Ep #10: Beef Demand, Global Markets & The Future of Ranching with Rich Bradbury
What’s driving the future of ranching? In this episode, host Brian Kearney and guest, Rich Bradbury explore the evolving landscape of ranching, from shifting cattle markets to land access challenges. Sharing insights from his experience managing large-scale grazing operations, Rich sheds light on the biggest opportunities and obstacles facing today’s ranchers, including sustainability, global demand, and the financial realities of the beef industry.
Listen in to learn how young ranchers are navigating barriers to land ownership, why regenerative practices are gaining traction, and what the future holds for beef production in a rapidly changing world. You’ll hear about the impact of international trade on the U.S. beef supply, changes in Australian beef exports, and why many believe USDA cattle inventory numbers might be overly optimistic. Rich also talks about his viral LinkedIn post on the role of corn in cattle production, its impact on carbon intensity (CI) scores, and the ongoing debate about sustainability versus profitability.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
The challenges of land transition.
Cattle market trends.
How integrating livestock benefits soil health and sustainability.
The role of cover crops in improving land productivity.
The global demand of the U.S. beef market.
Why some believe the USDA’s cattle numbers are inaccurate.
The high cost of acquiring ranchland and possible solutions.
Corn market volatility and its impact on ranchers.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“When you say the era of corn is ending, it's going to scare a lot of people. But I think really, we need to examine what that is that's scaring us about it. Because it's not going to be the end of corn. It's just going to be a transition into a different era of agriculture.” - Rich Bradbury
“We really have to reprioritize … how we're rewarding people financially. It needs to be less tied to the crop and more tied to the health of the soil.” - Rich Bradbury
“I think the movement towards cover crops is happening.” - Rich Bradbury
Resources:
Rich Bradbury: LinkedIn
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Read the Transcript:
Rich Bradbury: I'd expect to, when you say, yeah, the era of corn is ending, it's going to scare a lot of people. But I think really what the question is we need to examine what that is that's scary enough about it because it's not going to be the end of corn, it’s just going to be a transition into a different era of agriculture.
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Brian Kearney: Welcome to The Land Ledger. Today, I have Rich Bradbury on the show. Saw an interesting LinkedIn post that I'm sure we're going to dive into, but, Rich, welcome to the show.
Rich Bradbury: Well, thank you for having me.
Brian Kearney: Oh, I'm excited to dive in. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we get into the nuts and bolts.
Rich Bradbury: I do ranch and I ranch here in Southeastern Oregon. It's the most remote place in the lower 48 states, which is sort of mind blowing for some people, but and then I also have a real estate company here and I got into real estate after working in commercial real estate in Reno and I sold some oilfield tools when I lived down in Texas and decided I enjoy sales.
I thought it'd be something I never really appreciated, but I got into real estate to sell ranches and it's a, the ranch broker part of it is a tough sort of a hole, but it got me really looking into what underpins the value of ranch properties, water, soil, that kind of stuff. And then since the 80s, my parents have really been into savory and we've just sort of building on that.
And then Gabe Brown and Regenerative Agriculture came along and we have gone primarily into selling grass fed beef and went through a co-op in Idaho called Desert Mountain Grass Fed Beef and utilizing cover crops in the Idaho Golden Triangle area, and have developed some really good farmer partners and yeah, so we've always, we've never really participated in the commodities market.
And I had a lot of people on LinkedIn asking me what my opinions on were on the market and I really didn't have one. So I started doing this deep dive into the markets and that’s what sort of brought me here because yeah, my conclusions, I guess, have stirred some people up.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, for sure. For sure, they have. No, that's interesting. We need to get Gabe Brown on the show at some point, but we're actually having Roger Savory on the show a little bit later. So it'll be interesting to dive into his side too. But, yeah, that makes sense. What's, I guess we'll dive right into your view on the cattle market.
And right now, I was talking to a farmer earlier this week, and he said it's the only time in his career where he can't deliver a semi load of corn and buy one bread heifer. It's like, “I just can't do it right now.” So I want to dive in a little bit to that side and what you see with the market cycles for cattle.
Rich Bradbury: Yeah, I thought it was really fascinating and I thought the run up starting probably late in the summer, like everybody started questioning like this is abnormal. And then the USDA starts sounding the horn about the cattle inventory and it's down considerably. And the big red flag in that scenario is that people are not replacing their bred heifers.
