Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Do Dairy Cows Need Grain? Dairy Cows and More with Shawn and Beth Dougherty image

Do Dairy Cows Need Grain? Dairy Cows and More with Shawn and Beth Dougherty

S3 E1 · Little Way Farm and Homestead
Avatar
340 Plays10 months ago

This episode features Shawn and Beth Dougherty. You might have heard our prior episode with the Doughertys discussing low-input farming, but this episode focuses much more on dairy cows. One of my favorite questions that came up was whether or not a dairy cow must be fed grain - this questions and more are covered throughout the episode and we hope you find the discussion inspring and of value to you, wherever you are in your homesteading journey.

To learn more about Little Way Farm and Homestead, including the farm or for other Podcast episodes - please check out littlewayhomestead.com, or email us at hello@littlewayhomestead.com. 

___

Shawn and Beth Dougherty have been farming together since the 1980's

Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, the Doughertys raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, and feed, on the farm. Their ongoing project is to identify and test the potential for operating a farm and homestead with minimal off-farm inputs.

They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, actively contribute to Plain Value magazine, have written for Mother Earth News, Hobby Farms and more. They have been featured in various interviews, podcasts, and conferences

Shawn and Beth promote an outline of farming and homesteading that is inspiring to us as we consider the ways we engage in a stewardship model which considers homesteading, farming and the Catholic Faith.

We are excited to bring you this interview as a production of Little Way Farm and Homestead. If you are interested in helping this podcast grow and reach a larger audience, please consider leaving a review wherever you are listening to the episode, and share with someone you know!

Helpful Links:

The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-independent-farmstead/

The One Cow Revolution Website https://one-cow-revolution.com/

For more information about Little Way Farm and Homestead including the farm, podcast, and upcoming events, check out https://littlewayhomestead.com/.

For media inquiries, advertising, speaking request, guest referrals, consulting and more - email us at hello@littlewayhomestead.com.

Recommended
Transcript

Introduction to Regenerative Farming and Faith

00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Little Way Farm and Homestead is a regenerative and educational farm in southeastern Indiana. Motivated by the Catholic faith, we strive to inspire, encourage, and support the development of homesteads and small-scale farms in faith and virtue. I'm Matthew. And I'm Carissa.

Grain Feeding in Dairy Cows: Necessary or Not?

00:00:18
Speaker
We're excited for you to join us on the podcast.
00:00:23
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for another episode of the little wave farm and homestead podcast. We have a great episode to share with you today featuring Sean and Beth Daugherty. You might have heard our prior episode with the Daugherty's discussing low input farming, but this episode focuses much more on dairy cows. One of my favorite questions that came up was whether or not a dairy cow must be fed grain. This question and many more are covered throughout the episode. We hope you find the discussion inspiring and a value to you wherever you are in your home setting journey.
00:00:53
Speaker
To learn more about Little Way Farm in Homestead, including the farm itself or for other podcast episodes, please check out littlewayhomestead.com or email us at hello at littlewayhomestead.com.
00:01:19
Speaker
Well, Sean and Beth Doherty, thank you again for joining us on the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. We're excited to have you both here and for another opportunity to chat with you all. We're excited to be here. We're excited to be here.
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, we wanna dive right in.

Role of Dairy in Nutrition and Sustainability

00:01:32
Speaker
One of the conversation points that came up when we spoke last was about the importance of dairy animals on the farm, specifically having some type of lactating ruminant animal and being able to incorporate that animal into the farm for a milieu of reasons. We wanna dive right in and talk about dairy cows. And to begin that, I wanna ask just kind of generally, what is it that is so important about a dairy cow across a family homestead?
00:02:00
Speaker
Well, the most important thing is that instead of a one time harvest, it is a twice a day daily harvest and it is the best food for the farm, for the humans, for everybody. There was people who were saying that cow's milk is only for cows. I don't know who they were. But they don't know their anthropology. Right. I mean, this has been, you know, God said, uh,
00:02:29
Speaker
I'm going to give you this wonderful land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Milk is the food that people understood would make you survive through practically anything, and it was essential for the sustainable farmer. So that's the most important thing that the cow does, is that it
00:02:53
Speaker
gives you this this unbelievable food twice a day but the other things that it does is it gives you fertility there's a big picture part of this right like the the daily the twice daily harvest of proteins fats and sugars is the the in fine in the moment answer the big picture answer takes us all the way back to creation it takes us to the beginning of agriculture and it takes to the to the
00:03:21
Speaker
The first source, as in the only source as well as the primary and time source of energy for life on the planet, and that's solar energy. When God clothed the earth with plants, he had to build in a way that soil replenishes itself from whatever the plants take out, right? And that built-in way is called death and decay. For soil to be built and held in place, the ground needs to stay covered with plants
00:03:50
Speaker
and those plants have to provide their parts as they shed leaves, twigs, et cetera, those parts have to be broken down to make soil. 40% of the land mass of the planet is grasslands of some kind. And those plants don't, like a deciduous tree, drop their leaves so that they can fall to the ground and become broken down.
00:04:12
Speaker
Those leaves need to be grazed. If we leave them for weather and gravity to drop them to the ground, grass plants will actually smother themselves before they break down adequately to let new grass shoots

