Food Security Starts With Grass

We are all hearing that the U.S. beef herd is unusually small.

At the beginning of this year, the number of beef cows in America was the lowest it had been since 1961.

There are a lot of economic reasons for that, and cattle markets are complicated.

But underneath all of it is something much simpler:

You cannot have cattle without forage.

That may sound obvious, but I think it gets overlooked.

Why Did the Herd Get So Small?

A cow-calf ranch depends on grass.

When there is enough forage, cows can stay on the land, raise calves, and produce the next generation of cattle.

When there isn't enough forage, everything changes.

Drought reduces pasture growth. Hay becomes more important. If a ranch doesn't grow enough of its own hay, it has to bring it in from somewhere else.

That gets expensive very quickly.

I know ranchers who are still selling heifers today because they don't have enough forage and the cost of bringing in hay simply doesn't work.

And selling a heifer has consequences beyond this year.

That heifer could have become a cow producing calves for many years. Once she leaves the breeding herd, rebuilding that productive capacity takes time.

A replacement heifer has to grow, be bred, carry a calf, and finally produce that calf before she begins adding to the beef supply.

That is why cattle numbers can fall relatively quickly but take years to rebuild.

This Is Where the Environment Becomes the Food Supply

I say something fairly often that I think the current cattle situation demonstrates very clearly:

Environmental security and food security are the same thing.

If the land cannot capture enough rainfall, grow enough forage, and maintain enough living roots through difficult weather, eventually that becomes a food problem.

It isn't an environmental issue over here and a food issue over there.

They are the same system.

Healthy land grows grass.
Grass feeds cattle.
Cattle produce food.

When one part becomes less resilient, the effects eventually move through the entire chain.

So How Do We Grow More Grass?

This is the part that interests me most.

We tend to think there are only two ways to produce more food.

Use more land.
Or add more inputs.

Our experience at Tyner Pond Farm suggests there is another possibility:

Improve the environment so the same acre becomes more productive.

When we started, it could take us as much as 10 acres to produce one finished animal.

Today, we can produce roughly one finished animal per acre per year.

That is a remarkable change in the productive capacity of the land.

And we didn't get there by planting pasture, adding fertilizer, spraying herbicides, or feeding grain.

We improved the environment.

The tool was cattle management.

The Cattle Are the Tool

We manage where the cattle graze, how long they stay, and how long the plants have to recover before the cattle return.

That timing changes everything.

A plant that is grazed and immediately grazed again has to keep drawing from its reserves.

Give that plant enough recovery time and it can rebuild its leaves.

More leaf means more photosynthesis.
More photosynthesis means more energy going into the roots and the soil.
Better roots help the plant access more water and nutrients.
More ground cover protects the soil from heat and reduces moisture loss.
And all of that helps produce more forage.

The cattle graze it, return nutrients through manure, move on, and the cycle begins again.

We aren't manufacturing fertility.

We're managing the conditions that allow the biology already there to do more work.

More Grass Means More Food

This is where regenerative farming becomes much more than an environmental idea to me.

It is a food-production strategy.

Our land supports far more cattle today than it did when we began.

At the same time, we are seeing more ground cover, more plant diversity, more insects and birds, and more biological activity.

Those things aren't happening despite increased production.

They are part of why production increased.

The healthier the environment became, the more food it could produce.

And Better Forage May Mean Better Beef

There is another layer to this.

Forage isn't simply calories for cattle.

Different plants contain different minerals, fats, and plant compounds.

Recent research looking at grass-fed beef from farms across North America found that cattle grazing more diverse, well-rested pastures tended to produce beef with higher concentrations of vitamin E and a broader range of plant-derived compounds.

So the pasture may influence not only how much beef we can produce, but also characteristics of the food itself.

That makes forage quality every bit as interesting to us as forage quantity.

Food Security Is Beneath Our Feet

When we talk about America's beef supply, we hear a lot about cattle prices, processors, imports, feed costs, and grocery prices.

All of those things matter.

But before any of them comes the land.

• Can it grow enough forage?
• Can it hold water when rain comes?
• Can it keep living roots through difficult weather?
• Can it recover after being grazed?
• Can we increase its productive capacity rather than slowly use it up?

Those are food-security questions.

The lesson I take from the small national cattle herd isn't simply that America needs more cows.

We need land capable of supporting more cows.

And our experience here gives me a lot of optimism about what is possible.

We have watched land become healthier and dramatically more productive at the same time.

To me, that is the point of regenerative agriculture.

Environmental security isn't separate from food security.

It is where food security begins.