Bovine Banter

Episode 22.5: Pasture Management with Dave Hartman

• Penn State Extension • Season 22 • Episode 5

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 Join Dairy Educator Emily Fread as she interviews Dave Hartman, Program Director of the PA Grazing Lands Coalition. about pasture management. Dave raises Angus cattle and Katahdin sheep on a 170-acre farm in Montour County.

Emily Fread:

Welcome to Bovine Banter with the Penn State Extension Dairy Team. I'm Emily Friend and I'm a dairy educator based in Union County, Pennsylvania. Joining us today is Dave Hartman, a program director of the PA Grazing Lands Coalition. Before this role, Dave was a livestock extension educator for Penn State Extension for 38 years. Dave resides in Montour County on a 170-acre farm with 14 head of Angus cattle and 45 Katahdin sheep. Dave currently grazes on about 45 to 50 acres of his farm. Thanks for joining us today, Dave. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Dave Hartman:

Yeah, sure. So I actually grew up in the same area where I'm where I'm living right now. And most of my 38 years with Penn State were spent here in the Bloomsburg area working from Columbia County. As time changed, we went from being more on a county-oriented basis to being more regional specialists. And people, folks in extension, were a little bit more specialized. So they allowed us to specialize, but then we needed to get out and cover a little bit more territory with our specialization area. So I have uh a wife and two daughters. My daughters are both married, got one granddaughter. We're just taking care of livestock and then working part-time for the Pennsylvania Grazing Land Coalition as a program coordinator.

Emily Fread:

Can you tell us a little bit more about the Grazing Lands Coalition and the programs that it provides?

Dave Hartman:

Sure. So this started a lot of years ago. I think it was in the 1990s, actually. And there was some concern among some farmers and ranchers that most of the funding that was, or federal funding, it was coming towards grazing type things was actually being directed mostly at public grazing lands, in other words, government-owned grazing lands. So there was sort of a movement to try to direct some funding towards activity related to private grazing lands. And so that led to the creation of the National Grazing land coalition, otherwise known as NATGLC. And then all states had an opportunity then to establish their own. And I think there's like 19 or 20 different states in the country that actually have their own state grazing land coalition. So Pennsylvania has had one for many years. It's generally what they've tried to do is find people representing different agricultural organizations in the state that may have an interest in grazing. And then that person is nominated from their organization to come and be on the board of the grazing coalition. We also have a we actually have a fairly large number of members at large. And as long as a person is actively involved in managing grazing livestock, they can serve on the board. I think we have 13 board members right now. What I'm doing actually is springs from a grant project. So we actually were grant funded. So we have a grant that actually has pays for my time part-time coordinator to try to bring to fruition some different programs outlined in our grant. And so right now, some of the major things that we have going is we've got a successful authorship program where we pair up mentors with mentees. So we take a person that's got a long time experience, whether it would be in beef cattle, small ruminants, dairy cattle, whatever it might be, and pair them up with someone that's interested in learning that may have a farm, maybe they have some livestock, but they don't have much direction as to they're confused on which way to go with a lot of things. So it's an effort as a peer-to-peer type of training. And so we support that. We have 11 different mentors right now and working with 12 different mentees. Some of our mentees actually are NRCS employees as well that were wanting to learn more about grazing management through this type of an arrangement. We have some mini-grant programs where we have a certain amount of money budgeted each year to help sponsor some regional events or state events or some county events. And so people that are perhaps uh putting together some sort of a meeting, they'll apply for some funding to help to make ends meet. So we have a committee that oversees that. We've also done some work with demonstrating technology. So we uh the grant that I'm working on actually had some funds in it to purchase a limited amount of virtual fencing equipment. And we were able to get a bunch of those fence collars out this past season onto two farms in the state to just sort of put that stuff into play and see how it worked, learn a little bit more about it because there's a lot of interest in that kind of thing. And I know we've got people wanting to learn more, and so that was a good project to get in place. And hopefully that thing will be continuing next year as well. Those are some of the major programs that we have gone through our grant funding. Each state grazing land coalition can actually chart their own path, basically. Some of the ones in the West have landed bigger funding over the years and they actually have full-time employees employed by their GLCs. And they may be doing diverse kinds of work. Maybe it's education, maybe it's related to eradicating certain types of invasive weed species from the landscape and things like that. It's all up to the direction of the leadership of that state coalition. So that gives you a little summary on what we do.