Grazing Animals and Grassland Maintenance

00:04:27
Speaker
grow in. Sure, for a year, two, three, a few years,
00:04:30
Speaker
A grass plant that is not shorn in some way, mowed or grazed, can continue to get some sunlight down to its growth points. But at some point, the massive plant above the growth points will smother the plant. So we made grazing animals. Now, here's where magic comes in. All the life energy on the planet is solar energy. It's captured by plants and locked up in long, complex carbohydrates, hydrocarbons, we call them.
00:05:00
Speaker
80% of the hydrocarbon mass on the planet, as plants make it, is cellulose or some kind of cellulosic fiber. Now that has solar energy locked up in the chemical bonds in the cellulosic fiber. And guess what? Almost nothing, macro animal, almost none of them can access that. Think about that. 80%.
00:05:24
Speaker
of the energy locked up in plants is inaccessible to meat eaters, to most omnivores, to the massive of animals that aren't either cellulose digesting bacteria in the soil or cellulose digesting bacteria in a termite's gut, we could raise termites and eat them, or the cellulose digesting bacteria in the guts of ruminants.
00:05:52
Speaker
Ruminants are specially made to digest cellulose more efficiently and to a far greater degree than any other kind of land animal fitted into the human food system. I can't speak to things like manatees.
00:06:07
Speaker
So we have to figure out if we, a Catholic family, anybody settles down on a piece of land and says, this land is now in my care so that I may feed my family and pass the land on to my children so that they may feed their families. Our job is to figure out how do I harvest solar energy and turn it into what two things, food for now and fertility so that the soil can grow and
00:06:32
Speaker
raising plants. I know enough about you to know that you now see the rest of this picture, which is that when we take ruminants classically in the west cows, graze them on our grass, they turn that inaccessible energy locked up in cellulose,
00:06:48
Speaker
into this amazing thing. We go from carb that we can't digest to proteins, fats, and sugars in their most digestible forms. Plus what comes out of the back end of the cow every day is tens of pounds of mostly broken down cellulose already pre-digested, ready to go with its probiotics in place to go back into the soil so that the soil can go on doing this ad infinitum.
00:07:16
Speaker
Now, one of the things that's really important is that the grazing process be done well. You have to manage your animals well.
00:07:24
Speaker
We were just on a farm where the people simply have a perimeter fence, they turn their cows loose, they have other ruminants in there, and they are destroying that pasture because they continually go back to what they like most and leave the junk. And so eventually that field will look like what we drive by, any pastures we drive by on the highway.
00:07:53
Speaker
Often, most people are not rotationally grazing. So we will find that they are mowed down to like a golf course, which some people would say, oh, that looks great. That's not what it should be. And then these woody, stemmy things that the cows won't eat. But if the animals are managed well and they are rotationally grazed all year round, they will end up
00:08:20
Speaker
again, not just with their manure, but with the way that they graze, they are going to improve the soil.

Farming Decisions: Family and Soil Health

00:08:28
Speaker
And that is, there are two, and in making any decisions on the farm, there are two very, very important considerations. The first is the family. How is this going to affect the family? And the second is, how is this going to affect the soil? And the soil is being ignored over and over and over again by farmers today, where they are just destroying the soil
00:08:50
Speaker
or they think that there are things that are going to make it all better like I'm going to no-till or I'm going to we come up with these kind of catch phrases that ultimately they're better than previous methods but they are not really improving the soil. The way that you improve the soil is by running a ruminant on that
00:09:13
Speaker
grass and then moving it around. So keeping most of your farm in pasture, not mowing it and taking it for hay, but really letting it be cow food. And as Beth was saying, then we get this wonderful, we're unlocking what is in the grass and it becomes our food, which is... And when we say rotational grazing, there are tons of terms
00:09:39
Speaker
for various practices, which mean moving animals around on a pasture. People argue about the terms because it could be so easy to misinterpret a term like rotational grazing to mean you've got four pastures and you move the cows from one to the next on a calendar basis. We mean something rather more complex that has to do with moving animals
00:10:07
Speaker
based on their impact on the place they've been and not bringing them back to any land until it's ready based on its regrowth.

