Episode 179: Rewilding Livestock Instincts for Soil Health with Bob Kinford

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations about all kinds of fun topics related to regeneration, regeneration of soil, of plants, of livestock, of our health, and of our relationships. Today I'm looking forward to perhaps a bit of an unusual or interesting conversation, an uncommon conversation for many of us. Um, there are— years ago I read this fascinating little book by Rupert Sheldrake titled Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. And mainstream science for many years referred to animals as being dumb animals. Oh, they have a smaller brain capacity than us, they don't have decision-making capability like us. Um, and yeah, they were just referred to as dumb animals. Well, You don't have to spend very much time with livestock or dogs or really any animals in a production agriculture setting to figure out that that is not true, that they are actually very capable of decision-making. They're very intuitive. They're very aware, probably as in the case of dogs who know when their owners are coming home from quite some distance. They're aware in ways that we are not. And so I've really been looking forward to having this conversation with Bob Kinford, who's a name that may be familiar to, to many of you. Um, Bob, thank you for joining me here today. Rather than offering an introduction and a background of your work, I'd love for you to describe that and tell us a little bit about your journey and the things that you've been working on.

Well, I started out— my dad was an electrician, and we lived out of town. All the neighbors around us are ranchers and farmers. And home life wasn't that good. And I wound up spending all my time on the, on the farms and ranches around the house. I mean, from the time 5 years old, I'd run off and go help somebody do something, or, or probably pretending like I'm helping somebody, and they tolerated me. But by the time I was 8 years old, I knew I wanted to be, you know, I was just going to be involved with livestock. That was just a done deal. And everything that I ever thought about doing was either, you know, because it was involved with livestock or I might make enough money to buy a ranch. And about 8 years old, I started asking people because everybody had sheep or goats or sheep and goats and cows. And so I started asking people, well, how come your sheep are over there? They're all grazing together. Your goats are all grazing together. And her cows scatter out. And the answer was always the same. Well, that's just what cows do. That's just what cows do. And it was something that just didn't sit right on me. And, and as such, I just— at that young of an age, I was starting to try to figure out different ways of handling livestock and observing them. By the time I was 11 or 12, there were people that I would not help just because of the way that they handled their livestock. Oh, along about, along about '79 or '80, I read an article on Allan Savory and his, his whole view on, on the grazing and recovery. All of that made sense. It just instantly made sense. The only thing that didn't make any sense was why do you need to have fences to do this? You should be able to do it without having to build fences and not having to be there all the time. And most of the places I've worked on have always been absentee owners. I mean, I've, I had times for, you know, back in the '80s, I could go to work for one guy for, for $750 a month and be in a bunkhouse, or I could go to work over here and have 500 cows to take care of by myself. For $300 a month, I take the $300 a month job. Uh, the— it's— and I'm— it's 70, almost 72. I'm still the same way. It's the— the animals are the more important part of the equation than the— than the money, which I need to start figuring out a way to change that a little bit so I can fix my gas lines. Um, but in the process of being able to work by myself and always riding colts, or, you know, just somebody sending me some real crappy, crappy horses that would break in two just at whatever time. I had to start, you know, I was experimenting because I had to, and I was— I'd start noticing things and put them back together, and eventually I got to where I could have 30-section pasture and, you know, I might have, have 800 animals on it and broken up between 6 or 8 water points. And I would have 6 or 8 herds going out there. Of course, you don't want to really tell anybody you're doing this because, you know, they think you're crazy. So it got up to in '90, 1990, 2002, I believe it was, I, uh, I went to work for Leachman Cattle Company out of Billings, and I was forced into going to a Bud Williams seminar. Now, it's— my relationship with, with Bud is kind of weird because I was forced to go to that school, and my first reaction when I saw Bud Williams, an advertisement for Bud Williams School, was Who the heck does this guy think he is? He's going to teach ranchers and cowboys that are always handling cattle how to handle cattle. But I also never made the connection as to why when I was working by myself, I could handle more cattle with less effort than when I had a bunch of people. And I sat through that class and, and it's like Everybody kept asking these questions, and I'm thinking, man, this is pretty obvious. So the last day of the school, I went ahead, instead of going to lunch, I sat down, talked with Bud, and I started telling him some of the things I'm doing, like what I call a, uh, you know, a fade turn, where if, if a cow turns to go running off, I'll turn with it, but instead of stopping parallel or chasing on the parallel, I'll take a step or two off to the side, a little bit wide, and it just shuts them down. You don't have to do anything else. It just shuts them down. They turn around and go back. So I'm talking to Bud about this, and he, uh, he told me, he says, well, you're on the right track. He says, I could tell by the questions you asked that you were ahead of what I'm teaching in the class. And I said, well, do you have any, any courses to where I can go and take and, and kind of fine-tune this? And he says, no, I don't. He says, in a classroom, he says, it's impossible to teach in these classes because it's too advanced. Which struck me as kind of odd at that time, and I thought on that for 20 years before I figured out that it wasn't that it's advanced, because no stockmanship is advanced. Every bit of it is, is just an interaction. And it's, it's, uh, you know, you might be more advanced at reading something, but it's all taken advantage of or working against their, their natural instincts. You know, you see all these videos on, on Facebook, these guys who got these wild cows and they come out and they got 5 cowboys and 20 cows, and boy, as soon as they— the cows are already running and they just break off into a dead run. And it's like you're training them to be that way, you know, because that's— if something's chasing you, you're going to run. And if every time you see something and it chases you, you're going to run, you're going to get away from it. And you can go out and. And instead of chasing them when they go to run, back off and then just kind of mess around a little bit and figure out where you think they're going to go. Pop up over there and they run again. And it's really funny because I've done this on, on animals where a crew of 4 guys tried for 5 days to get a bunch of slick yearlings in and They didn't do it all week. And I went out in the same pasture and I went out and I started messing around. They ran. I, the only loping I did was around the back of a hill and I came out the other side ahead of them and they turned around, went back and I loped back. And after 3 times of that, they, when I met them at the one end, they changed direction. Well, instead of chasing them, I rode off to to the, to the right. And there's something about this when, if you're going off to the right or to the left and you catch their eye, well, that, that animal, their basic instinct is to go around you. Well, when you're going out and at kind of an angle to get out there, and it's— and that was the straight angle was when I was just figuring this out, uh, they'll tend to go the other way.. And I did that 4 or 5 times, and by 1 o'clock I had him pinned. Now these other guys, they didn't appreciate the fact that I got him pinned. It made him mad. But the, the guy that was running that place, him and I went ahead and, you know, we branded him and I messed around with him in the pens, put him in a little trap, and the next day I drove him 3 miles and they actually drove better than, than, uh, than the cows on that ranch or either one of their sister units. And it makes people mad when you do that, you know. It's like, because you're arrogant. And it's— no, it's, it's— I've accidentally figured things out because I'm weird.

