Mob Breeding

Welcome back to another video, folks. Today I'm taking a long form interview with Bjorn Johansen from neighboring Norway. Bjorn visited our farm a few years ago and he knows a lot about breeding and genetics and is very interested in the concept of mob breeding. And it's something that all holistic graziers could integrate into regenerative agriculture. And so we'll talk about all elements of that as well as breeding new breeds, which is something that Bjorn does too. So I hope you enjoy the episode, folks. Okay, Bjorn, thanks so much for joining us today and taking the time to speak with us.

Hello, good morning. Whatever.

Applies. Bjorn, tell us a bit like how you, what's your background with farming and how did you get interested in genetics in the first place?

I grew up on a farm and we bred multi purpose kind of cow that's called a Swedish Red and is now called a Scandinavian Red. And also through my father I was involved in, I am involved in preserving indigenous pony breed that's called Gotlands Russ. Through my uncle who was responsible for that, most of the breeding in the entire breed we had a focus on how we can keep genetic variation up. Maybe not caring so much if one singular animal is inbred or outbred, but we take care that we don't lose genetic information. So we have these two and then we bred cats. And because they are land raised cats, every cat has a mother and a grandmother, but nothing else.

Right.

So most of no cat has a father. And we figure out that, I mean it's a good teaching that cats, they, they take care of the breeding, yourself, themselves and we, you are just culling the, the ones that are too white or red or white or whatever or they're wrong in some way. Right. Basically a cat is a cat and all of them function. It's a great teacher. If you look at the animals that humans keep, the cats are the most strong and healthy and that's the only one we are not interfering with the breeding. So it's a, it's a kind of, you know, eye opener. Right. I look at the reindeer for example. They are bred in the same way. Like you're, you're removing everything that doesn't work and then you breed from the rest. So I have a general interest in everything. Right. But these are the main starting points.

It really ties in line. So we're going to talk a lot about mob breeding and your ability to breed new animals. And I'm really interested in this because it really ties into Bill Hill's statement of stop growing things that want to die and stop killing things that want to live. And this whole approach you have to breeding is really about allowing animals to express their physiology and to some degree and to bring a lot of benefits to a farmer through the consequences of potentially not bringing animals onto the farm and bringing in disease vectors in that way and the ongoing cost of that. But could you give us like the elevator picture? Like what is mob breeding? Just to paint a little picture before we go into detail with it.

We have this old saw that you are working 80% for 20%, 80% of your work is for 20% of your income. And the other way around, right? So that means you are, when you are keeping animals, you are helping the weakest animals a lot just to keep everything rolling. So just make sure you have less weak animals in the next generation. If you have these that need deworming, just figure out maybe you can cull them. You help them at that point when they need the help and then you cull them later. Right? Same thing with, with calvings, with lambings, whatever. It's, it's bad luck is very repeatable and it's highly heritable. So it's, it's always bad luck. But if you remove the ones that have bad luck, you get better luck.

So you really focused in on improving the average of the herd by only culling out bad animals, rather than taking a sort of more conventional approach to breeding, which is believing that we can discern which is the best animal by a very simple metric like how its coat looks or how quickly it fattens, which doesn't describe the hidden genetics behind it.

Like if you are just weighing them and say the biggest is the best, maybe you don't get all the, I mean you are probably losing some of the good stuff that the second best and the third best has, right? But by constantly removing the worst, you have a very strong marginal effect, right? You get, you get less cost. I like to say it like this. A perfect cow is an ordinary cow without fault. It's still just a cow, it looks the same. And the perfect sheep is an ordinary sheep without fault. And the perfect goat is an ordinary goat without fault. Right? So removing fault is way more important than having them weigh one kilo more or less, run a little faster or whatever, right? I mean, obviously if you are breeding for something to run as fast as possible to win, then mob breeding doesn't work. But when you are doing day to day work with the animals, you want non nervous and productive animals that don't need a vet and you know A.

Simple way of saying that, like, for sheep is essentially, you've got an animal that can rear its lambs, produces enough milk, doesn't need your intervention, doesn't have problems with birthing, and grows decently. And that's a good enough sheep.

That's a good enough sheep. And basically when you are handling good enough sheep, you can handle 400 of them. Right. If you, if you are dealing with messy sheep, you can't tell or you say 4,000 of them. Right. But if you're dealing with messy sheep that need individual care at lambing, you don't get anywhere.

Yeah. Let's explore the philosophy behind mob breeding. So in nature, males fight out for the right to mate. And that's nature's way of choosing the best genetics. Right. And so there's an element of allowing that to take place. So could you speak a bit to the, like, what are we looking for in the male and then what do we need to look for in the female? Because I guess the monitoring has got to be done extremely closely on the mothers of potential breeders.

Yeah. So basically there is a lot of focus about avoiding inbreeding. When you come to breeding livestock, you talk a lot about, this one is related to this one, and this one is the first cousin of this one. And then in nature, well, you have, if you look in Bambi, for example, you have this big white tailed deer. Well, of course, Bambi and that girl deer that he's meeting later is of course his half sibling. Right. And that's the way it works in nature, Right. You get a mix of outbreeding and inbreeding. And if there's something wrong with the inbred animal, it doesn't compete. And if it's nothing wrong with it, it's in the game. Right. So the nature will sort out any bad genetics. When you want to prove that inbreeding exists, it's proven many times. It's, it's not good science, but it's halfway good science. Because the, the question is how much does the performance decline when you use four generations of random full sibling mating? And the problem is not the inbreeding, it's the random. Because in a farm, no one breeds from a skinny boar, from a nervous dog, from a weak horse and so on. Right. So you breed from the strongest and then if they're inbred or outbred, it doesn't matter as much anymore. Right. It's only on average that an inbred progeny is worse than the outbred progeny. So by culling the worst, you have the same average.

Just.

You have 8 left instead of 10 right.

Can we just define, like, what's. How would you define inbreeding? Because there's some confusion between inbreeding and line breeding. My understanding has always been that line breeding is mother and father with son or daughter, whereas inbreeding would be technically brother and sister. What would you say about that?

Let's say. Let's say it like this. Line breeding is purposeful. It involves. It. It's purposeful and it involves culling. There is a method to it. And inbreeding is when it's related. You're mating nobody's son to everybody's daughter. Okay. Which are words that I wish that they were mine, but they are not. So basically, inbreeding in itself is when the animals are too closely related for comfort, which is usually more than half sibling. So if you are breeding half sibling to half sibling, you have half the amount of inbreeding than if you breed full sibling to full sibling or mother to son or something.

But you're saying regardless, that's not so interesting to you because you're in control of the cull list, essentially?

Well, I. Yes. I'm not. I am not the line breeder. I'm not purposely inbreeding animals, but I'm more like, I don't care. So let's say now, for example, with the Peace sheep, we put one year, I think, nine rams out. So there's 11% risk that one of them will breed his mother. But There are also 150 other used to breed. Right. So if his mother, who is one of the strongest Jews in the flock, happens to have a bad one that next year, it doesn't go anywhere. And if it's a good one, it's either not inbred or it's inbred, but it didn't matter.

Yeah.

But then we. Then we can use it. Right.

So that's the. That's the male part. It's like you're. You're allowing the males to compete to breed. And it's.

And we used to.

Yeah, inconsequential.

We're using too many. We are using too many males.

Yeah.

