Cow Mover

A ranching operation has 4 essential ingredients ---- land, ruminants, sunshine and rain. These ingredients have always existed and always will exist without man's help. Let's consider "Nature's Ranch". Land is the only ingredient that doesn't fluctuate at all. The earth is 75% dirt and always will be. Sunshine fluctuates predictably EVERY year. In all places on earth there are seasonal variations of the amount of solar energy available to the ranch system. The amount of sunshine increases after December 20 and decreases again after June 20 (in the northern hemisphere). Rainfall is largely seasonal too. But it is not as predictable as sunshine. Ruminants are the most variable of the 4 ingredients. Their very existence has to change with the seasons and weather. On Nature's Ranch the ruminants only have 3 options. They can increase in number (reproduce or gain weight), decrease in number (starve to death or lose weight), or move to another location (migration). When they migrate they are actually displacing another ruminant, and killing it off by eating its feed source. And so the ruminant population rises and falls with the sunshine and rain.

Mankind now enters the picture and becomes a rancher. He is essentially only a "juggler of ruminants." He has NO control over land, sunshine or rain. He has LIMITED control over weight gain or loss, reproduction, or starvation. These ruminant processes continue despite his best efforts. But he has one tool that determines whether he lives or perishes --- migration. Early man could move his goats to fresh grass or else they would starve, essentially wiping out his family. This is all human ranching is. It is the movement of ruminants to more land, sunshine and rain. We constantly look at these 4 ingredients and "juggle" them to serve our purposes. In the winter, when we have little available sunshine, we use our migration tool to move our ruminants to STORED sunshine and rainfall. It is stored in the form of a bale of hay, bucket of grain, or fresh pasture of grass. We do the same thing when we get little rainfall. We again use our migration tool. Our ruminants are either moved to stored energy or sold to someone else who has the stored energy. 99 percent of what ranchers do is look at the 4 ingredients and juggle their ruminants using migration.

Sunshine and rain are FREE sources of energy. If we are successful ranchers we can convert this energy into surplus meat. The key to our economic survival is to produce more dollars in meat than we spend for stored energy. Land is merely a medium for collecting the energy of sunshine and rain. Whether our land grows native grass, alfalfa, or grain, it is still just a big feed barrel, catching sunlight and rainwater.

After 5000 years of ranching we are still just jugglers of nutrients, moving (migrating) one source of energy to another. We move solar energy to grass energy to meat energy. Then we move the meat energy to human energy. A small part of our human energy (ranchers, meat packers, retailers) goes back into the ranching system and we start the process over. Modern ranchers have a huge array of fancy words in their vocabulary. They say things like "artificial insemination", "daily rate of gain", and "expected progeny difference." Maybe we like to make ourselves seem more complex than we really are. Just as the Plains Indian followed the buffalo across the prairie, we are still only movers of ruminants.

Nathan Lee, January, 2004