So at some point in the conversation, possibly it might have been before the recording was turned on, you said something to the effect of animal psychology and grazing management and pasture management is all, it's all the same thing. It's all connected. We can't have a conversation about one, uh, without including all of them.

Exactly. And it's kind of funny because everybody's, you know, I always called the polywire is recreational fencing. And these collars, I'm, my new name for the collars is beach bum fencing because they can sit down on the beach and they can adjust, you know, adjust their fences. And that can be useful. A couple of weeks ago, I was out in California, and, you know, the people are just starting out. They're wanting to have a horse refuge, but they're working with Roger Savery to, to build up the grass. So they're using cows, and they're not there. And the first set of cows they got are a little bit waspy. You know, they, they see you coming and, and they'd be running off. So I spent one day out there, no horses on the place yet, out there walking the hills, and I got them down to where I could stop them on foot, you know. But there's some sort of a relationship, and I'm still trying to kind of figure it out. Uh, good friends and clients in, in, uh, in Kansas, Josh and Gwen Hoy, they figured out that what I'm doing is creating murmurations in the cattle. And I had— I'd never, I'd never thought about that. But murmurations is like, you know, the, the flock of birds, large flocks of blackbirds. Yeah, exactly. Or fish. And they were watching a, a special on murmurations, and it, at one point it got down to where they were looking at a million wildebeest from satellite, and, and it was actual video. And they showed where the one in the front just turned a little bit and it just went right down the line. Everything starts turning. And, and Gwen said, she says, you know, when I'm writing— because when I teach, I cannot teach this like, like Bud did. You cannot teach this in a classroom because it's, it's too abstract to what we've learned all of our life. So I'll go out and I'll demonstrate, and then I'll have, I'll have you follow me and be on the offside to where you're not interfering with the cow, and follow me, see what I'm doing, and then I'll let you do it. And then, you know, and we just keep taking turns like that for 5 days. And there are some people that, that don't have a talent for reading animals, don't have a talent on the horse, but they're, they're trying and they don't quite get it. But then you get somebody else that's got a talent a little bit with both, and boy, by the second or third day, they're, they're playing around with it and they're figuring it out. But she says, you know, because one of the ways that I'll also turn cattle is I'll go down the side of the herd, and instead of trying to get out in front of them and turn them, I'll get about 50 head back and I'll just I'll put a bend in my horse's back to where instead of traveling straight forward, they're bent and traveling to the side. And I just start finding my zone where that, that zone is that's going to start affecting them. And then all of a sudden, 4 or 5 cows up in front of me will just start boom, boom, boom. And, and they'll— the end might be 50 cows up ahead of me, and they'll be turning way before I ever get there. And, and she says what happened— she says after seeing that, that she realized, I'll be riding along and I'll shift my back, and when I shift my back, my horse's back turns like that, and then the cows wind up doing the same thing.

So the cows are essentially turning away from you?

Well, they're— I'm doing the murmuration. I'm, I'm bending my horse like that to, to turn this way. And they just start doing it before I get there. So just for clarification for the people who are listening to audio only, so if you angle your back so that your face is facing towards the right, let's say, when, when I'm, when I'm on a horse and I want it, say I'm gonna go left, I'll drop my, I'll drop my left hip, and of course the horse starts to go away from it. Well, when you're dropping your left hip, you get a bind, a little bend in your spine. Well, and when you stop and think about it, that same thing happens to the horse. And then as you're coming up and we've got this saying in the business, you gotta get their eye, which I, every time I hear that, I wanna slap somebody because as long as you're not in the blind spot, they can see you. Exactly. If they're not doing what you want them to do, your body position isn't correct for what you want them to do. So Gwen was saying, okay, she says you're, you're get that bend in your back and then your horse gets that bend in the back. And of course then I wind up kind of moving the hip out a little bit to where it gives the illusion that I'm turning that way. I'm still going in a straight line, but it gives the illusion to the cow that I'm turning that way. And they start reacting to it and turn.

Creating murmurations. I love that. That's a beautiful image.