We are using them only for one season because their replacement is as good, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It comes from. The replacement comes from the same flock or the same herd. In the case of cattle, they will be replaced two years later by their sons and one year later by bulls that are not their sons. And in the case of sheep, and they are replaced by their sons every Year. Yeah, we have an extremely fast turnover in, in males and a slower, much slower turnover in females. And the reason. And so the gene flow between male and male is very fast and the gene flow between female and female is reasonably fast, but the gene flow between female and male is slow simply because a female has to be tested for at least three years to be in there.

Let's get into that then, because I think once we start to talk about particular animals, then this thinking needs to be perhaps adjusted. But let's get to that later to cover the basics. So it sounds like we're letting all the males have the right to breed, but only for one year. But then there's a lot more attention put on the females. Right, so what, what are the key elements to look for? How does a mother have the right to breed a breeding animal?

Okay, so let's, let's say something about not, not all the males, but let's say we're talking about maybe 20% of the males. So we're taking the best, the best two thirds of the 30% that has a mother that's old enough, that has stayed in the game for long enough. And how does mother animal stay in the, in the herd for long enough? Well, we need to breed something that resistant to culling. A cow must calf, she must calve on her own, raise the calf. If it's a beef cow, let's talk about beef cattle here for case of simplicity. So she must calm and raise the calf and have an acceptable calf. And by that I'm not talking about Olympic standards, I'm talking about the top 85% of the herd. So if the calf is good or decent, then it's a good cow. And by removing the cows that have really sorry calves or removing the sheep that have really sorry lambs, you have a really strong marginal effect. It ties to holistic management really strongly, like moving the. Removing the worst. Few animals have a really strong marginal effect. And the higher you come, the lesser it matters because the first animal have maybe have 11 weaknesses and the 10th, 10th worst animal maybe just have two weaknesses and the next one maybe just have one. Right? So you are removing unproportionally much weakness by taking out the worst. So basically these animals, if you look at one year's production as a race and they must complete at least three races, right? It's not about, it's not about winning, it's about completing the race before the shutout time. Right.

So how do you, what would be the actual process of reviewing the mothers to see who is cold in the program.

When we see some problem, we write it down. When we help them, we write it down. There are lots of computer programs for this, but you can even write it in your notebook. I was working with one farmer, he had, he had four different codes. I forgot some of them, but one of them was hh, that means high headed. So it's a nervous cow. Right. And one was sp, which was Norwegian for Spinville. It means that it was, it was spinning crazy. So it's like you've got two level culling for nervousness. But anyway, like even you can have a book, just write the simple stuff or you can have a computer program, but it needs to be written down. So when it's slaughter time that you pick the right animal first. I mean, you are basically hurting your flock when you're removing an animal. Right. So you take the one that you hurt the flock the least by removing it. And on the. And that's also mean you are improving the flock most by taking it.

Yeah. And so it's worth pointing out at this point then that that's like obviously you don't need to take that animal away. It could breed an animal for home consumption or whatever. But it means it shouldn't breed an animal that leads to a breeding male, essentially.

Exactly. You can cull an animal without harvesting.

Yeah.

I mean you can, you can decide it's no longer part of my breeding program or you can allow its daughter but not its son, for example, or you can have a twist like that. But usually if you have room, if you have room for replacement, if you can put young animals instead of old animals, then you harvest it. But many young startups has to keep most of the animals, even if they are bad. Right. Just to get the numbers up. But there is always a point when you can harvest it.

Yeah.

And if, I mean if a sheep lost half the other, you have to replace it. But if it's just see it has lower production, it can stay another year. But then you just make sure it's not, it's not going to spread that.

You know, I think this whole notion of culling is a little sensitive because of how we relate to it as humans. But from a farming perspective, it strikes me like both with plants and animals we want to cull hard, but it's, it's a notion that rubs some people up the wrong way because people have suggested that in human breeding haven't really gone down well in history, it seems. But there's, there is something there that's worth exploring because our human breeding is pretty interesting, sometimes questionable, but it's not. It's very taboo to even go there and talk about it.

I mean, for me, there is two things about this. How you sought is one thing, right? But the main thing, if I take the right to kill something, it's my obligation to kill the right one first. As simple as that. We are going to eat all of them in their own time, right. So by making sure that the healthiest and most fertile and productive stay longer and improve the breed, we have done nothing bad. We have reduced the suffering in the world. And when we take the right to kill anything for food, I mean, it's that simple, right? If what I'm talking about doesn't apply philosophically, if you are not going to kill anything, but if you are going to kill even one food, make sure that you take the one that has a limp or something, right? You improve something, either you kill the one animal that has the worst life, which is a purely humane thing, or you kill. Kill the one that is most in the way and least. Least productive. Right? So your obligation, your. You owe it to your herd. Your animal is not one animal. It's a part of your herd. Right. So it's a symbiosis between you and your herd. It's not the same. It's. You have a friendship with one animal. Yeah. This. This cow is Rosa. Yeah. I like her, you know, and. And I had her in the exhibition four years ago and my neighbor's kids are riding her and so on. Right. So this is my relation with this specific cow. But my real relation is between me and the herd. Or really it's between my family and the herd. Because I am also going to be replaced at one point, right?

Yeah.

So by moving the relation from the individual animal to the herd and don't have favorites. If you want to pet an animal, pet the nervous one. My father used to tie, if he had. If you have eight or nine heifers, he used to tie the. And one of them were nervous, he tied it up by the door. So whenever you go through it, it's like kbt, right. It gets tired of being afraid. And every time you have the chance, you can pet it. And you know, most people will like to pet the easy one. The easy one, Right. They are petting the same one because it's closest and then it's their favorite. And when it gets unhealthy, they can't cull it.

Yeah.

And then they're using the son of this animal out of the Wrong for the wrong reason and make more sickly, weak animals, right? Well, I, of course I wouldn't take males from. I wouldn't take breeding bulls from the most nervous heifer. But I'm just pointing out that we can manage the animals for profit and for social things and we can cull them for breeding. It doesn't have to be the same thing. Yeah, I can kill something that I like because it doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it gives you that a better overview of where to put priority. And I guess the approach works because it's very hard to look at a group of animals and determine which is the best. But it's not so hard to determine which is the worst, right.

It's impossible to see the best one in case it's not glaring. I mean, most of the time. Most of the time it's not possible at all. And there are times when you have one that's so much better than the others that you can see it. But it's also a matter of how good we are, right. When it's the sole interest to look at animals, right? You figure out a lot that you can't figure out when you are just an ordinary person, right? And we are all different. But this method is not about being a star. It's about that everyone can do it. And a very interesting thing when we are doing the culling for the my breeding project and we have all the males in one pen and these are the ones that has a good enough mother. And now we are going to remove one third of them or something, right? And I always bring some people that are not farmers. I brought to that place a building engineer or architect. I brought a cocoa farmer from, from Ghana. There I brought concrete expert from Ireland and so on, right? And all of these people, or you bring some young guy, some, some girl of 17 or a boy of 16, right? All of them in that context can pick out the first worst animal. And what we do the minute we have all decided and we tell this, this beginner like you made it, you found the ugliest animal here or the weakest animal. Then one go in the pen and lift that one out and send it, give it to the other, give it back to the flock, right? So it doesn't go in the way. And then we are looking again. And then usually the beginner can found the worst animal yet again, right? And when it gets difficult to find the worst animal, it doesn't matter anymore. Once you get the worst out, you're fine. So we Started with. If we started with nine and we have six left and you can't, you can see which one is the biggest. But they're all good. They're all good enough. And that's the, that's the main thing. It needs to be good enough. You're not going to breed from shit, but if it's decent animal, you have a winner.