Emily Fread:

Yeah, that's interesting. So can you explain rotational grazing to our audience and the benefits to both livestock and the soil?

Dave Hartman:

Sure. I guess starting way, way, way back in the beginning when I was in college, there was a little bit of mention about this stuff back in the early 1980s when I was in college. And it was referred to at that time as voisin grazing. So Voisin, Andre Voisin was a Frenchman, a scientist who actually developed and outlined some of the concepts in or with rotational grazing. Okay. And he actually wrote a book. It's still available. It's called Grass Productivity. And that was like the first book about the benefits of a rotational grazing system. So things have evolved from there. You can probably find probably at least 15 different names given to different types of grazing schemes that people have developed and promoted over the years. But just going back to the very basics of rotational grazing is the whole idea was to allow those forage plants time to recover after being grazed. And so if we don't do that, if we just do what's known as otherwise as continuous grazing, you'll get uneven planes of nutrition for the livestock, you'll get uneven harvesting of the grasses and legumes and forbs that are in the field. We'll get less productivity, you'll have less drought resistance. And so it was determined pretty quickly with research throughout a number of years and several decades, really, that rotational grazing really was a good thing and allowed us to have more productivity. And along with that, or one thing that actually happened that that kind of made it easier for that to take place was of our fencing materials became better. And so this day and age, we have a lot better fencing materials that allow us to be able to break down pastures pretty quickly. And a lot of those things became available back in the 1980s, probably to us here in the U.S. I think a bunch of that technology was shipped to us from New Zealand and maybe Europe, with lightweight fencing materials, fence that's polyfenced, which has small filaments in it with plastic thread that can be wrapped up pretty quickly on a spool, different types of posts that we can just carry on our back and just pop into the ground with our heel pretty quickly and string the fence on it and move livestock that way, especially cattle. With sheep, there's a little bit more challenge keeping them where we need the net fencing materials available and so on that can help with managing whatever kind of livestock we have. Yeah, so the benefits to the livestock would be in a rotational system. I mentioned about keeping animals on a more even plane of nutrition. So if we turn a big herd of cattle into a pasture and we're just gonna let them there for a month, they're not stupid. They can figure out basically what tastes the best, which often is plants that are higher in energy. And so they will go in and eat what they like the best. And then over time they're eating the stuff that they didn't like, and plants that have perhaps a little bit less nutrition level. Maybe it's become more fibrous, it's lost its energy content, maybe the protein is down. And so, with a rotational system, part of that is we're we're putting a little bit of pressure on the animals to consume what is there on a more even plane and consume it more quickly. So it provides just that little bit of competition. With soil, there's a lot of talk these days, you know, about soil health that we didn't have that kind of understanding of things. I think a lot of people knew it was important, but just didn't quite know what to do about it. The science has come a long way in 20 years. Part of the advantage with a rotational system is we can allow the plants in the forage stand to recover after grazing, develop some more roots in their system. Then maybe the roots are pruned back a little bit at the next grazing. So over time that helps to develop some more organic matter in the soil. Another thing, in a good rotational grazing system, we do a little bit better job of distributing manure around paddocks. So in a continuous grazing, there's and there's been research done on this, which shows that you know, in a continuous grazing type of setup, it would take many, many, many years for manure from one cow to hit the same place. It's I think I forget the research, but it was like 20-some years until that happens. Okay. In a rotational system where we're kind of controlling that grazing into a smaller area, we get much better distribution of manure and urine around the paddock, which is good for us because it spreads out nutrients and we might be a lot less likely to have to purchase nutrients to replace what we've lost. Also helps to increase the organic matter and make the forage more productive at the same time. So there's many advantages for a little bit of input in time, taking care of the pastures and making sure we move fences. We have to have an adequate water system and uh we have to be thinking about shade. That's always an interesting topic that gets discussed a lot, and you get hot summers like we just went through, and and it becomes a big issue, even in Pennsylvania. Thinking through what our strategy would be to offer shade to animals is important. You know, if we don't do anything, the first thing that happens is cattle will crouch in along the nearest fence row, they'll go stand underneath a tree, they'll go to the watering point, or go back to the buildings. But any of those things over time cause nutrients to sort of accumulate in those heavy traffic areas where they're standing all afternoon. So if we can develop some ways to have movable shade, portable shade type systems. And I've seen different contraptions that people have built. There's some things commercially available that are a little pricey for us in Pennsylvania with our small operations, but there's ideas out there on how to construct something on your own. And you can move that to a different place every couple of days so that we're not getting a lot of mud building up underneath it and at the same time distributing nutrients around. And there's plenty of research data which shows that if we have shade available, that it's beneficial for animals and their performance.

