Yet, today, pastured meat remains a niche market. It’s estimated that less than 5% of the 32 million beef cattle, 5% of the 121 million hogs, and 0.01% of the 9 billion broilers produced in the U.S. in 2017 were raised and finished on pasture. What would it take to make pastured systems the mainstream model of animal agriculture? And how might scaling up affect land use and the environment?

Our new study, produced in partnership with 10 pastured livestock farms in Pennsylvania, explores how much land and feed it takes for these farmers to produce a pound of grass-finished beef, pastured pork, or pastured chicken. The project was funded by a Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education (SARE) grant and the Shon Seeley Memorial Fund.

Results varied significantly—for example, while one pastured beef cattle farm was capable of producing 71 pounds of meat per acre of pasture and hay, another farm was producing just 31 pounds of meat per acre. The most efficient of the pastured poultry farms the study examined produced 1,760 pounds of meat per ton of feed, while the least efficient produced 540 pounds of meat per ton of feed.

Considering these results, many pastured livestock farms likely have the ability to become significantly more efficient at translating feed and land into marketable meat—and thereby improve their yields and bottom line. Farmers can improve their systems by considering what their high-performing peers are doing.

Bill Callahan of Cow-A-Hen Farm in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania relies on locally adapted genetics as a key way to boost the efficiency of his pastured cattle herd, which has been exclusively bred on-farm for 25 years. He carefully selects mother cows based on breeding success and calf survival. While many farms favor cows that birth large calves, because large calves can lead to higher value stocker cattle or to more marketable meat per animal, Bill finds that with smaller calves he has very few problems with cow and calf mortality. Additionally, smaller-bodied animals take less time to mature, helping maintain cash flow on the farm.

Cow-A-Hen Farm has bred its herd on-farm for 25 years.

Another author of the study, Brooks Miller of North Mountain Pastures in Newport, Pennsylvania, finds that predator control is a key aspect of an efficient pastured poultry operation. “Losses from predators anywhere in the production cycle significantly increases the total amount of feed needed to bring a bird to market,” said Miller. In 2016, Miller developed a new brooder design using second-hand steel shipping containers. These containers virtually eliminated losses of chicks to weasels, rats, and other predators. He’s also installed automatic feeders and waterers in the brooders. He finds that by keeping feed and water consistently available, chick growth and survival rates have also greatly improved.

North Mountain Pastures designed a custom brooder to prevent loss from predators.

While it’s clear there’s room to scale up pastured livestock production at the farm level, is there room to scale up at the state level? How many acres would it take for pastured livestock farmers like the 10 in our study to provide meat for all of Pennsylvania’s 12.8 million residents?

Considering the benchmarks identified by the study, and assuming all residents are consuming the USDA recommendation of six ounces of animal protein per day (many likely eat considerably more meat on a given day, some less, and some eat none), a rough calculation shows that all of the state’s existing cropland would need to be converted into perennial pasture plus an additional 7.2 million acres of pastureland and 1.2 million acres of cropland outside of the state would need to be utilized.

“Pastured livestock systems still have plenty of room to scale up in Pennsylvania and nationally … But if it’s going to be our default method of meat production, we’ll also need to make informed choices about how much meat we choose to consume to enable a healthier and more environmentally sustainable model of meat production to succeed.”

In contrast, if all of these animals were raised using confinement methods, 4.9 million acres of pasture and 434,000 acres of cropland in Pennsylvania would need to be converted, plus an additional 885,000 acres of cropland outside of the state would be needed—in other words, still a large land-use footprint, but far less land than the pastured model requires.

This means that if we all chose to eat pastured meats, we’d have more land in deep rooted, perennial pastures that protect water, enrich soil, improve animal welfare, and support human health. Yet we’d also have to convert substantial areas of cropland that could be used to grow food grains, vegetables, and other crops.

Pastured livestock systems still have plenty of room to scale up in Pennsylvania and nationally as a farming method. But if it’s going to be our default method of meat production, we’ll also need to make informed choices about how much meat we choose to consume to enable a healthier and more environmentally sustainable model of meat production to succeed.

Read the full report here.

The post What would it take to scale up pastured meat production? appeared first on Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.

Dairy herd at Hameau Farm, a Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship host farm. Credit: Emily Decker

On June 11, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry approved Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship to become a formal apprenticeship program for aspiring pastured dairy farmers in the state.

