Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, Episode 89.
Find pasture, walks, find workshops, other firms to visit.
There are so many things that you can learn from going to visit other people's places.
You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, helping grass farmers, learn from grass farmers, and every episode features a grass farmer and their operation.
I'm your host, cal Hardidge.
On today's episode, we have Jen Kobe of Howlingwood Farms in Vermont.
We talk about her journey to where she is today grazing sheep, improving land as well as her podcast, choosing to Farm.
You'll have to check it out.
It's a really great episode, especially for those people interested in sheep, because she tries to help me.
I always need some help, so stay tuned to talk to her.
But first, 10 seconds about my farm and, in fact, for this week, we're gonna talk about two other things.
We're gonna talk about the podcast in 2023, as well as the Grazing Grass community.
In 2023, we released 43 episodes and we had almost 100,000 downloads.
So thank you, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing and, as always, if you find something useful, share it with someone.
That's the way we get the word out.
I was a little disappointed in one thing Our downloads were 99,000.
We were so close to hitting 100,000.
But that gives us a goal for 2024.
So we'll see how we do then.
Secondly, the Grazing Grass community on Facebook.
If you're not part of it, I encourage you to join it.
Do answer the question.
So I know you're real, but it is a growing community of like-minded individuals and we had a post that just got posted just recently that really hit the mark when I thought about this community and why we needed it.
Tracy Runtsky posted that they're looking for a mentor.
They've got some land, they're trying to figure out this commercial cattle thing and they're thinking of the custom beef journey, but they need some help.
They're new to intensive rotational grazing and figuring out what's going on with adaptive grazing, and Tracy made a post on the Grazing Grass community asking about a mentor.
It had great discussion.
Some people in the local area has volunteered their help, which is wonderful.
They can reach out and get some help.
You know we're all in this together, wherever you are on your journey, and through each other we can help each of us take that next step.
So, tracy, good luck.
If you need anything, I'm here.
Noble Research Institute has released their dates and starting next week we will have those dates listed in the coming events section.
If you're interested in looking at those, just go to nobleorg and look at their grazing courses as well as their other courses, and you can find out if they have a course coming towards you in the near future.
Once more, I just want to say thank you.
Thank you for a fabulous 2023.
And I'm looking forward to a great 2024.
And we're kicking it off with a wonderful conversation with Jen Kobe.
Let's talk to Jen.
Jen, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast.
We're excited you're here today.
Thank you so much, cal.
I've been listening to some episodes and I really am enjoying them very much, so it's an honor to be here.
Well, thank you, I appreciate that, jen.
Can we start out by you telling us a little bit about yourself and your operation?
Absolutely so, Jen Kobe.
I'm located in central Vermont.
I primarily raise sheep in a grass-based situation system.
Now I've done a little bit of everything in terms of livestock, except dairy.
I used to work in dairy, but I've never actually been a dairy farmer.
But at this moment, my whole emphasis these days is to simplify.
So our operation is on about 88 acres.
I am managing the animals through about 25 open acres and woods edges and things like that and we're running a group of about 30 to 50 animals annually and we only graze.
We do not make any hay.
I buy animal hay.
My whole goal for this farm is to bring it back from a severe over grazing for multi-generations situation.
So we lost a lot of topsoil down those hills.
We have bear rocks in the middle of our pastures and so my goal is to bring it back into productivity, and my major goal these days is my sheep.
And one thing I'd read on your podcast is that you have steep land.
So I have not traveled to the New England area, have seen some photos, but yeah, just to lay out in your land there.
So our slopes range between ooh, I think we probably have steeper slopes, but they run.
Most of our pastures are nine to 13% slopes, so they're horrible, but we do have some good 35 to 40% slopes, a few of those as well.
But basically our farm is steep enough that, according to the soil survey and soils maps, we don't have any agricultural soils officially, and that's largely due to the steep slopes, they just disqualify.
As soon as they get too steep, they become non-agricultural soils, which has been an interesting thing, both for management and also for opportunities that are available too, oh yeah.
Now jumping back to just a few years ago long ago for me, but just a few years ago for you.
How'd you get your start in agriculture?
Oh goodness, so this, oh, this is a long jump back, you know for about the month.
So I consider myself to be a returning generation farmer.
My great grandparents were dairy farmers and prior to that, multiple times prior to that, multiple generations of farmers.
