https://www.listennotes.com/e/b83eae59c5c347f3a7f6a03f33dbd6cd

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to producing healthy soil, healthy feed, healthy livestock, and ultimately healthy people, which is the foundational purpose and reason of agriculture. If we miss that objective, then what are we here for? Exactly. So this conversation today is one that I've been looking forward to for some time. I met Jim Elizondo a long time ago. He just told me 11 years ago. And one of the things that I was intrigued with Jim, years ago, we had a conversation around the untapped yield potential of forages and some of the work that C.J. fenzow was doing. I dropped the ball and we never followed up on making some of those experiments happen. But I've always been intrigued. You are in a, in a slightly different ecosystem and climate from many of the popular grazing gurus. You've become a little bit of a grazing guru of your own. You've had a lot of impact on the way many people approach grazing management. And you've developed your very, perhaps a very original perspective on how you approach grazing management. Tell us a little bit about that, about your journey and how your perspective is different from perhaps, perhaps the mainstream view, if the, the contemporary or the, the not, not necessarily the mainstream view, but the fringe mainstream view. How about that?

Yes, yes. Well, let's start with conventional gracing management, which was in 1953, mostly continuous gracing. And that's when Kreider made his famous experiment of the take half, lip half, where he cut with scissors, potted plants, young seedlings, up to every other day and then every two weeks and so on. And he found that over grazing or cutting too often, a young plant will stop the root from growing from there. Somehow those grazing girls that you mentioned got the idea that whenever we graze now with rotational grazing or non selective grazing, which should take no more than half of the plant. And that's a very bad conclusion from an experiment not done for that.

Right.

So since then, a lot of people have been behind the black eight ball by trying to focus on taking half when livestock do not graze like a mower, but take down to the ground to prefer species and leave behind the ones that they don't like. And that has created most of the problems that we have today.

So let me just clarify, when you say what has created most of the problems we have today is giving them the opport, are you referring to giving them the opportunity for selective grazing or.

Okay, yes, because when they try to, to make livestock graze like a mower up to 4, 5, 6 inches. Whatever flavor of the month, rotational grazing system they come up with, they will always create selective grazing, which always converts into over grazing, which is the main cause of long lead soil carbon being lost to the atmosphere.

So what is the, what is the solution? What's your solution to, to graze it hard, not give them the opportunity to take half and leave half.

Okay, that's, that's a good point. And, and it needs to be clarified.

Yeah.

Total grazing, which is what I teach, is taking down the grass plant to 1 to 2 inches from the soil surface. But well recovered grass plants, not young plants, which will be overgrazing. Overgrazing is when we regrase a plant while it is too young. And that's what shortens roots. That's what Kreider demonstrated and that's what creates a hard pan 4 inches deep where the roots is always created by a lack of strong roots.

All right, now, Jim, I had no idea of the conversation we were going to get in, but this is, this is, this is so intriguing because over the last couple of years, grazers have been reaching out to me with this exact problem. They, they're being instructed to take half leave. Although they're getting instruction from many leaders in the grazing space and they for many years have. They've been trying to do the right thing and yet their soils become more compacted over time. They're no longer building soil carbon, they're no longer building organic matter. And there's a variety of contributing factors. I've also come to the conclusion that a part of it is that their grazing patterns favor grass dominance and they lose out on their forbid populations because they're not stressing the grassroot systems enough by simply grazing half and taking half. But you, you mentioned, I want you to elaborate. You said this creates a hard pan. Let's just expand a little bit. How is a hard pan created when you're grazing?

By. When over grazing, you create short roots. The hard pan develops because strong roots is the way to avoid a hard pan from, from reforming after it gets wet. Yeah, that's it.

So overgrazing the way that you're describing it, in essence is grazing a plant before it's matured or when it's still immature.