Founded by dairy farmers in Wisconsin, Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship was the first nationally registered farming apprenticeship in the country and is now operating in several states. Pasa administers the program in Pennsylvania and surrounding areas.

The two-year program pairs beginning farmers with established farmers, who serve as both employer and mentor, to provide a guided pathway toward managing or starting a dairy grazing farm. Using a model of education that has prepared skilled workers in the trades for generations, the apprenticeship combines paid, on-the-job training with related technical coursework in business management, herd health, dairy nutrition, soil, and more.

Dairy is the largest agricultural industry in Pennsylvania, and grass-based dairy products are in-demand—Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship is training the next generation of dairy farmers, from pasture to cheese cave, how to compete in an often challenging market.

“Dairy is the largest agricultural industry in Pennsylvania, and grass-based dairy products are in-demand—Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship is training the next generation of dairy farmers, from pasture to cheese cave, how to compete in an often challenging market.”

In March of 2019, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry also approved Diversified Vegetable Apprenticeship, a program for vegetable farmers developed by Pasa in collaboration with 19 farms in the state. It was the first state-registered apprenticeship for diversified vegetable farmers in the nation. Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship and Diversified Vegetable Apprenticeship are currently the only state-registered apprenticeships specifically catered to farmers in the Commonwealth.

Unlike many informal apprenticeships, which often charge tuition or do not compensate apprentices for their work, state- or federally registered programs require host farms to pay apprentices an hourly wage. Some farms offer additional in-kind compensation, such as housing or other professional development opportunities, or schedule wage increases as apprentices develop their skills.

By ensuring apprentices are compensated for their labor, registered apprenticeships acknowledge the value of an apprentice’s contributions to a farm business and make farming training more widely accessible. They also serve to support the labor needs of established businesses.

“By ensuring apprentices are compensated for their labor, registered apprenticeships acknowledge the value of an apprentice’s contributions to a farm business. It also ensures that farming training is more widely accessible accessible. They also serve to support the labor needs of established businesses.”

During a time when 75 percent of beginning and aspiring farmers under the age of 40 in the U.S. did not grow up on a farm, farmer training programs are becoming increasingly vital. Without the traditional transfer of knowledge between parents and children, aspiring farmers need hands-on opportunities to learn the intricacies of stewarding land, tending crops and running a financially viable business. And as more farmers approach retirement—the average age of a farmer in Pennsylvania is nearly 57—the country faces a critical labor shortage, threatening the stability of the food supply.

Farming is highly skilled work, requiring knowledge of everything from botany and ecology to marketing and business. Registered apprenticeships provide the rigorous training beginning farmers need to succeed. Plus, they have the potential to achieve a level of scale few other training programs can match.

Interested in becoming an apprentice or hosting one? Learn more.

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Second-year apprentice Jessica Matthews shares her journey into dairy grazing.

Jessica is participating in Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship, a federally registered apprenticeship that PASA administers in Pennsylvania and nearby areas. 

I had four day-old chicks nestled under a warm lamp in the spare room. This was my first small foray into animal husbandry, and I hadn’t realized before I brought them home that I’d need straw for bedding…oops.

As I took to searching through classified ads on PASA’s website for straw, I stumbled upon Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship. I thought, This could be the opportunity of a lifetime! I’m an animal lover above all else, and the thought of working with cows for a living under the patient guidance of an experienced farmer seemed—despite having less than 24 hours of animal husbandry experience—perfect.

I was seeking a career change, and the idea of farming had gotten into my head. I just couldn’t shake it. I had been dabbling in the idea by growing vegetables for several years, and now by introducing some backyard chickens into the mix. But there was no way to dabble in dairy farming—especially just outside of Philadelphia where I grew up.

“I thought, This could be the opportunity of a lifetime!”

Exploring the Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship website some more, I discovered Hameau Farm, which is owned and operated by Master Grazier Gay Rodgers. Hameau’s website featured a grain silo painted by generations of campers who had spent their summers on the farm, red and white cows (which I had never seen before!), and lush green pastures. I was in love. I created an apprentice profile and sent a gushy email to the owner Gay Rodgers (subject line: “Oh my god, you’re PERFECT!!!”). Gay invited me to her farm for an interview.