Guidance for New Homesteaders

00:10:16
Speaker
What would be maybe, you know, I'm thinking of the young family who's just starting out and they want to get into home setting. Maybe they want to do a little bit of farming, but they're committed. They've heard at this point, they believe that
00:10:29
Speaker
The dairy animal is something that they need to bring out to their farm for their family sustenance. They believe in the idea of rotational grazing and the impact of the ruminant on the land and they're bought into the idea and they believe it. What are some practical steps for them to get started? Types of cows, different characteristics within the cow maybe they should be looking for.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, one of the first steps we might suggest is get off of YouTube. You're going to find that YouTube is going to give you a lot of misinformation about that. There are good people on YouTube, Joel Salatin, obviously, Greg Judy. But even those people are on such a different level and their goals are so different from what the homesteaders goals are that everybody needs to be very careful about what they're hearing on YouTube.
00:11:18
Speaker
and definitely not seeing it as biblical truths that, oh, so-and-so said it, I must do it this way.
00:11:30
Speaker
help people image what we mean by rotational grazing and getting that cow and starting to move it is think of Laura and Mary. They had simply a picket and a rope so they would put a stake in the ground and they would let that animal eat for 24 hours or 12 hours on the area and then they would move it and they would keep moving it and they would not bring that cow. Now we don't see this necessarily in the books but they were smart farmers
00:11:59
Speaker
You don't bring an animal back to food that's not ready to go yet. So you're waiting for that for the grass to regrow to full height before well till eight inches or something like that until you bring it back to the same area again. So that's one thing that we really want
00:12:21
Speaker
people to understand is this is not complicated. You don't have to be measuring your bricks. You don't have bricks as a way of measuring. There's lots of, as soon as you start doing math, stop. You're probably, it's probably unnecessary. Right. Make this very simple and think about Laura and Mary simply moving a cow around. Now multiple cows
00:12:49
Speaker
Again, you can do some of that with a picket and a steak. It starts becoming harder. And that's where we would move into electric fence, polytwine, super easy to set up, not in paddocks that are preset, not in permanent or semi-permanent paddocks, but in paddocks that you can continue to expand. So step in post and polytwine. This kind of stuff you can get from Premier One,
00:13:16
Speaker
They're a good company source. Another good company source is Ken Cove. We don't get any money from these people, but those are sources that we like. They're both American made and good sources. The other thing is, people who are listening to this, they can email us at seanandbeth1960 at gmail.com. We're happy to send out what we, we've kind of come up with a starter, electric fence starter kit.
00:13:42
Speaker
We don't sell it, we just tell people what to buy if they want to start out. Yeah, if they want to go to Premier or Ken Cove, these are the things that we would suggest. And we certainly are willing to answer emails and talk to people about questions that they might have. So I went down a rabbit hole a little bit. I'm not sure if I covered all the things that you were talking about.
00:14:04
Speaker
So some things that I would look at. And to go back to the YouTube thing for a minute, looking at YouTube, like submitting your question to the algorithms of YouTube is a little bit like if you wanted to know how to play chess, getting a snapshot of a chess player in the middle of a move. You may be seeing something brilliant, but if it's out of context, it's not gonna give you good information.
00:14:30
Speaker
There may be great things to see out there on the internet, but your best teacher is a few basic principles and then get out there and make it happen. Just do it. Pay attention to animals, plants. God's gonna show you. There are no tricks. Nobody's changing the rules part way through. So that's your best choice. As far as cows go, two things that are really important.
00:14:59
Speaker
make sure those teats are gonna function the way you want them to function. If you, for some reason, are certain you're gonna use a milking machine, and we wanna emphasize here, milking machines are not necessary. And not preferred either. If you have no hands, or your hands are extremely arthritic, then you might say, in my case, milking machines are necessary. But in general, milking machines are unnecessary. So let's think hard for a minute about how we're planning on milking this animal.
00:15:28
Speaker
Because hands are going to be better for the cow and they're going to work even when your power's out, we're going to lean toward hands. Make sure the teats on this animal are long enough for complete grasp. For most people, if those teats are about the size of your thumb, from the webbing to the end, that's a pretty good teat size. So teat size is very important.
00:15:51
Speaker
Another big chunk of importance is what's the history of this cow? If she spent her whole life, I mean, when we started out 35 years ago, 40 years ago, the instruction she'd often read her, you know, like you might get a cull cow from a dairy, from a commercial dairy. Well, in general, that's not going to be a good recommendation anymore.
00:16:13
Speaker
50, it might've been a good recommendation. It's not one now. You'd like an animal who's already accustomed to living out of doors, accustomed to harvesting and digesting her own meals. Not grain. And you'd like an animal who has not had a lot of grain in her diet. People say, what's a lot of grain? Well, the cow is gonna eat about, say you've got a thousand pound cow,
00:16:42
Speaker
She's gonna eat about 30 pounds of dry matter in the way of grass or hay in a day. Grain can substitute, it's concentrated, so it can substitute for part of that. But if she's been eating say five pounds of grain a day, that's a pretty significant part of her calories. Beware the owner who says, oh, she just gets a little scoop when we bring her in for milking. Take a look at the scoop, find out how much she really means.
00:17:10
Speaker
Given that we're living in a broken world, in a broken environment, in a broken system, we're gonna have to start with broken parts, broken land, broken us, broken animals. That's not a depressing thought, it's simply a challenge to our creative cooperation with God. We often tell people the best dairy cow is the one you can get, the one you can get your hands on. If you start out
00:17:37
Speaker
with the end quotes, wrong cow as in she's not an ideal fit. If you didn't pay more for her than she's worth in beef, you haven't lost anything. In the meantime, you can learn
00:17:52
Speaker
You learn way more from a bad cow in some ways than you learn from a perfect cow because a bad cow is going to throw you curve balls. She's going to get a limp and you're going to learn pretty quickly that a cow with a limp isn't a call to the vet usually. It's usually just a reason to not make her walk so far over so much hard ground for a while until she recovers.
00:18:15
Speaker
we learned our first cow was a total disaster.

Learning from Dairy Cow Mistakes

00:18:20
Speaker
And we didn't know that because when you start out farming and you've never done it, your grandparents are dead and they were the last people in the family who farmed. You have nobody to show you. There is a piece of your brain, at least a piece of my brain, I think of Sean's, that goes, this is all my fault. And so when our first cow had
00:18:45
Speaker
More than half of the caps she dropped were DOA. No telling why. We've kept 75 cows since then, and none of them have had that habit, so we don't know what was up. She had metabolic issues that meant we were often babying her in the field as she wouldn't get up for a week. It was a disaster, but boy, did we learn a ton. And in the meantime,
00:19:13
Speaker
We encountered the value of milk on a farm. It feeds everything. It feeds pigs and chickens. It feeds dogs and cats. It makes cheese and milk and butter. We can't run the farm without milk. So the best cow is the one you can get your hands on. Now, I'm just going to throw this out there for young Catholic families.

Shared Roles in Family Farming

00:19:34
Speaker
I know a lot of super women. I see one sitting next to you, Matthew.
00:19:41
Speaker
we think like, two toddlers and a baby on the hip and I'm pregnant, I'm going to be okay milking this cow. I applaud not only the intention, but if the husband's on board, I applaud the idea. But remember not to measure your success
00:20:05
Speaker
Don't measure yourself against some image of an imaginary pioneer woman who did it all and raised 10 kids because she didn't raise 10 kids. She died after five and the husband had to remarry for the second five. Doing everything can be too big of a strain. Feel like a success if for say, how would you start to describe that? I mean, a young couple with several small children
00:20:32
Speaker
We're seeing them around us. And gets a dairy cow. You need to be prepared for things like getting her started, getting milking, realizing that having a baby four months into this lactation is going to
00:20:50
Speaker
make things too difficult and drying her off. Letting her graze your pasture for the rest of the year and not getting milk out of her is just fine. We have seen fathers, dads, who say, honey, this is your thing. I'm so busy with my job that if you want to go down this route, you can go down this route, but this is your thing. I'm not going to critique people who make, if they can make it work, that's great.
00:21:18
Speaker
But I think having two horses in the harness is really
00:21:25
Speaker
important so that when Beth can't be available for something, I'm there and she's available when I, you know, our split normally is I'm the morning milker and Beth does the afternoon milking. But if I got adoration in the middle of the night and she covers for me the next morning and there are other times when, and when we're sick,
00:21:52
Speaker
So we've got to be able to work together as a team. That's really, really important. I want to throw two more things into that mix. A 10 year old can milk a cow, but a 10 year old should not be in charge of a cow. That is
00:22:08
Speaker
The adults need to be intimately involved in the decisions that are being made. Now that 10-year-old can become a 12-year-old who not only knows how to handle that cow, but knows how to set up a paddock the right size for her. Even then, that's under parental guidance, parental attention. Believe that your kid can grow into this, but a lot of folks are like, oh, my 10-year-old takes care of the chickens.
00:22:38
Speaker
That's great. I hope the grownups are paying attention. So the child is, has some backup, but a cow is going to be a, it's just a bigger responsibility. And then the other piece that I want to throw in that mix is, and we can, we can add a little spice of Wendell Berry into this. We've learned in, we've been married, I think, I think we had our 38th anniversary. I don't remember.
00:23:06
Speaker
you know, here it is, the 21st century. There are all sorts of pressures on the family. It has been our huge blessing that we've always homesteaded, which meant we always had a shared, besides the children who are gonna grow up, we've always had a shared, I don't wanna say interest, it's more like that, we've had a shared concern.
00:23:33
Speaker
And as the children have grown, it's become a shared concern with the children. Now that most of our children are adults, it's still a shared concern. And when being a nursing mom of toddlers, and then gradually fewer and fewer of the kids were even needing to be homeschooled, now I'm down to one, this shared vocation, Shaun said, my shared vocation has
00:24:01
Speaker
becomes something we value very, very, we've come to see it as part of our divine vocation starting in Genesis chapter one. And it makes me think of Wendell Berry talking about neighborhood and community and marriage in terms of, he says of city couples with each with his or her own job who share a bed and a house and maybe some meals every week.
00:24:29
Speaker
And he says, they are not able to enact their marriage, their marriedness. And the shared interest of a farm is a gift to a couple that helps them enact their marriedness when certainly children do that. But children are their own thing. They belong, they're not ours, they're not us. Whereas the farm,
00:24:56
Speaker
is this object outside of ourselves that we can share and serve in order to serve our family. And the thing that, you know, so much of what we've done, we've done on faith that we believe that this is the right way.

