Today, I am going to talk about why pink eye, foot root, and other health problems like grass staggers or grass tetany occur mostly on cool season grasses.

We need to understand that cool-season grasses and warm-season grasses are very different.

This means that we need to manage them differently in terms of stage of maturity at grazing, best livestock genetics for each one under the Total Grazing Program and I am going to explain why this is so important.

Have you ever wondered how day length could be important in how grass grows? Not only in that it will produce more on longer days but what effect that has on its quality?

Today I am going to go through the huge impact on forage quality that altitude and latitude has.

We have known, for a very long time, that alfalfa hay grown at high altitudes will be much higher in nutritional value than the same alfalfa hay grown at low altitudes. Forages grown at high altitudes are lower in lignin, which makes them more digestible.

Latitude also plays an important role in determining the quality of grass; the growing season is shorter than in lower latitudes, but it is intense: think of Canada compared to the Tropics.

Forage quality is also higher in high-latitude environments than in lower-latitude environments, and this higher quality translates into better animal performance.

So now we know that high altitude and high latitude create higher quality forages with higher energy and lower lignin. How does this affect our decisions?

Low and erratic rainfall environments have lost many of their best forage species by overgrazing.

As we know, overgrazing is returning to re-graze too soon before the plant has fully recovered, and this happens when we allow our livestock to do selective grazing. Eventually, the best species which were perennials are replaced by annuals and invasive species as the land degrades or desertifies.

Today I am going to talk about why it is so important to bring back perennial grasses and palatable shrubs in low-rainfall environments.

I just read a post by someone stating that he is regenerating his land with selective grazing, he wrote that not taking more than 40% of available forage allows higher photosynthesis and thus, a much higher production. 

Then, he added, the soil surface is shaded and the sun will not damage soil microorganisms.

He even wrote that there are various scientific papers supporting this type of grazing and most people approved of his writings and said that taking less than half of the total forage available is best for the land and for the animals. 

If you have been following my podcasts, YouTube videos, Masterclasses, and online courses you know that I do not recommend selective grazing as a program, now I will speak about the reasons why a selective grazing program, at the high stocking rates required for maximum productivity and profitability will ALWAYS end in overgrazing.

In this episode, I will speak of how to make long-term decisions that include ALL, and not just economics or lifestyle or workload.

We need to be more ‘whole-istic’ than the holistic people as we need to take EVERYTHING into account.

But how do you know that the decision you made was good?

Of course, there is a long process that we need to make before we come to a conclusion.

We also need to be wise and do our homework, but even after crunching all the numbers, talking it over with our spouse and family, and making sure this is the best decision, we still need time to process all the information, consequences, and outcomes before we implement action.

Land prices have increased over the past 50 years, so much that in most cases it is hard to pencil out a livestock operation with a land credit to buy the land and livestock.

This is disheartening to many aspiring livestock producers who want to have a life in the country regenerating the land and producing the healthiest animal products possible at the same time.

We now have the knowledge to do this at a very low cost but we need to have control over a piece of land as the total grazing program gives results in the short and the long term.

So, what to do if we do not have the money to buy a piece of land? Not everybody inherits land and most of us did not have that luxury. We can be creative and the first thing we need to learn is how to do numbers correctly before embarking on a new venture; if it does not work on paper it will not work on the ground.

Join me in this week’s podcast to know if leasing land for cattle is worth it.

If you are one of my students in the total grazing program, this will interest you. You know the importance that I give to humus and how regeneration of soils totally depends on increasing the humus in them.

For more than 100 years, humus has been used to refer to the stable fraction of organic matter that is no longer easy to degrade under the action of microorganisms and is what determines the true fertility of our soils.

Lately, some people have written to me that humus does not exist and that a study done by Lehmann in 2015 proves it, so I started to investigate because 7 years have passed since that discovery and nothing has happened.

So does humus really exist?

Have you ever heard of selecting bulls that excel in daily weight gain? Weaning weight, yearling weight, etc.?These are called performance tests and have some problems in design and when they measure an animal.

We almost always select the Bulls that have gained the most in a performance or daily gain test. Why don't we select those that gain less per day? What does the breeder think when he makes the decision to choose his next Bull or ram?

Now, let's analyze what the daughters of the bulls or males we choose need in order to be profitable under low inputs in a real-life situation, and at high to very high stocking rates.

Most of us have heard that we must take the "whole" into account so as not to make mistakes that will have long-term consequences.

And this is true because if we do not take everything into account we may not be successful in what we want to achieve.

It is said that many of the undesirable consequences that we are having today with the use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides are due to not taking into account the entire soil biome, its interaction with the quality of the plants that we produce and how them, by not being well nourished in a natural way, send a signal to pest insects so that they come and devour them. This happens because the molecules are in a simple way, the way that the insect pest needs to be able to digest it. This is a small example of what happens when we do not take into account the "whole" when deciding on something.

I believe that it is really necessary to take the "whole" into account without dogmatism and trying not to leave anything out. For this, it is necessary to ALWAYS follow nature and NEVER go against it. Why? Because nature has bigger pockets than any of us!

There are many companies out there offering protein supplements with 100% or even 130% protein content.

What does that mean? We know that it would be difficult to get to 100% protein as there are other ingredients to account for. 

Non-Protein Nitrogen is just that, nitrogen without it being assembled into amino acids. 

Because Non-protein nitrogen sources are usually cheaper than real protein from oilseed meals or alfalfa hay, they can be used when convenient but with great caution. There are many horror stories about someone losing cattle to urea poisoning.

The rapidly available nitrogen in urea can create an ammonia excess in the rumen which raises the pH and can create bloat. It also can go into the bloodstream where it will take the place of hemoglobin displacing oxygen turning the blood chocolate color and the animal dead. 

With all of this, you may ask: why go to the trouble and management to use NPN if it has so many risks?

Understand when and how NPN can be used on different classes of livestock in this episode.