And it sounds like. So just to sum up the benefits of this approach, so it means basically we're overall always improving the average and not giving our money and time to weak or sick animals that should be killed. So we're never trying to like, look after something that wants to die. Essentially.

You could say we're often taking care of the thing, the ones that need care, but we're only taking care of them this year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sometimes it makes more sense to kill them immediately if they're suffering. Right. Or if they need an operation or something. Right. It's out of the question if you're going to make money. Right. But sometimes you can de worm one particular animal or you can help it, help it have a cough or something. Right. But you make, make a note that you don't do that again.

Yeah. So the emphasis would be not worming the whole flock for the benefit of one, which will bring down the health of all the animals, essentially. So it's focusing on improving the whole overall. But then what are the other benefits? It's the fact that you could get away from bringing in animals from other farms.

Yes, exactly. It's a signi mean you're talking about the biohazard thing. Depending on where you are, that's a little or a big problem here. Up here in the high north, we have extinguished most of the nasty diseases for cattle. All of the nasty diseases for cattle, brucellosis and BVD and leukosis and so on. It's gone, all of it. Right. And with sheep we are close enough. Like sheep have just a few diseases like that, but. And goats have only one. So we're getting kind of close. But in the world as a whole, you have a lot of problems buying and selling, like the flying herd, like the British say, Right. It's problematic. So. But keeping your keeping to your own, it means you have one risk less to take care of. And then buying expensive breeding animals, it's a significant cost, especially if you have a little flock. Another saying from my father. You want to buy that good horse, feel free to buy that good horse. But remember that the white fences, they don't come with the horse, right? The white fences on that fancy place, they will not, you know, you will get the horse, but not the white fences, right? So just make sure you are impressed with the right things. And usually buying from a no nonsense, grumpy old farmer is usually the best, right?

What should. On that note, it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this because one thing to be aware of is like, most farmers will sell their worst animals first. And that's just the natural order of things. So what should people look for when they are wanting to buy animals?

At the beginning, you should buy animals from someone who stops keeping animals you buy at a sellout. Then you have all the good ones, right? That's one thing. Or you buy a large series of like animals with numbers, right? You buy a gate cut. So I'm saying I want, I look at your catalog and I say I want every animal between 420 and 429. Then I get the seven good ones as well, right? But if, if, if one farmer says, I am just selling these three animals and you are like, wait, one has a lump under the eye? Well, doesn't matter, it's just ugly. But the other ones, it's limping a bit or it has only three teeth if it's a cow, right? So then you get your worst, right? But if you, if you take all the numbers in a row or if you, if you buy it on the. When someone is finishing his business or something like that, you're. And what you easily can do is buy good males from. When mob breeding gets more common, which it will be in five years, right? If you buy the males that the farmer was using last year. I was talking about how we replace the males every year. So if you buy my rams from last year, you are going to be fine. And you can buy my rams from last year. One more year or two more years, right? And at some point you will consider your own good enough. But if you are buying from like conventional breeding, you get the best bulls and the worst cows. And then you're trying to figure out at some point where is your good enough. And it's not an easy game, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like say the starting point is average animals minus the one with obvious glaring faults. And then you have a good flock.

So the emphasis on you got to start somewhere also. And so maybe we could turn our attention. Let's talk about sheep first, because that seems like the easiest scenario in some ways. Like, like how would someone, how would this practically work? Could you give us like the overview of say I've got a couple of rams and 10 sheep. How do I, like, start this process?

First of all, you figure out when your dandelion lions are going to flower, and then you go five months back from that and then that's where. That's the date when you put the rams in with the ewes.

What happens if you only have one ram? Can people start this with just one ram? And the sheep they've got.

Well, it's simple, simple as this. You can't have less than one ram. So one rem is the quorum. Right. That's where something happens.

I'm just emphasizing this, Bjorn, because I think some people will be worried that they're starting from too small a genetic base or something like that. Maybe you could usually.

Not the problem. Let's say you are breeding mecheep to make this simple. Right. And you start with seven ewes and one ram. And you have plenty of genetics. If you. If you're using that ram one year and you're using his sons the next year. So his sons are half of what he is. Right. They're. They're also half of what the females are. If you use their sums the next year, that generation is just. Just 25% of the original ram. And the next generation is just 12 and a half percent of the original ram. And so. And some of the four generations down the line, some of these rams, they are way more related to certain use than they are to that particular ram. Right. So you can, you can even it out. For example, the wild buffaloes, the feral buffalo, feral water buffaloes in Australia, they started with only seven animals and there was only one male. Yes. But after three years there were plenty of males. Right. And they are fighting it out. So.

So you can. So for people listening in, you can start with what you've got. Yeah. And just work from that. So. So you put that ram in with the females five months before you've got good spring growth, so you've got good lamb and outdoors you've got a close window of births. And then you cull the male, right?

Yes. And then you are. You probably have a bigger flow. I mean, you cannot continue forever with only seven years. But if the flock is growing, you're fine, right?

Yeah.

And if you have. If you have something like a few hundred, and if you are using one male for every 10 females, then you can go on forever. And there is. If it's too small, maybe, maybe or maybe not, you can go on. And how do you find out if you can go on Forever. If it works, it works.

Right, so what would people do? Like, you know, say people are starting with small amounts of sheep. They've put the ram in at the right time, then they cull the ram. When you serve the ewes now, you've got to start your record keeping, right? So you're looking for, yes, ewes that give birth to two lambs, no more, no less, that can wean them and birth them on their own. And what should people be keeping records on?

Yeah, like must keep record on. You must keep record on if they needed individual help. You don't take rams from something that needed even individual help. It's simple as that. There is always something in your flock that's self propelled. It may not be the most magnificent thing, but it's self propelled. And you want to breed self propelled because that makes it easier. And I have, I have people, some of the people that listen to me have one difficult lambing and three pet lambs in over 400 lambings, right. It doesn't have to be a mess, just, you know, breed from the lambs that go. Gets up and start drinking. Right. If you have something that's tired and you need to put the milk inside it, it's not the breeder.

So that's not to say, just to re. Emphasize this for listeners. That's not to say anything needs culling at that point. But it's not like if ewe is not breeding healthy lambs or needs help, she is not going to be able to breed a breeder. But it doesn't mean you can't breed her again. But you shouldn't be putting the offspring into the breeding flock, right? So.

You don't need to harvest. You can decide to cull it in April because it was, it made a mess of the lambing. One lamb survived, the other one died and you have to give it a lot of help. So that's not a good way to start. But you can still keep that lamb that you got and you can still keep the yew for another year because you need more numbers. Right? But you make a decision that in April I'm going to cull this animal and then you kill it in, harvest it in November the year after.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and it was lucky the next year, right. So you have now three lamb from it and two are females and now you have a better situation. Right. But you can make the decision in advance.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you said something about a short lambing. It's very important because then you can, you can the comparison between the production of different animals. If they are born within four weeks, you can actually look at them and say the smallest are the worst. Right. Or when you weigh them, the weight means something because they had the same conditions. So that's important. Like you make sure that the birthing season is short.

Yeah.

And that may. If you. Let's say for some animals you have, you buy something that births year round, you buy a flock from different people and so on. Right. But you make sure that your end goal is to have them calving or lambing within the same. Same month. Right, yeah. Because that's what. It's better for management. It's easy to get it, easy to be alert for one month and it's very hard to be alert for three months.