No, I didn't say mature before it's well recovered in its energy reserves, which are in roots and crowns. You see, there are two theories of what makes a plant recovery regrow after grazing. One is the one that I follow and nature follows. The regrowth is fueled by energy reserves in roots and ground. That's it. The other theory, which is wrong, says that regrowth is filled by green leaves left behind. But that would be true if livestock graves like a mower. But because livestock do not raise that way, they take all the green material and which creates energy by photosynthesis and leave behind the stems that consume energy by respiring. So that gives us a much lower energy plan for growth for livestock and for improving the soil with the root exudates.

Yeah. All right, so what is the distinction between a plant that is fully recovered and a plant that is mature?

Yeah, there is a. Have you heard about Andrew Vossan raspberry back in 1950? Some.

He's. He's four or three or four incredible books with his name on them.

Yes. Well, the one I'm referring to is called Grass productivity.

Yeah.

And it says that there is a best stage. I don't know how to say it in English. Punto optimo de reposo means the optimal point of recovery for a grass to be grace. And that's when the basal lips start to turn yellow. The tiny lips that were created first start to turn yellow due to the shade of the taller green leaves shedding the sunlight from the lower base of leaves. That's when little energy is being accumulated due to a more larger canopy of green leaves, not to confuse with yellow basal leaves. In the dry season, that's different. So that would be when the plant has recovered enough. But then we need to consider the livestock, which are ruminants and require a minimum amount of fiber so as not to go scours. So in cool season grasses, which are low in fiber and high in sugars, their energy is in the form of sugars. We need to wait a little longer so the grassland has enough fiber so the cow or you can chew their cut and not scour. Because we need in our livestock first health, then maximum performance and then best conversion efficiency. Just as you do in soil. The rumen works mostly the same.

Many grazers have they. They listen to Ian Mitchell in US and Alan Williams. I could name a long list of. Of the. The heroes in the space, the. The innovators, the pioneers who've done incredible work. And then grazers need to take that information home and adapt it to their situation, figure out how it fits in their context. And one of the things that I've come to realize is perhaps one of the things that's missing is. Is not a good. Not having a good enough understanding of the foundational principles of why we are doing Things a certain way. And so the point that you made earlier about sugar reserves in the root system, I think is something that is not well understood. Generally we don't, we don't tend to think. We're not taught to think about how sugar flows and how sugar moves in a plant.

But wait, wait, I didn't say sugar. I said energy. Okay, let's not confuse terms because later I'm going to explain how fatty root exudates are so important.

All right, good. So, boy, now, now I want to ask that question, but I'll finish my thought and then we'll come back to that. So my thought or my question is the approach that you were describing. Where are the growers? Are there growers in different geographic areas or different climates who have needed to adapt your approach to their climate? And what does that look like?

Yes, yes, yes. I just returned from New Zealand and Australia where I went to teach this, the Total Grazing Academy. And in, in November, October, I was in Spain and in Italy. And I have students all over the world proving this works everywhere. That green grass grows because the rumen is rumen here and in Iceland. And overgrazing grass works the same here and in the tropics or in Canada. I was in Canada in November last year teaching at the Manitoba Grassland Conference, before that in September in Alberta. So I have students with success in those environments. The same as in South Africa, the same as in South America. It works the same. We need to remember that soil life is the determinant of grass productivity. And the most important determinant of soil fertility is soil long lived carbon. So we need to increase that. And we can do that now that we know how it's created and it's not in the green season raising area.

How is it created? How do we create long term soil carbon?

Okay, well, you know all this, but let's talk to the audience. Mineral association. Organic matter or particulate organic matter? One is long lived soil carbon, the other one is short lived soil carbon. Both are important, but the one that we have been mining off soils and we need to replenish because it's our savings account, is the long live soil carbon. So what I found after years of observing and trialing in different environments around the world is that by stockpiling pastures for over six months, we create standing hay to use for our livestock in the difficult seasons of the year. And we increase sponginess of the soil because the fungi to bacteria ratio improves. We get more fungi. And then I started measuring organic car and it went up faster. Than with any other method. And did you know that soil grows upwards instead of downwards?