It— and it is fun. It is fun. I had a— I started doing where part of what we have to do is, is just try to get the cattle all go into water at about the same time. Because if you're going to have a herd they've got to be going into water at the same time, and they need to be, uh, ruminating at the same time. So, you know, we get them in there and then we're, we're kind of sitting on them, and you'll have little bunches of cows sitting around, and they'll start getting up, and you'll have two cow— two, two groups of cows about anywhere from 5, 10, 15 head, and they're maybe 20 feet apart, and they'll start grazing off in opposite directions. And you can ride through them. I can just go to long trot right through them and angle my horse just right where they will turn in opposite directions and come together and head back towards the herd. So it's, I mean, it's, it's things that, that I realize, and I have to realize that from the perspective of somebody who's only done conventional livestock handling or Bud Williams, where it's constantly pressure and release, that this is something that's, that's just abstract, trying to, trying to wrap your head around it. You can't wrap your head around it until you see it, and then you really can't get your head wrapped around until you start doing it. And then when you start doing it, it just— after riding consciously for a while, then you can go ahead and, and just start doing it in the subconscious, which is where, where our minds usually are when we're doing things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So coming back to your comment about stockmanship and pasture management, grazing management, and, and moving livestock all being the same thing, all being intertwined, What does that look like for you today when you are managing herds of livestock from, uh, and with, with your approach? How do you, how are you thinking about these pieces and their interactions?

Well, it's, it's different. Everybody's looking for a silver bullet. And okay, you use fences and what are you doing? You're putting them down there. Okay, it's going to take one day to eat this or or it's going to take 4 hours and then we're going to have to move them every 4 hours. That isn't the way the wild herds do it. That isn't the way that animals graze. They don't stay in one little area for, for hours or a day. They, they, they're eating and moving as they go. And if they hit, hit an area where maybe there's nothing in that area they really want to eat that day, they'll line out and they'll bump. All of a sudden that the lead cow will stop. And, and it's interesting to watch. And I'm, I'm really— this is like the dog knowing when the owner's coming home. So I've done this even in pivots where they'll be eating and they'll be moving along a little bit. And then all of a sudden that lead cow will move up, just start walking out. Everything will line out, go with it, and then it stops, puts its head down, starts eating. Everything stops in back of it, and it is a perfect fit from where that cow stopped grazing. How do they know where that it all fits? You know, and I thought at first, I thought, man, I'm just— this is crazy. I'm saying things, I'm hallucinating. And when I talk about this, a lot of people say the same, you know, think the same thing. Well, he's just crazy. And, and it's— I always wondered why, you know, why it isn't obvious to everybody else in this. And, and I— Temple Grandin has been following my work. She's— she mentioned me a couple of times in her livestock care book, and I had the opportunity to go down and meet her. So we're there talking and she just stops just mid-sentence. Just, did you know you're highly ADHD and you're on the spectrum? So in other words, I'm like the, the banjo player in Deliverance, only it's cows that set me off instead of music. So because she says the ADHD makes you see patterns and things that other people are missing. And then the autistic side makes you go in there and investigate it, you know, ask questions about it. And I've been doing that my whole life. So every place is different, but you go in there and, and get these herd— these herds rebooted. And put them in a pasture and they will migrate around the whole pasture. Now, one of the things— and this is another thing that it's, you know, going back to the intelligence of animals and what they know— everything we think we know about cows from grazing, from grazing traditionally or grazing with, with the fences is actually, um, it's only correct in that context. When those cows get rebooted and they're acting like cows, their grazing habits change tremendously.

I was just about to begin asking you about that. How do they change?

Well, in more ways probably than you can count. One of the things that they do is like if it's a growing season, they'll just start taking that top third. And, you know, you're getting some, you know, in your context is constantly changing. You don't have the same context all day long, let alone, you know, it's totally, totally identical context between one ranch or one pasture and another. When, when the grasses come, you've got, especially if we have a diverse pasture, you've got some grasses coming on today, some forbs coming on 3 or 4 days from now, and then you have, uh, some different grasses coming up 3 or 4 weeks from now. So it's not like you're, you know, you talk about, you know, grazing at the correct time. Well, if you're in a if you're in a situation where you're planning your forage in that, yeah, you can, you can kind of time it that way, especially if you're in a monocrop situation. But when you actually get into diversity, everything's coming up at different times. And one of the things that if, you know, if you watch herds of elk or herds of antelope, there's times they're all spread out and they'll be going along.. And then all of a sudden they'll just come in together real tight and they'll stay real tight for a little bit and then they go back out. And what they're doing, they're being highly selective for nutrition. And we have totally blown that out of our cattle because, you know, we're not— we don't— we've blown that herd instinct out of them from our livestock. Or stockmanship point. So once you get that back, they completely change the grazing habits. And one of the things that I, I'd really like to, to figure out why, when I go into a place and I start doing a school, on the third day, and I mean it's like clockwork, on the third day, they start eating things that they've ignored. They'll start eating things that people say, well, they never eat that. Uh, spotted knapweed, or yeah, spotted knapweed, leafy spurge, um, ironweed. And I hear people say, oh, I had one guy that, that he was trying to tell me that he'd pay me, and, and if I was really an evil greedy son of a gun, I would have taken him up on it because he told me he'd pay me $1,000 a head for every cow that I could get to eat ragweed. And you can bring your own cows. Well, I'm just cow— I work for everybody else. I don't have my own cows. I said, well, I'll go down and I'll do it on yours, and on the third day they'll be eating it. And he just got all hooked up. And he, you know, if I would have— if I would have taken him up on that, I would have owned his cowherd. You know, because that was back when prices were down a little bit. But it— there's something in that to where it, it changes where they bite on the plant and it changes their timing they're going through. Uh, Ricky Krembers up in, in Wyoming, actually, and, and this is blowing— this is you can only graze these rangelands once. You got to let them rest for a year or 18 months. And we were talking about this deal of the different plants coming up at the different times, the grazing for nutrition. And yeah, you might have 10,000 head of bison go through an area and they're not going to be back for a year or two. But you know what? Maybe 6 weeks later, you had 10,000 elk go through the same spot at a little bit different angle. And then, you know, you might have 10,000 antelope or 1,000 deer or whatever. These herds were constantly crisscrossing and they were selecting for what was the best nutrition for the time that they were crossing.