Yeah, precisely. Yeah, yeah. So. So let's say we've got our seven ewes, they've had lambs, and we've got roughly half male, half female. We've culled the old ram. So now what, what's the step for the next cycle, as it were?

And let's say we don't know anything about the use.

Yep. We don't even know what breed they are because we just bought them off some guy on block it or something.

Yeah. And some of them were brown and some of them are black. Right. So, yeah. You know nothing about them. Right. Then you can basically weigh all these rams and remove the lightest ones and just use the heavy ones. And look, look, look at the heavy ones. If, if they look proportional and if they look okay, they are okay. Right.

So let's say, for example, we get seven young rams, seven young ewes, and so we're. We're taking the top three or four of those rams to breed the next cycle.

Exactly. And then as time goes by, you will know good. Good is what good does. Right. So you see a ewe that consistently does good. That's her sons you want. Right. And over time, the more times she has done good, the more lot, the more tickets she has in the lottery. So we had some sheep that were productive for 11 years and on the last four years they had rams in the flock. And why they didn't have from the third year because we didn't mud breed before that. But basically the longer time they stay in the flock and produce in the top 85, which typically the worst 15, it's where you remove a lot of problems and after that it doesn't matter much. Right. For health and reproductive efficiency and so on. So if they produce in your production window, which I Like to put at 85% but you can put it 40% if you are not growing your flock. Right. I like to put a lot of females through testing, so I want every female that is not, not hopeless. I want them to give them a chance. Right. And then I want. So I have more to cull from. Basically I don't want to be in the position that I have to three key keep one teeth. One teeth or three legged animals just to keep the numbers I want, like make sure I have plenty like abundance thinking sort of like that. But over time it kind of shows off which ones are not problematic and work. And then you use their sons and then each year there are certain three year olds that qualify. Right. And there are certain seven year olds that get out because they mess up in the seventh year. But you are still not, it's still a good thing that you, you used them before because they are still better than the other ones. Right. Every sheep will fail at some point.

Yeah.

Is that simple? Right.

So through monitoring their mothers you'll, you'll get automatic qualifiers of breeding rams.

Yes.

But then how, how are you dealing with replacing the ewes? If you, if you're building up your flock to a certain point, what do you then do to monitor the ewes that stay as the primary breeding stock?

Basically, I use every replacement that's not horrible. And then if they come up open, we call them. If they have a problem lumbering, we call them. If they need individual help, we call them. Right. Then the numbers approach. If you cull hard enough, the numbers approach what it was last year. And if you need higher numbers, you have to be more lenient. But you always take out the most, the nervous and aggressive first and then the ones that are not productive. Because a cow that wants to kill you, it doesn't matter if she milks double what the other cows milk do.

Yeah.

And usually this kind of cow, it doesn't want to kill the owner, it wants to kill someone else. You want if it. I mean, I was sorting beef cows with, with the one guy and he's got two now, he's got three grandchildren, but he had two grandchildren. Right. And, and I said, you have culled this cattle. They're not no aggressive cattle here, I said, because you cull them for that, right? Yeah, once in a while I have to sell a cow, but usually it's no problem, right. I said, you don't know what happens around children. They start to walk next year. Right. Then you may have to cull something else because they might Attack children, even if you are grown up, confident people. Right. And so the focus must change once in a while.

Yeah.

And then we walk around in the flock and one of the cows blows. Not to me. Right? And he said, I've never seen this cow be aggressive, ever. I was just hitting her back. It was. She couldn't scare me, but she was threatening me. Right. Because you are. I saw something new. So it's. It can be good for to. If you're calling for disposition, it can be good to bring a stranger in the flock. He's got new eyes, but also your animals will look at him differently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an important thing about the children as well, because animals get surprisingly flighty around little people.

Yeah. I mean, it's. And a farm, it's supposed to be a reasonably safe place. I mean, there are dangers in a farm, but we are supposed to have it in the way that bring the children in the flock, it should be natural, right. We shouldn't, in the name of production, keep animals that hate people. It's as simple as that. Right.

That's meant to be. One of the laws of our domesticated animals is their hierarchy, their quick reproduction and the fact they're not trying to kill us.

You have the laws of robotics, like, you cannot. You cannot harm a human.

But you have this. Like, this seems very easy to manage with sheep because of their short gestation. And so how. I know a lot of people are going to have questions about different animals, like, how would you apply this to, say, beef cattle, where you've got a similar pregnancy length to humans? And having to keep uncastrated bulls, that's gonna, for a lot of people, that's gonna be way outside their normal practice. So what would you do in that case?

Like, most people use bulls, and there is no difference between keeping seven bulls and one bull. It's actually safer to keep seven bulls because they keep each other busy and they don't get grumpy. So. And you can. You can have oxen or steers, you can have them with the bulls. It doesn't matter, right? They're. They're going to play around and have fun anyway. Right? And. And then you can. Even if. If you are too bored, if you are castrating what is not breeding material, you can. Even when it's time for breeding, you can even put the oxen in with the cows as well. It doesn't matter, I guess, people, you have just one flock to manage. Right?

Yeah. And that would be a great benefit. So maybe you could Speak more to that. Like some people would say, well, why am I keeping these uncustrated animals and more animals than I technically need? I don't have the space. Like, what are the pros and cons there? Maybe you could spell that out.

Yeah. Well, like if you know how to feed your animal through holistically planned grazing and through a sensible forage production like hay and silage, whatever. But make sure you have good. Make sure you have good forage for your animals and your bulls will make you more meat than your oxen. Right. And it's not insignificant either. It's if an ox is ready by two years and your bull is ready by 20 months. Right. So that's a lot of. That's a lot of more meat. So, I mean, yes, and bulls are more dangerous. This is obvious. So they need to be taken care of. But it's not worth worse to take care of a big flock of bulls than just one bull. And an upside when it comes to safety is that younger bulls are less aggressive. They may be more playful and so on, but they're less aggressive than older bulls.

Become wondering how you would structure the management, because they're. Obviously, you need to let them grow longer before they're ready to serve the cows.

Yeah, yeah.

How would you manage that?

Typically, I would put the bulls in. I like to measure the quality of an animal at the time where its sons is going to slaughter. I don't care how good a ram looks when it's four years old, because you are going to sell his sons when they are five months old. Right. So that's four or five months is when you are checking which ones you like. So that's one thing, right? One year and three months.

Yeah. So you. So you're then carrying a load of animals that you might not be wanting to through winter or whatever. Like, how do you. How are you managing them? You got to keep them separate, right.

There will be another grazing flock or there will be in another area if you're feeding them. Right. So basically you have. You can have either one flock or two flocks. Right. If you're castrating every bull, then mob breeding is not for you. But it, it doesn't matter if you are keeping 10 bulls or one bull. And if you. Some people have one, just one flock and they're borrowing a bull from someone else, for example. Well, if that's convenient enough, maybe. Maybe mob breeding is not for them. It's all about the context. Right. Relatively easy effort. When you take the bulls that are one year and Three months old, let's say they are born in March and you put them in June for breeding. And it's very easy to see at that age which one other. They are masculine, they are muscular, they are, you know, fat and shiny. Right. It's very easy to see it at that time in the middle of summer there.

Yeah. And would you let them breed for two cycles before culling them then?

Not for two years, but for two. Yeah, for two cycles. Right. And you can even have them breed for three cycles. The important thing is you make sure that most of your animals get pregnant and there is some point where it's ridiculous. Right. If you're. If they're calving four months later, it's inefficient, but you want them to calve in a short window. So. But you also don't want to cull as many, so that's a trade off. And you will probably start by breeding for two months and then you will breed for 42 days and then maybe can go down to 21 days. It depends on who you are. Right. And what the conditions.

