With all the snow stories lately - I thought I'd share some cattle wisdom with our readers. One of the toughest challenges Ranchers face is how to feed cattle during the winter months. Cattle were created to be natural wanderers, traversing great distances in search of food and water. In the past, during winter large herds would migrate from northern areas to the south in search of more favorable grazing conditions.

This migration, combined with a rest period for the northern pastures, created a mutually beneficial cycle that allowed the soil to support more plants and resources for summer grazing. As a result, the animals were able to put on weight and require fewer calories during the winter.

One of the primary ways ranchers prepare their herds for winter is by checking their backs for snow retention after the first snowfall of the season. Good, fat cows will carry snow on their backs for most of the day following a light dusting, thanks to the insulative properties of their back fat. This helps us determine if our cows are ready for the winter season. If not, we usually sell them off before the harsher winter weather arrives and their condition deteriorates.

In nature, we can see evidence of the benefits of mob-stocking, rotational, and management-intensive grazing practices that promote carbon sequestration. The cows themselves provide historical evidence of their preferred grazing patterns. However, many cattlemen today rely on selective grazing and continuous stocking techniques, which involve fencing in an area and leaving the cows to graze continually without any planned movement or management.

Despite the benefits that nature demonstrates, ranchers often deride these practices as "too much work." It is important to recognize that what is declared normal and beneficial by nature should be a guiding principle for ranching practices. By implementing these techniques, we can not only improve the health of our cattle and the land, but also promote more sustainable and profitable operations in the long run.

The key concept to remember here is that there is no such thing as a free lunch - we must invest energy into our food supply. However, this investment does not require 100% of our effort. In the past, there were likely times when humans had to work hard simply to survive. But with our brains and opposable thumbs, we have the ability to optimize our resources for maximum efficiency.

That being said, we must be careful not to become so complacent that we damage the soil and overuse or misuse resources, leading to unforeseen consequences. By practicing responsible agriculture and sustainability, we can ensure that our land and resources remain healthy and productive for generations to come. So while we should strive for efficiency and optimization, we must also remember to work in harmony with the environment, rather than at its expense.

Our Cows need salt.

They like it, and salt provides them an efficient way to uptake certain minerals no longer present in the biosphere.

Years ago, an abundance of minerals resided in the soils and plant life - today, they are all but gone. As the great western herd of 70 million bison moved over the vast landscapes of California, they would ebb and flow with the natural flora present.

Driven by taste, pressured by predators, the massive, heaving mass of Bulls, Cows and Calves would meander from site to site, uninhibited by your swimming pool or interstate 5.

Seasonal and geographical variations would permit rooting depths of the perennial grasses to forage deep within the crevices of ancient buried rocks and mine out minerals from eons ago. This, combined with the natural growth cycle would present various plants of diverse size, shape and color to the heard. Each individual inside the group would select its grazing requirements based upon need and metabolism. A wonderful and magnificent dance of give and take would result. Those not capable, or adapted to ferreting out the right plant, at the right time, with the right nutritional uptake would fall to predation and not reproduce. The cycle of life is far more efficacious, and might I add, brutal than our puny brains and opposing thumbs could ever be - nature is, if anything - a strict schoolmaster.

In today's world of modern Ranching, none of this is true.

The animals cannot roam freely, at least not to the extent they once did. They cannot cross from the pastures outside of your community, over the streets, past the grade school, behind your backyard BBQ, and near the coastal shrub plains to gobble up a snack of Arizona Bunch-grass for that boost of iron or copper they so desperately need. 

Conventional Ranchers - the majority of producers, today, do not salt correctly. The Cow must choose their nutritional uptake. When a Rancher puts out a salt block, it is usually what the Rancher thinks the Cow needs - the Cow cannot speak, so the husbandman must interpolate its needs - right?

Wrong - the Cow can speak, just not with words. 

In fact, nature speaks all the time, we just choose not to listen. 