Benefits of Children on Farms

00:25:13
Speaker
We don't, you know, I mean, we were just having a conversation with one of my older kids today about
00:25:20
Speaker
about, he said, you know, what we did as kids, nobody else was doing, nobody else was getting up, uh, in the middle at 5am and going outside and milking a cow and then going to mass. No, nobody was doing that. It was very, but the payback, you don't know when the payback will come. You don't know. And it's not just about payback, but right now, uh, all of my children, but one,
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, everybody's over here except one, right? Except for James? Everybody's here except for James, and James can't be here because he's in the Air Force. Everybody else is over at the house site, and they are doing timber framing. For the sake of your listeners, our house burned down last May 30th. And it is the most beautiful, it is going to be unbelievable what they are doing. People are just
00:26:19
Speaker
You know, we're gonna have workshops and things like that as people come in and when they see this house They are going to be and and the thing they are so much more skilled than I ever was and more than that They are they are not perfectionists, but they want it to be right. So in in my world We would get started and then just keep pounding away because I don't have time. We've got to do it
00:26:46
Speaker
They will take it apart five times to make sure that each joint fits perfectly, and then it's all put together with wooden dowel pins. It is an amazing... If you want to see images, you can go to our very seldom used blog, One Cow Revolution, or I know that John Paul and Maggie have a YouTube channel that's just John Paul and Maggie, and they posted a
00:27:14
Speaker
real short video of the guys putting part of the house together yesterday. It's beautiful. It's unbelievable. So that's what they're doing right now in nine degree weather. They're all over there cutting timbers. And that's where I was until this interview pulled me out of the cold. And that's where we're going back as soon as this is done. That's right. It is interesting. I was thinking, go ahead.
00:27:42
Speaker
Well, I was just gonna say, you know, when we started this podcast, it was in August of 2023. And we really, I don't think had any idea for what was to become of it. And what we have found since then is a certain confirmation that there certainly is
00:27:59
Speaker
You know, maybe I'll struggle to put words to exactly what this is, but there is a sense of a movement happening across the country, the world, an idea, maybe a reaction against a current political system or a current societal structure where people are finding that there is a better way of living.
00:28:18
Speaker
And I think I struggled to say that this way was that way for some time because I didn't want to be exclusionary. And I didn't want it to sound as if this was the only way that you can live. And I don't think it is. I think there's certainly legitimate reasons not to. But I am finding, and maybe it's striking me as you all talk about having the homesteading life as something else to pursue together,
00:28:43
Speaker
that this is a good way of living. And

Homesteading and Catholic Values

00:28:48
Speaker
I wonder what you all might think of that specifically with regards to Catholics. Oh, you know, we can't think of a better way to raise children. Children need chores. Children need to learn skills. Children need to work together. And once again, the payoff that we've seen has been
00:29:08
Speaker
Just amazing. We've got Genesis chapter one, in which the Lord says, let us make man in our own image so that he may have dominion over the land, the sea, the plants, the animals. We have to catch what that so that means, right? It means that our image being in his likeness
00:29:37
Speaker
is a function of our stewardship, not just over creation with a, you know, sort of a sweeping all the atoms in the universe and let's go out and conquer a bunch of them, but over the life on this planet. And it is funny that we often, we just did a farm consultation for John and Becca Lovell of Warrior Poet Society
00:30:03
Speaker
And John stopped us on the first day and he said, it's funny, you're using terms that would normally be red flags for evangelical Christians like serving nature and taking your cues from nature. And it is a shame that because some people
00:30:25
Speaker
practice idolatry of nature. Actually, we're not very good at any kind of idolatry except for of ourselves, but you know what I mean. Because nature can be taken out of the Christian context, we assume, we grant those words to the pagans to use in their way. But really, that's what Genesis says we're here for. So that's a piece of our answer.
00:30:55
Speaker
If we say, my responsibility is not to provide my own food. I'm going to let McDonald's do that, or I'm going to let Kroger's do that, or I'm going to let Aldi's do that. You are, that's not what God has said. So I think that that's really something to think about, but you also are missing out on a tremendous education and wonderful experiences
00:31:21
Speaker
to have with your children. That our grocery store is our basement, our cellar, our freezer, and we daily go there and that's where we get our food. 90 to 95% of what we eat comes from our farm.
00:31:39
Speaker
What we eat that doesn't come from the farm is luxuries and, you know, coffee, tea, sugar, things like that. And we enjoy our luxuries. We're happy to have them. And since they don't cost us all that much, we don't have a problem with having them. But our responsibility to our family and our community tells us that we need to have more control over our food than that. Right.