Emily Fread:

So can you tell us a little bit more about the grazing strategy you have on your farm? You know, how often are you moving animals between paddocks? How many animals are you stocking to the acre? What do you have going on?

Dave Hartman:

So when I was working full time, sometimes my there's that old saying, the carpenter's house comes last. Well, sometimes the county agent's farm comes last. So I would stop at my farm first thing in the morning. I could check my cattle from one point on the farm opposed to where I would park my truck, take binoculars, make sure the water was functioning, that the float was up in the water, and then I'd head on my way to work. And there just wasn't always enough time to do anything too fancy. You know, you'll talk to people that move cattle every day, sometimes multiple times a day. That that sort of thing was completely out of the question for me. So I've gone more with the old-fashioned agronomic recommendation was or is that if you're moving your livestock every three days or so, that's pretty good practice. Okay, maybe twice a week. And what that means is that when we put cattle into a paddock, or again, I when I say cattle, I may mean cattle and small ruminants, but we put livestock in a paddock and they start grazing, you'll start getting regrowth. By the time you get to about day three to four, the regrowth at some points of the year, especially in the springtime, is going to be enough that we can that the livestock will regraze what they grazed a day ago or two days ago. And so the idea with a three to four day move is that you would pull the animals out of there, move them to the next paddock before they have a chance to graze regrowth. All right. So I basically go on by that strategy. The way I set up the farm, it's basically divided not quite in half, but almost in half by just a two-wire, uh, an alleyway with two-wire high tensile fence on each side. So I can run the farm in two great big paddocks if I want to, or I can divide it to probably 40 or 50 some if I want to. There's watering points, couplers at different points where I can tag into water along that alleyway. That's generally what I've done is try to move about every three to four days and keep it practical for my situation. Plus, the other thing is the farm where my cattle spend most of their time is a mile from where I live. So if I were trying to move cattle several times a day, I just I can't be driving to the other property to just move cattle. It would not be practical. So sheep and my home farm here is only 10 acres. And but that's where the sheep spend a good bit of their time. But after I wean lambs, which is during the summertime, I'll keep the lambs here at the home farm, but then take the ewes to my other farm and actually put them in with the cattle. And I what I do is again, it was a time savings type of thing. I'll let the ewes go wherever they want to go. Okay. Some people call that a planned grazing system because the the sheep go wherever they plan to go, not where I plan for them to go. But they'll follow a similar pattern, interestingly enough. I've noticed. But I divide the cattle paddocks with just a one strand of polywire on top of a pigtail post. And that keeps cattle where I want them, but it allows a sheep to go underneath the fence. Sometimes they're in with the cows, a lot of other times they're not. So they'll go around and glean things out of the pasture that they prefer, which is more the broadleaf type of plants. So they'll graze more of the clovers, plantain dandelion, different types of forbs like that. They'll top graze off grass a little bit, but they've helped to clean up some weed issues and things like that, just by their selective grazing and giving them a wide area to traverse and sort of eat what they want to eat. Yeah, that's the basic rundown. I've worked with net fencing to create paddocks for ewes and lambs. And again, that's it's a time thing. There's a lot of time involved in that. One of the things I see really, and I haven't really done this much myself. I did some of this a few years back, but I haven't done a lot. But with net affordable net fencing for small ruminants, that's a great way if you're just getting into agriculture and you want to raise sheep or goats. There's little odds and ends and pieces of land out here that you