out fertilizer, we're not doing a lot of the other pasture activities we've done in the past.
What are they doing? They're just moving cattle. Wouldn't you rather spend time with cattle? Our guys on the ranches will not go back. Even their own farms that they own themselves, they've moved completely toward the regenerative side, because one, it's a lot more enjoyable, it's saving a lot of input cost, and they're getting to spend a lot more time with the livestock. The land's improving simultaneously. We've been really ticking. Now, the drought's going to make us destock a little bit, but up to that point, we've been really impressed. It's not as big a lift as a lot of people would've thought. And if they want to come talk to people that are doing it, they're welcome to come see us.
Kasey Brown:
That is some good news. That is awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today, and I've really enjoyed our conversation. Listeners, if you want to find out more, check out our print publication, The Angus Beef Bulletin, or our digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. You can find ways to subscribe to both of those in the show notes. If you have any comments or questions, you can email us at abbeditorial@angus.org. And as always, we'd love if you'd share this with other profit-minded cattlemen. Thank you for listening. This has been Angus at Work.