Controlling Food Production for Security

00:32:05
Speaker
You know, you, Matthew, are responsible for the
00:32:10
Speaker
protecting and providing for a family. And because you till the earth and subdue it, because you practice husbandry of plants and animals, you can say to yourself with some certainty, when my children are hungry, I Matthew can make sure that they have something to eat. It's a much longer stretch for somebody whose job is a nine to five or whatever it might be, but it is a job
00:32:40
Speaker
The only benefit from which accruing to his family is cash to go by goodness knows from where goodness knows grown how food that goodness knows how it got here and goodness knows whether it will get here tomorrow. That's I totally get that that we are born into that situation that people aren't out there electing to be lazy or
00:33:07
Speaker
Careless and say that other people take care of this. I'll just have a cash job and buy my food We didn't choose it. But as we mature as adults mature as Christians mature as parents We should begin to have our eyes open. I don't think we can help if we're if we're awake and responsible we begin to have our eyes opened to the fact that
00:33:34
Speaker
our actual needs down to the water we drink and the removal of our waste, our actual needs are all being curated via the means of cash and proxied out to people whose methods and intentions and ability to go on doing so
00:33:55
Speaker
are largely unknown to us. And even if we have commercial farmers who are doing the best job that they can, when you are on that scale, and this is why we think it's incredibly important for people to be farming on the human scale, but when you are farming on the commercial level scale, you are forced to use methods that, I mean, there's no way to deal with weed pressure other than
00:34:24
Speaker
spraying it with poison. On thousands of acres.
00:34:28
Speaker
I think we kind of wandered astray. I'm not sure where we were going. That's okay, because a lot of what you're saying are things that we're coming across as well. The idea of human scale productivity, productive labor, subsistence farming. These ideas, I think, are becoming more of intrigue to people because they're recognizing that what has been promised to them in society, the frailty of infrastructure that's been built to support a society that ultimately
00:34:54
Speaker
at times is in contrast to Catholic values and a way of living, they are finding can be found in a way that we can build it now. But that means that things are going to look different. Something we would add to that. Farming is not just like the faith life, but good farming for people who weren't raised that way, even for people who were raised that way, is part of the faith life.
00:35:23
Speaker
And it has this in common with the converts out there, also the cradle Catholics who maybe came to a deepening of their faith in adult life are going to recognize this. There's an awful lot to farming and faith that happens because you launch out into the deep. You put out into the deep, you say, well,
00:35:49
Speaker
That deep is unplumable by me. I don't know what's in it. Some of it might be scary. I could sink in it and not be able to sustain. I don't know what will happen, but I'm going to launch into it because my reason and my faith tell me it's a good. And then it's going to teach us, teaches such a thin word. It's going to deform and grow and
00:36:18
Speaker
develop and What is it that butterflies do they? Metamorphose us into a different kind of human being We can only tell you that it happens you as a as a Homesteader have already experienced it some and for your listeners who are thinking well, maybe this would be a good way to live and
00:36:45
Speaker
When you undertake to do this, remember, this is God's creation. He blows his breath into it at every second. It's not going to let you down. It's got, as Sean often says to people, God didn't devise a world in which failure was the default mode. Life is the default mode. However, if we choose to say, I'm going to live differently than what nature
00:37:12
Speaker
And that is the majority of the world right now. Instead of being in the economy of the farm where I get what I need from the farm, I live in a world, many of us live in a world where I'm in the land of the dollar.
00:37:28
Speaker
And so I know that if I go out and accrue as many dollars as I can, I can get everything I want. That system is so fragile because all it takes is the petroleum system to go down or coronavirus to come in.
00:37:45
Speaker
or any number of things and suddenly the dollar isn't solving the problem. Where when those things happen to us, all those little bumps in the road on the farm, they were just bumps in the road because the farm provided what our needs are, not the mighty dollar.
00:38:05
Speaker
Again, you're speaking all the things that we are coming across at this point. I'm suspicious we're either reading the same books or you read them a long time ago or just in your natural wisdom have come to these conclusions. I want you and I want anybody listening to know that that's precisely what happens. The universe begins to be a place where you recognize
00:38:32
Speaker
You recognize the lights that you've been given in other people, in their books, in things that happen on the farm as you take steps on the farm, things that are given back to you like fertility and abundance. You come to see the unity of God in that similarity of thought that you're describing. An easy illustration for me is that Sean and I have always been
00:39:03
Speaker
Big readers, Wendell Berry's been on our bookshelf for many years. 30 years ago when I tried to read Wendell Berry, it was opaque to me. I had no substance in my mind to respond to his words. But many years later reading Wendell Berry, it's my own thought stated obviously better than I could state it since these are Wendell's words.
00:39:31
Speaker
But you encounter the truths as truths and not simply as words in a book. And I would say that modern first world Western people, we're about due for some real honest face-to-face knowledge instead of abstract.

