Episode 150: Grazing Beyond the Mainstream with Jim Elizondo

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast

AEA Marketing

Science, Natural Sciences, Earth Sciences

4.7 • 548 Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jim Elizondo is a trailblazer in regenerative agriculture, supporting his accounting degree and agronomy engineering training with hands-on experience. He spent 20 years as a dairy nutritionist and managed a grazed dairy for 28 years, shaping his unique perspective on grazing management.

Jim's work centers on revolutionizing grazing practices to enhance soil health and livestock productivity. He developed the Total Grazing program, which emphasizes non-selective grazing to prevent overgrazing and build long-lived soil carbon, drawing from his observations across climates from Florida to New Zealand. His insights challenge conventional wisdom, advocating for adaptive genetics in livestock and stockpiling pastures to boost soil fertility naturally.

In this episode, John and Jim discuss:

How Total Grazing minimizes overgrazing
Why selective grazing leads to soil compaction and loss of long-lived soil carbon
How stockpiling pastures for over six months shifts root exudates from sugary to fatty
"Happy plants" are perennials that grow larger leaves without seeding
Using adaptive genetics in livestock to improve land health, mimicking the role of extinct megafauna
The importance between "recovery time" and "rest time"

Additional Resources
To learn more about Jim and his work, please visit: https://www.rwranching.com/
To take Jim's Total Grazing course, please visit: https://www.rwranching.com/enroll
Jim's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realwealthranching/
Jim's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@realwealthranching

About John Kempf
John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). A top expert in biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education, tools, and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who grow it.

Through intense study and the knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive systems-based approach to plant nutrition – a system solidly based on the sciences of plant physiology, mineral nutrition, and soil microbiology.

Support For This Show & Helping You Grow
Since 2006, AEA has been on a mission to help growers become more resilient, efficient, and profitable with regenerative agriculture.

AEA works directly with growers to apply its unique line of liquid mineral crop nutrition products and biological inoculants. Informed by cutting-edge plant and soil data-gathering techniques, AEA's science-based programs empower farm operations to meet the crop quality markers that matter the most.

AEA has created real and lasting change on millions of acres with its products and data-driven services by working hand-in-hand with growers to produce healthier soil, stronger crops, and higher profits.

Beyond working on the ground with growers, AEA leads in regenerative agriculture media and education, producing and distributing the popular and highly-regarded Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, inspiring webinars, and other educational content that serve as go-to resources for growers worldwide.

Learn more about AEA's regenerative programs and products: https://www.advancingecoag.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the regenerative agriculture podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to producing healthy soil, healthy feed, healthy livestock, and ultimately healthy people, which is the foundational purpose and reason of agriculture. If we miss that objective, then what are we here for exactly?
0:20.4	So this conversation today is one that I've
0:23.3	been looking forward to for some time. I met Jim Alizando a long time ago. He just told me 11 years ago.
0:31.5	And one of the things that I was intrigued with, Jim, years ago, we had a conversation around
0:37.0	the untapped yield potential
0:39.7	of forages and some of the work that C.J. Fenz out was doing. I dropped the ball and we never
0:45.6	followed up on making some of those experiments happen. But I've always been intrigued. You are in a
0:51.8	slightly different ecosystem and climate from many of the
0:58.5	popular grazing gurus. You've become a little bit of a grazing guru of your own. You've had a lot
1:06.6	of impact on the way many people approach grazing management and you've developed your very
1:11.8	perhaps a very original perspective on how you approach grazing management tell us a little bit about
1:18.2	about that about your journey and how your perspective is different from perhaps the mainstream
1:23.3	view if the contemporary or the the not necessarily the mainstream view but the fringe
1:29.8	mainstream view how about that yes yes well let's start with conventional grazing management
1:35.8	which was up in 1953 mostly continuous grazing and thus when crider made his famous experiment of the take-half, leaf half,
1:48.2	where he cut with scissors, potted plants, young seedlings, up to every other day, and every two weeks and so on,
1:57.4	and he found that overgrazing or cutting too often, a young plant will stop the root
2:05.6	from growing. From there, somehow, those grazing groups that you mentioned got the idea that
2:14.3	whenever we graze now with rotational grazing or non-selected grazing,
2:20.3	we should take no more than half of the plant.
2:23.6	And that's a very bad conclusion from an experiment not done for that.
2:29.7	Right.
	...

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