Hameua Farm (Credit: Shay Frey)

This may sound like an exaggeration, but I swear it’s true—the first time I drove down the lane to Hameau, I burst into tears. Even if I failed the interview and freaked Gay out because I was all heart and no knowledge and never got to come back here again, I was able to visit this beautiful place that day. (Two years later, when the sun hits the mountains just so, and the cows are munching happily in the pasture, I still well up with that gratitude.)

During my interview with Gay, I knew I wanted to work with her. She was smart, quick, funny, gentle, and she obviously loved her cows. I was honest about my complete lack of experience working with livestock (I’ll have to ask Gay what she was thinking when I expressed this to her, but at the time she didn’t flinch). Gay encouraged me to stay on the farm for afternoon chores. It was the first time I had ever been so close to a cow—they were a lot bigger than I thought!—and the Birkenstock sandals I was wearing were not exactly farm-friendly footwear.

“At times it felt like the only thing I was proficient at was filling water troughs—and even then I didn’t always do that right.”

Still, I worked alongside Gay through the afternoon and, in addition to meeting the herd, I met Hameau’s flock of sheep, hens, and calves. I discovered several bags of fluff in one of the calf hutches. “Is this wool?!” I excitedly asked. It was indeed—Gay had been looking for someone to put it to good use for some time. I had taken a spinning wheel class the weekend before, so took this to be a good sign.

I committed to apprenticing at Hameau and spent the next few weeks overwhelmed and easily flustered. At times it felt like the only thing I was proficient at was filling water troughs—and even then I didn’t always do that right. When I learned to milk, it was hard to keep track of getting all the cows cleaned, prepped, milked, then post-dipped…and finishing up at any kind of decent hour. It felt like nothing was ever going to click.

Curtzee the cow (Credit: Shay Frey)

Then, it seemed to happen all of the sudden. I got it. The rhythms and routines of a dairy farm gave me time to practice things until I got them right. I remembered to bring hose clamps and buckets and my water bottle with me when I had to walk way, way out into the fields (it took many thirsty trips until I got that right!). And I milked! I milked well! I learned to take my cues from the cows. If I stayed calm, they stayed calm. If I got stressed out, they got stressed out and kicked me. If I chased them instead of walked confidently beside them, they ran. In the wrong direction. I was learning to communicate with them while I demonstrated to them I was worthy of their trust.

“I learned to take my cues from the cows. If I stayed calm, they stayed calm. If I got stressed out, they got stressed out and kicked me.”

I took my cues from Gay, too. She was able to stay cool even in situations that were extremely flustering. One afternoon after helping her corner a runaway heifer in heat, I watched her calmly slip a harness on her. As she walked the heifer inside I asked her how she managed to stay so calm and patient. Gay told me, “It was something I worked really hard at.” I was glad to hear that. It meant it was something that I could work really hard at too.

By the way, my chicks (chickens) now live at Hameau, where we have plenty of straw.

• Check out Jessica’s next post where she’ll share her experience learning about—and responding to—the state of the dairy industry in Pennsylvania.
• Learn more about Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship.

The post From Backyard Chickens to Grazing Cattle appeared first on Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.

Raising animals outdoors on deep rooted, perennial pastures can have big benefits for the environment, animal welfare, human health, and family farms, but for the time being, pastured meats remain very much a “niche” market.

Can farmers realistically scale-up pastured production to become a bigger, more mainstream part of our food system? This is a complex problem, involving daunting challenges in production, marketing, and distribution. As a starting point, it’s important to understand just how much land it takes to produce pastured animals, and where some of the bottlenecks for more efficient production may lie.

To get at this question, PASA’s SOIL Institute has been working with pastured livestock farmers across the state to share on-farm data on production and inputs for their operations. Over the past summer, a total of 8 farms shared data from their farms needed to calculate their “land use footprint,” that is how many acres of land they need to produce a pound of meat.

Farms in our Pastured Livestock Research Group

The data needed for this analysis are actually fairly routine: participating farmers dug up their 2016 numbers for total meat sales for each type of animal raised on the farm; acres grazed, pastured, or hayed on their farm; and total pounds of feed or forage purchased off-farm. Most of the farms had these data available in Quickbooks files, Excel spreadsheets, or in fail-safe paper notebooks. Using these numbers and a brief interview with the farmer to put the numbers into context, we were able to account for both on-farm land used for grazing and haymaking, and the off-farm land on which purchased feed or forage was grown.