Exactly.

So by using this, she's actually set up where she's grazing half the ranch. She gives one half the ranch off during the growing season. The other half she's grazing. Well, she has, ah, gotten it down to where she's almost tripled the size of her cow herd. Plus she— what's that? Sounds impressive enough, but She brings in cows of people that, that they run out of grass every year. So she brings in 700 cows on top of that for 3 or 4 months in the winter. But in order to, to do that, she's going across that other half of the ranch 3 and sometimes 4 times during the year and still stockpiling. Because those cows are eating something different every time they go through.

All right, so let's, let's talk about this. We've, we've been having, uh, somewhat theoretical conversation up to this point, um, and I, I love this conversation, Bob, but give us, um, paint us a picture in our imagination as well as you're able to. If you, if you integrate this, uh, type of cow movement that you are describing, where you have essentially these murmurations of livestock moving across the landscape without fencing, only picking what is most nutritious at a certain point in time. What does, what does that look like practically? What is the minimum herd size that is needed to make that work?

And that's what's really cool. I had a guy in Mississippi, one of me, wanted to try it back there. He had 5 cows and 10 ewes. And I said, boy, this is going to be hard to try to do a school on that smaller number. And so he had a friend of his that had 180 head and then another guy that had another 150, 200 head, and then one of his neighbors. So I was going to rather than try to actually go through the reboot process, I told him what we could do. We go around to these different places and work with each one of these herds, you know, we'll work with yours in the morning, we'll go somebody else's, and then the next day we'll go someplace else, or we can go back and forth. And so it's like the one day we actually worked with 3 different, you know, 2 of the other herds on top of his. And when we got there, or when I got there, course I do have all my personalities. Uh, we, you know, I get there and we're gonna move these cows, and I literally had to run into them to get them and push them to get them to move. They were that dead. Whenever he needed to move him, he'd go out there with a bucket of feed and he'd move them around. Well, I started, you know, just kind of pushing them and moving them and And it wound up being a really fun week because we're going between the other ones and he had a bunch of chickens running around and he— and I'm trying to explain to him, I said, all of these, anything that's, that's eating— and this is something that, that I figured out too, is that we used to, you know, the cow, the sheep and goats used to graze together. Cows scatter out. Now a lot of places you go the sheep and goats are scattered out too.

Yeah.

And, and it's because we used to handle sheep and goats one way, then we handled cows another, then we just started handling everything like cows. So he's got this flock of chickens over there. And I said, you know, I said, you, any animal that, that is a grazer or a browser, they've all got these same instincts. So I started herding his chickens around. And I've— it works with elk, it works with deer, antelope, kangaroos. I even, I even played around with an emu when I was in Australia. All of this stuff works on the same, but, but it's the opposite of what our minds are, is because we're going on a predator, we've got to put the pressure on like, we're going to get you. And then they move off and then we get around it because we're going to stop you. And if you start using their, their instincts for, okay, all I have to do if I'm wanting to stop a herd is ride up and just start kind of, kind of keep a straight line and drift off a little bit. And they'll— those ones in the front, front Well, actually, you can, you can— that's what I usually do because I like keeping my horses limber. If your horse doesn't, doesn't have any lateral movement, or if you're on foot, you can just turn around and walk off at about a 45-degree angle, and those cows will stop. They'll stop and look at you. You're not having to go up there and get the eye or get in front of them to block them. So we're using all this Predator stuff on the pressure and release. Where, uh, and, and Josh Hoy coined it. He says anytime that you're doing pressure and release, he says you're doing reactive. You know, oh well, they're doing this, so I've got to go over and do this. And what, what we're doing is proactive, and you see something start to develop So you just kind of do what you need to do to keep it from developing, if that makes any sense. And that's kind of hard because we have a hard time popping into this paradigm because we're taught from as soon as we start working cows, this is where you're supposed to do it. And what happens is We get that so set in our minds that we can't see that there's something else. It doesn't— it just doesn't sound right.

Yeah, so Bob, let me, let me tell you what I'm hearing from you, what I'm understanding, and then you, you correct or you add the things that I'm missing, of which I'm sure there are many. So what I'm hearing you describe is that you move cattle across a landscape by creating murmurations, by essentially being proactive in guiding cattle with intention to the direction that you want them to go in. And that from a grazing management perspective, this looks like the cattle are just— they're making multiple passes across a field in a season, uh, and they are at each pass through, they are taking through what is at optimal nutrition at that moment and leaving the rest. And, uh, you are bringing them to— I remember you saying you're bringing them to water at a certain time of the day, a consistent time of day. You're, you're having them all ruminated at the consistent time of day. And that, that combination of movement and pattern gives you increased forage productivity and increased yield. And also I would expect gives you much calmer cattle as well. So that's, that's what I've gathered from you so far.