Lots of them were just diversified in this area, lots of folks with small farms, and that comes from both sides of my family.
But the last couple of generations, my dad and grandpa, were in trades electrical and construction.
My dad was a contractor, and so I knew that I loved animals.
I knew I wanted to go to school to be a veterinarian.
But, I didn't realize.
After going getting getting my animal science degree, I didn't realize that actually what I really wanted was to be a farmer.
I thought that if you wanted to work with animals you had to be a veterinarian.
I thought that it was a one-way thing.
It's not a one-way thing, it's not a linear path.
And so out of college I started working for an organic dairy company.
That was very small and over the next few years it grew tremendously.
I was supposed to work on that farm.
I did not work on that farm, I worked in the office.
Oh yes.
The office just sucked me in and the farm never got me, which was a real bummer.
And then I just decided in the course of time while I was working for that dairy farm and dairy company, that I wanted to start my own something.
I didn't know what that was, I didn't know what animals I wanted, but they grazed because they were organic dairy.
I thought grazing was really cool, that was really smart, and I had a background in animal science and environmental studies, which in the 90s was sustainable agriculture, before we actually call it sustainable agriculture.
So there's actual degrees for that now.
But I sort of mushed it together at the time and what I realized was grazing solves so many problems at once.
It solves environmental problems and culture and community problems and happy, healthy animals.
It just I was a convert in my early 20s, without a farming background that grazing was the way to be.
I didn't know how to do it, but I knew that it was the solution and I know it was what I wanted.
And so in the late 90s we bought a property and started doing a few little homestead things on it.
I really consider myself as starting actual farming around 2000.
That's when we got pigs and we started to sell to other people and we had pigs and we had chickens and we did a couple of sheep which were a total crash and burn.
And I said to my husband never ever shake me if I ever say I want to get sheep again.
Anyway, then there's a whole story there but I'm a sheep farmer for about 15 years now, but not that kind of sheep.
Not that kind of sheep.
But then I tried a bunch of different things.
I tried gardening.
I didn't like gardening.
As soon as the chicks came in the spring, I ignored all of the plant starts and I didn't need anything anymore.
I was willing to move animals every day but I didn't want to weed a garden.
So a lot of that was just testing things out and trying to grow a little bit.
And we were at that location for about 16 years and we came to a point of deciding whether we had an old house, and that was an awkward farming situation right on the road.
It was really rough and we had to decide do we invest in this house, do we invest in this location, or do we move and we find a new home?
That's the right home for really leveling the farm up, making it a real business, just all of it.
Like taking it much more seriously than we were and we rented for a while.
We took our sheep to a rental house in town.
We were very popular, especially at lambing time.
I imagine so.
Kids with strollers and stuff would come by the lambing pens at our rental house in this neighborhood, just on that subject.
I live out in the country and of course all around me there's, I'm trying to think, between me and town.
There is a guy that's got some goats, a few, but really everybody's beef cattle Lambing season or kidding season.
People stop out on the road all the time.
Yeah, it's like what you don't see all the time, right?
I mean, yeah, yeah, and for us we had moved from a rural location.
We were on 40 acres, 20 minutes outside of town.
We rented a house in town that happened to have a couple of acres next to it, and but it was a neighborhood.
It was not a thing that they got to see very often.
Oh yeah.
We were there almost almost three years while we were looking for the right farm, and we've been at the right place now for about seven years, and so this is a much better fit for us.
So the upshot of all of this is I've been heart time farming for most of the last 20 plus years, while I've been doing other things as well.
Oh yeah, so I was with extension for a long time and worked for the, for a nonprofit, for a while.
I picked up all different kinds of skills that I use in my grazing actually.
Oh yes, One thing you'd mentioned there was you'd start out, you tried a fair number of different species.
You even tried sheep and decided no, and now and then you came back to sheep.
What caused you to come back to sheep?
So to best understand why I came back to sheep is actually to give you the context of the sheep that I had to begin with.
So I thought sheep are interesting, sheep are cool.
Sure, I'll try them.
I had the opportunity to get some free sheep.
Oh yes, I'm a fan of free, but that's gotten me in trouble before, so yeah, so afterward I had someone say to me free sheep are never free, and they were absolutely correct.
And I didn't know anything really about sheep.
I didn't really understand their behavior.
I'd worked with pigs for a long time and chickens and turkeys.