Farming as a Connection to Faith

00:39:56
Speaker
book knowledge. It is one thing, for example, to read that grass is good for cows. If you rotate your cows, they'll be healthy. If they're healthy, they can face climatic stress. It's another entirely for me to go down the hill on an evening when it's 14 degrees and it's going to go down to four overnight and move aside a section of fence to let my cows onto their 12-hour paddock.
00:40:27
Speaker
and have them come running down the hill, and as they pass me, flourish their heels, basically, which is a sign of happiness and abundance in a cow, and see that on January 14th, 2024, my cows who have lived their entire lives in this field, who have had access to nothing to eat but the huge biodiversity of this field, but have been moved every 12 hours onto fresh paddocks, are so healthy
00:40:57
Speaker
on nothing but winter forage. This is not, hey guys, this is just standing grass in the field that when they go onto their new meal in 14 degree weather, they're so thrilled they're going to kick up their heels and show me that. That's a level of learning that's really vital to me because we've all had the experience of reading, put a big quotation mark around this, truths.
00:41:21
Speaker
and spitting them back out on tests, maybe, or reproducing them for an employer that do not resonate with our souls and are not demonstrable in the world around us. Here, in immersing ourselves in nature, we get to learn, we imbibe truths directly from the God who made them, and we see them resonating all around us, and they feed us really delicious food.
00:41:47
Speaker
again, that we take away as Christians, as Catholics, is how good our God is, that He has created a pattern of living, that if we will follow that pattern, we will have this incredible abundance, the best food that there ever was. And not only that, but the farm will continue
00:42:08
Speaker
to improve every year so that when we pass on, we will be passing on to our children a better farm, better land than when we picked it up. And it produced these fabulous kids. Seven of the eight of them, plus, you know, husbands, wives, children, et cetera, work to rebuild our farmhouse that burned down. And they're having a terrific time. Our favorite people to work with
00:42:39
Speaker
are one another and our greater community here. This could so easily sound like hooray for us, aren't we cool? And it isn't that thing. It's simply
00:42:53
Speaker
If I accept the limitations that I see justice requires of me, like not taking more from the soil than I can put back in, if I accept those limitations, God doesn't let me down. If I will reverence his creation, his creation was made for our joy, for our health, for our abundance, except his limitations,
00:43:20
Speaker
And just like every marriage should be, people should look at marriages and say, oh my gosh,
00:43:29
Speaker
That's beautiful. I want that too. What we have found with our family is that people see what we do and say, that's possible. And it's possible in a world that I think has given up on a lot of that, that parents are at odds with their teenagers.

Family Bonds and Farming

00:43:52
Speaker
people don't like each other. They assume that kids will hate chores, that chores are an imposition on the child.
00:44:03
Speaker
Treasure has to be dollars because that's going to guarantee me that I have food and things like that where money doesn't mean much to us. What really means a lot to us is our families and that we can be with our grandchildren and not just be with them, but work with them and share with them. And when they need milk, we've got milk for them. And when, when we need milk, we'll get milk from them.
00:44:33
Speaker
It's a wonderful sharing that is unfortunately unusual in our world and it shouldn't be. It's time we had more contact with real stuff. Fewer human constructs, more dirt plants and animals.
00:44:52
Speaker
Hearing you guys talk about your family and your children, it absolutely gives me that feeling of like seeing something so beautiful that you've created and seeing that it's a possibility for us too and hoping that we are walking in that same journey towards having that type of relationship and
00:45:12
Speaker
mutual provision for our own family one day. I did want to get back slightly to the cow topic. I was curious, is there any particular breed or type of dairy cow that you guys really prefer or would encourage other people to look into?
00:45:32
Speaker
We happen to like jerseys because that's what we started off with. But we've heard wonderful things about Guernsey's, Shorthorns, Dexter's. We like our Dexter's. Mutts are great. Yeah. Some points that I look for. So I'll throw this out there. We have in print eight
00:45:54
Speaker
short books, we call them field guides. They're just self-published and you can order them from our website, One Cow Revolution, or you can go to the ebook site, Lugoo, L-U-L-U and find them there. But in

Selecting Efficient Cow Breeds

00:46:09
Speaker
one of the cow books, there's a list of 14, 15 points that we would say, okay, here are things to look at if you're shopping for a cow.
00:46:19
Speaker
I'm not suggesting everybody go buy it, I'm just going to condense that smaller size wherever you are. So the mega cow, the huge cows that we have now, those are the result of breeding programs that didn't happen in a farm setting, like what makes this animal more productive
00:46:40
Speaker
in a natural setting. They happened in breeding programs at land-grant universities or on really big farms. Big cows are not very efficient. So I would say go for smaller-bodied cows. Avoid anything in the way of mini and teacup because the breeding programs that produced big cows and left behind things like forage efficiency and resilient health
00:47:10
Speaker
We're also left out of the breeding programs that led to teeny tiny cows. If what you're after is a cow that's only waist high, your genetic selection has to be for that. And you're leaving behind things like fuel efficiency and good health. So the mid-sized cow is gonna be in that 35, 45 inch range, which means for most of us, that cow does not come up to our shoulder. We're not talking about her head, we're talking about her withers, her shoulders.
00:47:42
Speaker
We want one that does really well on forage and native grasses. We don't want to have to give them alfalfa pellets, or we don't want to have to give them grain, or we don't want to have to give them... That being said, the good Lord made them for digesting forage. And so even though a cow may have spent her first
00:48:02
Speaker
four years of life on a farm where they were giving her silage and some grain. Her gut was designed by God to digest cellulose. And we've never bought in a cow that we couldn't
00:48:19
Speaker
switch over to all grass in the course of a year or so. You might see a cow that's rather lean for some seasons in that first year, and you want your management to take that into consideration. But your goal is to, two things have to happen for her to be all grass. One, the biology in her gut need to be cellulose digesting biota, not carbohydrate, like starch digesting biota.
00:48:49
Speaker
And the other changes, her rumen needs to get big enough to hold a whole lot of grass because grain is concentrated, it takes less room. So you want to get her there gradually, but we've never seen a cow that couldn't. Still the best cow, like an ideal cow, she'd be a little bit below my shoulder height. She might be in the 40 inch range, thereabouts. Say she's five or six years old, she's already had two calves at least and
00:49:17
Speaker
lactated, so I know something about her ability to lactate. And those births were good births. That's right. Simple, easy. That's right. Unassisted births, live calves. She's pregnant already, so the first thing I do with her doesn't have to figure out
00:49:33
Speaker
how to figure out when she's in heat and then get her bread. A dairy cow is a cow that likes to be milked. If you pull up a stool next to this animal and she plants a foot in your chest, you want to put
00:49:49
Speaker
If you're considering a counter on somebody else's farm, ask them whether that's normal and get them to stop her. See what it takes to make her not kick you. Does she have to wear kicking chains, hobbles? Does she have to have her foot tied? Does she have to have a kicking bar in her hips? Because if she does, she doesn't like to be milked and is therefore, by definition, not really a dairy cow, regardless of how much milk may come out of those teats. If she doesn't like to be handled, she's not really a dairy cow.
00:50:17
Speaker
What else would you say, Sean? She needs to be mild. I mean, that's kind of the same thing, but we love a cow. When people talk to us about a cow, they'll say she is the sweetest cow. And that's absolutely. This is a cow that you can reach, you can touch. She likes being with humans.
00:50:35
Speaker
That doesn't mean that if you walk up to her in the field, especially if this is the first time she's met you and you put your hand on her, it doesn't mean she's going to want you to touch her. She won't scoot away when she can, but it does mean that she'll walk into the barn, put her head in the stanchion, and then hold still, even without treats, hold still while you milk her. Now, a cow that's been accustomed to treats, she may fidget because she's thinking, where are my treats?
00:50:59
Speaker
And sometimes we've got, our best cow is a dancer. So it will occasionally lift up its foot and stuff like that. It's not trying to kick me at all. It just, you know, maybe it's a little bit uncomfortable on one foot or the other. So that's not what we mean by a kicker. People need to understand that kicking is not just the lifting the foot. If you've got a cow that wants to kick you, she'll kick you. You'll know because she'll have kicked you and then you'll say, oh, this cow wants to kick.
00:51:28
Speaker
Keep in mind, all of you listeners, since I know Matthew and Carissa know this, that a cow kick is not like a horse kick. If you're in the path of a horse kick, there's a lot of power behind that solid hoof. But a cow, when she picks up a foot and kicks, is doing a lightning fast move that's not intended to damage, it's intended to move the thing that she's worried about.
00:51:52
Speaker
Typically, she's going to kick with her back feet. What she got to protect back there? Her udder, of course, the most sensitive part of her body, which is right where, say, a marauding coyote could grab it and tear it. When she kicks you, if she plants one on you, it's probably a mistake. But just mere shifting of her feet, please don't think that's kicking because it isn't.
00:52:17
Speaker
Well, one thing, maybe our last question for cows and then this will probably be a good place to conclude. We