can find that people just want taken care of and they may not even charge you for it. And you could fence it with net fencing, get a solar charger on it, get some water, haul water, and uh, you could be in business, even if you don't own land. Okay, so there's definitely potential for people that are interested in sheep and goats to get into business that way without owning anything other than some polywire and some animals. Trailering, you know, having a way to transport animals is important. But I have one friend that had somebody approach him years ago about using his sheep to graze off an abandoned building site that this guy owned. And so he said, Yeah, I'll do that. So he he grazed it off and he didn't pay to graze it, he didn't get paid to graze it, but it was just there for him to use. So he took advantage of that. And then the guy that owned that property told somebody else. So then my friend got another call. So next thing you know, after a few years, he had four or five properties where he would just his sheep got used to the drill where he would pull his trailer up there and they would open the door and they just hop in and go to the next place that they were being grazed. So there's a lot of potential there. I haven't done much of that myself, but it's an opportunity for a lot of people. But as far as stocking rate, my sheep stocking rate is low. You know, you're looking at during the springtime, probably about two and a half to three U's per acre. It's not heavy enough to keep ahead of the forage. We bail off maybe part of that land area to try to even that up because I use forage in the wintertime. So the cattle stocking rate for quite a few years, I didn't have cows, but I actually bought calves to grass finish. Okay. So I was in a situation there for eight or ten years where I actually bought calves, would finish them, and then a another couple that had their own label, their market had outgrown what they could produce. So I would sell wholesale beef carcasses to them. And so when I was doing that during those years, I ran at a fairly low stocking rate because I wanted the cattle to have the opportunity to be a little bit more selective because I wanted them to get the best forage that they could glean and grow quicker and finish and end up in a choice quality grade category. So at that time, I was probably only counting on about two and a half to three acres for one steer. Okay, so a fairly light rate. I would end up with some excess in the springtime, and if it got out of control, which it usually does, I would have that baled actually and just use it for bedding the next winter. It wasn't a quality I would want to feed to uh finishing steers, but I used it for for bedding. So I did that, but now that I have cows, it'd be a little bit higher stocking rate, but I'm counting on cows to eat a little bit more of that lower quality forage and glean it down a little bit further because their nutritional needs aren't quite as much during part of the summer as what my finishing steers would would have been.

Emily Fread:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Dave Hartman:

Yeah, you want to pay attention to to the forage quality and understand, first of all, understand how forage quality fluctuates as plants mature, and also how it fluctuates maybe through the seasons, and then understand then what your animals' demands are and what they need, and then how you can make the the two things compatible. If we're finishing steers, like I'm talking about, I want them to eat as much as they can every day of good quality forage. We don't want extremely high protein, we're looking more for energy. Okay, so you're looking at things like TDN on the forage test report and fairly low fiber. And so that might be different than what the cows actually need. They may be able to get by a little bit less, uh especially during the dead of winter or whenever we're our cows are dry, they're in that calf's wean, they have an embryo or a fetus inside them, but it's really, really small. So their demands on them are really, really insignificant. So a brute cow can get by on some pretty meager groceries during the winter time. And but if I've got finishing steers, I want them on really good forage. Keep them gaining. We don't want to let them slip behind and get real slow. We want to keep them gaining.