I had a lot of poultry, but I hadn't, I had not worked with sheep and I didn't understand their flightiness.
I didn't understand parasite management.
These were cast off ram lambs.
That's why they were free.
They just wanted them to be gone and four out of the five of them that we had died on their own schedule, not my schedule, and they were all wool sheep and so they got wet and they got full of burdock and they just were a complete mess and I'm pretty sure at least one of them, if not several of them, died of fly strike because of the wool and the wetness and just all of it.
And then fast forward a few years and I was working for University of Vermont Extension and my job was to do outreach and education for grazing and livestock farms.
So over the course of my career at Extension, I had the opportunity to do workshops on over 300 farms and, just you know, learn from them and see different situations and just pick up that tidbit.
And so we were doing a workshop early in my extension career at a katata and sheep farm.
Oh yes.
Quite close to me and he was describing, you know, how great these sheep were in.
You know, not just the parasite management, which is certainly a piece of it, but the lack of requirement to shear them and just a lot of the things, the fact that they're a flocking breed, when one gets out of the fence, you don't have to lose your mind because one is just going to stick around the rest of the fence.
It's not a big deal.
Yeah, or they're all out, or they're all out, absolutely.
It's exactly, which is great, because usually when they're all out, it's much easier to get them back in than when there's half in the net.
So so I fell in love with these sheep from this particular farm and ended up and I said, boy, I think I might be ready.
I might be willing to get sheep again if I could get some of you or sheep.
This is the conversation I had, oh yes.
And a couple years later he called me up and he was going in for shoulder surgery and he was going to keep some of his U lambs but he was going to sell all of his breeding use and he saved four really great ones for me and they were the founders of my flock.
And I still have descendants from those from those four years.
And it is literally because I had the wrong sheep in the beginning and now I have the right sheep that fit my needs.
We don't have to dock tails.
I actually rarely even castrate.
They're so well mannered that they're so easy to manage.
I just adore these sheep so much, so much.
Interestingly enough I have a similar story, but it's about goats.
When I first got meat goats, a local person had some goats for sale and and they could have been show goats because they were into showing and in fact I know some of them were these.
These weren't quite the show quality, but they were.
They were definitely boars that were bred for that.
So I purchased a handful of them.
They were really good, in fact still impressed with them as boar goats Not on my management side.
But then I thought this is going so well, I need some more.
So I started cruising Craigslist and I came across a few registered boar does for sale not too far from me.
The price didn't seem bad.
I talked to my wife about it and we talked and weren't quite sure and they just hung around on Craigslist.
They weren't going anywhere and we talked about it more and I ended up going and looking at them and they didn't look all that good.
But you know, I used to make a little bit of fun of my dad.
I'm still a little bit guilty of it too sometimes.
Sometimes you go to sell barn, you bring home a bargain animal and a lot of times you you doctor him, you get him turned around and you're good to go.
Well, I decided I'll do that with these goats.
Obviously, if you're familiar with goats and sheep, I did not understand parasites in small animals, small ruminant, that caused me a wreck and it was.
I got those few and a similar experience and it actually.
I went to a goat workshop or goat day at Langston University and In Langston, oklahoma and I went there and someone had mentioned Kiko goats and I have my notes from that day because I'm really bad about keeping everything and I have on there look up Kiko goats.
So that was when I started researching Kiko goats and I totally changed what I was doing and, luckily for me, I was just running those those Goats that had parasite problems, right at my barn.
I wasn't rotating them, they were right here, close.
So when I got the Kiko goats we I started using a much bigger land base and Was able to not deal with that parasite issue I had then.
That was probably the start of my end of having bore goats.
It's easy to get there.
I think so, and we're in a situation that doesn't seem like it's working.
I think that, as livestock, people like Maybe it's us, but maybe it's just not a good fit, you know oh yeah, maybe that animal just isn't a good fit.
And I mean I see that in you know there's lots of, there's lots of you know trends toward trying to to transition large confinement dairy animals, dairy cows, into a grazing system and it's gonna take generations because those are just Not set up.
Those are animals that they don't like their room and isn't adjusted for that they.
I mean it takes time.
It's gonna take some generations and right.
They were bred for that environment develop and they're so good at what they do yeah which is not grazing.
Right walking around to go get their food.
Yes, yes, yeah.
So you got those.
