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The Grazing Grass Podcast features insights and stories of regenerative farming, specifically emphasizing grass-based livestock management. Our mission is to foster a community where grass farmers can share knowledge and experiences with one another. We delve into their transition to these practices, explore the ins and outs of their operations, and then move into the "Over Grazing" segment, which addresses specific challenges and learning opportunities. The episode rounds off with the "Famous Four" questions, designed to extract valuable wisdom and advice. Join us to gain practical tips and inspiration from the pioneers of regenerative grass farming.
This is the podcast for you if you are trying to answer: What are regenerative farm practices? How to be grassfed? How do I graze other species of livestock? What's are ways to improve pasture and lower costs? What to sell direct to the consumer?
NOTE There were 3 speakers identified in this transcript. Podium recommends using "Find and Replace" to change the speaker label to the appropriate name. Speaker separation errors can arise when multiple speakers speak simultaneously.
Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 114.
Surround yourself with people that are already doing it, that are like-minded.
You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices.
I'm your host, Cal Hardage.
You're growing more than grass.
You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment.
You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs.
You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations, to last generations.
The grazing management decisions you make today impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you.
That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenerative Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy to follow techniques to quickly assess your forage, production and infrastructure capacity in order to begin grazing more efficiently.
Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts.
Learn more on their website at nobleorg slash grazing.
It's n-o-b-l-e dot org.
Forward slash grazing.
On today's episode we have Brooks and Abby Bowser of Bowser Family Farms and they come on.
They share about their journey, about what they're doing on their farm cow, calf, finishing beef and pork, as well as crops For the overgrazing section.
We dive into a little bit more about social media marketing.
The bonus segment for our grazing grass insiders is about on the farm store.
So very interesting segment there, excellent episode.
However, before we talk to Brooks and Abby, 10 seconds about my farm.
If you drive by my farm you might say I am a good grass farmer right now.
I think most farms you drive by this time of year in my area people can say that there's still some that's over grazed and there's tons better I can do, but this time of year it's always easy to think we're doing better than we are.
Not to be negative, but just keep working.
Do a little bit better each day.
10 seconds about the podcast.
On next week's episode we have August Horsemann.
He was on back on episode 15.
So you might want to catch that or go back and review it.
We catch up with him next week.
Find out what he's been up to and how things are progressing on his journey.
Enough of all that.
Let's talk to Brooks and Abby.
Brooks and Abby, we're excited for you to be here today.
Welcome to the Grazing Grass podcast.
Yeah, thank you.
We're excited to be here too.
This is our first podcast.
We've been a listener for a few months now.
Nick Rogers turned us on to it.
Yep, we're excited to be here.
Can't wait to chat with you.
Wonderful To get started.
Let's just start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your operation.
So I'm a first-generation farmer.
My grandpa gave me the opportunity to manage his small farm when I was in high school.
I went to Michigan State and I got out of there and I met Abby yeah.
So we came back on the farm.
My grandpa gave me the opportunity to run the farm for ourselves and then, yeah, started doing everything pretty conventionally, Got on YouTube, found Gabe Brown, and the rest is history.
After that, as far as the whole grass farming and regenerative farming journey, and a little bit about my background.
We couldn't be more opposite.
I grew up on a farm.
I'm a fifth-generation farmer.
We had beef cattle and we had a market garden.
So we went to farmer's markets and had vegetables and cut flowers and we had a retail store on farm as well.
And I did 4-H and I've been a part of the cattle business and when I met him he looked like he was a farmer.
I thought he was a farmer.
But as we got going, it's been a very interesting experience with someone that's I was raised really conventional and he's had a lot of interesting ideas about agriculture, and so the balance between that has been very fun.
But I'm completely on board now after seeing, going to the Soil Health Academies and reading some of the books and listening to the podcast.
It all makes sense.
But it took me a little bit to get here.
Oh yeah, when you've got that background of however you're doing it, it's much tougher.
I think Tom Lester said that he'd rather make a farmer out of a boy off the streets of Tokyo versus a conventional farmer.
Yeah.
Something like that.
I'm sure I'm messing that quote up, but that's okay, someone will fix it.
Get the trust yeah.
So let's just jump back on your side, Brooks, for a second.
You got this opportunity with your grandpa's land to do some things.
What prompted you to do that?
To just farm in general.
Yes.
