Herd impact saves soils? #cattle #soilhealth #grazing

Interested in diving further into the story of this husband and wife ranching duo? Check out “Herd Impact” on YouTube!

How do two people (sometimes three) run 5300 head of cattle on 14,000 acres?

By focusing on herd impact.

As Deborah Clark explains here, “herd impact” is multifaceted concept. The components include soil disturbance from the livestock’s hoofs, fertilization from dung and urine, and purposeful grazing to nurture the growth of denser, healthier grass.

The rest period after the impact is an integral part of this method’s effectiveness. It’s a balance of not stripping the land, but mimicking nature’s regenerative process that allows those native grasses to grow, like the Eastern Gamma Grass.

Mob grazing those cattle into one area is easier to manage as well, making it possible for 2-3 folks to run one massive herd.

Interested in diving further into the story of this husband and wife ranching duo? Check out “herd impact” on YouTube!

About the Farmers:
Emry Birdwell and Deborah Clark
Birdwell & Clark Ranch in North Texas
33 inches yearly rainfall
5300 head of cattle
14,000 grazeable acres

[willaknotts]

Thank you for all you do to feed America and the way you care in doing it. We need you. I buy local here in Vermont. Stay strong. Live long! ❤

[JamesThomas-dnhz]

Love that you guys are doing this! Seems to be far better for the land and the animals.

[taberjordan]

One of the reasons North American Bison are so important.

[rickstrandberg]

I wish I knew about the carbon cowboy videos before I sold my flint hills pasture. You folks are doing us all proud. God bless ❤

[sarahdeason]

This intelligence and research is amazing .. This should be taught everywhere it could be applied .. In awe of this information ❤

[matayojosephine]

I’m so glad farmers are starting to figure out they don’t need the dam chemical companies to make a profit. Thank you lord let’s put Monsanto and the others out of business

[mtngrl]

I love rotational grazing habits. On smaller properties with horses you can make what is called a "paradise paddock". The "pasture" is on the inside closed off and there is usually a track around that where horses imitate the travel grazing they would do in the wild. You can lay down different surfaces like rock and logs so they get good exercise and their hooves get nice and hard and get naturally worn down.

[suzdeangelo]

Praise God. Bless your wisdom for looking at alternatives. Be prosperous.😊😊😊😊😊❤❤

[barrymantz]

In my country we collect cowpoo in the massive stables we have, ... mix it with water and spray it onto the land just after we cut the gras, an took out the hay! So all winter it can go into the ground to furtilize. In spring the grass is nice and young and the cows have plenty of fresh grass!

[alicecarmona]

This is very interesting. Many blessings of success and safety to ranchers that are figuring this out because this can't be good news for the huge corporations. We all know how they don't like competition.

[bigmikesproducts]

I really enjoyed learning about the science of farming and agriculture. Your content is very compelling.

[Jamiebrackenmusic]

This subject is one of the most interesting and hopeful things I have discovered. Thank you for the content.

[GLJ]

The way it was told to me, because of the size of the bison herds we had, they would overgraze an area, then move on, the antelope would follow the bison to the same area later and eat the growing weeds, giving the grasses what they deeded for regrowth. Might've been bad info, but thats what i was taught.

[maggieholt]

So glad to see this in the Shorts on YouTube where it can reach so many more folks who can make good use of this information!!! 😊

[dieterjacobs]

Rotating the cattle around and rotating crops, getting back to old school farming.. don't need the all the steroids, antibiotics and Healthy land, healthy animals, healthy food, healthy The farmers coming together with the environmental A win - win....

[jackiecarter]

You two are AMAZING farmers! Thank you for sharing yourselves with us! ❤🐾❤️🐾❤️🐾

[justaguyreal]

seriously, just look at the old american bison model as millions grazed moving over the lands and the lands recovered and were beautiful. people simply dont think enough. pesticides were absurd. so glad to see ranchers and farmers are realizing and learning the differences.

[Brian-uytj]

I needed to edit this My numbers were admittedly outdated.

And if you grass feed them to harvest you don't need all of the corn and the feed lots. 96% of all the corn grown in the US is used for feed.
(at one point this was accurate but now we throw tons of corn away on alcohol production which is terribly inefficient compared to making alcohol from sugar cane, so, the 96% statistic is no longer accurate)
Imagine if instead of corn you left it as grass and raised more cattle this way. all of a sudden we could provide the world all the beef it wants.

PS Grass fed Beef is healthy.
It is the grain fed are given steroids to grow faster and antibiotics because they are crammed into feed lots, butts to nuts, which is so unhealthy and the processed crap that is full of nitrates, nitrites, etc that are bad.

[kameljoe]

University and extension offices have been pushing this for a long while. The problem is you either need 5000 head per section or you need 20 acer pastures to mass graze. These pastures cost money and a lot of it. Even if you were to string up hot wire which I have built some nice hot wire fences it still takes a lot of labor to build them. Then you need to provide large volumes of water and just a stock tank is no longer enough. When you are mass grazing you have to account for massive amounts of water. Which means one pasture that was inteneded for 100 cattle all season long had one tank now needs a dozen or more watering stations per section to house 5000 head of cattle.
The other thing is you need to go in and clean up these pastures. Trash piles need to be removed, old buildings, tree patches, invasive plant growth.
Even in places like Colorado where sage brush and yucca can be more than 50% coverage of the land, or parts of Kansas where cedar trees sprout up in pastures, or other states where they have their share of growth problems.
Not only these problems need to be dealt with you need to also go in and fix old cow trails, old roads, erosion problems from washed out gullies. Water logged areas and so on and so on.
We know so much more than we knew 2 decades ago yet because it takes a lot of investment to fix these things we wont see a lot of ranchers and farmers doing it.
I have seen people bring in old hay, ground up trees, yard clippings and so on and add it in to their pastures and farm land to help improve it. I have also seen people bring in sand to help loosen up clay packed aresa. I have even seen people strip a huge section of land off of one area and back fill in another area. Pretty much they leveled a whole section of land. In the end they recovered about 40 acres of poor flood prone land. With all of that dirt work they were able to change the top 2 feet of the soil which helps to drain water better. The farmland is now in better shape than it was before. It was a massive investment on their part yet its paying off.

[randyschock]

These are the guys that need to talk about this. Reminds me of every rancher I've ever met.