You got that opportunity by just a few Cotodons.
Did you at that time, you were still on your 40 acres that you'd purchased in the late 90s?
Did you have infrastructure ready to start grazing them, or where were you on that journey?
So interestingly, all of all of the locations we've been, I have primarily used flexi net fencing.
Oh, oh yes so we did at our original place.
We did, I did, I did pay to get five strand put up in one area and it'll we graze through that in three or four days.
So it really felt like it wasn't a great investment, exactly like that.
It cost a thousand dollars to put in.
You know this.
I mean it wasn't even Quarter of an acre or maybe, or half an acre it was very big.
And and I certainly recognize the math works a whole lot better if you have a much larger.
Yes yeah, set of acres that you're enclosing.
But it's interesting because because in that location I just started to use some flexi net fencing that property was a really funny.
It was 40 acres but it was two acres on one side of the road in 38 acres.
Oh like.
Successional woodland on the other side of the road and we were on a blind corner, oh so.
So moving the animals across the road was a real challenge.
So, sunday morning five or six o'clock, I would like take a bucket and move the sheep across the road, and we'd go up into the woods.
And so, though that wasn't an area that was going to be a good perimeter fence kind of an area.
Oh, yeah, so so and we didn't have a lot of Um shelter for them really ever so we used hoop shelters for them to just be able to duck into.
Basically is Mobile run-in shelters.
We sheltered them in the woods quite a lot, you know.
I fed them bales in different places as well and we started to build up and improve.
You know different here in the winter, you know, through winter feeding.
Oh yes.
And I just got to the point where I can put up fence pretty quickly and I love the.
The flexibility of it if there is an area that I really want the animals to be on for longer or something I want them to move around.
It's very easy to put a jog in the fence if there's a ceiling or a sapling or something I want to protect.
And it's funny because when we came here to the new farm, I I have priced several times getting some perimeter fence sections that we can subdivide and I I keep finding myself not doing it and I think I think it's because I like the flexibility of Using net fencing, which is I know some folks think things, think that moving net fencing is sort of crazy, but I I look at it as daily exercise and a good excuse to Go check on the animals and I see them every day and it's exercise.
I don't mind moving that fence as long as I'm not moving it through trees.
It seems like all the trees on the lease land I'm using has thorns that just help the trees grab it.
And it is.
That is awful when and and I'm not very smart, and this is another reason because I think I Should be able to put it through there and I will work way too long getting it through the path I want it, and then I'm like now I got to take it down and it's the same problem again.
And and not only the.
The thorn trees are terrible, but if you get little oak trees it's just about a foot tall.
They are amazing.
Yes, they do, they really do yeah.
So if I'm out of woods I think it's great, but going through woods I'd prefer not to yeah.
I get that.
I'm trying.
So it's interesting.
Because then so at our new place I am a Largely for parasites and also because this farm has Some areas of very slow recovery.
I mean oh yeah, we tend to be.
We have a lot more moisture than other places, so we don't we're not, you know, we're not in the cycle of really brittle recovery like some folks are, but I have some areas that I can only grace once or twice in a season.
And it's gonna be 60 or 90 days apart from those, which has meant that we have a lot of seedlings that that come in and I don't have a tractor and we don't clip, so the animals the animals are the tools, or my four clippers or something else, and so there are some Seedlings that have come up, that pine seedlings specifically, that have come up, and I've been thinking about how to use those areas.
Maybe just cut the trees down, the center of them, so it is easy to put a net.
Oh yeah and then use that as a as a living barn or oh yeah.
Something else you know, like how do we use what, what is is naturally growing there To the benefit, and not make myself crazy trying to run net through the trees because I.
Completely agree with you.
Running through the trees or bushes is just that piece is a nightmare.
But I think we can do that.
I think we can figure out.
Oh yeah, I think that's a good idea.
My, my thoughts are Along that line.
I keep thinking I've had goats in the area.
It's trimmed up nicely.
I need to get in there and trim all the sprouts, the trees that I'm not interested in keeping, and that's going to widen me some spaces and then I would have passed through there and Probably the way to start that is the to decide on my main pass.
I'm probably more likely to use and do those first, yep, before I get in there and trim a whole lot.
I would love to go in there and do a lot of trimming, but it becomes a time issue Totally.
Eventually we'll get there.
Totally.
I've been looking at this as just a very long trillion management.