Yes. And how much, how much can it grow upwards? I've seen some remarkable numbers an inch a year. An inch a year?

Yeah. You look at the pyramids in Mexico, how they were covered with soil after 500 years of nothing and. Or look at, at the alone near a house, how then later on you need to take out some soil because it's coming higher than the. Than the. Than the house? Yeah, in my backyard I've seen that. Or on the highway. Or the disappearing boulders in Ireland, where a picture taken 50 years ago showed the boulders and now they're covered with soil 50 years. So it depends on how you manage and how good the environment is for holding that long lived soil carbon. Because as any carbonate cycles and the higher the temperatures, the more difficult it is to increase it. But in Florida, we have gone from 1% organic matter in sandy soil to 3.18% in five years.

Wow.

That 15 tons of carbon per acre per year. That's a lot. So it can be done.

That is a lot. And so when you describe mineral associated organic matter versus particulate organic matter, how for. For the mineral associated organic matter, the long lived soil carbon, how do you build that most effectively with grazing management?

The truth is that by minimizing overgrazing in the green season, by using the program that I have, the total grazing program, you increase grass production by three to five times compared to continuous grazing. That allows you to stockpile a section of your farm to grow standing hay to recruit seedlings as your best forest species, which will be impossible under selective grazing, rotational selective raising. You kill them when they are trying to germinate by returning livestock. Plus you save money on hay, plus you start creating long lived soil carbon because the root exudates off. In the green season, when you're grazing the plant, the energy reserves go up and down every time you graze it. The plant consumes energy reserves and roots and ground and they are replenished. And then you graze it again. By doing that, you minimize overgrazing by waiting enough time, recovery time, which is very different to rest time. Rest is different. Okay. And then when you do not graze a paddock for a at least six months of the year, a long time, the root exudate change from sugary to fatty. And that's when the energy in the root exudates gets higher in complex substance, organic acids, organic fatty acids and amino acids, which fungi can digest better than bacteria. And that's how we Feed more fungi, which are super crucial to create long lived soil carbon. And I have all the links to the scientific literature and I am releasing a paper on that.

So. So to summarize what you just said, if you allow plants to fully recover, as they recover and they are no longer in the actively growing vegetative stage, their root exudate profile changes, they have a lot more fatty acids and that's how you build mineral associated organic matter. Did I get that right?

Yes, but let me explain a little more. And this is going to sound crazy, but I have the pictures and I have the scientific that if we didn't.

Have good crazy stories that stretch the boundaries, what would be the reason of having a conversation?

Okay. Have you heard about happy plants?

No.

Okay. It's a term I started describing grass plants that keep growing after maturity without sending a seed head and increasing the size of their leaves by three to five times.

Okay, come again? I thought when the seed head was mature, that was the end of growth.

No.

Okay.

No. I have a lot of pictures. In September in Alberta, Canada, orchard grass cock food for people in uk. It goes mature and then it keeps growing in the fall. Why? Because it's a perennial. So. Yeah. When mature, unlike perennial ryegrass, which really stops and falls down because it's been selected for lower and lower fiber and higher and higher sugar. That's a mistake. Orchard grass grows set seed, turn brown and then regrows green leaves. Okay. By then the root exudates the. Sorry, the. The roots and energy reserves are full. And when that new energy comes from the new green dips, there is an excess of energy in the roots and it starts to exude as fatty root exudate. And that's when we get the. Do you know the priming effect?

Yes. Okay, but explain, explain the priming effect.

Priming effect is what makes particulate organic matter. And it. We lose carbon to the atmosphere and that's what creates fertility or a fertilizer effect. Long short lived soil carbon. The more sugary the root exudates, the higher the priming effect. The higher in amino acids and organic fatty acids the root exudates, the smaller the priming effect. So more of that carbon is turned into particulate organic matter carbon. And that's how we increase the long lived soil carbon in our soils. And then after cycles of this, let's see. Because we alternate these stockpile products every year through the property to improve the whole property, which I consider as an organism communicated together by mycorrhiza, then we start to get happy plants and that's when things start to improve faster.

