Ian Mitchell-Innes Interview on Holistic Management Planned Grazing
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- From the Archive: Interview from HMI's Future Farmers & Ranchers course held at Mt. Vernon Farm, by Holistic Management International. Ian Mitchell-Innes is a South African whose family has been on the same ranch since 1863. He has practiced many forms of ranching and farming: growing crops, feedlotting, conventional extensive ranching, irrigated tropical and cool season grasses. At the age of 48, he determined to practice Holistic Management, and completed the Certified Educators Program. Over the past 8 years, Ian has trained ranchers, farmers, families, businesses and communities in Holistic Management.
After taking Holistic Management Financial planning training, he turned off his irrigation pumps and has never turned them on again. He ceased all forms of farming (turning the soil). This amounted to a huge savings with no electricity, tractor, labor or fertilizer costs.
He reports that no dosing or dipping is done and as far as possible no chemicals are used. This past year the only supplementation given to all the cattle has been salt and bone meal (phosphate). No hay, bales or protein licks are used at all.
High Density Grazing and Holistic Grazing Planning have resulted in such an increased production and palatability of grass that half the ranch has been leased out for three years. This is despite the country being in the worst drought of 40 years. The utilization of the available grass has improved to the point of having to bring in more cattle to prepare the ground for spring.
In 2005 Ian's son, William, came back to the ranch (14,000 acres) and they have tripled the number of cattle, running two breeds. Ian runs Beefmaster cattle and William decided to ranch with Ngunis, an indigenous breed. Services that were previously outsourced are now being kept in the family with the return to South Africa of our daughter, Georgina, even though she is not living on the ranch.
I was very fortunate to listen to this man speak in person. He is amazing.
"the price of beef will come down..." Finally someone is saying this. These premiums for grass fed beef are bad for the "industry" and for the consumer. We must get costs under control and improve our soils, pasture diversity, and our cattle's grazing efficiency. It can be done. Grass fed beef should be less expensive than grain finished beef, while giving the grass fed producer a greater profit per acre.
I agree with you that grass fed should be cheaper than grain...but you have to realize that grain is subsidized, double whammy because corn goes for feed and ethanol...cheap fuel and feed. This creates artificially low commodity beef prices.
The cost of grass-fed beef is coming down now. :) And boy, is it ever delicious!
Drought doesn't cause bare ground, bare ground causes drought. -Allan Savory
When you do mob grazing, you get lots of new (old) grasses and plants on the pasture. They have lots of minerals that cattle need. So you don’t have to buy minerals. When you let the fields rest for 2 months+ after grazing, the roots get long. That’s where the carbon is stored, in the topsoil with deep roots.
It depends on the soil. Greg Judy uses a 16-compartment mineral feeder that the cattle can use as they need. Then they poop out around 85% of the minerals, which then go back into the soil. After some years, he hardly has any need to give them the minerals since the grass now has everything they need.
Wendy Scott -Yes, thank you for correcting me. 😁 I saw the vid where he showed the mineral trough after this 🙂
Good Day!!Nice video..Thanks for sharing...
On making a living as a farmer- Who said, 'If one does what everyone else does, that one will never be more than average'? If you are not happy with that average, then it is time to do something different! Farmers have greater opportunity to reduce income needs by producing: their own electricty via small windmills or solar; growing oilseed crops to run their diseal tractors & heating oil: most of their food (permaculture & other techniques yeild results w/minimal time or inputs).
Most soils are degraded. Sustainable is not the answer. Regenerative is the answer.
Great job Ian! -Chris Stelzer
Fantastic!! What an ripple effect Mr. Savory.... we have started already. Let me see what I can do. "Let me play my part". :-) xxx
On fuel- how many people today know that Rudolf Diesel designed his engine to run on peanut oil??? Just imagine how different the world would be if diesel engines had continued to be run on plant oils! (Some farmers are returning to the practice of growing at least a portion of the fuel they use. Combined w/agriculture practices that reduce the need for fuel, they could become self-sufficient in energy. Micro-hydo, home-scale wind & solar are other useful techniques.)
you can run a engine off of biomass. so anything from your farm could run a tractor when you convert it.