And there's that, it's not showing much recovery. And then, I think that the market was further–what we anticipate from the market was further sort of throwing a skew because of the tapeworm, or the screwworm on the border.
Brian Kearney: Okay.
Rich Bradbury: A lot of import, live import cattle that would normally be in the United States right now on forage are not here. And if I get anything wrong, I apologize. This is a really big, it's a lot,
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rich Bradbury: From what my understanding is, a lot of the imported cattle, live imported cattle would graze the winter wheat in Oklahoma and Texas and those that's just not there. And then we're even seeing it in California.
They got a good early shot of rain and California sort of lives and dies on rain. And so they had a lot of pasture, but a lot of people that they counted on to send cattle took, sold their cattle early and ended up not going to California. So it's sort of even destabilized that market a little bit, but I think California will recover.
Brian Kearney: That's interesting. Okay. What does the economics of a ranch look like for both the owner and the investor? On the show, we've gone in pretty far into the row crop world of the Midwest and in greater region, but we haven't really gone into the ranch side of it. So what does that look like and what does the difference between conventional and regenerative look like?
Rich Bradbury: So I always start with this caveat. I get in trouble for being overcritical of what in the beef industry, we call the conventional producer, raises a calf and it goes to the feedlot, goes through the system, very conventional way, and then, but what I have, the caveat I have to add to that is nearly every western ranch, and it gets a little different as you go probably east of Wyoming, those ranches start to change.
They become a lot more hybrid between farm and ranch, and then when you get out into your country, you get more into that heartland and the soil, and the commodity crops and that kind of stuff. So I primarily focus on western ranches, and what I'd say is they're some of the most pristine properties as they sit just because of the nature of a cow calf operation. Their value is greater, and this is just the very basics, most branch values are greater than what the operation can buy.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Rich Bradbury: A good branch operation can support the branch, pay the property taxes, and you can do really well, but if you want to go and replace that, it's nearly impossible. And what I've seen, the people that are coming into ranching are not necessarily ranchers.
They've made a lot of their money somewhere else, or they're looking forward to an investment, but it's a tricky investment thing because a lot of what you're banking on is appreciation. And that brings us to like the regenerative side that I like to focus on is, for me, it comes down to soil, water, and climate, and what resiliencies that combination of thing will build into a ranch.
And in the ranch market, those aren't really factored in even at the appraisal level to a minimum because a lot of times when you're doing property comps, you will put, they look at the acreage, and then, because so few ranches trade hands, there's not many comp to pull from, so they're really comparing acreage.
And some outfits are rangeland outfits, some have lots of water, and some are sort of a hybrid between both. Or some might have a little bit of farming with them. So really, I spent a lot of time trying to a coach sellers or buyers through what they should be looking for because there's so much romance around what a ranch is but there's also some really good deals and what I tell most investors is if you want to get something with a lot of water that's going to add you a lot of value. If your soil is in good condition that's better but if you're looking for a ranch that has a lot of water that might have had marginal management in the past, there's a tremendous upside that you can add value to that.
Plus there's just the natural appreciation and you can't, as a real estate person, you can't really bank on that appreciation, but it's held pretty true for the last 40, 50 years. There's a pretty steady increase in agriculture land, more so on the crop side, but the ranch holds right in there, especially that aesthetic part of the ranch, that adds quite a bit of value.
Brian Kearney: yeah it does, that makes a lot of sense, and I guess when I think of people buying ranch ground, I don't typically think of people buying it for the farm. I typically think of exactly what you're talking about. They made their money elsewhere. You look at like the Ted Turner's of the world and made boatloads of money elsewhere, wants to buy a ranch because of that romance, like you said, is a huge kind of unquantifiable side, but that's interesting. when you talk about deals, is there a typical size you see that you can get a better deal?
Is it over a certain size there's going to be so many bidders it's not worth it? Or what do you typically see there?
Rich Bradbury: It's really property by property because a lot of people really have to fall in love with the location or maybe sometimes it fits something they're already doing or they have a particular draw to a place or a lot of the places that I've, a lot of the smaller agriculture properties that I've sold, are people that were from California.
