Don't go to the town diner for breakfast in the morning — it’s too far of a drive. I would imagine, though, that with beef prices as high as they are for calves, there would be plenty of ranchers horn-tooting about their recent paychecks.

Weaning weights have been and often are the centerpiece of bragging rights, and topping the market with quality calves is another. Of course, it would be foolish to forget that we are paid by the pound or neglect the need to sell quality calves, but too many times we focus on our gross income and not our net income. How much did it cost to produce those pounds? What percent of the cow herd was open?

Over the past decade, I’ve come to appreciate a few important metrics to measure my farm’s success. Pounds of calf weaned per pounds of cow herd exposed is one metric that accounts for fertility, weaning percentage, and animal health. One must understand the costs associated with those pounds, which brings us back to our balance sheet of dollars in and dollars out. Understanding profitable culling techniques and when and how to sell that calf crop can also add considerable value to your field and forage management.

Adaptive grazing

In terms of forages, doing more with less is one way to extract value from good management. Using some form of managed grazing can help protect your forages from being overgrazed and keep them in their optimum growth phase for longer periods, resulting in more pounds of beef produced per acre. This can be as simple as building a fence to divide one large pasture into two, or be as labor intensive as moving cattle to new paddocks multiple times a day.

I like to employ adaptive grazing. By utilizing perimeter hotwire and subdividing pastures with polywire and step-in posts, I can move cattle as often as twice a day or as little as once a week. Water, shade, animal nutritional needs, forage type, and my personal schedule all formulate a plan of action regarding animal movement and paddock size.

The higher the stocking density — or how densely you fence cattle for short periods — the less selective grazing occurs. Cattle will start taking bites of plants they otherwise might not have tried. They will also trample more forage.

We are more likely to utilize higher stocking densities with mature forages and then allow for longer recovery periods. On our perennial pastures during the growing season, we typically move cattle every two to four days in appropriately sized paddocks to allow some residual and a faster recovery. Then, we wait until those pastures are fully recovered before returning.

Redefining “weed”

Another way we try and optimize systems here in southern Georgia is by working with weeds. The first step is defining them. Do our cows eat it? If so, then it’s not a weed. Does the plant dominate its environment and outcompete desirable species? If not, then it’s not a weed.

We believe that the complex biological system of the soil microbiome is trying to repair the damage we have done through our management mistakes. If we are constantly using pesticides to disturb soil and plant life, we will always be fighting against nature. Quorum sensing, or cell-to-cell communication, is one fascinating activity that soil microorganisms do to promote a synergistic and collective effect on the health of plant communities. Likewise, seeds in the seedbank germinate based on complex interactions that occur to promote the optimum health of the greater soil organism. The more we dig into the science of soil, the more we uncover how hard the soil is working to repair our mistakes.

We do soil sample, but we do not put commercial fertilizers on our grazing pastures. We are playing the long game, allowing both the sampling and the soils to show us our deficiencies. After over a decade of this practice, we see a multitude of forb, legume, and grass species we did not plant that are thriving in our pastures. These species change throughout the season, and we have learned when and how to graze them.

Little barley, which is high in protein and palatable during the vegetative stage, has about a seven-to-14-day window to utilize before it produces a seedhead and becomes a weed. Pigweed shoots are nibbled on in early growth phases, too, as is smutgrass, which is a cuss-worthy problem most of the year. In the spring, we try and allow the wild ryegrass and white clover a chance to hit their exponential growth phases before grazing; the same goes for crabgrass in the summer.

We corral our weeds with two mowings per year following a grazing event, using a fully depreciated 1982 John Deere 4240 and a 14-foot mower to keep costs down. Those clipping events keep the broadleaf species from dominating the sward and move the nutrients they mined from the subsoil to the topsoil layer, acting as a fertilizer for the grass species. With adequate moisture, we typically see a fertilizer effect for our bahiagrass- and bermudagrass-dominated pastures.

Eyes on organic matter

Soon, we will be experimenting with vermicompost extracts to add microbial activity to our sandy loam, low-organic matter soils. One thing that is obvious when you pull fertilizer inputs is the difference in production and species in 1% organic matter soils versus 2.5% organic matter soils. The former are usually dominated by the most aggressive weeds and grasses, while the latter tend to have more diversity and produce more season-long biomass and better cow pies.

We like to “hay bomb,” or feed hay more densely, on those low-organic matter soils to jump-start biology, improve soil pH, and lay down nutrients to feed the soil critters. We also feed hay and minerals on top of our weedy areas to create disturbance and inspire Mother Nature to shift the plant communities. Sometimes we broadcast seed afterward to see if she likes our ideas.

There really isn’t a prescription for optimizing your operation — it’s just a mindset. How do we find a profitable level of production over the long term? Each manager has to answer this question for themselves, but hopefully some of our practices and ideas might inspire your own solutions so you can brag about your earthworm counts and the amount of taxes you had to pay at the local diner.

This article appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Hay & Forage Grower on page 14-15.

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