So culling less harshly because you've got a slower turnover of the males.

Yeah. But basically you are breeding one season and you have the ones born that year, they will breed the next year.

Yeah.

And how long the breeding period is. We have taken it down to 17 days for the sheep and 21 days for the cows in some places, but double that. And you are better off if you need more replacements, for example.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you. Have you seen anyone doing this in dairy herds? Because that's obviously a very different setup and scenario where males are obviously not wanted in.

I mean, a short breeding period is. It's commonly practiced in, for example, Ireland, where it's. Dairy animals are strictly raised, basically. So. And when it comes to. You can mob breed dairy animals without problems? You have this kind of sorting thing. You have to sort the bulls out through at milking time and so on, which can be fixed by technology. You can give them a transponder and have the. Have them go through a different gate and so on. Right. Or you can. You can cut them through, cut them from the herd anyway. Right. It's also possible if you are a dairy farmer and you don't raise your bulls, you can have a specific farmer raise your bulls every year and you can go and collect the bulls you want to breed from.

Yeah.

I mean, the idea can be tweaked. Right. You don't need. Exactly. You don't. You don't have to make it worse than it has to be. Sort of like that.

Yeah.

There's one thing about dairy animals which make them stand out from the other ones. It's that with dairy animals, if you have artificial insemination and you collect all the statistics, statistics, you basically have mob breeding. Right. You make sure that you're looking at 40 health, health parameters and production parameters. And, and it's, it's a holistic way of breeding the animal. But with beef animals you don't get that. And I'm saying with the Nordic model of how you, how you breed dairy animals, we look at 40 different things and we collect statistics for all of them. Them. And we weight them economically towards each other, economically and socially and so on. Right. So it may or may not be advantage to use mob breeding in a dairy herd, but it depends on what your costs are. For example, if you're not doing, if AI is problematic, maybe using, borrowing your, borrowing your own bulls from your neighbor who raises bulls. Right. Just go and get your bulls, use them for two cycles and put them back with your neighbor and he will finish them, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of scope for like, you know, a new type of dairy that's focused on raising the bulls and selling beef as well.

You know, many, many, many dairy farmers look at culling as something, oh shit, we have to cull something. Right. Not realizing as a holistic dairy farmer noticed that he's producing a lot of beef.

Yeah.

As simple as that. I mean every cow becomes beef if it doesn't die on the farm. But just so making, making the beef production in the dairy, in the dairy herd, make it a theme, start thinking about it and maybe you're breeding, breeding goals are different. Like we said, we talked about the double muscling or like more muscle. Right. It's very possible to have a great grass based dairy where the animals look like beef animals. You get the same production from cemental and a jersey. They just look different, Right?

Yeah.

And you can get something in between as well. Right. We're talking about the Brindle cow, which is my main first owned breed. It's got more muscle than the Simmentaler and it's as small as the jersey and it out produces both in milk. Right. And it's quite possible just change of a change of perspective. Like just realize that a third of your money or a fourth of your money is beef and you're, I mean, because it's like that, right?

I guess it's like it's really suited for the sort of audience listing in here. Whereas, like a modern, you know, robotic dairy, it's just not set up for that change of perspective. Whereas there's a massive marketing scope for the beef coming off a dairy farm. When you think about it, or veal or anything like that, it's. There's a big marketing opportunity.

If, if nothing else, the beef from beef cattle is a worse quality than the beef from dairy cattle. And actually the beef, the milk from beef cattle is of better quality when you make cheese, for example, than the milk from dairy cattle. So once again, I talked about the cats. In the beginning, people like to screw up because we want to. We focus too much on quantity and quality goes out the window. So it's kind of fascinating that beef from a milk from a dairy animal, from a Jersey, from a Scandinavian red, from a Holstein is really good quality. And it's a selling point, really.

Yeah. So, hey, we should hear a bit about your work. So you've been doing different things with creating new breeds. Is that like. Often that's going to involve like breeding in double muscles or whatever to get better combinations of animals, but is that done with mob breeding as well? Maybe you can give us a picture of how you go about that.

With the, with the Brindle cow, we are basically we mixed in a breed that has bigger muscle, it's called double muscle. But it's really twist in the genetics that makes the muscle bigger. So they have a higher muscle mass, they have a higher balance point because muscle balance is up and down all the time and they just move the balance point. And most of most of breeding that has to do with muscular animals. It's in the really intensive beef production in France and Italy and sort of like that. But I just realized one day that grass based, holistically managed animals can look like that as well. They just don't grow up as fast and they can have benefits. In the Brindle cow, they are very nice because they are brown with black stripes. So they're really flashy. And they can be used as a dairy animal as well as a beef animal. And because you can stack them with their genetics and still have their beefy look, which is all possible when you know, when you know the genetics behind it, the functions behind it. You can figure that one out, but. And another stacked function breed we are talking about is the Peace sheep, where we keep the glossy pelts from the Gotland sheep, but in a setting that it has much more muscle and it's specifically bred for forage production, for.

Grass feeding.

Yeah, for Grass feeding and it's specifically bred for holistically managed grazing because that's what the farmer is doing. Right. He's moving them once or twice a day.

That's pretty cool.

The ones that get more full is the ones that can eat more, are the ones that milk more and have the biggest lambs and so on. Right. So over time we are seeing the change that they get bigger and bigger rumens and bigger personal appetite. And on the, we are on the way there. We can't launch this thing yet, but it looks promising.

So tell us about like for context, for people listening in. The Gotland sheep has beautiful skin and the skin is worth more than the meat animal because it's a scrawny kind of sheep.

Yeah. So like it's, it's a middle size, it's a, it's a middle sized sheep and when you, when you harvest it, the, the pelt is potentially worth more than the meat. Even if you just sell it to the slaughterhouse. The, the pelt is a significant portion of the value.

So how, what have you done to create a new breed? Like tell us a bit about the, the process. Like what's involved with that?

Well, we call, we call it the washing out or the washing down. Basically what we are doing, we crossed a meat sheep with a specific genetics for, for a lot of muscle, like the one called double muscling. We crossed that one to a Gotland sheep and then we cross it back to a Gotland sheep and some of the progeny still have the mussel and then we cross those back to Gotland sheep and we cull the rest. So some of them, they, they become ugly. Like they will have ugly wool like a meat sheep but without the muscle. And some will have ugly wool but with the muscle. And then another generation and another generation and we cull half and go on. And after a while they got good pelts. The third generations were all gray, for example, like we want them.

So you ultimately you've got a multi year process to get a consistency of double muscle sheep that have good pelts essentially and how many years to get there.

And this is just. Yes, this will take roughly 10 years. And we are, we are a few years down the line already. We started in 15 with the seriously mob breeding it and did that first initial cross breeding and then now we have split the flock into half. Half of it is washing out the pig sheep as we call it, which is the meat sheep we added. We are basically keeping the smile and you know, like the Cheshire cat, like this the smile remains, but the cat is gone. Right. Sort of like that. So we're just keeping that one gene and it's to be swearing in church a little bit. It's the, it's the poor man's gmo. We are, basically, we are, we are putting a gene from one sheep into another breed. And to give an example on how crazy this is or how what we are actually doing is we are mixing orange juice and coffee, which is at 50, 50, it's disgusting. At 75, 25, it's still disgusting. But when you get little enough orange juice, it will taste like coffee. Or if you get a little enough coffee, it will taste like orange juice. Right. So that's what usually is referred to as breeding up. Like you are washing out one half of it of the crossbreed and you go, go to full. But what we're doing is the same thing, but we're focusing on one gene that we want to stay with us. So we want a little, little bit of this orange juice in the coffee anyway. Right. It's not. We remove the foul taste, but we want the different color or whatever. I don't know, the analogy will break at some point.