A lot of people moved to where I'm located because they were in that paradise area in California and the fire just got overwhelming and they got what they could and they moved to a place that–it's a little bit more, less fire risk, influenced. Yeah
Brian Kearney: That's interesting.
Rich Bradbury: And water is critical. California is, water is a mess right now and so you can't count on that. Even in parts of Oregon. But there's parts of Oregon that are in the great basin, like Nevada, Utah, where there isn't the pressure from endangered species like there are on places where the water runs to the ocean. We do have our struggles. I deal with endangered and threatened species all the time, but not to the extent and to the sensitivity of a place where the water is in that ocean hydraulic system.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. And then I think this question is just kind of going to show my naivety when it comes to ranch ground, but how are you typically looking at it? ‘Cause if you look at a row crop farm operation, it's gross per acre. It's kind of the easiest way to break it down. Do you do something similar when you're trying to buy a ranch ground?
Are you looking at stocking density? What are you typically looking at there? And how do you start to wrap your head around what type of revenue each individual property can produce and what you can improve it to? If that makes sense.
Rich Bradbury: I think ideally, I think maybe right up front is that most cow guys, the only way they're going to afford another cow ranch is if they like 1031 exchange into it.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rich Bradbury: And it's really hard. I talked to a lot of people that want to get started and just can't touch it because they can't, they don't have an operation. They can't build an operation on that piece of property that will cash flow their payments and that. So I guess I lost the question. And I get in conversations about this all the time, it's like, well, the operation should be able to make the payments on the ranch and that's how you know if you have a good operation.
Well, that's just not a reality in a lot of these ranches. They're trading for way over what you can buy that on. So a lot of people are making the investment. Now you can stack revenue on it, which is different than the traditional cattle thing. I sold a guy a 1,600 acre ranch that was in a burn.
We had a huge giant burn here where I live locally. It was 600,000 acres. Burned a lot of forest land. And, so yeah, he's got in. He's salvaged the trees. And a tree on the west coast only is viable for timber for a certain time after burning. And then it's called Blue Timber, and so he salvaged as much as he could, but the mills were to capacity and they couldn't take anymore, so he's transitioned to creating biochar.
And then he's taking in more outside cattle, so he's gonna lease, he doesn't own any cattle, so he'll lease that, and then he's applied for a lot of conservation grants through like beaver analog dams, and I think the biochar might be also some sort of conservation grant. So you can stack different value and a lot of that is the ecological value of the property because they already start at a higher level. So there's a lot of interest in keeping that intact.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Okay. That, that makes sense. Do things like … or hunting leases, do those make much of a difference or is that kind of a rounding error?
Rich Bradbury: I would say the general I will tell you an interesting story, but I would say, first of all, hunting, I don't believe, over the time, has proven out as a real revenue stack that's gonna move the needle very much. There's some exceptions, of course, but not enough to make the payment on a ranch over 2,000 acres. It's just too big.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
Rich Bradbury: I will tell you about a really cool company that is allowing ranchers to stack revenue and it's called Land Trust and it's like Airbnb for hunting. And I've used it on my operation and, yeah, if you use it right, you can generate, I think I got $700 for people staying for two days, which seems like a little bit of money, but when you're all set up to do it, it's something that you can add. And I think it might actually create more value than the traditional, I bought all this for myself and I'm going to keep it for hunting, and I'm just going to allow a couple of people on it. The metrics down in Texas are probably a little bit different, but here there's just not that demand, but we do get big dollar hunters up here, but it's not enough to swing the difference.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, okay, that, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And then, what–
Rich Bradbury: Oh I got to speak to agritourism. I just talked about–
Brian Kearney: Yeah, please.
Rich Bradbury: So like everybody, or most people, or I guess 20% of the population, I've brainstormed a lot with AI. And that is AI's go to thing as to add revenue to a ranch. And I'm like, you just need to stop with that. It's not really realistic because, but, there's just, people don't travel into these parts of the world that much unless, that it's not their destination place. It's not what they're gonna do with their disposable income.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Rich Bradbury: I mean, there's exceptions to the rules like the largest hobby group in the United–the two largest hobby groups the United States are bird watchers and train people that go around and look at the old trains that they have out.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rich Bradbury: And so like bird watching is great, but they don't spend that much money.