Grain-Free Dairy Cow Success

00:52:24
Speaker
hear it seems constant that you cannot milk a cow without grain and that the cow has to have grain as a treat or something else.
00:52:35
Speaker
Don't tell our cows. Everyone's well, somebody will fire us an email that says, my neighbor says you've got to be lying. And we think, does he have so little imagination that the only options are what he thinks is true or the other guy's lying?
00:52:55
Speaker
Let's look at that statement. One, nature does not provide grain for grazing animals. Cows are grazing animals, so nature does not provide them grain, therefore they don't require grain. I think what's really going on, even if people don't examine their own thoughts this closely,
00:53:19
Speaker
is that when a farmer or a vet or the guy at the feed store or the guy down the road says to you, you can't raise that cow without grain. And they'll say the same thing about beef steers. What they're really saying is,
00:53:32
Speaker
I have in my mind an idea of what a cow is and what it ought to do. Like a cow is a thing that converts bot grain into meat or milk, and it does it at a fairly rapid rate. And you can't get those results, like get a steer say from birth to 500 pounds in eight months without shoving grain in the front end, maybe, right?
00:54:00
Speaker
Maybe you could, but at any rate, your neighbor is thinking you can't. Therefore, you can't raise your steer without grain, because he assumes that his goals are the only goals, they're the right goals, and that the way he knows of accomplishing them is the only way there is.
00:54:18
Speaker
Now our experience is that if you want a consistent amount of milk coming out all the time, you can have more success by putting a lot of grain into that. It's not our experience, but that's what we can look at. Well, we had a little bit of that experience with the first. Oh, I guess we were doing. And if we, if we kept giving her more grain, we would actually get more milk. But what we've, what we are doing is that we're letting the natural cycles
00:54:48
Speaker
Happen so that we will get a we will get milk all summer long on good grass lots and lots and then as we go into the winter we know that we're gonna see a Drop in the amount of milk that we're getting especially as it gets colder we're gonna get less and
00:55:09
Speaker
As it warms up, we get a little bit more. But then when those cows hit April or March, and that grass is, new grass is coming in, and the warmth comes in, that production just explodes. The same cow that was giving you six pounds a day, which is about three quarts, will be giving you 18 pounds a day. So if you want to have a, if you don't want to see any of these dips,
00:55:35
Speaker
Yeah, grain helps, but also grain is not good for, this is not the best thing for these animals. Best done a lot of research into that and read things where people are saying by keeping them at this hot burning grain fed amount, it's actually
00:55:57
Speaker
ruining their insides, their organs. Right. There are a lot of problems with feeding grain that is simple carbs to an animal whose job is to break down cellulose. Let's back up for a minute. We've got a planet clothed in leaves that need to be harvested for multiple purposes, two of which are to feed all the animals directly in the case of herbivores and indirectly in the case of omnivores
00:56:26
Speaker
and carnivores, and it's gotta feed this soil.
00:56:30
Speaker
80% of that is cellulosic fiber. God put grazing animals, particularly ruminants of all kinds, all over the planet to release the energy of cellulose so that it's available in the form of meat usually to all the other animals on the planet or all the omnivore slash carnivores on the planet. So our job,
00:56:56
Speaker
when we're managing cows is to harvest cellulose. That's one of the reasons that we elected to become all grass, all native forage. I want to give you another couple of pictures there. Here's one. Good farming has been the pursuit of humanity. Good animal and plant management has been the pursuit of humanity since the garden, since the Garden of Eden.
00:57:26
Speaker
It has