It, it does. The cattle, Chris Jorgensen, he was working for, for Maschdow when, when I worked with him the first time. And he told me later on that winter, he goes, you know, he said, my cattle have always been gentle. I always get 'em gentled down and they handle good. And I thought that, that they were pretty stress-free. But he says, I never knew what stress-free cattle truly looked like until, until I started doing this. And, and that's something else too that we've gotta— we don't have to, but it probably beneficial to. The number one, you know, everybody's saying, oh look, my cows, they're, they're fine. They're out there. They got their heads down. They're eating. They're there's no— they don't have any stress. Well, the number one comment from people who've had a friend or family member commit suicide is they never had a clue. So if you don't have a clue that a close friend or a family member is stressed out enough to kill himself, how can you look— how can you say that you can look at a bunch of cows and say they're not stressed? Because it's a different, you know, it's the— they will— I mean, when they— when you go and you've got your cattle and they're scattered out and, and they go to bed down to ruminate, and you say you got a group of 10 and they're laying down together, and they will lay down in exactly the same place every day. Well, when you get these animals rebooted, they don't like laying down on their same manure every day, and they will go to a different spot, and it'll be in the same area but a different spot. Um, Fernando Falamir, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's the, the grazing, uh, consultant for Understanding Ag. He was, uh, He went to the first school I did in Mexico for Alejandro Carrillo's, and his cows would graze. And then when they bed down at night, you know, they've got a lot of brush down there. So instead of being in the brush or bed down on the grass, they would go up just past the edge of the grass and bed down on bare ground. Well, they get up and, you know, they've got, they've got cow pies and urine spots 3 foot apart. Well, that mycorrhizal fungi can travel 12, you know, or 6, 6 to 9 feet. So you're looking at, you've got a, you just created a big web of fertility. Well, the next night they come up there and they don't lay down in that same spot. They lay down right next to it. And he had— and like a lot of the country does in northern Mexico and all across the Southwest, there's volunteer Bermuda all over West Texas. And but it's never very thick or very— he has thousands of acres that he has created. That's, you know, it's diverse, but it's predominantly Bermuda because those cows would lay down like that.. And then as soon as it gets moisture, it's shooting out rhizomes and runners up, boom. And it, and it covers it. And that is something that, you know, when you're doing your fences, you're not getting that with the fences. You're not getting that when you're using the, the, the Beach Bum fencing. You're not getting it then. There's all of these things that the cows will do naturally on their own. Don't do it when you're keeping them, you know, from, from just naturally doing what they're doing. You know, you're forcing them into that. And if you watch a lot of videos where people are making pasture moves, and I mean, they go through that, they're all at the gate and they're bawling. So if they're at the gate and they're bawling, or they're just standing there at the gate, if that's waiting for you to get there They're stressed out because they're wanting to get fresh feed. And then when they turn out, what happens is, you know, if they've got them like in a 5-acre or 2-acre, whatever size, you know, small deal, and they've got 500 cows, those cows fan out and bounce off the fences and then come back. That isn't relaxed behavior. And it's, and it's not creating, you know, if they're stressed, they're not performing as well.

What degree of human presence is required to get cattle to behave in this way and maintain their behavior?

You know, there again, you gotta go on context because, you know, you get a, a area of rolling hills or, or flat ground,. And I actually had a little group of cows going for this hunting ranch that had like 50 cows, and but they were on like 30 sections. I went to Australia for 3 months, came back, and they were still together. Pedro Calderón, he's kind of my, my protégé. He's managing the bison herd for American Prairie, and he's seen the same thing. That up to 3 months and they'll still be together. But if a person goes out there and starts handling them conventionally, they'll break up real fast too. Or if you just, you know, like that place, they were putting out deer feed and they get down to the bottom of the load and they get all the, you know, all the crumbs, all the fines, and they would go out there and they had some feeders set up and they would go out there and they would honk horns. I could tell every time they did that just because of the fact when I got there, those cattle would be scattered out just from the stress of that. And I go out and I'd ride on once, and next week they'd be, be back together because it was just a one-time event and it's easy to put back together. But this got me to thinking on—

let me just clarify something you just said. You said you would ride on them once so you could recreate their original pattern of behavior, which is a single day of presence.

Yeah, and it's not, it's not like a single day of going all day, right? Because what, what you do when you, you put them back together, you'll pick them up, put them together, and, and take them someplace, and then just slow down and let them start grazing together, and then you ride off. You don't— the thing about this is you're making it to where it's their choice to be together. You know, when they did the roe deer project, uh, they— and Alder Spring Ranch is doing the same thing where they've got the herders, and, and they, they said that they, they tried doing what I do and they couldn't get it done. And, and it's like they're taking all the cattle down like at 8 o'clock in the morning where they want the cattle to be at water. At 10 o'clock they gotta go out. Well, the natural cycle is they will, depending on the, the amount of feed and how long it takes them to get filled up, they'll graze for 4 hours and then they'll ruminate for 4 hours and then they go back out. So when you're, when you're forcing that issue, they can't relax enough to, to come together as a herd. Um, and I, I started doing something was the Circle Ranch down here. Chris Gill had it. They were big into the holistic management. And what I started doing is we had a set of heifers from King Ranch, and rather than, than going out and, and calling the cattle in, I asked the foreman if he would start going out and, um, putting the cake down, you know, at a predetermined deal. And I would just go out and I would bring the herd to them. They never learned that that feed truck was there. And what I did is I had them— you could do one of two things: either start and make spiral out, and, or take and make equal lines of, you know, 3 or 4 lines of the equal length And when you bring the cattle into that, they just fan out and put their heads down and they start eating. As versus with the feed truck, boy, they're all hyped up and they're running up to the truck. Then they're fighting up to around the truck while you're waiting for everything to get in before you start putting out the feed. And that adds a half a pound a day to the gain on those heifers. Wow. You know, and people go, well, that, that just seems like that's a lot of work. But the thing you have to realize is these cattle handle so easily that you can put them out over there a half mile away and move your truck and then just go trotting over to where you're, you know, because you're going to have a good idea where those cattle are when you're taking them a couple times a week. You ride out there and you, you ride against them. This is the other thing, we don't push them. We ride up to them at an angle that asks them to go by us. They go by us. You just kind of ride along with them. And you don't even have to be able to see that feed. You can tell when that first cow hits the feed after the second or third time you feed them, because it's just like an electric shock. The one clear at the back knows that they're there. They all line out, run, and buck and play. Bump, put your heads down, go to eat.