So what is it? So you're, you're mob breeding, so you're paying attention to all those parameters of the mothers and of the breeding rams, but you are looking also at the outcome to replace the.

I mean, what we could have done was take ordinary Gotland sheep, put the crossbreed it and then wash it out. It would have been simple, right? It would look like a Gotland sheep, but with more muscle and it would be done fast enough. But what we are doing at the same time is mob breeding it because we don't, we are not satisfied with just the Gotland sheep. A Gotland sheep is fine on its own. It's more thrifty and healthy than many other sheep breeds. But it's still, it's a land race from the beginning, but it's still gone through 50 years of selection for pelts. So it's lot of small weaknesses has been accepted and now we're breeding them out through mob breeding. And we want them more focused on forage, bigger rumen, bigger appetite. And we want this kind of bouncy lambs that just come out and they are up and running before the sibling is born. They're already looking for colostrum. Right. We are seeing that now. We want them bouncier and more like off the ground immediately. Right. And we want, we want this kind of attitude that they Are hungry on life and so on. So we're doing two things at the same time. The mob breeding to make them with more muscle and profitable in two ways. It looks like it's the biggest thing, but that's the small thing. The mob breeding is the main part, because reducing cost and reducing grief, it's where it's at, basically.

Yeah. Okay, so it's complex. And why is it called a peace sheet?

The point is, when many people start using it for the holistic grazing, it's made to fit holistic grazing and it's profitable so that a startup can get his money back fast enough. Right. And he can lean on the peace ship to make money. So that's the point of the peace ship. But why is it called a peace ship? Every time we talk about the peace ship, we start thinking about peace. And without peace, all the other efforts are like they're nothing. So it's a deliberate way of having people working for peace. And essentially other names like the love sheep and the care sheep and so on, but I mean, peace is fundamental. So often when you look at history and you wonder why were people not efficient in the old days? Well, they had to take care of safety first. Right. They lived in inefficient villages because that. Then they can defend themselves. If they live spread out in the countryside, which we're more efficient. Well, it's too deadly. Right. So that in my country, we had peace for 200 years and our perspective has changed a lot. And if you look at places that have wars more frequently and more recently, they can't be efficient and they can't build that good. They can't build that good society because it always breaks down from the war. They want extra focus on peace. It's a little bit humorous, but yeah.

What is the. Like, where have you derived inspiration in terms of like, maybe you could mention there's a couple of books you recommend for people to read more because there's not so much literature on this topic. Right, but you were talking about being inspired by a couple of people.

I have been told I should write. People tell me certain things. I should write that book. I don't know how I could make that book to be not worthy because I like to tell stories. But anyway, there are some people that do this, that do things that are similar to my version of Bob breeding. Because of course, reindeer are bred that way in Africa. Your pet dogs are bred that way and cats are bred that way. Right. So there is, you can see that everywhere. But there is one beef farmer In United States it's called Tom Lassiter. He did this for him and his descendants have done this for roughly 90 years now in a herd of beef cattle. And they have gotten them really, really good. The breed is called Beefmaster. And even though Lassiter and his son in son, sorry, his brother in law whose name is Casey, they are still breeding the best of the best beefmaster by mob breeding. And still somehow people bought these animals and corrupted them by doing the conventional breeding on them so that some certain beefmasters outside of these circles are not no good anymore. Right? So it's in the mob breeding. You can't fix forever good traits by mob breeding. It can be corrupted later. But if you keep the mob breeding, you get them better and better.

It's really about, I mean that speaks beyond to the like. What I like about this whole approach is the pattern based perspective which seems like a child would understand it. And it forces humility to the farmer of really know, like yeah, you're the conductor of the symphony, but you also need to know when to step back out the way to let nature do its thing. Because however, like something I always end up saying is however complex you sort of understand it to be, it's way more complex than that, Right?

Yes. I was teaching this to a farmer in his 60s and he's giving me, he's very knowledgeable, right? So he's asking me really qualified questions and I expound and expound and explain, right. And then he says, and I ask him, do you get this now? And he says, I am still confused, but on a much higher level. But the thing is we are addressing complexity. And anyone familiar with holistic management, it's all about anything we are managing, it's about complexity and we can't know everything. I mean I know in detail a few of these genes, right? But there are 34,000 genes in the average cow, right? Just good luck knowing that. So we can't micromanage it, we must macromanage it. But looking at the cow and seeing if, if she's shedding the hair on time, if she's getting pregnant on time, if the cough is worth anything, right. You can see that if you're addressing complexity, you don't need to know what goes on in the rumen. It's fascinating. You got infosories and all bacteria and all kinds of stuff in there, right? And different cows, they are chewing in different ways. And some cows have stronger teeth and can go on in the teens and some you have to cull earlier and blah, blah. But this is fascinating, but it's not that important because function form follows function, right? Which is from Jan Bonsma, another great one. He's very different. If you want to read something, Jan Bonsma is over the head of most people is not a good way to start. But we have Tom Lasseter and we have Johan Seetzmann, who is talking specifically about how to manage in very brittle environments in Zimbabwe. But his talk about animal breeding, it works in everywhere. So he's one of the good ones.

And I'll get references from you and stick them in links so people can see that. I'm really interested because I remember when you came to the farm, it was quite some years ago, and we were trying to convince a group of interns for someone to take on breeding a meat chicken. Because something that I always end up having to explain to people is like, yeah, we know raising pasture boilers sucks because we're reliant on industry, genetics and these F1 hybrids and all this imported grain. But I still defend this enterprise because it makes a lot of money quickly, it builds soil and it produces something superior to what you buy in store. And as a cash flow management, you know, there aren't many enterprises that can compete with that. And so I'll stand by that until people start buying geese or rabbits off me. But I know in Australia they've bred now a meat bird that's I think 10 weeks to full production. And something I always end up having to justify to people is like, hey, there's nothing wrong with hybrids. It's just the context of the company that owns those hybrids that's the issue. And so.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

I'm still up for paying someone a salary to come breed a meat chicken because I'm too busy to do it. But could you give an outline of like what that project would look like? And hopefully we can find someone that will breed a new chicken for us.

I mean, basically the, the things that made the Cornish cross broilers great, they are legitimate, right? But the context of the breeding, it's for a very controlled indoors environment. So what we can do is drive it on fourth gear instead of fifth gear, right? And there's these Australians and the French and so on that they are driving on third gear or sometimes on second gear. And you know, they have to, they have to make an expensive product, but really we can slow them down, but not that much, and we can breed them more stronger and more healthier and still make hybrids. And we can have a lot of fun with that because basically we can Put half of the earth, three quarters of the breeding goes into one side and, and three quarters into the other. We don't have to take care of everything in one side. And then when we make a hybrid, we can.

Can you explain what you mean by that? I think that would be confusing to people. The three quarters, one side.