Brian Kearney: Right. They do it because it's cheap, probably. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Huh? Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but that makes sense. Unless your farm's 30 minutes outside of a major metro area,
Rich Bradbury: There's one outside of Chicago. I think they're about 30 minutes out. It's called Seven Sons and they are very diversified operation and they charge people $20 to get on their little tram and ride around the farm and pet the animals and see how they do it and they, I think, all summer run that as a pretty steady little business. So there are like, I said, there are exceptions to every rule.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. And we'll put a link to their website in the show notes. Good website too. Really, really good website.
Rich Bradbury: Those guys hustle, they're amazing.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, they do. Yeah, that makes sense. And then let's dive into the LinkedIn posts, which was probably the one of the more interesting I've seen. Let's see how many, 287 likes, 126 comments.
Got a lot of views, but you were talking about the kind of corn being king in the agriculture market and how that might be shifting and you might be seeing some of those headwinds. Talk a little bit about that.
Rich Bradbury: I'll start at the beginning, I dove into the cattle business, and what's affecting the cattle market. And the indicator, what I've narrowed down, what most cattlemen watch, the indicators that most cattlemen watch are corn, boxed beef cut out, herd inventory, and–draw blank on the fourth one. Anyways, but I thought that the interest, I got really interested in the corn because it, how would you say it? Corn is such an interesting commodity, and the fact that a lot of it's subsidized through, and I'm not bitching about subsidies, I think that they keep food cheap, and I don't think that they're–I think it's just stopping people at the retail from paying more for food.
If we didn't have those, our food prices would look a lot different. 40% of corn goes to ethanol. So that leaves sixty percent of the corn that goes to the feed. And what we've seen over time is that the organic matter in a lot of the crops that are primarily corn, and I have to apologize, I'm a rancher. I'm ignorant about farming. But I know that there's rotation crops, but corn is the primary cash crop that everybody continuously grows because they can count on that backstop. And not only that, they have the crop insurance also. So it's pretty, the margin of risk in corn is less than really jumping out and trying other things.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Rich Bradbury: And then the four big packers are able to watch the corn market and the feed that's going to the packer plants and they can play that market and sort of understand what they're going to do. And then there's a lot of other factors in there that'll get me in trouble if I talk about it, but I don’t want to get sued.
But what's happened over the years is, early in the, when we were first getting established as corn being the king commodity, you're looking at organic matter soil content of five to seven to 5%. Right now, on average, American agricultural land across the board is down around three and some corn, they're down around two.
And I don't think you can go much lower than two because it just to, naturally, organic matter can't go that low, but it is sort of at a crisis situation, and from what we understand about water is for every per 2% of organic matter you lose, you lose 50% water retention. So now the corn crop is drinking more water than it ever has before. The organic matter down really low, and it takes greater amount of synthetic inputs to produce that crop.
At the same time, with the organic matter lower, it's providing less nutrition to the cattle, or it's providing less nutrition to whoever's buying the corn. And then, we're seeing that in the cattle, the cattle nutritional density is going down, and their conversion rate's going down, but their carcass size is going up.
And since the 2000s, carcass sizes have gone up 150 pounds.
Brian Kearney: Jeez. Okay.
Rich Bradbury: So the, how would you say it, market isn't operating like a traditional market because there's so many variables that change the cow market. So what I was looking at from the cow market stance, I was looking at it from all these incentives that go into corn and how they can be used to dictate what the cow market is just by a tremendous advantage going downstream of data analytics and that sharing of data across some really big players.
And so they're sort of able to control the cattle market through different nudges and stuff just based on corn. And then you can add the imports into that. But what I saw was that the organic matter situation and the water situation isn't a sustainable situation. And the more I got to researching it, we've gone through different eras of agriculture.
This is not like it's a cycle that hasn't happened before. So up until the 1920s, we were in this sort of subsistence agriculture phase. And then we got, we went through this era of mechanization, which really brought intensive farming up and crops up. And then we went into the, what I call the grain era.
The grain era was a lot like the corn era is now, and what we ended up with in the end was the Dust Bowl. And then, I think some probably time, and I'd say like that Michael Pollan book, I can't remember the name of it, Domino's Dilemma, started to sound the alarm that the mechanisms that were put in place after World War II to make corn the primary commodity that supported the beef industry and supported so much of the Midwest, I think that era is coming to an end.