While the data available thus far is very preliminary, the early results have been very interesting.

Pastured animals can work together to reduce “Land Use Footprints”

When we look at separate animal groups typically raised on PASA farms (beef, pigs, and broiler chickens), we find that pastured operations do take considerably more land to produce a pound of marketable meat than benchmarks for industrial confinement systems (Table 1). Not surprisingly, beef takes by far the most amount of land, with the all-grass farms in this research group using much more land than confinement systems that typically blend grass raised stockers and feedlot finishing phases. However, it’s important to understand that most of this extra land is deep-rooted perennial pastures, not cropland raised to grow annual grains (with the tillage, chemicals, fossil fuels, etc. associated with that grain production). Essentially, the land base of a pastured livestock farm might be greater than a CAFO, but its ecological impact could be considered not only lesser than the confinement model, but can even be viewed as ecologically regenerative, in a well-managed system. In-fact, on many pastured-livestock farms, cows, pigs, broilers and other animals will interact in ecologically important ways. Pigs or chickens may follow beef cows in different phases of a rotation and work to control weeds, break up pest cycles, and provide additional fertility to the grazing pastures.

Table 1. Land use footprint of PASA pastured livestock farms for beef, pork, and broiler enterprises. Land use is presented as square feet needed to produce one pound of marketable meat,  including pasture land and cropland components. Data for the “Confinement” systems are drawn from de Vries and de Boer, 2010.

Figure 1 shows total land use data (in cropland and pasture) for a leading PASA farm, North Mountain Pastures. On their Perry County farm, Brooks Miller and Anna Santini, raise about 4200 lbs of beef, 18750 lbs of pork, and 21840 of broiler meat each year for CSA and wholesale accounts (as well as a small number of ducks, turkeys, and goats, which we will leave out of our analysis for now). By weighting each animal group’s relative land use and contribution to total farm meat production, we derived a land use figure for one pound of meat on North Mountain, as compared to one pound of equivalent meat production from a confined operation. We can see in this figure that, while North Mountain uses more land total, this additional land is mostly perennial pastures. In fact, North Mountain’s use of annual cropland is half that of a CAFO.

Figure 1. Square feet of pasture and cropland needed to produce one pound of a North Mountain Pastures share (9% beef, 42% pork, and 49% broilers), using pastured versus confinement methods. Data for the “Pastured” systems are based on North Mountain Pastures numbers while data for the “Confinement” systems are drawn from de Vries and de Boer, 2010.

Value and insights for farmers

These are interesting numbers, but what’s the take-home value to farmers In the case of North Mountain Pastures, these kinds of figures can help the farmer understand the productive value of each acre of land, when evaluating land use and expansion or contraction of an operation. The real power in studies such as this, however, often begins to arise when we build larger datasets and farms can compare across operations figures that affect their bottom lines.

For instance, because feed bills can typically be more than 50% of the total costs of production for pastured pigs, the pounds off feed needed to produce a pound of marketable meat is a number to watch carefully. Looking at a small sample of just 6 PASA farms (Table 2), we found more than a 220% variation in this number, with the top farms using just 5.2 and the bottom farm 11.4 pounds of feed per pound of meat. At a PASA workshop hosted by Dean Carlson at Wyebrook Farm this past August, a group of about 12 pastured livestock farmers gathered to explore these numbers and brainstorm production practices that might help improve feed conversion efficiency. Through some spirited discussion, it came to light that one of the biggest differences between the top and bottom farm may have to do with feed storage infrastructure (shipping containers vs. feed bags in a barn). The lower scoring farm was losing considerable feed quantity and quality to pests and weather, although differences in genetics and housing were also probably very important across the two farms.

Get involved

As we come into the winter months, now is a great time to gather up your farm record-keeping and get involved with PASA’s SOIL Institute and the pastured-livestock research group. If you are interested in sharing numbers and learning more, please contact Franklin Egan (franklin@pasafarming.org, 814-349-9856 x707). At our upcoming conference, we will also be hosting a “Pastured Pigs Cost of Production Learning Circle,” where farmers can share their numbers for costs and further brainstorm ideas to push efficiency (Sat, Feb 10th). Also at the Conference, we’ll be hosting a half day seminar on “Setting Your Records Straight Using FarmOS,” where you can learn some streamlined, effective tips for managing farm records using the free, open source software FarmOS (Th, Feb 7th).

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