Dealing With Drought continued from page thirteen
buying breeding stock, and the best quality meat products if they are buying meat,” he says.
separately. Then I read about someone who grazed them all together and A Family Affair that made sense, so we did it. This was one of the greatest things we’ve “My wife Rhona and I have 4 daughters. Virginia is 21 and finishing up ever done,” says Lemke. a Masters Degree in business at Howard Payne University. Margaret is The various grazers complement one another in their grazing habits 18 and a freshman in college majoring in business and playing basketball and plant use. “It’s amazing how well they work together and move for Tarleton State University. We also have 11-year-old twins, Catherine together. The sheep and goats, guard dogs, cows with calves, all graze and Caroline. They enjoy helping on the ranch and we let them participate together. The late stockers and finishers go to different pastures, but the wherever they can. They don’t do much with the cows and calves but they rest are one big herd,” he says. help a lot with the sheep and goats. They also do the gardening, as well The pastures provide more pounds of meat per acre, running the as managing the mobile chicken pens around the pastures in spring and various species together, than if they are run separately. “We also utilize summer,” says Lemke. our forage base much better, and give “We have a few hens—to have eggs the maximum time between grazing— for our own consumption, but the last for a good, long rest period,” he says. “In the spring and summer when couple of years we’ve been working with meat chickens. I am amazed at the chemical trucks are rolling up and Grassfed Livestock Alliance number of people who want local down the road and farmers are pasture-raised chicken with no Lemke is the Production Manager for the Grassfed Livestock Alliance. The spraying their pastures, we just use antibiotics, hormones or chemicals. This is still a new enterprise for us, but GLA has producers throughout the electric fence to move the animals a growing one. The girls help feed the southwest in Texas, Oklahoma, chickens and make sure they have Louisiana and Arkansas. “All of our around to eat the weeds.” water, and do whatever needs to be producers are required to be members done on a day-to-day basis,” he says. (in good standing) of the American The girls are getting very good at their Grassfed Association (AGA) and follow tasks. Every day is a learning experience, and they are learning as their grassfed standards. Those are the standards we believe in. As the they work. industry grows, there has to be a certifying organization that leads the “We are all still learning,” Lemke notes. He chuckles at people who way in defining what grassfed is and isn’t, and I believe that the AGA is claim to be experts and claims there is no such thing. The first thing he the organization to do it. There are too many people out there claiming they are grassfed, but not backing this up with any kind of certification.” In tells producers is that he is not an expert, and that if someone comes to our place saying they are an expert, show them the gate. January 2014 Lemke was named to the AGA Board of Directors. “A person who always thinks he/she is still the teacher and not the “Grassfed is somewhat of a fledgling enterprise today, even though pupil is usually too closed-minded to learn anything new. Even when you this is the way farmers and ranchers used to finish animals—for think you have something figured out, something new comes along that centuries— until feedlots became the norm. Grassfed is nothing new, but producers are rediscovering it has some difficulties. We work very hard to requires a different approach—and you realize how little you truly know and how much you still have to learn.” provide our customers with the best quality breeding stock if they are
The Charter Trials continued from page three
2,000 paddocks per herd. His herd calved on green grass. He used higher protein supplementation when the cattle were on dry grass in the winter. Zietsman says the most unfinished of his management changes is improving the cattle genotype for higher inherent body condition and greater disease and parasite resistance. He uses figures from the Charter Estate trials and from his own ranch data to show maximum sustainable stocking rate is the most important economic factor in ranch
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management. (See sidebar on page 3). On top of that, he says, when you triple stocking rate on a cow-calf operation, you only need a 30% calving rate to equal the profit from a conventional cow-calf operation with an 80% calving rate. These are particularly interesting numbers in light of a study featured in the January 2013 issue of Beef Producer. At the request of this magazine, Texas economist Stan Bevers used real numbers from the standardized database he keeps on ranches in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
September / October 2014
Bevers calculated 30% higher gross return per herd from only a 50% sustainable increase in stocking rate. He also estimated an 8.5% increase in net profit per female. That story can be found in the archives section of www.BeefProducer.com. “When people are presented with these facts ... it becomes very obvious that increasing stocking rate by utilizing grass more efficiently and growing more of it, whilst improving the land, is the only logical way forward,” Zietsman says. This article is reprinted by permission from Beef Producer where it was first printed. To learn more about Beef Producer go to: www.beefproducer.com.