Emily Fread:

Right. So, other than your sheep, what's your strategy for weed control?

Dave Hartman:

Weed control is always an interesting one. I never bothered getting into arguments with any of my former colleagues at Penn State because the the weed control mode for most of us, I think, in the grazing world, it's not the same as with road crops, okay, or with field crops. We can look at things a little bit differently. We don't have to be quite as tuned in and right on top of those problems. And oftentimes what happens is if you want to try to go in and spray for a certain weed, you kill all the broadleaf plants that are there. If you've got a good stand of legumes, you're taking that out. So you got to be careful on what you do and how you approach weed issues. And it's multi-pronged, I guess you would say. So if we're talking about a new stand of forage, okay, let's say we've renovated a field and we're trying to get some new better pasture established, we're probably going to get a flush of annual weeds coming, okay? And that's usually what they are at that stage, would be in this part of the country, anyways, things like lamb's quarter, pigweed, uh, foxtail, all that kind of stuff. It's going to try to come in. But what we want to do, or what I've done, and it works really well, is just cut them off, clip it before they set seed. Just keep any of those annual weeds from setting seed. So you have to understand what's coming as far as what plants are there in terms of weeds and understand what their biology is. Are they an annual? Are they a biennial? Are they a perennial? And so annuals, if we just cut their heads off basically and keep them from setting seed, and then frost comes like we have at this time of year, next year they won't be back and the forage will be more competitive. And what few do come back, they won't be able to compete. If we've got a perennial problem, okay, so you've got Canada thistle maybe showing up. You'll see a lot of pastures with goldenrod or with uh multiflora rows or those kinds of things, those are a different deal and may take some specific strategy to eradicate them. Some of it involves maybe herbicides, some might involve clipping, some might involve how we manage the grazing. So I haven't had too much problem on my farms with perennials. And interestingly enough, I mean, livestock, if we ask them to and through our grazing management, they'll put pressure on plants like Canada thistle and take them out. And it's not an issue. Molliflora rose may be a little different story just because of the thorns. Uh cattle don't really mess with it too much. But I've had I've seen sheep take those plants and strip the leaves off them and eat the new growth back a ways. And after a couple of years of that, the molliflora just disappears, just gone. So there's a lot we can do with the livestock if you're willing to try to manage it. But the first thing you want to do is understand what those weeds are and what their biology is, what their life cycle is, and then understand where the right point is to attack them. For example, I had a the one farm that we own had spent had been in CRP for eight years when we bought it. So I was obligated to continue the contract after we bought that farm for two more years, and all we could do was go in and mow it after the middle of July. That was as per the contract. And at that point, there was a weed that turned up in there called wild parsnip, and it was it gets very tall and big, taller than the tractor that we were using to mow, which was a pretty good sized tractor, and it was setting seed, and I ended up getting uh actually dermatitis from it, like almost like poison ivy, okay, because it actually found I found out after the fact that it's actually a photosensitizer, so it gets on your skin, the dust and the and pieces of leaves, and it can sensitize your skin to the sun. So I ended up with blisters from that. And when I started learning more about the weed, I understood that it's a biennial and it also affects livestock that way. So, and my sheep had actually grazed some of it. It was still there when we started raising sheep after I got the place fenced. And that's a plant that causes them to photosynthesize or their their any any exposed skin with uh no pigment in it was blistered and sunburned. And and so it was a a plant that you had to understand how to get rid of, but really with just some intensive mowing at the right time, took it out, and it has not been a problem ever since then. So my point is just understand the weed and its life cycle and where the best place is to attack it and how to go about it. It might be chemical, it might be biological, might be physical, meaning a mower.

Emily Fread:

So, how often are you reseeding your pastures and what do you usually reseed with?