Yeah, obviously, being a high schooler, you don't always know what you want to do.
But he came to me and said do you want to get serious about this?
And I said, absolutely.
I didn't know anything about it but it sounded pretty intriguing.
So we went to Michigan State and fell in love with farming, met all kinds of friends still friends that I have now today just absolutely fell in love with it.
As a kid did you think you would be doing farming?
Not at all.
My grandpa first asked me, I'm like what be a farmer
no way.
My dad owned a body shop and I thought maybe I'll learn how to paint cars.
But once I started on the farm, grandpa gave me a lot of leeway and learning some stuff.
I felt like I had some ownership in the farm.
Yeah, just fell in love with it, made a lot of mistakes.
That happens, abby, did you know you were always going to come back to the farm?
I did not at all.
Obviously, growing up with a market garden, we had a whole acre of vegetables and flowers and it felt a little bit more like slavery than it should have at that time, and so I went to school and then I ended up changing my major to ag business management and then thought I would go the business route sales.
I had internships with chemical companies, so I was selling fertilizer and chemicals and for my internships did a lot of crop scouting and extremely conventional world and thought I would go that route.
And then, obviously, choosing to stay in a small town with your fiance at the time, the job pool got a lot smaller and so I ended up taking a job as a high school ag teacher.
So we did that for about four years and then, now and then I started my own flour business.
So I'm actually a florist and a flour farmer.
And that was around the time we had kids and COVID and we decided staying at home for me and doing my own business and working on the farm too was a better option.
I turned out just like my mom, even though I didn't think that was going to happen.
So now I'm raising flowers and selling beef, so just like I did when.
I was younger.
There you go.
It's often it's these journeys.
How we end up here is always very interesting and, whether or not we anticipated it or not, I find fascinating.
Brooks, once you got started, you were going to school.
When were you introduced to Gabe Brown, and how did that journey go?
I want to say that was probably like in 2018, 17, something like that.
We were struggling on the farm financially.
It just really wasn't making financial sense.
I was starting to go in debt and I was working part-time for a guy that spread fertilizer and lime.
And I listened to a podcast on YouTube and a guy named Gabe Brown came up, so I listened to it and just a light bulb went off.
Oh my gosh, I think I can make it happen.
This does make sense.
Before that, I never heard the word regenerative ag.
You know I was familiar with cover crops to some extent and we experienced with them a little bit.
Um yeah, but once I heard gabe talk, I bought his book right away.
I read that it was the first book that I've ever finished, oh yeah very good, congratulations on that yeah, I've read some sense.
Wasn't much of a reader before that and it just made total sense.
And what was it?
2019?
I think we had the opportunity to go out to.
Gabe was supposed to have a soil health academy in his farm.
It got canceled because of drought.
Um, we still went out there and we got a private tour of gabe's farm.
He gave us a lot of good advice and kind of lit a fire underneath us that we really needed and that gave us the idea that we could make it work.
At that time, when you all went out there, abby, were you on board?
I was.
I definitely was trying to be a supportive wife, I think in the beginning we were doing it together.
I'm not quiet by any means, so I was very much what if we did this?
And we've been kind of doing it together since we were doing it together.
I'm not quiet by any means, so I was very much what if we did this?
And we've been kind of doing it together since we were 20, which is crazy.
So we've been trying to figure it out together.
So when this whole thing came about, it was kind of a newer movement.
We didn't know anyone that was doing it.
He found it on YouTube so I was like I'll buy in, let's do it.
He found it on YouTube so I was like let's all buy in, let's, let's do it.
We made it a family vacation to go out to North Dakota and so we were like, all right, let's do it.
But after hearing Gabe, he's just so well spoken and obviously knows what he's doing and obviously does, does all these things and it has been successful.
So it started to get more in my head.
I think what really solidified it was just when he took it the next level, brooks.
We ended up actually implementing the things and then just seeing them out of nature that it's just been a night and day difference.
There's butterflies out there, there's just these giant swarms of birds.
It's just so much more enjoyable to be at the farm.
And then I've taken several soil health or not soil health, but soil biology classes in college, and so that part made sense to me.
I think what I was struggling with was the cattle part, where it was like let nature deal with the health issues of the cattle.
That part was hard for me to transition to.
We don't even treat for flies anymore, we just let the birds do it.
And that took a minute for me to are you sure, are you sure?