Embracing Traditional Farming Methods

00:57:27
Speaker
taken the form of agriculture, we are told by anthropologists, for about 12,000 years. Much good knowledge has kept humanity living and thriving on this planet and of latter years reproducing in big numbers.
00:57:44
Speaker
So we have had some successes along those lines. But in the last three generations, four generations, actually, depending on where you want to start, all the way back to maybe the 1200s and 1300s, that knowledge has been sort of bleeding off gradually as we found other ways to keep our minds busy. And especially since World War II, it's
00:58:11
Speaker
It's disappeared. Our grandfathers were farmers, but by the time we knew the questions to ask them, they were dead. So that, their torch did not get passed on to us. So when we undertake to learn to farm,
00:58:27
Speaker
We need to know what our preconceived notions are. We need to begin to peel away at unquestioned and unquestioning assumptions that we've built up that are our idea of farming and go back to first causes. Instead of saying to ourselves, for example,
00:58:51
Speaker
my research and my experience of conventional ag is that steers should grow this fast, cows should make this much milk. And therefore, those are my goals for those animals. We, especially from Sean and me, this has been our farming goal for 40 years almost.
00:59:13
Speaker
We want to know what is the nature of these plants and animals? How did God create them? What was his intention for them? Not just because on some philosophical level it's better to do things God's way than in some other way, but because if we want this system to work without boosting it up with
00:59:37
Speaker
modern chemicals, meds, petrochemically derived and grown and harvested grains, etc. If we want it to work, we need to go back to first causes. That means that instead of shoving grain in a cow to get a goal that we've formulated out of
01:00:00
Speaker
modern agricultural goals and not out of what is the nature of cows and grass and how did God design them to work. We need to start from, let's design our husbandry around the nature of the herbivore, the ways she harvests, the ways native forages make possible
01:00:30
Speaker
her 12 months of the year, nourishment and health. And then determine having done our best for the animal, let her show us what's the best she can do for us. And this would apply to this reticence about trying to squeeze the system for all that will give us.
01:00:53
Speaker
should apply to all of our farming methods. And in fact, it should apply to the way we treat other people. Instead of having an outcome, this is what I want. I can use any means that isn't egregiously illegitimate to get to this goal. We've tried to say, what's the nature of this animal? How is she to live? I'm going to give you one reference point. Fred Provenza is, I'm going to say, a brilliant
01:01:24
Speaker
livestock and wildlife nutritionist, biologist. He has a book called Nourishment, and it's worth reading. It can be a little
01:01:34
Speaker
It can have some fairly dense sections full of science talk, but it's very well written. For us Catholics, I'm just going to warn you that Fred was raised a Catholic and is not a Catholic. As so many Catholics in the last century have lost what little faith they might have had by not seeing
01:01:58
Speaker
through the ill health of the church in the last century. So don't let that turn you off or at least not too much, but it's a great book to read about how grazing animals are designed to meet their needs in a natural environment where they improve the environment and the environment not only grows them, but gives them deep, resilient health
01:02:26
Speaker
That's a great book. We

Indicators of Healthy Livestock

01:02:28
Speaker
have watched that happen on our pastors at the Franciscan Convent up the road as our cows were transitioned to 12 months of the year grazing on all native forages that we manage in intense rotation. They maintain a level of health we've never seen in any animals anywhere. How is that evinced?
01:02:54
Speaker
in addition to the fact that they grow slow but strong, they're beautiful, they're bouncy, they reproduce well. It shows in things like a very fluffy, sparkly coat. The best-gunned teddy bear can't compete with our cows for beauty of coat.
01:03:19
Speaker
Those are, I'm throwing that out there as just a hint, an example of why as we Catholics move back into the realm of agriculture, we desperately need to put our faith in the way God created and the way he holds creation in being and not decide that
01:03:46
Speaker
we not have preconceived outcomes toward which we are willing to take whatever, to use whatever methods we can cull from our researches on YouTube or in farming books or whatever. We need to go back to the first principle which is we will behave with justice and reverence toward
01:04:09
Speaker
the plants, animals, and soil, the people placed within the reach of our judgment, and then trust that if we do that, God's going to honor that with health and abundance. And the learning that happens is through observation. That's right. Sometimes we hear people talk about, and again, they're maybe following YouTube or they're following books or things like that, but they're not out there watching their animals.
01:04:35
Speaker
So they will say things like, well, you, you have to give it brain. That's not, that's not been our experience. What is that really been your experience that, that an animal will stop lactating if it's not given brain. I mean, every animal eventually is going to stop lactating, but, but that's not been our, our experience. And I think it's really important that people observe and observe well and watch what their animals are eating.
01:05:02
Speaker
then when they see and hear people say things like that, they say, well, that's not been my experience. And I trust my experience and my observation over you, unless you're also basing it on your observations, which maybe have more experience than mine.
01:05:27
Speaker
Sean often says to people, if somebody tells you the solution costs money, you need to think twice about that solution. And- If they're selling something that's gonna be- Right, or even if what they're saying is this biological community that you're undertaking to direct in ways that will make it more abundant, more healthy, and more beautiful, this biological community absolutely requires some man-made purchased input.
01:05:56
Speaker
then anybody's reason, Christian Catholic or otherwise, ought to at some point send up a red flag that says, hmm, I wonder how nature manages without all those inputs.
01:06:07
Speaker
That's wonderful. It's great. It's a good reminder, especially the idea of observing the animals and not becoming so committed to maybe the guidance of someone else that you're seeing online who lives in a completely different geography and a completely different place and climate and really bringing that back to where you physically are, which is probably a good reminder of how we ought to consider what we ought to be doing in life anyways is
01:06:34
Speaker
In farming, there are no experts. In farming, when we deal with nature, there are no experts. They're just practitioners. And we're all accruing. It's a little bit like being Catholic. We continue to practice being Catholic. And those people who think they are the perfect Catholics probably are not. The saints are the people who are the first to say, one, I didn't
01:07:01
Speaker
I have not accomplished what has been accomplished through me. And two, St. Thomas Aquinas, it's all straw. It's just the beginnings. I'm just beginning to see how glorious things could be if I was better at serving them and getting out of the way.
01:07:21
Speaker
And I'll just throw this in there too. We have a terrific amount of fun. And we eat three phenomenal meals a day. And we go to bed at night expecting the same thing the next day. And we sleep well. Yeah. And I'm not sure what else we could want. Right. The Caribbean cruise, maybe. It's great. Maybe. Right now when he's 13 degrees outside.
01:07:48
Speaker
Well, this was wonderful, Sean and Beth. And I really appreciate you all taking time out to talk with us again. And every time that we do, we feel honored to have the conversation with you all. We know that we're going to learn something every time that we do have a chance to speak with you. And certainly this was another one of those examples.
01:08:05
Speaker
So I want to say thank you for being a part of the podcast once again, and thank you for being willing to speak in the way that you do to help bring others to a better understanding of what it means to farm, to homestead, and for your willingness to speak about the faith as well. It's been our pleasure. Thank you for joining us on another episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Check out the show notes for more information about this episode and be sure to tune in next week.