Dave Hartman:

I haven't done much as far as reseeding. I mean, we've done a little bit over the years. It's kind of one of those things where again, it depends, everybody's goals are a little bit different, and your situation and the context you operate within is different from the next person. So I did some reseeding initially on the farm that I was just talking about, and I used a try to use a pretty diverse mixture of grasses and legumes, but primarily what I was using on the well-drained land on that farm was mainly orchard grass and alfalfa. But there were other places on that farm which were a miserable, miserable type of soil where there's shale knobs and then also heavy wet areas. So you just didn't quite know what to do. I reseeded those with the reed canary grass mixture, which tolerates all those kinds of conditions, whether it's wet or upland. But over time, one of the things that's happened on that farm is that the pasture has reverted back more to tall fescue. And the fescue was in the mix that was used to seed down the old CRP contract, and it was allowed to stand until the middle of August or the middle of July each year. So it allowed that those plants to just set seed and populate the soil with fescue seeds. So now it's there. So it's been a challenge trying to keep the fescue pushed back. I mean, it has its advantages. I cattle and and sheep, they'll graze it at the right stages, and then this time of year they'll start grazing it more after it's been frozen a few times. So there's always those kind of challenges. But I think for whatever you're doing, here's what you need to do. You have to understand what your soil is. Is it droughty? Is it really wet, or is it somewhere in between? Is the is the nutrient levels are they bad? Are they good? Is a pH low or is a pH closer to neutral? That's gonna dictate a lot of what can or can't happen there. So understanding what the soil is like is part of that step if you want to renovate. Planting a good mixture of forages, species, forage species, which is a diversified mixture, is going to allow something to survive and hopefully thrive under your management and your soils. Okay. So the more diverse you can make it, something is probably going to be favored by what you do. That having a diverse mix is good. So if you do a good job. With the grazing management, maybe it won't all end up as one species or two species. You can always tweak things a little bit. I have done a lot of frost seeding over the years of clovers. Get out at the end of the winter when the soil sort of warms up in the daytime and gets a little sticky, thawed out, but then freezes up overnight. If you get out first thing in the morning and spin red clover and white clover, it worked really well in this part of the country onto that frozen ground and allow the soil to just freeze and thaw and sort of pull that seed in. And then when the temperature's right, it'll start growing later in the springtime. I found that that's a really good way to get legume into the pastures in a low-cost way. And when I get legumes there, grasses will follow. So if I can get a good stand of legumes there, it just always seems that it helps to improve the grass stands as well at the same time. So that's what I've done. Nothing, nothing too fancy. You know, and there are other schools of thought out there, and there's research to back it up. So I've seen results of research studies, including some done at Penn State years ago, where they studied, they took cattle and just started grazing a field that had been in corn pretty much continuously for a long time, and then fenced that and just started grazing whatever started growing. And over time, cattle eat weeds at the right stage. Most weeds are fairly nutritious. So you don't generally have to worry as much about weeds as maybe what you've been taught sometimes. So if we can just graze whatever starts coming, chances are those weeds, you know, if there's anything in there, it's poisonous. Oftentimes it's not very palatable, anyways. And animals have to be neglected to want to eat much in the way of poisonous plants. But, anyways, the research they did was once they quantified two, three years later what actually was growing there, they found they had a mixture of grasses, legumes, and forbs. And I think there was like two dozen different species of plants growing. And that was with seeding nothing. Okay. And the point is that there is a seed bank in most soils that's just there and it's latent. It's going to grow when the conditions are right, kind of when we ask it to, but it's there from past generations. And seeds from a lot of species can survive for many, many years in the soil and just stay dormant until the conditions are right. Again, if you're in a situation where you don't have much money to work with to get started, you don't have equipment or whatever. There's some things like that you can do to just bring some pasture into the picture without getting a huge amount of money tied up into a stand. Something to consider.

Emily Fread:

What common mistakes do you see in most pasture management or people who are just starting with grazing?