But slowly, just letting him obsess about it and research it and let him implement it.
I do think it helped that I had two kids in four years, so I was like I'm not really paying attention, so busy.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's, he's.
I'm so proud of him.
He's definitely taken on all this, and it definitely helps that he was first generation, because I think I would have been stuck in my own loop.
Yeah, very easy to do.
So when you all went out to Gabe Brown's farm and you came back, what did you implement or what did you do immediately?
Yeah, our biggest issue was not maybe the biggest issue, but one of our issues was diversity in our pastures.
We just took an old hay field that we'd planted and it was two species basically.
So he gave us some ideas some pulse grazing.
You set up a small paddock, get some high stock density for a little while and then you give them the rest of the paddock for the rest of the day and then long rest periods.
So after that we started giving a lot longer rest periods.
It was a 30-day rotation and now we're pushing 45, sometimes 60, which comes with its challenges with that hay field.
Sometimes the forage can get rank on us.
That's helped.
Also, too, we're feeding corn and we still are.
But he gave us some ideas and pushed us to to be able to raise our feeder cattle more on grass than grain.
And and also you said, if you quit feeding grain tomorrow, you're going to make more money.
But our biggest concern, or my biggest concern, is our product, to be able to finish cattle on grass.
So we're trying to, trying to go slowly into it and we have.
We've every year we've cut back on grain more and more and this year we'll we're still going to feed grain, but it'll be a lot less.
Oh yeah, and we're still going to feed grain, but it'll be a lot less oh yeah, and, and it's a journey and there is so much of it.
That's an art.
So, yes, taking it slow, learning as you go, reflect on what's happening.
A wonderful plan there now.
When you got your started working with your grandpa's land, were you just farming that, or do you have some livestock too?
yeah, we had livestock since day one.
That was what I started we had 20 oh, you started with livestock cows.
Yeah, that was.
Yeah, that's what that was the first thing that I started with.
Yeah, so we had 20 acres of hay, 18 head of cattle.
We direct marketed all those, but they were in a feedlot uh, feed and grain, which I'm very thankful that I started with the direct market business because it seems to be that seems to be a hard thing for people to get into.
So I'm extremely thankful that I started with a direct market business because it seems to be that seems to be a hard thing for people to get into, so I'm extremely thankful that we already had that started.
Then I went to MSU for beef cattle management.
It was an ag tech program, so it was just a year, but I worked on a feedlot there.
Oh yeah, I came back with the feedlot ideas in my mind.
I went to North Dakota for an internship.
They were very conventional and also they had a cow-calf operation, but unfortunately I didn't get to work with the cows a lot there.
We got the crop bug.
I feel like we were like then we were raising our own corn and soybeans for our feed.
And then we were like everyone around us is a crop farmer.
So we definitely were like, okay, we need a combine.
And then it started to get very heavy crops and very conventional yeah yeah.
So when I got back from north dakota, grandpa had a total of 350 acres.
I started to farm all of it, all very conventionally and my grandpa's big on he's an organic guy, so we had any feed that we raised with the cattle.
We would moldboard, plow, disc plant and then cultivate and we struggled at trying to make that work and that's how I got introduced to cover crops because we thought maybe that would help with some weeds and stuff.
And it really didn't help a lot.
Maybe we didn't give enough time, I don't know.
I was doing the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time to erase things perfectly.
So then, obviously, I got in contact with Gabe and started no-till and using cover crops, but what comes with that, obviously, is some herbicides too Right.
Which, at the time, we were all in on.
But then, I think, as we got older, we started looking at it in a more financial sense too and we were like, okay, if we're going to make this work, we really need to perform financially.
And just looking at our input costs, obviously as all farmers do you're like how did this number get so big?
And then just trying to figure out how to get that number down is basically where it all came from, in a very simple sense.
Yeah, it was extremely scary how much money we spent on the farm, especially being a small farm with that time, 25 out of cattle, 350 acres it was scary how much money that we were spending.
Oh yeah, so talk about just for a moment.
Talk about that process.
When you came back from Gabe Brown's and you started implementing some different grazing practices, you were and I believe you still are feeding out cows using some corn and stuff.
But talk about that process to go to lower expenses.
Obviously on the farming side, a diverse cover crop, diverse crop rotation.
That was step number one on trying to cut back our inputs as far as the crops that we raised for our cattle.