So happy plants are plants that continue growing vegetatively after they have set seed.

No, they don't even plant a seed head. They don't send a seed head because they have reached energy, homeostasis or balance or equilibrium. And the plant does not sense the need to go to see the perennial plant. And then they keep growing in leaves without sending a seed head. Most people have never seen this in their lives.

Okay, yeah, I'm just, I'm going to keep exploring here because I want to talk about this a bit more. So you used an orchard grass example just a moment ago of an orchard grass that matures and then continues vegetative growth. And I assumed when you said matures, that it, or maybe you said it, that it sends out a seed head, but you're actually saying that that doesn't necessarily need to be the case.

Exactly. I have a. I have more experience with bahia grass, Pensacola Bahia grass in Florida, which is usually produces seed three to four times a year. Every time it senses the need to reproduce, it sends a seed. And that's why people don't like that grass. And they recommend to use better species with synthetic nitrogen. Okay, but when you manage Bahia grass or even phalaris grass correctly in, in, in Australia, we call salaris grass the poor man cockfoot or orchard grass, because you create much larger leaves, like racing management. Okay, but let me go back. The Bahia grass that I have most experience with, it starts to produce larger leaves, up to five times larger.

As in wider.

Wider and longer. Bigger. Five times larger. Not only long, but wide. And you know, a leafy pasture has more energy than a stemy pasture.

Yep.

So that improve the soil humus, or long deep soil carbon faster and we start to get happy plants that do not go to seed, they do not sense the need to go to seed. And we get strong and deep roots and thus our main focus to improve the soil with our grazing management.

So what you're saying, in essence is that reproduction in perennial grasses is a response to stress or a response to low energy reserves?

Both. Both. You see, when you have a very high humus content and you know, long lived soil carbon or humus feeds plants on demand. And because the microbes whose bodies were converted into long live soil carbon had all the different nutrients required by the plant, they will be fed on demand by amino acids, as you explained, in fatty organic acids. And then the plant will be more waxy, more high in fat, and then the livestock do better, but the soil improves Faster. Okay. So those plants that have reached that stage of homeostasis between the soil and the energy they are returning to the soil did not go to seed or very little. In drier environments, you see, like 10% seed heads instead of 100%. In more humid environments, 0% of seed heads.

All right, so let's review the steps.

I see you smiling a lot. I see you smiling a lot.

When I say, oh, yeah, I'm smiling a lot. I'm smiling a lot about what you're describing, because this is. You're describing some new concepts that I haven't heard of before. And I. I enjoy learning. And, you know, one of the challenges of reading a lot is that I often hear repetitions of the same thing or read repetitions of the same thing stated in different ways. And that can be insightful as well. But it's a lot of fun to. To hear new ideas. And so, yeah, this is. I'm finding this conversation very enjoyable. Plus, all the things you're talk. Fats as root exudates and waxy leaves and amino acid nutrition, like, these are things I've been talking about for years, but I sometimes feel people haven't understood them particularly well.

Oh, they were talking the same language.

Yeah, we're talking about exactly the same thing.

Okay.

Yeah, I've been talking about fatty acids as root exudates and, and the power that that has in. In fungal digestion and the humification process for decades. And not a lot of people, you know, it's. It's a lot harder to achieve that in a. An annual cropping system than it is with perennials.

It is more difficult, but I think you're leading the way in that. The first person that talked to me about fatty root exudates, you know, who was it? No, it was you.

It was me.

2014 in the Iowa Practical Farmers Conference.

Okay.

Yeah.

Things come full circle a decade later. Yeah, that's fun. So I want to. I know the answer, but for, for our listeners, I think it bears repeating again. How do you produce happy plants?