And I think that the regenerative piece of this is that a lot of that organic matter is going to be rebuilt with livestock, whether it's cattle, sheep, whatever you want to talk about.
But it's just that natural input that needs to go back into the land, get the organic matter up. I'm not saying that corn is done, that we're nailing the coffin down, but I think that it's going to become less of a factor. And my thesis, or my idea is that we're gonna, the one interesting thing that I've found since I wrote that post, because I've kept researching it, like I've researched these eras and how they are a natural transition. But I think the really valuable thing that came out of corn since World War II is the precision agriculture it created.
So the precision agriculture tools that we have now, the ag tech that is functional and that corn people and crop people have been relying on, is amazing. And I think that it's going to transition well into the next era. Just needs to be, as corn sort of comes out, we're trying to put these cattle and these livestock back on to these places that the organic matter builds up. I think that persistent agriculture that was a hundred percent built on the back of corn is gonna play a tremendous role in what this next era is gonna become.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. No, that's interesting. And I think part of what interested me there, and I'm going to have to do my own research and really dive in, was when you were talking about how there might be an interesting comparison to the housing market in 2008, where everyone said the housing market can't crash, but it was being mismanaged.
So that's interesting. I don't know that that's the case for, particularly I'd say our area, and we just look at Illinois, Iowa, Indiana ground for the most part and stuff that touches it since some of the best soil in the world still has 5% organic matter is not unheard of. It's kind of common. But marginal ground, I can see how that kind of makes sense. If you are farming timber ground, I could see how the lower organic matter, the sub poor subsoils could be an issue. That's interesting.
Rich Bradbury: Yeah, the way I see it is when I look at it like the 2008 thing, I was sort of looking at it through the lens of we were able to bail ourselves out of that. Created financing and everybody sort of pitched in and took those tranches and diffused them across the economic system until we could write that thing. The organic matter in the soil is a much slower moving crisis,
And there's no amount of money that could bring that soil back in the same amount of time that the housing was able to recover. Because what I found fascinating is, following Gabe Brown, and I watched the movie Common Ground.It was the sequel to Kiss the Ground. And he was saying he started regenerative agriculture in 1994. His soils were at the two per two to three percent level. And that's the thing that got him into it is the erosion was became sort of untenable for him. It was heartbreaking. And, after 30 some years of work, he has got it is organic matter up to between seven and eight.
And that was 30 years of work. So when I say it's a slow moving crisis, the recovery takes a long time. And I think that he plays the trail and there's probably faster ways to get there now. But pick that soil level up to that 6 percent organic matter level up to that 6 percent level, it's probably 20 to 15 to 20 years.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. No, that makes sense. It's interesting. What would you say is the fix on the ranch side for the transition that's coming to kind of change tax? Because I would imagine it's similar again to row crop, which is more what I'm used to, but I'd imagine it's similar where the landlords, the owners of the ranches are older, has to transition somehow and the capital just might not be there. So is that something that's also common in the ranch world?
Rich Bradbury: Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the things that a lot of people that really into the commodities and trading watch, there's a guy, his name is Corbett and he has a YouTube channel called Feeder Flash and he gets about 9,000 views every time he posts something, which is small, but when it's this, it's a niche market, there's not that many ranchers out there and they're not, he's not dealing with the, he follows the contract sales of Big Ports Cattle, but he's going around and he's seeing all the things that are happening at the little regional sales barns, and he said, “Yeah, the common age of a rancher might be 65, but I'm seeing more guys in their 80s that are still…” And then they're talking about, he was also talking last week about how everything that they're seeing in those little commodity market auction barns is lots of dispersal sales.
Now those cattle are going somewhere. I don't know if they're going into the food supply chain or they're getting distributed around to other ranches, but I think he and a lot of his contemporaries believe that the inventory that the USDA is banking everything on is actually lower than what they believe it is. And I think–
Brian Kearney: USDA being wrong with their numbers? No.
Rich Bradbury: Yeah. So the US inventory may be more, may be worse than what we think. And then the other really interesting thing about the cattle market that I've noticed is the strength of the dollar. And the rise of the Asian middle class has changed the international beef market.
