Before You Can Raise Cattle, You Raise Grass

“You can lose all of your money. You can lose all of your cattle, and you can still make it work. If you lose your grass, it’s going to be very difficult to come back.”

Those are words my late grandad, John Murphy, often repeated throughout his life here on earth.

I was too young to fully understand what he meant before he passed away. At the time, they were just words. Looking back, I realize they were some of the greatest lessons he ever gave us.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized he was talking about something much bigger than grass.

He was talking about the one thing that every single ranch depends on, but few people outside of agriculture even think about. He was talking about grass.

Not the kind that simply turns a pasture green after a spring rain, but the kind with roots that anchor the soil, capture rainfall, feed livestock, shelter wildlife, and quietly determine whether a ranch will still be productive fifty years from now.

Every ranch has a heartbeat. It isn’t the sale barn, it isn’t the branding pen, it isn’t even the cattle. It’s the grass. Everything else simply depends on it.

The Wealth Beneath Your Feet

A rancher’s wealth isn’t always measured by the number of cattle behind the fence. Sometimes it’s measured by what grows beneath their feet.

Healthy grass is the cheapest feed a rancher will ever produce, yet it’s one of the most valuable resources they’ll ever manage. Every pound a calf gains, every healthy cow that breeds back, every bale of hay put up for winter begins with sunlight captured by a blade of grass.

Long before cattle convert forage into beef, grass is quietly converting sunshine into life.

That’s something no feed truck can replace.

In many of my articles I talk about markets and their bipolar tendencies, the true fragility of equipment, and ranchers whose mental and physical health climb one year and fall the next. Those things are frustrating, but they can recover.

A pasture that has been neglected for years doesn’t recover nearly as quickly. The prairie keeps score, and rewards those who care for it.

A Ranch Is Grazed From the Ground Up

The smartest, most successful ranchers don’t just manage cattle, they manage grass.

Every pasture has a carrying capacity, the number of animals it can support without damaging the forage resource. If we exceed that capacity for too long, the consequences begin below the surface before they’re ever even noticed.

When grass is repeatedly grazed before it has time to recover, it loses leaf and blade area. Without enough surface area, grass cannot capture the sunlight needed to rebuild its root system. As the roots shrink, the plant becomes less resilient to drought, less competitive against weeds, and slower to recover after grazing.

Eventually, bare ground begins to appear, rainwater runs off instead of soaking into the soil, weeds move in, and production declines. It doesn’t happen overnight, it happens one bite at a time.

That’s why rotational grazing has become one of the most valuable management tools on working ranches. Rather than allowing cattle to graze one pasture continuously, producers move livestock between pastures, giving previously grazed grass the opportunity to rest, regrow, and replenish the energy stored in its roots.

Rest is not wasted time, it’s an investment.

Healthy grass with time to recover grows deeper roots, captures more rainfall, withstands drought more effectively, and ultimately produces more forage over the course of the year.

Sometimes grazing less produces more, and more grass almost always produces healthier cattle.

Nature Doesn’t Like Empty Space

The prairie is always growing something. If it isn’t growing native grasses, it’s usually growing whatever is willing to take their place.

Just like bad “friends,” weeds don’t ask permission. They simply wait for opportunity.

Few invasive plants have become as troublesome across Oklahoma as sericea lespedeza.

Originally introduced for erosion control, it has spread aggressively across native rangeland. As the plant matures, its high tannin content makes it highly unappetizing to livestock (imagine eating a mouthful of coffee grounds). This allows it to spread while more appetizing grasses are grazed around it. Year after year, it claims more ground, reducing carrying capacity and replacing productive forage with vegetation cattle would rather avoid.

Then there are eastern red cedars.

Most people admire a lone cedar standing in a pasture. Ranchers see something different. One cedar becomes ten and ten become a hundred.

Before long, sunlight no longer reaches the grass beneath them. They compete for moisture during dry years, reduce grazing acres, increase wildfire intensity, and slowly convert productive prairie into cedar forest.

The danger isn’t that they grow quickly, it’s that they grow quietly.

Sometimes the Best Way to Grow Grass Is to Burn It

To someone unfamiliar with ranching, intentionally setting fire to a pasture seems completely backwards.

Why would anyone burn the very thing they’re trying to protect? Because the prairie was born with fire.

