No Risk Ranching
A great book that shows how to make a living healing the earth
It is really hard to make a living in agriculture. It often seems that just breaking even feels like a victory. Most farms appear to need some kind of off-farm income just to stay operational. But a small number of agriculturalists have somehow found a way to not only make a decent living growing food, but also not burn out in the process. It is almost like they have found some kind of ‘cheat code.’
When it comes to ranching, Greg Judy, author of No Risk Ranching, has definitely found one of these cheat codes. He is able to make a living wage ranching full time, with no debt and no second job. And the really cool thing is that he is regenerating large swaths of land while he does it (he has about 1,200 acres under his direct management right now).
He gives a very detailed description of exactly how he does it in this book. His first trick is to keep startup and overhead costs exremely low. The way to do this is to not own the land you are grazing on, or the animals you are grazing on it. Also, don’t bother buying a barn, tractor, mower, baler, big truck, livestock trailer, or any other heavy machinery. Instead, save your money for top quality fencing and water sources.
I know it sounds really crazy, but Greg Judy goes into minute detail on how exactly how he was able to rapidly build a profitable grazing company this way. He found idle land that people would lease to him for low prices because he was able to explain to them how he would improve it with regenerative grazing. Then he found cattle owners who would gladly pay him to graze their cows for them, because paying for grazing is cheaper than paying for feed in a feed lot. Then he took the money he saved by not buying land, livestock, or expensive equipment, and used it to install fence and water access. Debt is one of the biggest farm killers. By keeping his startup costs so low, he was also able to avoid the debt trap.
The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to actually make money at ranching instead of breaking even. But it really has a much broader appeal than that. It is a great read even for someone who never plans to even touch a fence post, because it reminds us that in spite of the non-stop stream of negative news, there are people out there doing great things and we need to learn about them and support them, and imitate them in our own sphere of life.
We are bombarded continuously with the message that cows are destroying the world. But this is a dishonest half-truth. Yes, cows can wreck a whole lot of ground if you manage them the wrong way. But almost anything can be destructive if managed the wrong way. However, if they are managed the right way, cows are one of the most healing forces in existence. Just by interacting with the landscape they can literally suck huge amounts of carbon out of the air and stuff it into long term ground storage. simultaneously, they can increase water holding capacity by about ten fold, as well as increase the volume and the diversity of other plants and animals. We need to let this sink in. We tend to think of fixing the environment as something that costs a whole bunch of money. Greg Judy has figured out how to make it profitable, and with a low barrier to entry.
If you are really interested in ranching you should read his second book as well, called Comeback Farms. In it, he details an even more regenerative grazing system that he figured out how to implement, called Holistic High Density Planned Grazing. In this second book he also spends a lot more time detailing the environmental benefits of regenerative grazing.