Here is a short clip of how we manage and handle Salt on our Ranch (BTW - we are not conventional Ranchers if you haven't figured that out yet)​

Sure, we offer Pastured based livestock products like Grass-fed & finished Beef and Pastured, Pork and Chicken – all stuff people desperately need, but on a daily basis, but I’m increasingly convinced that our primary purpose, here at SonRise Ranch is to reach out to the consumer and offer them an education.
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What kind of education can you get from someone who moves Pigs around a pasture all day long?In the early 20th century ninety percent or more of the U.S. population was involved in Agriculture to some degree or another. Today, Farmers don’t even rate being counted on in the US census. In fact, the current population of incarcerated persons in the United States dwarfs the number of Farmers by two-to-one.

People, for the most part, due to no fault of their own, are agriculturally illiterate. They have no idea how food is grown, how animals live, what they should or should not eat – this comprises the bulk of our conversations with our constituency.

Conservatively, I have over 100 conversations per week regarding food, food production and sustainable agriculture.
And we are by no means, a big attraction. On the contrary, we are a small farm.

I meet and talk with folks at the Farmers Markets, at Weston A. Price dinners and conferences, at social events, via email and phone calls – literally hundreds of concerned mothers, steak loving fathers, and environmental activists each week contact the Ranch seeking knowledge and information.
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The level of interest in farming is staggering.

“Hi – I am looking for chicken that is grown only on California soil, eats no Gluten, Soy, Wheat, Corn, Grains, Bugs, Dirt, Ants, Rodents, Fish or Fish by-products, Can you help me?”

My first question would be; “What do you propose we feed them?

Air? Snowflakes? Clouds?

Theirs is a valid question, don’t get me wrong, in fact we invite people to ask these questions. But seriously folks, what, pray tell do you propose these wonderful creations eat while being raised on our farm?

I need to feed them something!

The impetus for this disconnect is a lack of understanding between what the Doctor is prescribing, and what the chicken is metabolizing. The customer, in this case, is severely allergic to the aforementioned foods and desires the chicken they are consuming to have the same dietary restrictions they do. This is completely unnecessary and dysfunctional.

What a chicken eats, and how it affects the human who eats the chicken, fall into one of two categories.

1. Products grown or found in nature - Examples include seeds, corn, lentils, beans, peas, wheat, and other grains as well as bugs, plants, grass, legumes, forbs etc.
2. Products made by man. – GMO corn, GMO lentils, GMO beans, etc. Pesticides, Herbicides, Synthetic Hormones, De-worming agents, and the like.

The chicken has no problem digesting the gluten found in grains.

Trust me – they’ve been doing it for years.

Birds (Chickens) eat seeds in nature. This is why they exist symbiotically with Herbivores. They can eat a handful of seeds and a few will pass right though, undigested then get deposited on the soil after a short flight. Nature relies on birds to spread the seeds just as it relies on bees to pollinate. If we were to travel to the Caribbean a few thousand years ago, to find an un-domesticated chicken, in its natural habitat, it would surely be eating grains – gluten and all!

When a chicken eats, the gluten (a form of protein) will digest down into amino acids; starches will break down into simple sugars, and fats will be converted into fatty acids and glycerol. This is all perfectly normal. These basic elements are what make a chicken, a chicken. They comprise its whole structure, its feathers, legs and feet. The sacrifice of the wheat grain, in this case, created the life of a chicken. It’s the whole circle of life.

In the second category, products made by man, the story is entirely different. Transgenic modified foods (GMOs) are un-natural at best and diabolical at worst. They can be metabolized, but at a considerable cost. The unpronounceable compounds, assembled by someone in a laboratory with a post-secondary education and a well worn pocket protector are not natural!

Man made products can, and will transfer directly though the chicken and into you. If you are allergic to glyphosate, for example (the primary ingredient in Monsanto’s Round Up) you will be given a hefty dose when you eat a chicken that has spent its whole life eating feeds treated with Round up.

Glyphosate will bioaccumulate(1) in the tissue of the chicken and enter you directly. Your body will no more know what to do with glyphosate, than did the chicken – so it will insulate it, catalog it and wait for further instructions. "This is a toxic invader, we better surround it with fat cells and make sure it can’t travel anywhere in the body" the immune system cries.

Not so with heritage, natural, non-GMO wheat. The chicken’s great, great-grandmother ate the same wheat, gluten and all that the grand- chicken is eating today, it hasn’t changed in a millennium.