And I mean, like, I mean like, if you want the fastest way of, of getting a gray cow, it's to crossbreed a white cow with a black cow, a white bull with a black cow. It's very fast, right? Everyone, every one of them becomes gray and you have a good compromise there, right? This is just a picture. It's irrelevant in any other way. But it's like how to easily do it, right. And how to make a great chicken. For fast meat production, you cross breed two different lines and sometimes three or four lines. But let's make it simple with two lines, right? We, that we can put meat and mother meat and, and mother line. We can have a mother line and the father line and the, and the mother line must have some focus on how many eggs it makes and how much hatchability and so on, right? While a father lion must focus more on muscle and more on growth. There must be growth on both sides because it's a meat chicken. But you can, you can, you have to put something else in there because if the mother chicken is only giving you one egg a week, then it becomes really expensive production anyway, right? So you need to have more parameters while the father line can focus on other things so you can have a different focus. Right.

How many cycles and how long would a project like that take to create a stable, useful meatbird, would you say?

We would come, we would make it great in five years, but we would make it good in three years.

Like good enough?

Yeah. I mean, good enough to produce, I mean any chicken produces meat, right? But it needs good enough. It's to. To make it profitable and manageable. And if it's, if they are too different inside the flock, for example, it's not manageable. You can't kill them on the same day. So there needs to be a consistency there. And that's what takes a while. I mean, you move the right, the right traits and then to all of the chickens and keep it in the same. It takes a while, right? But there's something magical, magical about chickens when, when you are used to breeding horses and sheep and pig sheep and cows, it's painstakingly slow. And with, with chickens, they start to reproduce before they're half a year and, and you get, you can have 200 offspring, right? Or let's say you want strictly to have two generations a year. If they start laying it at five and a half months, you still have 20 eggs, right? Before it's, before it's half a year. And if you have 20 offspring, 10 of them are female and then you go a long way, right? You have a much. And if you, if you can allow yourself to have a generation gap of seven months instead of six months, then you have much more offspring and you can sort even harder. Right, so there's a trade off.

Would you still apply mob breeding to that process?

Yes, but no. I mean there is much of that would be the same. And socially you mob, actually the professionals, they are actually mob breeding the broilers. They're actually. They have a sea of hens and there are 1 in 12 or something or 1 in 20 is rooster and, and they don't care which one is from which rooster because all these roosters are exactly the same anyway, right. The roosters are so in. So line bred that it doesn't matter if this rooster A or rooster C. So they are actually mob breeding in the production line. But we could actually, we could mob breed the parent lines as well. It would be possible. Let's give it six years then. But it would, it would make, I mean a form of mob breeding or a form of variety in there would make a greater pasture chicken. It's that simple. So giving it a little bit of time and like we talked about on Ridgedale three and a half years ago, we need the spirit and the hand. This cannot be done by one person if this one person is not some crazy Vicar in Sweden 50 years ago, which actually made a lot of laying chicken breeds. But I mean, for this purpose we need one person who is very structured and doesn't find boring work boring.

And it's their only job.

And weigh and measure every, every day and being very minute about all the details and I can provide the overview and you know, like talk about this, having this person being so interested he will continue this for every day. And I am not in myself. I know myself too well. I'm not consistent enough for that. Right. So if I would make it on my own, it would be not be as precise because I have this saying from Alan Savory that it's better to be roughly right than to be precisely wrong. But to make a really good pastured chicken, it needs to be very consistent.

Yeah.

And hybridization is part of making it more consistent because if you are, man. I mean, when you're mixing black and white, it matters less if it was cream white or Stockholm white or off white. And it doesn't matter what kind of black it was. If it was brownish black or grayish black, you still get a consistent product. So the hybridization in itself, which makes mess one generation down the line, but you don't go that, you stop. But it's a seedless fruit, right? So we could develop up two parent lines and get a long way in four, four or five years, I guess.

It's the sort of thing that needs a critical mass of pasture poultry producers in the locale where. Because it's the sort of thing that it could easily scale as a business, but then that's a whole different ball game. But it like I'm really up for trying to support people to start up country size or like county size compost business or seed saving or, you know, all these things that are best done at scale. But it's a difficult one with the poultry thing because on one level, like, you know, it's a national scale thing really, I guess. Or the other concern is like, what are the realities of stepping on the toes of big genetic companies? I mean, it's five families that own all the poultry genetics in the world, right?

I mean, it's a very polarized and very strange and confusing business because it's 17 billion birds, but it's still just five families, right? So there's something really off about that. And we could make it something more, more open source, if you like, and free for a free for all and open source thing. It's very hard to fight it, right? Because starting this, this year, 50, 50 years after the other guys, or 70 years after the other guys, it's. It will be all kinds of patent fights and everything, right? But if it's open source, I'm not owning this, I'm not making money from this. Right? And it's like we need more progress than what these families can give us because the critical mass, like you said, the birds specifically bred for pasture production, they are done with the left hand. The ones that did them did not really care, Right? The Free Ranger and Red Ranger and whatever they're called, right? So if someone did that with the right hand, with both hands and with focus, it would be something magnificent.

But how could that concept of open source work in that context where like it needs dedication of a person or a team, like, how do you open source that?

Maybe we need to have this crowdfunded as well, right?

Well, I Reckon if anyone's like, how do we know that someone's truly dedicated to taking on the mission?

We will find out. It's time for. We want 100 candidates and we want to weigh and measure them. Right. And if the candidates are not good enough, we will mob breed them. But like you mentioned the geese and rabbits, like there are enormous advantages of geese and rabbits simply because they eat the forage. What makes us get away with raising chickens on the grass? It's that it may be horrible, but it's still better than what the other guys are doing, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And it's, it's better to support monoculture grain production without the chicken houses than with the chicken houses. It's. And it's legitimate. It's a legitimate step. But like long.

It's only a step. Yeah, yeah. Well this is the, this is the trouble I always come up against Bjorn, is people will always bring up that question, but it. The easiest answer is like, well, how many pastured geese did you buy in the last year? Or how many rabbits? I mean, you know, the only people in Sweden that eat rabbits are the people that raise themselves.

So it's that simple. And I was act. I was talking to my favorite engineer yesterday about I have invented a cage for rabbit grazing rabbits and I was just speaking to an engineer yesterday and we're going to make the blueprints and we're probably publishing, publishing them through Ridgedale to get them started and then we can get the feedback and so on. Because my current problem is I don't raise rabbits. Right.

I would, I would happily trial them. We had, we. Our rabbit thing was quite short lived because we had, We've had three different occasions on our farm where we've allowed people to. Ending up to bring a dog and they're always, yeah, my dog's good with livestock's fine. And every time it's been a nightmare and twice they killed our rabbits. So.

And then you. And then. I mean rabbit production is sensitive from the point of view that it's so biohazard is. I mean the biosecurity is a problem, right There. There are so many diseases that can kill all of your rabbits.

Yeah, it could be, but I think I would like to try again. So I'm certainly up for testing some.

I mean, I mean I was. I'm. I have this dream when the next time I have rabbits, right. I'm still not going to hang out with rabbit people anyway, right. I'm going to hang out with cow people and horse people anyway, right. So I'm hoping that I will have less like make a context where I don't bring disease to the, to the. And you, of course you can vaccinate to certain of these diseases, but some of them, they just destroy everything. Right. And of course you can have the, your own breeding composite breed of rabbits with, with rabbits the same way as with chickens. It's extremely fast, Right?

Yeah.

You can have two generations a year and you have a lot of lot to choose from and there are basically no excuses to, to keeping rabbits that are not up to. I mean you have to have no nonsense rabbits, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and with, with geese, the same thing. For a more, let's say a more primitive way of production. They are fascinating, but people don't want to. So the market is narrow because people don't want to pay what it costs to produce it basically.

