a regenerative farming student's thoughts

mainly focused on holistic livestock management with interest in integrating perennial fruits and pasture-cropped grain alongside livestock

[happybone-blog-blog]

more farm inspiration

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Genetic mutation from one bull caused loss of 500,000 calves

Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, or Chief for short, is responsible for 14 percent of the current Holstein genome in the U.S.

Single best example of why AI is wrong. It produces sick livestock and ends up in literally millions of dollars of loss annually. One ejaculation equals one fertilization. When you separate one ejaculation into 500 straws, you’re giving 499 inferior sperm cells an egg to fertilize when they naturally would have failed to outcompete the strongest sperm. That means you get ONE calf of quality and 499 calves of increasingly inferior quality, all the way down to calves that are not able to even grow in the womb. Abortions, stillbirths, and debilitating mutations are all common and logical results of AI. Buying a semen straw is like buying a half-eaten sandwich. If you want to make a profit and have healthy, unstressed  animals, you can’t do it.

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Protecting, defending, and broadening the rights and viability of independent farmers, artisanal food producers, and their consumers.

The action alert page on this website is pretty useful. Just two days ago the USDA announced they plan to mandate RFID chips in each animal that crosses state lines. Just another way to make life harder with no reason other than to extract more money from small farmers and criminalize those who don’t comply. They already require this stuff in Europe and the farmers there are not happy about it.

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I don’t see William Albrecht mentioned very often in conversations about  regenerative agriculture but I think he’s got a real wealth of knowledge for those serious about farming. Volume 2 of his collected essays, Soil Fertility and Animal Health, really opened my mind to the mineral content of soil’s effect on vegetation quality. Not just of perennial pasture plants, but food crops as well. Check the page with the heading, “Mysteries of Creation”. Soil mineral amendment results in fresh ripe fruit that doesn’t spoil for over six weeks? Imagine the implications on food supply chains and food waste. Pick your jaw up off the floor. All that being said, Albrecht wasn’t acquainted with any kind of holistic planned grazing, and didn’t know that bacteria and fungi are responsible for soil and plant mineral metabolism. He died in 1974, just as soil science started to take a real look at the microbiome. I also read volume 6, Albrecht on Pastures, but I found it to be basically a less readable rehash and not worth buying. Pick this guy up if you want to get a practical, readable introduction to soil science.

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Tom Trantham of Happy Cow Creamery in Pelzer, South Carolina. This guy stumbled into a lot of wisdom. It really goes to show how insanely productive Holsteins can be just by adding fresh vegetative forage to their diet. I think he could increase per acre productivity and quality of milk through stocking more cows of a smaller grass-genetic breed, though. That would probably eliminate the need for a mixed ration to aid digestion as he mentions in another YouTube video. That would make a feed barn useless and allow for manure to be spread naturally across pastures in pats rather than sprayed on by a spreader. I’d also try to work out a portable milking parlor design so that there isn’t an overly-impacted path back to the parlor from all the paddocks. But it’s really interesting to consider whether or not there’s a significant enough production increase to grazing crops instead of perennial pasture to justify the labor invested in cropping. In the case of milking through winter, it would definitely be necessary to graze crops in order to maintain condition on the animals. Cool guy.