The chicken, like you and I, have a three-trillion member, internal, bacterial team alive and well inside it’s craw (they don’t have stomachs, like we do – but it’s the same concept). This guest society is well adapted, over thousands of generations and stands ready and waiting with all the right enzymes to break down and digest some wheat to convert it into energy.

Do you get the point here?

Our customer, in this case, was not really allergic to gluten, wheat or corn. They are allergic to the chemicals and transgenic modified versions of gluten, wheat and corn. Ancient, natural gluten, wheat and corn are nourishing, and have been for thousands of years – Jesus used it to feed 5000 hungry listeners and not one complained of an allergy!
Just because modern grains are sprayed with chemicals and have modified DNA, does not mean that ancient natural grains are bad! This requires putting your thinking cap on.

Throwing out all grains, because some have been sprayed with Round up, would be akin to outlawing cars because some are operated by careless drivers that cause ten-car pile ups on the freeway.

Would it not be wiser to simply arrest the offenders and revoke their driving privileges?

This is one of the reason we feed Non-GMO feeds to our Pork and Poultry (not Cows) – we don’t want the trace elements of glyophosate to enter the bloodstreams and muscle tissue of our animals.

Our method of feeding is called Bio-mimicry. Bio-mimicry is a fancy term that simply means “to impersonate nature”.
Let’s take corn for example. In nature, without human intervention, chickens would not eat GMO corn.

The Organic designation on our feed guarantees they are non-GMO and thus not poisoned with Round up. And while we are on this topic, a chicken diet restricted to vegetarian feed only, as is the craze right now, would be just as destructive as one doused with Round up. Chickens, like all birds, eat bugs. A chicken deprived of bugs would be a very unhealthy, unnatural chicken.

If a Farmer eliminates 99% of all feeds available, due to the unfounded fear that if humans are allergic to certain feeds, then so are chickens. Or worse, that chickens somehow transfer allergies to humans when consumed, will have a serious problem – his chickens will starve.

In days gone by, all, or nearly all Americans knew this stuff.

Of course, they didn’t have the allergies we have today. The credit for the absence of allergies went, first to the hearty immune system of past generations. Simply put, it was more robust than ours today. Those folks played with other snot-nosed kids in the park as children, ate more dirt wiping out on their bicycles or falling off tire swings, and did not have the so-called benefit of anti-bacterial soap.

Secondly, their immune system was not constantly assaulted with foreign substances, chemicals and transgenic modified organisms. They, unlike us, were not raised on sterile food, devoid of helpful bacteria.

They were healthier.
We are sickly.
​And it’s all a result of what we eat.

Notes: (1) Bioaccumulation is the tendency of  a consumed substance to become concentrated inside the bodies of living things. The lying scientists and their government cronies at the UDSA and FDA will insist that glyphosate does not bioaccumulate. Is that why, since the introduction of chemical farming in America, we have the dubious honor (or dishonor) of leading the world in obesity and chronic disease? Think for yourself! What makes logical sense?

Then, just today, we saw this article in Farm Ireland.​

The USDA is allowing import beef from Ireland to be labeled “Grass fed" if they are fed grass 80% of the time.
 
In stark contrast, SonRise Ranch Beef are 100% Grass fed, all the time. This is called "Grass fed & finished" - scary stuff for consumers who rely on their imagination of what Ireland is like.

In fact, the article admits that most consumers associate Ireland with green grass - thus they can be fooled easily.
And so, the bigger picture begins to emerge. Terms like “Grass fed” and “Organic” are being confused with what we do, here at SonRise Ranch. ​

Here is a quick video that explains what to look for in true Grass fed Beef...

To add insult to injury, the USDA, who introduced Mad Cow Disease, and spoiled import meat to the U.S. now permits import and domestic Big Ag to label their product “Grass fed” when their beef eat grass only 80% of the time.

​So what does all this mean?

​Let’s take a look at some definitions… from top to bottom (and I really mean bottom). 

Number two above is what really gets me – “must be fed grass at sometime”

All Beef eats grass, sometime in its life! In other news, water is wet…Come on, this is a ploy for the big time producers to recapture what they’ve lost to small time Grass fed & finished guys and the government is in collusion with them.

The sad part is that people can be fooled by what they read on a label and it is affecting real Ranchers in real ways. “Grass fed” should really mean just that, but such is not the case.
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Key takeaway - you've got to know your producer!