Yeah, it's that fine balance where we've really chosen products that people naturally buy and eat regularly. And that's. I think you have to start farming like that because you're not going to make it through the first few years otherwise. But it's. I think we're at a position now where we could actually do some geese and rabbits in a small way and we would shift them because we have a big enough customer base now that are curious about things. But it's, it seems to me obvious that we need to go in those directions. But maybe we can talk more about that another time about doing some breeding projects around that just on a small scale, just for interest would be really cool. But I want to maybe circle back. We better wrap up soon. But I want to circle back to the mob breeding. I guess for most listeners they're not going to be venturing into breeding peace chickens or love giraffes or whatever, but they're going to be interested in the mob breeding concept. And I mean this can be applied to anything, right? For pigs and horses, whatever. Is there any, anything that people shouldn't try it on, as it were?

Like, like, like Yoel Salatin says, anyone can farm. So I'm saying anyone can breed, but actually very few breed. But anyone can cull, right? And we simply. If you simply breed from the, the animals you didn't cull, you get a long way and that means anyone, anyone can do it. Right? And that's. It's easy to talk, it's easy to get start talking about what I'm interested in and what I did and what I want to do. But the basic is that mob breeding is for Everyone. And you can do it with horses. You have the social problem of putting more than one, more than one stallion in there. It should be fine if you have, if you have 20 of them. But, but basically they fight to. They fight and so on. Right. But it doesn't work well with horses. But you can still replace the stallions and you can still have the same way of sorting. Right, let's say we're talking about working horses, not racehorses, because racehorses doesn't work with mob breeding. Right. Mob breeding is not making winners, it's just making sure that there are no losers. So it's, it's, it's a. And with pigs, on postured pigs, it works really well. We have, for example, one in. My friends in South Africa are doing it and Tim o' Neill and Hendrick o', Neill, sorry, not Hendrik o' Neill is, is doing that. And, and it works really well for them. And they have, they have in a few years gotten really functional pigs. So. And with a little tweaks, you can do it with Muscovy ducks or with geese or these, some of these birds they marry sort of. You can't just change the males anytime, but you can change the generations. Right. You can start over from a new generation. And especially when you make the composite breeds and you have a fast turnover, you can, you can get there really fast. Like you can improve the number of eggs and the number there and the slaughter weights and everything at the same time. Sort of like that.

Yeah.

Which is not so well, it's what we're doing with the, with the peace sheep and the cow, but it's really, really slow. But, but with birds you can do it a lot faster and with rabbits. Right. But we need, in order to have this work, we need to get out of, of the great bull syndrome. We must know that one bull is just one bull. It's, it's just a step on the way and you. And we're building a kind of staircase. We don't know if the steps are going up or down. So it's. We must see. See the long term of everything. Right. And, and we are basically keeping the ones that are steadily going up.

And it's quite interesting that whole. Maybe you can speak more to it that is it the Aleutian Islands, where those cattle were left off by sailors for food. I mean, they've essentially been mob breeding themselves with no hay and harsh winters. And there'll be quite big diebacks, like 30% of the herd. But they're good. Right.

And the Funny thing is there, the only breeding perspective there is survival.

Yeah.

And what we are doing in mob breeding is applying natural selection. We are just changing the rules of the natural selection. We are changing the framework. So you say, can we get the best survival within these frames that are slightly different? Like we want. Also we want shiny wool or we want more fat than a wild animal would have or whatever, right?

Yeah.

But the same principles and fascinating thing with feral cattle like the Aleutian Islands. And when, when, when the performance of the animal important, like form follows function, like bonsmo sales.

Right.

So if the, if the framework, selection, framework is sensible enough, you get very feminine cows and you get very masculine bulls. Right. But if the. Because that's the way they come from. The aurochs had a big dimorphism. Right. But if the selection is messed up, you don't see that they all look like stairs, like Holsteins. Right. Totally androgynous. And so you see, you can see that something is off there. But these. And you can see it in the sports cattle of the. You know, the Americans like to ride bulls, for example, Right. They basically bred anything that was dancing high enough and now they're starting to look all the same. They all get the same athletic look. So even they are from 20 different breeds, they end up the same because this is the form that dances the highest and kicks the most and dances the highest. Right. So it's kind of like we're talking about the great bull syndrome and how to get around that. Like, look at the function and forget what in the papers. One detail with mob breeding is that every animal has a mother and a maternal grandmother, but that's it. Because we know that the quality of the paternal grandmother is very high, but we don't know what animal has what grandmother. And when we blind ourselves to the pedigree, we somehow start seeing the animals. It's kind of counterintuitive, but it's better to look at the actual animals and their actual performance than dreaming of pedigrees. Because pedigrees, if they are not tied to a land title, they are not important, Right?

Sure. I think it's like, yeah, for someone coming into farming with an entrepreneurial sort of flexible mindset, it's. It's going to be easy to grasp this concept. I guess the sort of perspective shift you're talking about is going to be harder for people that have been farming in a certain way for decades. It's the same sort of paradigm shift that you would need to go from fix stocking to Plan grazing or something like this, right?

Something of the sort.

Yeah.

But I always wonder why plant grazing seems to be controversial. I mean, when you are making silage, you are not cutting it when it's 8 or 9 centimeters. You wait until it's full cut. Right. When it's grown up, then you cut and then you don't go cutting there two weeks later. You wait until it's grown up. So I'm. Sometimes I wonder. But yeah, something like that. Not everyone will get it and some of the people that understand it will refuse it anyway because they are invested in something else.

Yeah.

And we must respect that. It doesn't. To me, it doesn't matter if the world does not go to mob breeding, but we are giving this to the ones that want it and make them successful. And that's good enough. Right. If we can make. We need all the young, we need all the new farmers we can get. So anything that helps them on the way. And you do a good job there because you have presented a lot of things that can make the road shorter.

Yeah, no, thank you. But I think also you could. It would be cool to have a support group around that topic somewhere down the line for people to share their experiences and to. Because it's just unknown territory, isn't it, for people. Sounds like you should make a Facebook.

Group, but yet another one.

I think that that's a great place to wrap it up. It's been super inspiring to hear about and I think a lot of people will be very inspired by that and also have a lot of questions. So I guess they can post questions and comments in the video below. But is there anywhere where people can be in touch with you if they want to be?

Well, they can find me on Facebook. I'm still going to play with that. So maybe if I can be useful.

I can put a little link to.

And if they want me to look at everything they have and turn it upside down, they can pay me and I will come and visit and sort things out. But. But I can do a lot from the comfort of my share, just answering questions and so on. Right. Cattle breeding. Livestock breeding is a very simple endeavor. The only difficult part is to keep it simple. So that's a paraphrase of Lassiter, but great.

Thanks so much for taking the time, Bjorn. I really appreciate you sharing with everyone and yeah, look forward to people's comments on this one.

I do too.

Great. Okay, see you. Ciao.

Ciao.

Okay. I hope that was interesting and informative for you. It's a very interesting topic and one that's not discussed enough. And something that I think is really a big part of regenerative agriculture and holistic grazing is this whole holistic ecological approach to breeding, and I think it could be very useful for a bunch of you. I'm really excited he got across that you can really take control of breeding and animal replacement on the farm. That's very interesting. Now I think it's best if you have comments or questions to put them in the questions below. And Bjorn's happy to answer a few questions there. And yeah, hopefully that was stimulating. Thanks so much for watching folks. As always. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and you can find out a whole bunch more in the links below about our book and online trainings, etc. See you in a video soon.