So a lot of cattle or beef that was traditionally imported into the United States because it was cheaper is now going to Asia. Like, Australia has signed a huge trade agreement with different Asian companies, and that Australian beef that was coming to the United States necessarily isn't coming here anymore. And I think that leaves Brazil who's not being able to get anything across because of the screw arm situation, which will probably get solved eventually.
But I just don't think we're that–I think we've been in our domestic bubble for so long. I think not only cattlemen, but row crop producers and everything that we're probably not paying attention to what's happening internationally in the rise of Asia. And those kind of situations because they just don't have the, they don't have the cultivatable land that we have available to us.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Do you think that we have the capacity in the country to both fulfill our demand and take up some of that export or should we just be focusing on our capacity to raise our own beef as much as we can so we don't have to be as at the whim of trade things that farmers can't control.
Rich Bradbury: My answer is going to be semi political and say by what I've heard from Alan Williams and Gabe Brown, think about this that have been involved in this a lot longer. I think first first we have to make sure that our domestic food supply is as secure as possible. I don't believe 100 percent that's the case.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rich Bradbury: As far as the regenerative side of it, everybody, a lot of people think it's a pipe dream, but as Gabe and Helen Williams were discussing on the Moving Cows podcast last week, is if you think about it in like a monoculture sense, it probably is impossible. But when you look at it through a regenerative agriculture lens, you're talking about stacking revenue.
So what are the avenues to regenerative agriculture is, and raising your organic matter is cover crops, more rotations, and that kind of stuff. Well, if you're set up to have something graze your cover crops, then you're stacking another lease on top of your operation.
Brian Kearney: Yep.
Rich Bradbury: A lot of commodity, and I'm not trying to offend anybody, I should say, a lot of people that farm, they primarily farm. They don't have the bandwidth or the infrastructure to take on livestock.
Brian Kearney: Right. Right. Because it’s just impossible for some.
Rich Bradbury: Yeah, so what I would see and what I'm sort of predicting is with this, if the corn area is coming to an end, there might be more and more crop producers sort of building that infrastructure out so that they can get these animals back on to the places that traditionally and for years haven't had animal input into them and because they're, I think the movement towards cover crops is happening.
But one of the biggest problems I heard is you just planted something that you're going to plow back under and you could correct me if I'm incorrect. So you could add the organic matter. We see this in Idaho with our farmer partners is they're actually going out and trying to find manure to put back onto the land that we're–and we just don't produce that much manure. But if you bring the animal to where you have your cover crops, then you're creating another revenue stream, plus you're actually, then you're creating a different type of feedback loop on your operation, and you have that organic matter coming back in.
Not only did you grow that plant, you captured all that carbon, then you have the cow eat it, run it through the rumen system or the sheep or whatever. Most everything that you're going to have on your farm has a rumen. And they're going to defecate it out, and that comes with moisture and natural fertilizer and the microbiome, the microbes that are going to repopulate that soil and get that content and get your systems back into a more natural state.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, no that makes sense and we just had someone that's an investor in the regenerative side on the show and he was talking about a client of his in Southern, Illinois who had 20,000 acres. He's like, “How am I gonna run cattle on 20, 000 acres?” It's like, “You probably can't.” That's a huge push.
What's interesting, and I'd love to hear, if you know someone in the area or if anyone in the audience knows, I'd love to talk to someone who might be trying to do that, where I can envision being able to run your cattle or your livestock for free on a lot of these farms if you'll put them there. I imagine there'd be a lot of farmers who would take you up on that.
So if there is someone doing that, I'd love to hear. Have you heard of anyone doing that in the Midwest?
Rich Bradbury: We've actually done an experiment, but we're in Nebraska. So it's sort of Midwest, sort of West, but it was right there on the line. They were, had investor owners and they were leasing from these investor owners. And the investor owners had got tuned into, I'm not trying to continuously beat Gabe Brown to death, but he'd made a trip down to them.
They grew grains and I don't know what else they grew. But they came to Idaho and asked us if we would bring, this was when the cattle market was low and said, “Hey, our absentee owners, the guys that are invested in this, that we lease from, they want to see animals on these crops when we're not farming. So could you bring it in?” And we sent 600 head. And the metrics didn't work out for us, but I think they did find more local cattle, but we did send them and it didn't hurt us that much, but it was a long ways to go from Idaho,
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That's a heck of a haul.