Okay. By stockpiling a section of the farm that is alternated every year. Once you have two or three cycles in good rainfall environment, you get happy plants if you do not use any chemicals in the soil. I did use some further fertilizer at first and mycorrhiza at first, because the sandy soil had no mycorrhiza from that trigger from years of excess glyphosate applied. Because it was a tree nursery, they applied glyphosate twice a month for 20 some years.

Wow.

So it was white sand with no soil life. And I saw that the walls, when they did their burrows, the grass grew five times larger there. So I researched. And that was from mycorrhiza. So I started overseeding with mycorrhizal inoculated seed, and that changed everything. I could see the green spreading through the farm.

Yeah.

Have you seen those pastures that are yellow and have bright green spots that people say those are manure spots?

Yes. Except I've never seen. I've never seen a manure spot four feet across, like some of them are.

Exactly. And then it starts to spread. So those are mycorrhizal hot spots. Yeah. Yeah. I. And, And I demonstrated that in New Zealand to people. Yeah. Very interesting.

So this is. This is a fascinating conversation that I'm enjoying a lot. But I'm going to go back because I have a feeling we haven't. There's many things we haven't uncovered yet. I started this conversation by asking you the question, what is. What is. What are your original insights? What are your perspectives that are different from many others and we've talked about kind of. Well, there's a combination of several that are all wrapped up in this, this larger theme. But what. What else. What else have you developed that is a different perspective that people aren't thinking about?

Okay. Adaptive genetics and selection guidelines. We need livestock that can not only be efficient converters of tons of grass to make saleable products, but can also improve the land on which they graze. Johann Fitzmann taught me that back in the day, a long time ago. And that's so true. We need to think of the ecosystem function of our livestock as a proxy for the large herds of megafauna that were killed off 50,000 years ago and which role was to improve the land on which they grazed. Half of them by weight were hangout fermenters and half of them were ruminants. This is what's lacking in all those gurus that you mentioned in many more, because they only went to what they were observing when they were younger, and that was a totally degraded ecosystem. Especially in the United States, when white men came to colonize, they thought that was a pristine environment, and it wasn't. It was already degraded. So we need to go back in time and by fossilized pollen and fossilized fungi spores that were in the manure of those ruminants and hindgut fermenters. Now we have a better idea of what really happened and why. The weather or the climate change because of the extinction of These animals and why wildfire rattling burns were more frequent after they were killed off. So this changes the whole paradigm. And the grazing paradigm needs to change, because selective grazing is exactly what we shouldn't do. It goes against basic plant physiology, goes against how this was designed by God from the first. And we need to go back in time. We can be better.

All right, you're bringing something to me again that is new. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about, in the case of North America, what North America, the North American continent, looked like 400 years ago, 500 years ago. And with the. The mental image that that was an optimal ecosystem, a managed ecosystem, of course, by the Native Americans, but an optimal ecosystem. But you're describing that that was not the case. But I haven't done the research and the homework to know what that would have looked like thousands of years earlier. So can you build a bit of a mental image you mentioned? Yeah. Tell us a little bit about what that might have looked like.

Let's go back 80,000 years or 150,000 years ago. Okay. Modern man were not there yet. And the megafauna consisted of half of the herbivores being hangout fermenters, which means that they can raise lower protein, higher fiber, grasses thrive in it.

What are examples of hind gut fermenters?

