From the Pastures: Why location matters

“Location, location, location” is central to real estate, but it should be central to livestock farmers, too. I took the Bud Williams “Hand ‘n Hand” Marketing School and Stockmanship School in-person classes in Bolivar in southwestern Missouri the first week of March. Just a few of the things I learned were you must include a profit in everything you do. There are no breakeven thoughts allowed. I must think and do the math to find the overpriced livestock I have and then replace them with undervalued livestock, but only if I can make a profit. The location does not have to be the same sale barn.

For livestock handling: 1. Think. 2. Observe the stock. 3. Then put my mind in a happy frame of mind before starting to move them. Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.”

Next comes locating myself and the help in the correct position to slowly move the stock as low stressed as possible to the place I want them to go, after I have convinced the stock that is the way they want to go. Easier said than done.

So, after a day and a half in the marketing class and a day and a half in the stockmanship class, I had a day and a half at the Bud Summit. This is a meeting of people, “Budders,” that actually use the marketing and low-stress handling on their livestock. The ages ran from 8 months to over 80 years old, with four teenagers and 10 people between 20 and 30 years old. So, out of the 56 attendees, 25% were under 30. Pretty impressive for agriculture.

One guy had 1,500 goats he rented out for brush clearing. Plus he had 1,500 hair sheep, too. Most of the people had big herds of cattle. Three guys came from Canada, and the first speaker was on Zoom from Australia. He mustered his 10,000 head of cattle with a helicopter.

The second speaker was Jennifer Ligon, a Virginia Cooperative Extension agent. She had facts and numbers showing how many more dollars per head her low-stress handling producers were getting over the conventional cattlemen. The low-stress handled cattle lost less weight in transport and started gaining weight faster than the other cattle. The location of the humans when they gathered, loaded, unloaded and then de-stressed the cattle in the receiving yards all played into taking the stress off the cattle.

At the Southern Indiana Grazing Conference, Greg Halich, forage systems economist at the University of Kentucky, talked about bale grazing and how it has improved his ground and others who have used it. Location of the bales need to be at least 20 feet apart and positioned where you need to improve the soil.

Nutrient values in one ton of hay are: nitrogen, 53 pounds; phosphorus, 18 pounds; and potassium, 80 pounds — and about 75% of those values will come out the back end of a cow or sheep. So, if you have four tons per acre of hay bales stacked on the ground or unrolled on the ground you have quite a bit of nutrients there, so you want to place it wisely.

At the Illinois Lamb & Wool Producers meeting, University of Illinois Department of Animal Sciences associate professor Josh McCann talked about “Staying Profitable in Dry Times.” He showed a map of Illinois and where the dry spots — and the really dry spots — are. The location of where you farm determined if you were wet or dry.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been in south-central Missouri, south-central Indiana and southern Illinois and they are wet to moist. Not so in central Illinois and going eastward. Location, location, location!