Rich Bradbury: But the idea, the thing I want to think I want to get across is they came and asked and they built the infrastructure, they put the water troughs out, they figured out the water and it was a good deal of cattle gain fine.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Huh. What kind of infrastructure did they have on that farm?
Rich Bradbury: It's just, they set up hot wire. So we hot wire, we break all our cattle to hot wire. So they respect it. So you don't need much more than a strand of really hot wire. They will respect it. And they had come from grazing a cover crop previously. So we rotate our grass with a cattle with several secessions of crest cover crops in a really local geographical region, so this was a little bit of a thing, so they'd already been exposed to the hot wire, to the cover crops, and yeah, so the cattle did fine. We didn't really, we didn't lose many. It was just the transportation there and back that got us.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. No, that makes sense. And then tell me about your ranch and what your rotation looks like, any numbers you're open to sharing I'd be interested in.
Rich Bradbury: Mine is bonkers. I ranch in the middle of the high desert, Great Basin, in a valley meadow, and I have rangeland. The numbers are going to blow you away and I'm not being braggadocious. It's this sort of reality in West, but we run cattle with about 16 other ranchers and we share a water district and we share a federal grazing permit and the grazing permit is almost 425,000 acres.
Brian Kearney: Jeez.
Rich Bradbury: But we only run about 3,000 to 4,000 cattle on that during the summer. A lot of my cattle go out there. I have made the, with the grass fed cattle, we have made the transition to leasing more metal grounds, irrigated pastures. And so we made a big jump last year in the fact that I got stuck wiht–we also hay our valley meadows while the cattle are on the leases or on the range and then we'll have that hay to feed in the winter.
So I'm feeding all my cattle right now on hay that I grew,, but I'd always have surplus hay and it got impossible to sell it because of our remoteness and because the hay market with the inventory collapsing and the dairy market's going down. I don't know how many people are aware of this, but the dairy markets in California, Oregon, and Washington have consolidated considerably.
And there's just not as many dairy cattle, so all this hay that always had a place to go, just doesn't have a home. And so we made the decision to split one of our pastures, hay one side of it one year, and run cattle inside. And me and one other guy in the whole valley keep our cattle in during the summer. So I ran 120 head and I should have pulled soil samples before I started this experiment, but it was sort of one of those rushed things. But I pulled soil samples after. I pulled soil samples after we got off and after we hayed. And I pulled soil samples from both sides and I saw a 2 percent swing in organic matter on the graze side.
Brian Kearney: Jeez.
Rich Bradbury: Like I said, I live on, we raise cattle on a lake bed that's never been cultivated. So it's got a millennia, or millions of years of nutrients built up into it. So we're not really trying to gain, but I like to see where we're at. But that sort of sent me down the path. That's why when I was looking at the corn, the nutrition and the conversion numbers really stuck out to me because we have started to look at our grass fed cattle and I started seeing a notable, noticeable difference in the ones I raised on the ranch in taste and the way that the actual muscles are organized and sort of the more nutrient dense I've found that the animal is, the taste is different.
It's almost a more gamey taste. And the muscle density is super tight as when you get like a really grain fed steak with lots of fat in it. You could almost tear it apart. So it's totally different eating experience. But I love this, everybody tells me that grass fed is fine, but you know, I hate that yellow fat.
We don't have yellow fat because we have one of the Japanese breed called an Akiyoshi that was isolated and raised on one of the islands in Japan and only ate grass. They were naturally, they were sort of like a heritage breed. They genetically were more prone to convert grass, solely grass.
And so we do a F1 cross with our commercial cattle with the Akiyoshi bowls, and the meat has a completely different flavor profile, and I buy into everybody's argument about the fat. It all tastes different, they're 100 percent correct, but my product, I haven't tested it yet, but I think when I test it, it's gonna test a pretty high level of nutrients to density, and the reason I started looking into that is because I have really good organic mattel in my soil.
I wanted to answer the question, is that transferring onto the cow? And then, when I started looking into the corn market, you can tell that it's not transferring, the corn is no longer transferring into the nutrition density of that animal that you're selling in the end.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That's interesting. That's really interesting. Well, I think we're getting pretty close to running up on time, but I have kind of a last question I always like to ask and it is, if you were restarting or picture, you're a recent college grad coming out of the, one of the land grant universities or about to go to one, where would you recommend they look at going into in the ag industry?