Horses, febra, mammoths, mastodons, elephants, ground slots, all of those are kind gut fermenters. Kangaroos, they can try on lower protein, higher fiber forages, while ruminants cannot, because the rumen microbes need a minimum of protein to be able to feed the cow or the ewe. Okay, so when men came in and killed them, the larger ones, first off, because they were easier to kill per calorie expended, they got more kilograms of meat. Okay. So they went after them first because they were slower moving also. And you can see all this, I have all the scientific links to the. And now we know that when they were killed off, then we started accumulating more residual, because now only the ruminants were left behind. Even the, the wild horses in America were killed off and they were hangout fermenters. So now they started seeing more, less green chops coming up because of the residual inhibits, the regrowth. And the seedlings and the growth points, which are close to the ground, turn white and die. And then we get larger interplant spacings. And nature is always striving for higher and higher productivity per unit of land and does that by complexity. And, and we know that okay. And that's how soil improves. But the native Americans started burning to lure into migrating hers now only her ruminants now no hank of fermenters. And they couldn't take it down to where burning was not needed. So that's what you are imagining 500, a thousand years ago burning. And before that because of charcoal fossilized records we know burning was not so widespread. Us after those large handcuff fermenters will were killed off because they would come.

In and consume all of the burnable material. They would come in and remove all.

The residue just like elephants do in the Okavango Delta. They are the last ones to move into migration because they can still feed on lower quality grasses. Yeah, that's why zebras are the first go on the migration. After the rain start and grass is more mature in, in Kenya, in the Serengeti. Then comes the wildebeest. And 20 some days later the feet on the regrowth come to castle. Fascinating why they didn't see this. Why did they go to a, an experiment done in 1955 or 53 and, and not changing 80 years? That's my question. I am amazing. And not, not very happy.

Well, yeah, the not changing 80 years is the particularly problematic part of us. It's in any other industry, in any other space. We, we know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. And in livestock raising we've been doing the same thing for 80 years and getting bad results and, and not changing, not being flexible and open and adaptable to change.

And when they measure long lived soil carbon, it doesn't increase, but they keep promoting it. We did an experiment, a friend of mine in the Minnesota, Iowa, Minnesota border, he took soil samples, samples of his land and his neighbor who was set stalking and after 10 years of rotational selective grazing, moving them up to 10 times a day, the cows, he took soil samples again with the neighbor and they were both the same. It didn't go up 1.1% because when you graze selectivity in the green season, you do not create long lived soil carbon. I did the same on my own farm where I had a Graze dairy for 28 years. And after the first few years that soil organic matter went up from 3 to 4%. It didn't improve after 28 years because we were always grazing grass in the vegetative stage as you need to do with a grazed dairy. So it never increased. Then I stopped milking and switched to beef cows and started stockpiling the total grazing program. And now it improved like crazy in three years. Yeah, that's the difference.

All right, I have a question for you on managing the livestock in the field and a question for managing the forages. And they're kind of related, but I suppose I'll start with a livestock question. From your perspective. How do you manage the herd to have a non selective grazing?

Okay. I covered that in my, in my online courses. One is total grazing program. Another one is the adaptive genetics and selection course. All these are online and come with coaching support, life coach. Another one is the optimal garden season. And another one is nutrition when grazing because I'm a dairy nutritionist with 20 years experience. I am an, I have an accounting degree and I am an agronomy engineer. So all this together means that to manage your grass better, you need management and genetics. And then you can do this at a lower cost. Of course, when we start, we may have unadapted genetics. So we start with the grazing management because that's the way to increase your grass production three times in the first year. So that makes a huge impact on profits. And then we start improving our selection of our livestock. So in five to seven years and starting on the first cash crop, we have better adapted genetics, especially in respect to nutritional adaptation, which is what allows some cows or use to be fat when others in the same herd or flock lose body condition.

Yep. All right. Earlier in the conversation you mentioned.

Oh, wait, wait. You say, how do I make them eat it all to 1 to 2 inches? Because that's total crazy.

Yes.

Okay. So in the green season, our focus is on performance. So we want the highest quality forage paddocks. But first comes animal health. So enough fiber so they do not scour, but young enough so they perform the better. That's why we need to understand a little about nutrition when crazy. Okay, we do that and we need to learn about the art of jumping paddocks. And then we do that with better adapted genetics and we give the total craze, which is better than mowing because the saliva in the cows and ewes inoculate the growth points closer to the ground with growth promoting factors like hormones and vitamins. And then the regrowth is up to 80% faster than when cut with the machine.