Long before county roads, barbed wire, or ranch headquarters adorned the landscape, lightning and Native Americans shaped the land with regular fire. Those burns removed old plant material, recycled nutrients into the soil, suppressed young cedar trees and brush, and encouraged fresh, nutritious grass to emerge.

Without prescribed burning, dead plant litter accumulates, reducing sunlight that reaches new growth. Cedars spread across the landscape, invasive plants become more difficult to manage, and the prairie slowly loses the diversity and productivity that make it one of the world’s greatest grazing ecosystems.

A properly planned prescribed burn is one of the most effective tools available to a rancher. It improves forage quality, stimulates native grasses, helps control woody encroachment, and pairs well with herbicide programs targeting invasive plants like sericea lespedeza.

Fire isn’t about destroying the land. It’s about renewing it.

Like every management practice, prescribed burning requires planning. Weather conditions, fuel loads, firebreaks, equipment, and communication with neighbors all play an important role in conducting a safe and effective burn.

It’s not something to take lightly, but when done correctly, fire becomes one of the greatest acts of stewardship a rancher can practice. Sometimes the healthiest pasture can begin with a lit match.

Stewardship Is Rarely Convenient

Healthy grass doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because someone pays attention.

Sometimes that means riding a pasture in July when the heat feels unbearable, checking water gaps after a storm instead of waiting until next week, spending money today to avoid spending far more tomorrow.

Controlling invasive weeds is one of those investments.

For smaller operations, many landowners use backpack sprayers or ATV-mounted sprayers to spot treat individual plants before they spread.

Larger ranches often rely on aerial sprayers that efficiently cover hundreds of acres with precise herbicide application.

Where terrain is rough or thousands of acres require treatment, aerial spraying by airplane or helicopter remains an effective option. More recently, agricultural drones have become another valuable tool, allowing producers to precisely target difficult terrain while reducing chemical drift and reaching places traditional equipment cannot.

Every operation is different, and the right method depends on the size of the ranch, the terrain, the target species, and the producer’s goals.

The True Cost of Waiting

It’s easy to postpone spraying another season, ignore a few cedar seedlings, and convince yourself the pasture can wait one more year. That is until one year becomes ten.

Removing a handful of young cedars may take nothing more than an afternoon. Reclaiming a ranch overrun with mature cedars can require heavy equipment, prescribed fire, years of labor, and tens of thousands of dollars.

A small patch of sericea lespedeza can often be controlled with timely herbicide applications, but a ranch consumed by it becomes a years-long battle.

The same is true for overgrazed pastures. Healthy native grasses can survive drought and they can survive grazing. What they struggle to survive is repeated abuse without recovery.

The cost of caring for healthy grass will almost always be less than the cost of trying to restore a prairie after it has been neglected. My great-great-grandfather Frank, great-grandfather Jack, and grandfather John knew that long before anyone published research to prove it. They read the land instead of textbooks, and generation after generation, the prairie rewarded that respect.

My ancestors handed that knowledge to my uncle Francis and my dad, Chris, who have carried it forward with the same care and respect for the land. Because every generation chose stewardship over short-term gain, my generation will inherit a prairie worth caring for instead of one that needs saving. Our job now is to make sure the next generation can say the same.

More Than Cattle

People often assume ranchers are in the cattle business. The truth is, the best ranchers are in the grass business. Healthy grass grows healthy cattle, healthy grass protects the soil from erosion, healthy grass captures rainfall instead of letting it wash away.

Healthy grass filters water, stores carbon, provides habitat for quail, turkey, deer, pollinators, and countless other species that call the prairie home. The cattle may be what leave the ranch, but the grass is what keeps it alive.

The Legacy Beneath Our Feet

I think about my grandad’s words more now than I ever did when he was alive.

At the time, to such a young kid they sounded like advice about ranching I knew nothing about at the time. Now they sound like a philosophy for life. Take care of the foundation, protect what quietly sustains everything else, don’t wait until small problems become expensive ones, and leave the land healthier than you found it.

Money can be earned again, cattle can be bought again, equipment can be replaced.

Healthy prairie isn’t built in a season. It’s built one rain, one grazing rotation, one prescribed burn, one cedar cut before it seeds, one patch of sericea sprayed before it spreads, and one thoughtful decision at a time.

Maybe that’s why Grandad always talked about the grass, he knew the most valuable thing on a ranch isn’t standing on four legs. It’s growing beneath them.

Looking back, I don’t think Grandad was just teaching us how to raise cattle. I think he was teaching us how to leave something worth handing down.