And then we found ourselves a lot of times in the middle of the summer feeding hay.
We had a flail mower, we had green chop and feed and one day we got done baling hay and I grabbed about three, four bales and I hauled them from the hay field in to feed the cows in the middle of July and I thought why in the world are we doing this?
At that time I didn't have any permanent fence up around the farm but my cows I got my cows pretty familiar with temporary fence on the piece.
We ran around three quarters of it with temporary fence and anything that was growing we grazed our cows on, just so I didn't have to feed harvested feed.
And then and then obviously we started after that.
We started getting a little more familiar with adaptive grazing and trying to get more diversity in our pastures and moving once a day, twice a day, high stock density, giving certain areas different rest periods to see what might happen.
And one thing Abby mentioned earlier butterflies, birds and stuff.
How soon did you notice a change on your pastures?
I didn't pay attention a lot because I guess, to give you a little more backstory too, at the main farm we only had 15 acres of pasture for 25 to 30 head of cattle, so it wasn't obviously it was way overstocked.
So we started implementing that and then obviously putting fence up around the farm to give that pasture more rest and I would say probably in year two we started to notice a big difference in just the health of the pasture and maybe after three years you start noticing birds.
Even though we weren't looking before, you're like I don't think these birds were here before and now you can go out and I would say two to three years you started noticing just some wildlife diversity out there and it was just it is.
You can shut down the side-by-side.
Me and my oldest daughter like to climb on the roof after we move the cows to a new pasture and just look and you see the birds, you see some flies, the butterflies, and the neighbor next to us has honeybees and the honeybees are everywhere over there.
Oh yes.
And then me and my daughter really like to look for worms, now there, oh yes.
And then me and my daughter really like to look for worms now and it was oh yeah, I would I would say two to three years.
We started just noticing things and then obviously it just keep, continues to progress after that I, I think and this is going to be my opinion I think those.
That's one of those things you don't really notice.
You don't notice the absence of it.
Really you're not.
You're out there just doing what you need to do, and then when you start getting more wildlife in and stuff, it's not.
Oh yeah, I saw three birds today, or whatever, but at some point it becomes wait, did we have this before?
I don't recall all this yeah, we just didn't.
Regenerative agriculture it's ultimately a shift in mindset too.
It is yeah.
If you don't know what to look for.
You didn't look for it and the only thing I noticed was when I would get done.
Cutting hay at the farm is all the bugs on my hay mower, but it was mostly potato leaf hoppers.
It wasn't like a vast diversity of insects and spiders and stuff.
Right.
And.
I think the switch to regenerative agriculture is, like he said, a mindset, but you're also just paying way more attention to nature and you know, you're just observing things.
We have pheasants again coming out.
We can constantly hear them and see them running around and flying around is I'm a pheasant hunter and we go out.
My grandpa's got a place out in North Dakota.
We go out there a year to pheasant hunt and you come back home and you might see one or two a year, but over the last two years we'll go out there in the spring, shut the side by side off and you just hear a cackle, cackle oh yeah neighbors are commenting on it and they're really excited.
People driving by the farm they'll see pheasants cross the road and it's like, okay, we're doing something right.
There's a reason why they're here oh yeah there's nothing else around that's attracted them, it's it's got to be what we're doing on that subject, the we have wild turkeys and we have a few around and on the lease lands.
Just drive me crazy.
I want to see wild turkeys over there.
I've been managing a few years.
I'm hoping to get closer to getting some wild turkeys in that area and it's right on the edge of some brush and so we get some nice edge area along with the grassy savannah like area.
I am just watching for wild turkeys all the time.
I've yet to see them there, but I'm like they're going to be back yeah, we have a fair amount of wildlife in here in general, um, but just as far as upland birds, they're just habitat destruction.
It's the only reason they used to be here, from my knowledge, everywhere, but everybody's taking fence rows out and plowing their land, and well, and our whole farm there's not very many trees because it used to be cropland, so it used to be one big field, and so it's not.
we're in the process of working with the nrcs and we're going to be planting some trees and getting windbreaks and some habitat clusters for different birds and things, but right now it's just a big old flat field.
Oh yeah, it's got a lot of grass growing, though, a lot of grass.
Yeah, good, yeah, Just for a moment.
Let's jump back and talk about where you're located and what the land is mainly used there for.
Okay, yeah, so southern central Michigan.