What is the art of jumping paddocks?

That's a term made by Andrew vasan back in 1960. And it's when you go to your best quality products in the green season to maintain the best animal performance possible. And that also improves your productivity. And I just created a master Class on that. It's very interesting when you combine that with the stockpiling because you see you stockpile mostly while your cattle or youth cannot maintain at the highest quality.

Yeah. So we've, we've mentioned Andre Voison's work twice now in our conversation. He has several books, Soil Grass and Cancer Grass Productivity. Forget the other two titles. I think there's two more titles, but it's in, in many ways he is the godfather of this grazing wisdom. I mean, we have Alan Savory and many, many of the pioneers, names that I've mentioned previously. But you go back and you read Andre Voisin's original work and we've forgotten collectively a lot of the stuff that he knew.

Yeah. Even in France, whenever I teach in France, I tell them, and nobody knows who he was.

Wow.

Like crazy. He could be a national hero, but nobody knows about.

Yeah.

Or, or in New Zealand, when I tell them. Grass to meal by McKinnon, which I written in 1960, some which was the basis of my making a profit on farming with livestock, where he said, the, the main determinant of profits is stocking rate. And I got that and I did all my calculations and he was right. Well, when I went to New Zealand last month, they didn't know who he was.

Something about a prophet not being recognized in his own land.

The most important factor in profit, and they did not know what it was.

Wow. All right, Coming back to our conversation on grazing management and total grazing. Earlier in our discussion, you mentioned that there is a difference between recovery time and rest time and that they are not the same. What's the difference between the two?

Rest times are merely the days or months that are between grazings that say you didn't graze a paddock for six months. I was in Georgia, near Russia, teaching a class a year and a half ago. And I say this. You need. Whenever you stockpile for six months or more, you will get very high bulk and more and more improvement of your soil carbon. And a man was backstage and he came to me very angry at the end and said through an interpreter, because I don't know Georgian. And he said, I'm very mad because what you said is not true. I did, I did my pastures to stockpile for six months and nothing grows. And I said, how can that be possible? And then he explained, I live in a 7,000ft high altitude place where we get snow for six months of the year. Then I take my, my sheep and goats down to the valley, and when we go back up, there is no stockpile. That's the difference between recovery time and rest time. When there is no growth because of growing conditions, that's rest time. When there is growth because of good growing condition, that's recovery.

That's an important distinction. That's a funny story. That's good.

It's funny.

Yeah. But also going back to something you were describing earlier with your bahia grass, I think we should not be measuring recovery time in terms of the time that has passed. Days, weeks, months. We should be measuring recovery time in the stage of plant development.

Yeah, but that's. You see, perennial grasses can go to seed both to seed very fast if you have short roots created by over grazing. So that will be the stage, the reproductive stage. Or they can delay and not go to seed because they have deep roots and high humus content in the soil and not being grazed. And then they will keep growing in this size. So it's not as simple as that. There is more. It's like soil carbon credits that they only measure a certain depth. It's not as that. We should do come up with a different way of measuring. We need to be pioneers in that.

How should we thinking about recovery time? What is optimal recovery time?

Well, in the green season, you want the highest quality for your livestock. That means energy, digestibility, enough fiber to avoid scours, and enough protein to not create a protein overload. When you have too much protein to energy, you create health problems in your lives. Okay, so how can we measure that? I usually do it by observing the manure in the cow, the gut feel in the cow, their behavior. And I measure their daily gains by weighting them. And then you can learn a lot about grazing management. And when you have a grazed dairy like I had for 28 years, you see the results next day in the ball tank. So then you learn more. And when you're a dairy nutritionist with Free Choice Enterprises, which I had the franchise for Mexico for 20 years, you learn even more. And then when you travel and consult for people around the world, you learn a little more. Yeah, so what I have found is that you need to see at the color of the grass. There is a vibrant green that you get from amino acids and fatty acids fed plants, which is so different than the deep green of the synthetic nitrogen fed plants. And as you know, you do not get insect pests because of that.