Clarification: 11:40 Mitchel-Innes meant to say, '5 generations', as he did earlier in that statement. Sadly, in today's society, knowledge from the past, even 50 yrs ago, is not respected. Education is important, but few professors have real-world experience in agriculture; their living does not depend on if what they teach works. (And ag schools increasingly are 'beholden' to major chemical companies, incl those that have restyled themselves as 'life science' companies.)
The farmers in my area (2 hrs. West of Washington, DC in Virginia) are a very conservative lot. If one farmer lets his field go a little ragged, his neighbors let him know the time for bush hogging is overdue. This group-think, coupled with GMO growing systems that greatly reduce time spent in the fields makes for an entrenched status quo. It will take a surge in consumer demand for locally grown food, and outsiders and young people to shake up this status quo. Not to say there's no hope.
Steven Schwartz Dr Allen william
Things are changing. Watch Carbon Cowboys 🌞
1:10 - 'If 50% of ranchers practice some form of Holitistic (Grazing) Management, we would sequester enough carbon so that the carbon content of the air would go back to pre-Industrial era levels within 5 years.' The data is available from Holistic Management Int'l. Note: un-grazed, untrampled grass oxidizes carbon back into the air, as does burning & plowing/tilling. Conventional 'no-till' uses massive amounts of toxic chemicals, so that is not the answer, either.
I want to come to come to my ancestorial lands so badly. I finally found my clan! Inness! My grandmother's middle name is Inness and my mother asked her if she was a reason for that Name and she said " this is our lineage" I was suppose to have Inness as my middle name and have Marie as my first for my mother's italian side every first born was born with a Marie name. So my next little girl will have the name Maria Inness because my youngest already has Marie ☺️
Great video!
Not hydrogen. CO2 is combined with H2O using solar energy (sunlight) in a process called photosynthesis to create plant matter that nearly all life depends on.
Yes, and that combination yields carbohydrates (CHO), which is what plant matter is primarily composed of. A lot of CHO is also pumped into the soil by plants in the form of simple sugars (root exudates) to feed the soil web of life. The hydrogen bonds in those carbohydrates is probably what he's referring to, since at a fundamental level it is those hydrogen bonds which are broken to yield the energy needed to drive cell metabolism in the whole system..
@@andreafalconiero9089 If the hydrogen bonds were being broken, there would be large quantities of gaseous hydrogen being produced. There is not. Besides sunlight during the day, plants generate energy through oxidation.
I know of no biological process or chemical reaction that releases hydrogen. If my memory serves me right, breaking hydrogen bonds requires more energy than you can get out of any hydrogen chemical reaction. Did I miss something in class?
@@peterm.eggers520 I wasn't suggesting that the conversion of carbohydrates into energy produces a highly-reactive compound like hydrogen gas (H2). Creating H2 is an endothermic process, which is the opposite of what occurs in cell metabolism. The process of converting the stored energy in carbohydrates into metabolic fuel is highly complex and I'm no expert, but my understanding is that fundamentally the energy that animals derive from carbohydrates involves breaking the relatively high-energy OH bonds in sugars (that plants created with solar energy) and yielding compounds like water where the bonds are lower energy. Look at the steps involved in glycolysis to see what I'm getting at:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycolysis
@@andreafalconiero9089 my reply was based on what you said, not anything you might have suggested.
@@peterm.eggers520 Yet you apparently thought I was talking about the production of free hydrogen. I wasn't. All chemical reactions involve breaking bonds and creating new ones, and in each of these transformations energy is either absorbed or released. The fact is that breaking hydrogen bonds and recombining them with other elements can yield energy; energy in this case that drives the metabolic processes of all animal life. The conversion of sugars is incredibly complicated, involving both exothermic and endothermic steps, but the overall process is exothermic, yielding work (via ATP) and heat. Anyway, I think I've clearly explained what I meant, and have nothing more to add.
hahahahaha a machine to put carbon in the soil! Can't use a cow? hahahahaha
3:00 he lost me.