bio
I’m an Agronomist Engineer with financial knowledge specializing on beef and dairy cattle.
In 1990 I bought my first irrigated farm and soon learned that it wasn’t going to make money following what I had learned in college.
Applying chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides only drained my wallet and degraded the land.
So, I started studying Andre Voisin’s book “Grass Productivity”, which helped me to understand how grass grows and what the optimum rest period is. But my environment was so different that it didn’t answer my questions on profitability and on regenerating the land. Economic circumstances had also changed big time since he wrote the book some 40 years prior, the cost of inputs had steadily increased while the price of our products, beef and milk, hadn’t increased at the same pace to where it was not and it is still not profitable to feed hay or silage.
There had to be a better way, so I started studying Holistic Resource Management and quickly realized that, while some insights were spot on, other things were left out of what they called the whole.
They didn’t have the answers to my questions.
I then learned a different form of ruminant nutrition from Mark Bader and gained 17 years of experience as a dairy nutritionist having a 300-cows grazed dairy myself and finishing beef animals after grazing.
This nutrition knowledge allowed me to understand how the grazing management impacted animal health. This knowledge and years of experience practicing it, answered many of those difficult questions to where I and my clients started having much better results.
In 2000, I bought my second ranch with degraded and dry land due to continuous grain agriculture before I bought it. Nevertheless, I made it work!
Later in 2008, I invited Johann Zietsman from Zimbabwe, Africa to my hometown where he and his wife stayed for a month.
He, being a commercial rancher with mud on his boots, made much more sense than certified instructors that had never owned a ranch and made a profit from it.
heir teachings and books coupled with my own observations have allowed me to put together a new perspective where nature is followed using low cost biological methods to improve profits to the maximum while improving the land the fastest.
This knowledge and experience are summed up in the Four Pillars of Real Wealth Ranching: Genetics, Grazing, Nutrition and Breeding.
This knowledge is now put out to the world to create real wealth from animals, land, microorganisms to aesthetics, harmony, society and genetics as they also impact the land and its biological processes.
I have taught and consulted on different environments from Canada, USA, Hawaii to Colombia, Paraguay, Mexico desert, mountains and tropics, France and Scotland.
The principles I teach are Universal in scope but site specific in application due to different altitudes, rainfall patterns, relative humidity and forage species.
My sincere wish is for you to be profitable, improve your land, have fun with less hassle and ultimately improve your surroundings!
https://www.rwranching.com/