Yeah, you do not get insect pests. And one of the things I'm. I'm. As a result of a conversation last summer I started digging into endophyte toxicity in fescue and yeah, I, I'd love to get your perspective on this because I'm persuaded that we can solve for endophyte toxicity completely with nutrition management. But I'd like to get your perspective on what you've, what you've observed.

Okay. What I have observed is that I have not tried to feed the plant better so it's less toxic. In the toxic fescue belt, for example, in the UK there is no problem with toxic fescue, but in Missouri there is. Why? I think it has to do with higher summer temperatures in Missouri than in the uk, but also with genetics adaptation. I have used the Machona infused livestock to deal with that in East Virginia and that solved the problem of the toxic fescue in summer. The toxic fescue problem is so high that people shift their calving season from the spring, which will be optimal to default, which is the worst time of the year because of the toxic fescue and using unadapted genetics. So that's what I have learned. But if you can find a way to feed the plant better so that the toxic fescue will not be harming livestock, that will be a huge hit.

Yeah, well, the research has already been done. The information is already in the literature on how to achieve it. But just as with Andre Voison's work, everyone's ignoring it. It was already done back in the 60s. I just went looking for it and happened to find it.

Wow. Have you heard that steel sharpens steel? Yeah, that's what we're doing right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, Jim, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. Where can people find you? What other thoughts do you have that you want to share?

Okay. We already talked about how the soil long, deep carbon is built. I'm sure you can do it other ways. There is always more than one way to skin a cat. This is the way that I have found and I have read you what you say about doing it with annual crops. Possible. It's just that I haven't. There is only one lifetime. I haven't had the time to go to that or the interest. I have dealt mostly with following nature. Mostly. I'm sure it can be done also with annual crops as you're doing. And I know that your, your foliars are working worldwide. I know they are. And. But I have been trying to go follow nature in everything because we're called to be stewards of the land and God created nature and we need to understand it the best. So that's as far as I have Gone. My website is ranching rw ranching.com and I would like to offer for people a free downloadable guide for to improve their production which is our w ranching.com passengers. That's it. And. And they can go there and, and get my podcast and everything for free. What else can I say? We already talked about the mega fa. We already talked about fires. That's a very important topic because in significant topic.

Yeah.

In parts of the world that's what's happening. More wildfires due to them not being here those animals. And we can use our domesticated ruminants as a proxy for that with the correct grazing management. But we need to stop selective grazing. If we do not stop selective grazing, we will always fall into over grazing with shorter roots, increase heartburn and lowers grass productivity three to five times. And then we cannot increase long lived soil carbon. That's what holds moisture. That's what feeds the plants the best. That's what determines your soil fertility.

And you'll never get to see happy plants.

Well, not in all environments. I told you. For example in the mountains of Chihuahua we got like a 90% reduction in seed heads. 90 but not 100% like we did in Florida.

But still.

Still. But that's a byproduct that I didn't expect. But it's so interesting and I need younger people to get on this because. Well, we need younger people every. Because we're called to be stewards of the land but our time is limited. So the more people and scientists that can get on this and determine for example what the fungit to bacteria ratio that when stockpiling compared to green grazing areas. That's so important. Or was the fatic acid contents in. In the. In the root exodus. They're just finding out that's. You need to look at recent research to find that out. And that's what I'm doing. So I don't go back in 80 years ago to, to see what they were doing 80 years ago when electric fences were not in use. I go now to what's happening worldwide because we want to be the best in the world, not just the best in our little area. Yeah.

Jim, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for being here, for sharing your wisdom and experience and I expect you'll get a lot of outreach as a result of this conversation. So thank you.

Thank you very much and may God bless you.

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.