Bob, the one question that comes to mind, you mentioned that you've had a class in Missouri and you have this rich experience in so many different—

What?

Oh, Mississippi. Rich experience in different ecosystems and environments. The one question that I have, many of the people that where I live here in Ohio, we're in a high rainfall environment, 40, 50 inches of rainfall a year. And forage can go, particularly in the fall, if we have an open wet fall, forage can go from decent quality to nutrition, nutritional value to mulch in a matter of sometimes a couple of weeks with rainfall and moisture and everything else. And also then in the season, you have, you have all of these different forbs and plants coming to nutritional optimums quite rapidly. I would expect comparatively rapidly compared to drier environments. Um, how, how do we adapt to that context?

That you're not going to really be able to get around that unless you could possibly get more cattle in. But if you, if you get the right type of supplement, you know, high-carb supplement, where they can digest that, then you can get out your grazing season longer. I mean, they had the bison were clear back to Ohio and they were in Pennsylvania.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure that, you know, elk were clear to the East Coast. Yeah. So If all of these animals could survive in that, then why are we having to feed so many supplements and stuff? And, and part of this, part of this is because we want to— we're, we're calving out at the wrong time of year because, you know, we got to be able to go out there and make hay, you know, because there is a natural— there's a natural way that they're weight goes, you know, they'll go through the winter and they're gonna lose weight. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna lose some weight during the winter. Then, you know, you get that spring flush coming on and they gain it back pretty, pretty rapidly. Then they give birth and they raise that animal and wean it, right? You know, that nutrition's going down and they just keep going through that cycle. And we have this deal where we think that we need to keep them, you know, at, at peak optimum nutrition all year long. And, I had a guy I worked with in Montana. He wound up going to the Rick's Ranch, and he said that when they changed their calving date and, and quit feeding, that it dropped their overall cost by 50%.

And how did it impact profitability?

Uh, he said that they calved later, but they weaned on the same day, and it only made 10 pounds a head difference. I can take— you can take a 10-pound drop in that if you can, if you can take out half of your 50% cost reduction.

My goodness.

You know, and, and I worked for Leachman Cattle Company for, well, from about '91 to '95 or '92 to '95, right in there someplace. But people talk about the registered cattle, you know, they, they, they put 'em on so many crutches. Now he, he did, of course, he put all of his, his ones going for the sale were heifers and bulls went in the feedlot. But his cows, he ran them tough, as tough as any commercial operator I've seen. He, he put them on, on, uh, he had them on wheat stalks after they weaned, and then they started, uh, you know, they, they'd go ahead and, and bring in the heavies into the, the calving springers into the calving pasture. That calving pasture was just native grass. And they would put up on these ridges, they'd make windbreaks out of 6 straw bales, just stack 'em up too high, and they would scatter some protein blocks around 'em. And when the storms came in and they couldn't get to the cattle, the cattle just got up around those, uh, those hay, those straw bales, and they ate straw and protein block. And that's how they made it through the winter on registered outfit. So those were some, you know, in reality, those were some pretty good doing cows for being run the way they were as a registered outfit.

Something you said earlier really stuck with me, and that was the phrase that— this is my paraphrasing— but essentially having a predator's mindset versus I'll use the phrase a shepherd's mindset of being a collaborator with the herd instead of— and shepherd can also have different meanings, but, um, being a collaborator with or a guide rather than having— than engaging in that predatorial way. And kind of the subconscious place that we come from within, you know, it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of Otto Scharmer popularized it, but it was a business leader named Bill O'Brien who first put the quote together. He said the, the outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with the skills or the ability of the intervener. It has everything to do with the place within from which the intervener comes. And of course, he was talking about human interventions or in human organizations when we try to get people to change their minds or go in a different direction. Um, and there is a degree of what you're describing that is very similar. It's the place that we come from within. And so within that context, I'd love to get your perspective, or even just more broadly, in any way you want to answer the question, what are the— what are the common— I don't know if mistakes is the right word, but the common stumbling blocks that you see people encounter that they have a difficult time getting past?

Okay, that goes back to, to basic human psychology. How we learn. And I mean, life is basically one long indoctrination process from the time we're born. I mean, think about it. You're, you're told what you got to think about religion. You're told what you got to think about treating— how you treat other people, how you treat animals. You know, you're— when it gets into, into ranching and stockmanship You're told what you need to do to these animals to get them to do what you want them to do. So you've got all of this is buried in your mind. So somebody comes along, says, you know, there's a different way that you can do this, and you haven't seen anything close to that. They're going to look at you and say you're crazy. You know, we've been taught all the way through life and even going into end of school, you go to college. And, and it's, uh, instead of going to college, I bought all the textbooks and I read them. And that way, you know, if you go to— if you go to school and you learn this is how you have to do it, okay, you're not allowed to think that doesn't sound right, that's wrong, because if you do that, you don't get a good enough grade to get that piece of paper that says I'm smart and went to college.

