Number-cruncher touts grazing

LeeAnne Bulman For Agri-View

ALTURA, Minn. – Number-crunching is the bent of Eric Heins of Hoosier Ridge Ranch near Altura in southeastern Minnesota. He uses his background as an accountant and his computer to determine profitability and best practices on his beef and grain farm.

When Heins bought his farm it was all grain, so he seeded some to pasture, and purchased Normande and Shorthorn cattle for grazing. On the best crop ground he now grows for small square hay bales, along with Kernza, canning peas, food-grade barley, beans, canning corn and food-grade oats. He’s avoided corn because of depressed prices, he said, but hasn’t ruled it out as a potential crop.

His best profits come from selling his grass-fed beef, which he direct-markets on the farm. His figures show an 180-day grazing season with a conservative estimate of a pound-per-day gain and a $4.50 hanging-weight sale price, he said. That produces a yield of $468 per acre. The number includes other expenses such as fencing, labor and insurance.

“They put on pretty close to 2 pounds a day live weight on our animals here as we feed them out,” he said. “Conservatively I put them at 1 pound a day (for the spreadsheet). With a price of $4.50 hanging weight, that translates to $4.50 a day of income.”

A surplus of pasture and a desire to increase his herd via natural growth led Heins to try a custom grazing business. He said custom-grazing is a smaller risk, with reduced capital and cash flows.

“It’s a little risky right now to buy feeders, especially on the grass-fed side, because you don’t know if that animal has good enough genetics that it’s actually gaining weight on grass,” he said.

He figures his net profit at $226 per acre for the extra animals. The next-best profit on the farm is small square bales of hay at a profit of $178 per acre, he said. Sweet corn for the canning industry is less profitable; it takes more inputs and yields $48 per acre.

Heins touts the nature of grazing with increased profits for beef. Established pasture has minimal inputs and takes no chemicals, reseeding, tillage or mechanical harvesting.

“I don’t fertilize my pastures,” he said. “There’s right, wrong or indifferent, but so far we’ve got five-year pastures (and) six-year pastures. And we’re not taking anything off of them technically; everything is going right back other than needing some lime here and there. Our pastures and our soil and fertility have always been pretty decent.”

The cattle fertilize the pastures as they graze, though Heins tested the soil and found that it could use some lime. He monitors for future problems, he said, which he thinks he can address as they happen. He uses no chemicals on the pastures.

His initial investments included a 3-joule fencer and O’Brien step-in fencing. They cost more, he said, but he thought the ease of use and longer lifespan made them worth the money. He plans to upgrade to some virtual fencing.

“I see a huge benefit in virtual fencing, where you can set that boundary to move a foot or something every hour so those cattle are constantly moving,” he said. “There is a lot of efficiency to be gained; I think it has a lot of opportunity.”

He tries to use his marginal land for grazing, saving the better areas for field crops. Some of the marginal land is rented from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. It was thick with brush, especially buckthorn, he said. He started clearing it by picking up the buckthorn plants with a grapple, tipping it up to expose about 4 inches of the roots. He pulled those up and burned them, then scattered leftover pasture mix of no particular variety.

Heins doesn’t mulch, to encourage the grasses. The pasture mix competes with any new buckthorn growth, he said. Buckthorn seed will germinate 80 percent the first year, with the rest the next year. It doesn’t survive long in the soil.

The DNR land is along the edge of his fields and gives his animals some shade, he said. The land drops off dramatically about 100 feet inside the parcels. Because there isn’t much feed in the woods, he uses one strand of fencing wire.

“It’s a matter of risk tolerance; they won’t push there,” he said.

“As you get better with grazing, your pastures produce better. You should be able to run more than one animal per acre per day.”

This is an original article written for Agri-View, a Lee Enterprises agricultural publication based in Madison, Wisconsin. Visit AgriView.com for more information.