Dave Hartman:

Probably the biggest thing that we would see a lot of places, and it's not just people that are just starting, it's a lot of people that have been raising livestock for years, but maybe don't pay much attention to grazing or the grazing management, would be just overgrazing and just trying to get graze what isn't there. And they keep the grass really, really short. And your productive species like orchard grass, ryegrasses, they disappear out of that situation. White clover, the old Dutch white clover that we would have in our yards, which isn't very productive, that and bluegrass is about all that can tolerate that overgrazing. So it becomes a pasture which isn't real productive, managed that way. I've always told people, even if you divide it just in half, you know, you're going to be better off. Just divide it once and flip the cattle back and forth. That's going to be better than not doing anything at all. So I'd say overgrazing is probably the biggest mistake that I see. And you open up the soil to more problems than potential problems with some of the perennial weeds by overgrazing because there's this the stand of forage just isn't competitive enough.

Emily Fread:

Well, you had said your one farm was in CRP when you bought it, but have you taken advantage of any other conservation programs that either NRCS or the conservation district or anything offer on your farm?

Dave Hartman:

Yeah, I've done some of that. Those are really good programs that are out there. And typically for conservation, they've been available to help people avoid creating problems. Okay. So they're willing to help cost share in a lot of those programs. They're willing to help cost share fencing. Used to be that it was mainly fencing to keep cattle out of creeks and sort of control their movement that way or to foster rotational grazing. But now there's other programs which may help people to do some of the perimeter fencing, water systems. Water systems is a big one, you know, because if we don't have a good water system, what has to happen? Well, cattle especially are going to trail back somewhere to water and create trails by walking on the same place and following each other in the line. There's programs that can help you develop a better water system, maybe even a water source. So yeah, I've participated in some of those programs over the years that were really helpful and much appreciated. So I did use some funding from EQIP many years ago because the one farm we bought actually had a manure lagoon on it that needed to be cleaned out and properly decommissioned and closed up. And so that, you know, again, it's an environmental hazard. It's there. Previous owners weren't able to do that. So we bought that property. We got enrolled in the EQIP program and it helped to take care of that problem.

Emily Fread:

Do you have any other advice for our audience or any take-home messages?

Dave Hartman:

I mean, even after this many years of doing this kind of stuff, I'm always learning something all the time. So try to be a continuous learner and ask questions. Find out who are some of the people in your neighborhood or in your region that you might be able to get good advice from. And sometimes they're not the loudest people. Sometimes they're the ones that don't say much, but you if you, you know, just sort of feel that out and see if you can find some people that maybe you can ask to help mentor you if you're a new producer and try to get some advice without being too much in the way. I think that's an important thing. This day and age, I think there's too many people that are following somebody on the internet or through social, social media or whatever it is, and getting all this advice, which oftentimes isn't very good advice because it's not necessarily tailored to your particular situation. And there's no the blanket advice sometimes isn't very good. Just not this, these things are not one size fits all. Context that you operate within based on your land, your finances, your livestock, the amount of time you have, and all sorts of other things like that may dictate what you're able to do or not do. And so I think trying to get a little bit more input from some experienced producers and successful people is a good thing. Try to do. Read as much as you can, go to meetings, network, find out who a lot of the other producers are of the with similar interests in your area. And when I was with Extension, we did on-farm pasture meetings years ago. And it was interesting watching that happen. Of course, people wanted to come and learn, but it was also becomes kind of a social event, too. And a lot of those relationships that people developed, they still collaborate to this day because they met through those kind of activities and uh got to know each other. Maybe some of them did business together in some way, shape, or form. And uh getting out there and getting to things like that, and don't just listen to just what you're hearing on the internet because it may not be applicable totally to your place. That's uh I guess one thing I would definitely point out.

Emily Fread:

I think that's good advice. Thanks for joining us today, Dave, and thanks to our audience for listening. Tune in next year for our next season of Bovine Banter.