I have to tell you, the way you brought that up, I have to tell you about an experience that I had that really kind of put me over the edge in some regards to modern education. Um, I, I only have about 8th grade formal education, and like you, I got a lot of books. I had access to a really great library, and what really put me over the edge is I bought or borrowed a I forget, but it was, it was a senior-level physics textbook that was used to teach physics at the college level. And I worked my way through that book very laboriously. It was hard work. I had to study and read, and I spent a lot of time with it. And I got to the last page, and the last page says something to the effect— I'm paraphrasing it a bit— but something to the effect of We now understand that everything we thought to be true about physics, we now understand is false, and that everything you've just learned in this book is incorrect, but we don't know any other way of teaching it, so we're still teaching you the incorrect way. That, that book left a dent in the drywall in my bedroom.

Well, it's—

at least they were honest about it.

Okay, my— I had experience like that in high school. My— the first chapter of our biology book, you know, it's talking about grazing animals and browsing animals, and, you know, deer and elk, they prefer brushes and twigs, where cows prefer grasses and legumes. And it's like, If that were true, how can we see all these deer down in people's alfalfa fields? Exactly. Why do you see cows quit chasing grass and go chasing those pine nuts and acorns? You know, and we get into this discussion and, and wound up taking the whole class and I wound up— I got a D. Then we had general science and the teacher goes through and this was in the— mind you, I graduated. This was like '69. Or '70, and before they found out about quarks and particles. But they teach us macrophysics and infinity, it goes on forever. And then they go into the microphysics and they go, okay, this is proton, neutron, electron, and that's as small as things that there are. My brain doesn't work that way, you know. No, everything has parts. What's the parts of those? And we get into— I'm not— again, I take a whole dang class and get a D because It's, it's— I couldn't see that. Well, oh, in my 20s, I, I stumbled onto a book called The Tao of Physics. Yeah. And they're talking about the quarks and the particles and, and all of, all this stuff. But the odd thing about that book is the way it's written, and it is a hard read, but it's astrophysicists that are looking at things through, through electron microscopes and relating what they're seeing and, and the descriptions these, these scientists are given about what they're seeing with Confucius and all these different philosophers, that their descriptions of things thousands of years ago are just what they're seeing in this, that they spent, you know, billions, billions of dollars trying to figure this out. And here's this old guy sitting up on the mountaintop 2,000, 3,000 years ago, already had it figured out. We just don't know how it goes, and I don't think we ever will figure out exactly how it goes. But knowing that all these, you know, Roger Savory and Alan Savory, they talk about holes. Well, you've got the holes, but there's holes within the holes within the holes. So, you know, we— and I don't know if how many people are actually willing and able to, to look at it for— you're seeing what you're doing with your horses affecting these cows in this way, that's affecting this grass in this way, which in turn affects the soil. And the soil has all of its components that were— it's, it's all It's all interconnected. And if we have these cows where they're going through and keeping that connection right, then we build grass. We don't just build grass, we're building diversity of life on top of the ground and under the ground. If we do the opposite and we don't let them function the way they should, well, then it goes the opposite way. But we don't need all of these fences and stuff. To get that done.

Yeah, so Bob, we went down this interesting, um, rabbit trail, if you will. I interrupted you at one point earlier. I was— I started asking you about, um, common mistakes or missteps that people might make and the place—

that's— see, that's all related because we get used to doing this that way and What they do is they go, oh, I got this, and they go to do it. Well, we're doing things and we can be thinking we're doing one thing and we're not even close. Uh, you can be doing something that's really a good thing and not even know you're doing it, or you don't have any idea of how you're doing it. Oh, I had a guy that had me riding this horse of his that was a bronc. It'd been fucking bucked his trainer off for 90 days. He got on it once and bucked him off, and his wife wouldn't let him ride it. So I go over to his place and I'm riding. He comes in for lunch and he goes, how are you two-tracking that horse? Well, when you're two-tracking a horse, you've got— got their shoulder will be set one way and you're leaving two sets of tracks going down, down to the arena. And I was doing that around the corners. And he goes, well, how are you two-tracking? How'd you get that horse to two-track so fast? And I go, what do you mean? He goes, well, two-tracking, you were just doing it. What do you mean you don't know? I said, honestly, I don't. And we got in a little bit of an argument there. And then finally he described it, and oh, like this. And I took him to the left, I took him to the right, and he goes, yeah, how do you do that? I honestly didn't have a clue. We all do that without realizing it. And so when you're trying to learn something new, you've got to consciously— you've got to really consciously do it and, and go back and review what you're doing. You know, it's— I like getting on places where we're okay. Instead of one guy going out to move the cows, like, you can still send out two guys to do it and But one guy just sit there and watch the other guy, and when things start going wrong, the guy watching him can tell what he's doing wrong. You got to be able to take that critique back and forth because we don't really— and that's the biggest mistake we make. And it's— I don't know if it's a mistake or just human nature that we're doing things that we don't really realize how we're doing it.

I've got a, a slightly different question. You started— we started this conversation, you spoke about observing sheep being bunched up and goats being bunched up, but the livestock being scattered all over the place. And now how in some management contexts, all three of them are scattered. There have been a number of— not many, but there have been some operations that we've worked on that had all three groups of sheep, goats, and livestock all merged and managing them as one herd with fencing, of course. What does that look like in this style of managing?