Rich Bradbury: See, this is interesting because a lot of people that follow that post are agronomists. And from what I understand, agronomists, you might be able to correct me on this, agronomists sort of work on that balance of crop and soil. I think I would dive 100 percent into the soil side.
Brian Kearney: Okay. Okay.
Rich Bradbury: And I think there's lots of opportunity because I think that we're finding the complexities of soil, the microceum network, the water, all that are going to be critical issues going into the future because they're societal things.
And I think that while it's really good to understand the plant toxicology–screwed up the word, but how the plant works is great, but I think that what's really needed right now is to understand how the soil works and to be able to point people that are in raising crops into being able to find ways to recover that organic matter. And I think that we're gonna figure it out. I think we're really smart at those kind of things when we get focused on the right thing. So I'm worrying about corn era coming to the end, wasn't like abandoned ship, the sky is falling. It's like we really have to reprioritize what we're building our finance, how we're rewarding people financially. It needs probably to be less tied to the crop and more tied to the health of the soil.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That's definitely an interesting space to go with a lot of opportunities, for sure, into the biology side of the soil. That makes sense.
Rich Bradbury: I'd personally become a lawyer, but that's what I tell people.
Brian Kearney: Oh, yeah. I got my degree in history and was planning on going into law. Didn't really like paperwork or school, so did not continue on that path. But you're right. You're right.
Rich Bradbury: One thing I would say is agriculture, people that were raised in agriculture, that's the direction they need to go. Because you know what I see, the people that I see in the regenerative space that are really focused on that, they don't have that agriculture background. They skip that. And so they don't have the big picture, all the little, the moving pieces and they don't have the culture.
And I think any person that's going through the land graduating, they're going to bring a more full toolkit to that soil side of it than people that are coming to it fresh.
Brian Kearney: Correct. Yeah. A little more nuanced, I think, and understanding the culture. That makes sense. I think that's good advice. Perfect. So yeah, Rich, thanks for jumping on the show. This has been an interesting conversation. Love to, I'll let you know what, what feedback we get. I'm excited to hear, I think, yeah, you're, I think you're right on a lot of the stuff you're talking about.
I'll be interested to see on the corn side, what does happen there, but definitely want to have you back, dive in and love to tap into your knowledge on the cattle market side every once in a while as well. That's an area I know nothing about. So I appreciate you jumping on,
Rich Bradbury: Can I interject–
Brian Kearney: Yeah, please.
Rich Bradbury: When we were building, we built two beef co-ops. One of the guys that helped us build the first one was a natural organic free co-op. And we overcame, like, one of the biggest conversations the group had. And there was probably 60 or 70 ranchers in this conversation when we started getting away from antibiotics and it seemed like a really big deal at the time. And what it was was you treat the cattle that get sick and they just don't go into the program. It's not, it's not the be all end all of everything. It's not like you wake up and go antibiotic free the next, one day you just don't let those cattle into the program that you say don't have antibiotics. And it was a heated discussion. There was, we're in this giant circle in this conference room. And this guy was really getting feisty. And he goes, and it was contentious and finally, this very intelligent man and really built this whole natural beef niche on the West Coast, at least it was before anybody was talking about grass, but they finally just look at the guy. He goes, “What are you scared of? What is scary to you about this transition?” And that's when it switched. And I think that I'd expect to, what do you call it, when you say, yeah, the era of corn is ending, it's going to scare a lot of people. But I think really what the question is, we need to examine what that is that's scaring us about it. Because it's not the end of, it's not going to be the end of corn. It's just going to be a transition into a different era of agriculture.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rich Bradbury: I think we have to examine what's going to scare us about that.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. I mean, that's a great way to put it. Doesn't mean that farming's coming to an end. It means there might be some transitions coming just like there have in the past. So that makes a lot of sense. Perfect. Well, yeah. Hey, thanks for jumping on the show. Again, definitely want to do a repeat down the road. Great conversation. I appreciate your time, and if you have anything you need, let me know.
Rich Bradbury: All right, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Brian Kearney: Thank you.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
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