Brody Wilson: This week on Farm Friday, we talked with a local rancher about what a more holistic approach to ranching looks like versus a traditional cow calf operation. We paid a visit to Wrich Ranch outside of Crawford on Fruitland Mesa and sat down around the kitchen table to talk ranching.
Jason Wrich: My name is Jason Wrich. I'm the owner operator, Wrich Ranches. We are a registered Black Angus outfit. We sell grass fed and grass finished beef direct to consumer as well as pastured pork.
Wilson: Before we talked about regenerative ranching. I wanted to make sure I had the facts straight on traditional ranching and how the beef many of us eat today gets to our plate.
Wrich: So most of the cattle ranchers, they just sell calves as weaned calves. So they literally pull the calves off the cows, put them on trucks and send them to feedlots. So the cow calf people, which is oftentimes the market that gets squeezed the most.
But in a conventional beef program, you wean these calves. They go to a backgrounder, which maybe they're eating annual grasses like wheatgrass or fall triticale or full wheat green grass, which then they graze short for a short period of time and goes dormant and then they harvest grain off of it the next spring. And then they go to a feedlot. And that's where all of your commodity beef comes in because you're marketing whatever the cheapest feedstuffs are in the area that you are.
So if you're close to an ethanol plant, it's distillers grains byproducts. If you're close to a big international bakery that shipped grain from all over the world, it's spent bakery goods or it's flour that didn't make the cut. If you're close to a candy factory, they grind up bags of candy still in the wrapper.
Wilson: Still in the wrapper?
Wrich: Oh, absolutely. Because the rumen sorts it all out. Right. So it digests the parts that it can digest and it passes the wrappers out the back.
Wilson: Now, certainly this isn't how all beef in the U.S. is raised, but it's safe to say that the majority of commodity beef, beef produced and purchased at commodity prices is, in fact, fed in these ways that Jason described.
So I asked Jason to describe how he raises beef on his ranch and what exactly he means by grass fed and grass finished.
Wrich: Yeah. So we're conception to plate, so we raise most of our own bulls. That way we can guarantee the genetics. We use other technologies like artificial insemination to focus on some carcass traits that we're looking for as well. And so conception nine month gestation, they calve and they stay with their moms about 7 to 8 months.
Then we wean the calves and we separate the heifer calves from the bull calves and steer calves. And so then they go to a separate ranch, the steer calves go to a separate farm that we lease. But it's a sweetheart agreement that we have with the like minded cattle rancher and landowner, and they're on that place for that entire next year until they're ready to go to the butcher.
Wilson: I asked Jason about feeding his cows through the winter, since, of course, there's not grass available year round at 7,000 feet in Colorado.
Wrich: So we put up a lot of hay, but that's mainly because we don't want to rely on other people's practices to buy hay from them. In our drought years, we've had to import hay from all over and getting forage analysis to make sure that it doesn't have all of the chemicals and sprays and things that we don't want to feed them adds a whole other layer of work and homework to do it. So we try and put up as much of our own hay on our own properties as we can.
Wilson: How successful are you? How much do you import?
Wrich: Well, we haven't imported any hay for two years and right now we have two years worth of hay made and stacked in our stackyards.
Wilson: Now, here's where we start to get a glimpse of what Jason means when he says regenerative.
Wrich: In the last six years that I've been leasing properties, many of them, I've doubled the hay production on them because I've weaned them off the synthetic fertilizer that the previous landowner used and we're using grazing to stimulate more forage production at different times of the year. And that goes right back to that observational science, right? Unplug from what the Extension tells you to put four tons per acre of NPK fertilizer and let the grass respond.
The way that evolved with early ruminants, whether it was deer, elk, bison, antelope. They worked together and they evolved together. Let's just use cattle in a smart management intensive way and you can increase so much, not only production, but also resiliency. Because the healthier the plants are the better they do in a dry spell.
Willson: That's all we have time for here. But we talked ranching with Jason for almost 2 hours about how he's flipping the script on traditional ranching practices using observational science, as he says. Keep your eye out for a deeper take on this conversation in a future Local Motion episode.