Okay. Well, I had llamas or llamas and alpacas going with cows for a little while on the circle. Last summer I did kind of an experiment because rather than, than sitting down, I'm realizing that these guys gotta get more approaches. Well, they had their heifers, then they had some pairs, And then they had a pasture that had hair sheep, wool sheep, and goats. So we go out in the morning, we all we do is we just go out and take those heifers, pick them up and get them to where they were grazing together. Then we jump over and we do the cows, and then we go over and work on the goats and the small ruminants. Now, the first time we went into the small ruminants, they had them on about half— oh, I don't know, it was close to half a section. And they were scattered. They were literally scattered out across that whole, whole pasture. Guard dog started boofing at us, and boy, they all go panic, you know how they do, panicking and running in together. So I, I rode down and I just picked them up and kind of made a little circle with them a little bit, and then I took them up and brought them by where everybody's standing there watching next to the water.. And I just set them like that and we watched them in. I said, let's leave them. Well, the next day we went out and instead of being across that whole pasture, they were taking up less than a third. So I did this kind of the same thing again the next day. We moved them and then after that they were all taken up about 3 or 4 acres. So you're actually getting your, you're getting your impact better. They're grazing for nutrition rather than just blindly eating. You know, it's, I don't know, do you ever stress eat?

Yes, I have.

Yeah. Yeah. I've got a real, I got a real bad habit about doing that. And, and that's the difference is that these these animals when they're going under, even when you're putting them into smaller paddocks and moving them daily, they're stressed by the moves. And I mean, if you're using the low stress stockmanship, you know, you're using the Bud Williams techniques, right? It's lower stress, but it's still some stress. You know, it's, it's kind of a unique deal. But when you switch over to this and you don't do anything, you don't get in back animals to move them. You're approaching them from the direction you want them to go. And even if they're looking the wrong way, they're pointing the wrong way, you come in from the direction you want them to go. And all you have to do is you angle your horse a little bit and they'll— or your, your movement. And then when they turn around, look at you, then you adjust for that to where they will wrap around and go by and go in the direction you want. You know, that's a lot more. That's like saying, okay, we've got a, you know, we've got a barbecue down there. We have got prime rib, rib steaks, you know, spare ribs, lobster, everything you can imagine, anything you want to drink, and it's down there. Now, if I come up to you and I start pushing you in the face to get you to turn around, you're not going to want to turn around. You know, you might even throat punch me. But if I come up from in back and you turn and look and I, and I go, hey, look down there. And it's something that you want to go do. You're going to pick up and go do it. And that's the same type of a psychology that you're using on these animals to where you're not putting that pressure on them to go. You're just showing them a good place to go. Yeah.

Bob, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I've enjoyed myself immensely, and I have the feeling that we've, we've made, we've made the proverbial, uh, pen scratch or pin scratch in an iceberg. Um, I'm sure there's so many other things that we could, could talk about. What are, what are major— are there any important topics that we've missed?

Oh, there's all sorts of topics that we missed. You know, everything, everything runs on frequencies.

We opened one, uh, one entry, uh, one entry of the encyclopedia. All right, everything runs in frequencies.

Everything runs— everything is held together by what? By atoms. All your molecules are held together by atoms. What holds them together? Electricity. So, and, and electricity has tons of different frequencies. I mean, just your internet's got one frequency, your phone's got a frequency. You know, your light bulb's got a frequency, and music— and I was talking with Roger Savory on this the other day— I cannot stand and never have been able to stand hard rock music. It just grates me. And then somebody sent me this, oh, you don't like rock music, listen to this. And it was— and I thought, yeah, right. Well, it was a band called Stephen the Seagulls, and they were doing AC/DC Thunderstruck, and I have— I've never liked that. It just— it's just something about it just gets my nerves going. But you listen to it on the acoustical side, and that is some good music.

Was it tuned to 432?

I don't know what it was tuned to, but it's the difference between the electronic version of the music and the acoustical version of the music. It's two different things.

Yeah, yeah, there is that. There is a difference between analog music and digital music and the completeness of the waveforms and the way they interact with your cells. There are differences in tuning and the, the frequencies and the harmonics and the way they interact. Um, yeah, there's—

it's—

I, I've sometimes daydreamed about What would it be like? What— how might our life be different if we could selectively choose to turn on or off the ability to see some of— into the, into the spectrum? Uh, when you think about all the ways that all these living systems are communicating with each other, the way trees communicate electromagnetically, trees and plants, the way livestock communicates, the, the whole ecosystem is so rich and vibrant with constant communication in the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, it would be overwhelming if we were exposed to all of it all the time. We, we would be incapacitated. But if we could just shift spectrums and see into different segments of the spectrum at different times—

okay, and this kind of goes back to the murmurations.

We—

animals communicate so much better than we do. I had a deal. I was on—

they can't talk.

Oh, I think they talk and we just don't— we, we don't— we're not on the same frequency. Yeah. Ah, we had 1,300 cows and it was on the third— it was again, it was that third day deal and they're going up this ridge and they went by this cordgrass. Well, cordgrass grows 6, 7 foot tall. It's coarse. The Indians used to make baskets out of it. The, the pioneers used to take and braid it into logs for firewood. Supposedly nothing eats it. Well, it was just about the last cow on this 1,300 head decided, well, I'm going to go over and try this, and it just started hitting down that 1,300 cows just turned around and followed it down, and she started going, going down one draw, turn around, coming up another draw, eating it. What is the communication going on there that this cow goes, hey, this is actually pretty good stuff, and everybody turns around and goes to eat something that, that they've never eaten, that everybody thinks they don't eat? It turned out, um, that the nutritional profile was almost identical to, uh, to Timothy. And these cows just changed, and they all communicated, oh, we've got to go down here and eat this. You know, what the heck? Because people don't— people are oblivious to things like that.

Wonderful, Bob. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. And I'm sure you'll have lots of conversations emerging from this. Well, thank you for all the work that you do and for all that you're bringing to the world.

Oh, just thanks for letting me do it.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006 we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA, we don't guess. We test. We analyze. And we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, Visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.