Episode 1151 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
- Grazing Philosophy & Context
- Leader, Follower Rotation
- Sacred Geometry
- Daily Labor Flow
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:33AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025, and this is episode eleven fifty one of Bitcoin. And I'm really excited to bring you this one because this is part three of the Cathedral series. I'm going to try to do Cathedral episodes every Wednesday until I'm done. And God only knows how long that's gonna be because this is it just ends up being kind of an immense thing, and it's gonna take a lot of episodes to get through everything. And then it's probably gonna take a few episodes to get through the pushback that I will be getting on, especially on a couple of tree varieties that I've that I've, talked about on the cathedral series. But will I might say, I'm gonna end up saying a few things about that in today's show.
But today's show, we we've gone through the basic architecture of the whole layout, the the the thousand acres, the the the the square, the 23 tree lanes, and and the the pasture and or agricultural space that's in between the tree lanes. That was that was episode one. In episode two, we talked about the architecture of the tree lanes and the interior of the perimeter trees and the kind of species that we're talking about and what they can do and and the hedgerows and we so we've gone into all that. So now the the next thing to talk about is the grazing lanes and the context of the grazing lanes and the the integration of the grazing lanes, which again are where the livestock goes, and they're in between all of the tree lanes. And the tree lanes define a maze like pattern where the animals move through the cathedral architecture from one end to the other, all the way to the other end, taking right around one year.
Now, we're gonna talk about the grays today. But there's there's another thing that you can do with the pasture or the the lanes in between the trees. And that is agriculture, like row cropping, like you could grow wheat, or you could grow beans, or you could grow, God forbid, corn, you know, or or it it doesn't have to be set as grays. My personal my the way I personally look at it, I don't think there's anything better than you can do that you could do than to graze animals through this system continuously for all time. I I don't I'm not saying that agriculture or row cropping at any given time is necessary for this system to work.
However, your context may vary. You know, one person's grays may be just a waste of space for them. And I I don't want it to be where you should farm the way that I think you should farm. That's not what this is about. So the grazing lanes are a 150 foot wide. And they're and the entire structure, like, even when you're coming around the end of a tree lane to reverse direction for you're going, like, the animals are moving south to north, and they come around and they hang a left. Or if they're going from east to west, let's say, they hang a left at the north side where there's a gap between one of the tree lanes and the perimeter.
And that gap is also a 150 foot wide. Why a 150 foot? Combines. Specifically, the size header on a combine. So so what's a combine? If you're growing wheat or corn or beans or whatever, chances are really good to harvest the those critters, you're gonna be using a tractor, and that's going to be called a combine. And it's got a header on it. So what's the header? At the front of the combine is a great big steel and metal contraption that is about anywhere between and and they make them in all sizes, man. Like, I think there's a header. I think the smallest size is fifteen foot, and that's width. And then there's twenty and twenty five, and then there's there's 30 and there's 35. And it turns out the the most sold size header in The United States is 30 foot long or 30 foot wide, depending on on what way you're going. But what it does is it basically it's a mower.
It just it it literally mows down the crop and then separates stock and leaf and like corn cobs or stock and leaf and grain heads. And it sends the essentially, it's a contraption that is a sorter. It just cuts everything down. It intakes everything, and then it basically says this is chaff and this is grain or this is corn and it it's it's we won't get into how it works. Just understand that that's what happens. So that's what a combine is. And the standard size header in The United States is about 30 foot wide. So if I've got like, you know, if I got 30 feet wide of a header and I want to do row cropping instead of grazing inside these lanes, then I can get a 30 foot header, put it on a combine, and it would take five passes from end to end running around the lanes to be able to harvest all 150 foot of width throughout the length of the cathedral system.
That's why it's a 150 foot wide. Right? So I I do need to make mention here. I am not married to any of these numbers. What happens if somebody says, need a 100 200 foot? Okay. You're gonna have less tree lanes. Okay. We only want a 100 foot between the tree lanes. Well, you're gonna get quite a bit of shading as the day, you know, from morning to tonight or to evening because the trees are going to shade portions of the field. I'm looking at a 150 feet as a pretty good a pretty good average size as to sunlight striking those lanes versus the shade of the east trees in the morning and the shade of the west trees in the evening.
And I think a 150 feet actually works because you can get, well, roughly about 640 acres of grays or of cropping, whichever one you want to do. It's it's that's up to whoever takes any part of these ideas and decides, well, I don't like this other stuff, but I kinda like this idea and and and so we'll keep. So so if you are the person that wants to incorporate something like this or or, you know, wanna tell your friend about it and and they're trying to wrap their head around it, you could say, well, you don't have to graze. It's it's actually built to to do cropping as well. And I I think that that is a way to service as many potential people looking at this system as an answer to doing agriculture a different way that that is possible. And and I like I like the ability to have possibilities involved in almost everything that I think about. Because otherwise, it just ends up being, well, just too structured and and it's it's inflexible. And and with systems without flexibility are are just essentially you're designing to fail because at one point or another, it's going to need to be flexible. And if it's not flexible, it's going to bend and then it's going to break.
And I don't I don't like that system. So that that's why it's a 150 foot wide is simply to accommodate somebody who wants to alley crop. And then there's here's here's the other thing. You could do both. You could alley crop every other year. You could and then graze every other year. Except there ends up being a problem with, well, you have to completely reseed the pasture every time you wanna graze. And then you've got to make sure that you're not putting in you're not putting in grasses that grow so damn tall that it's gonna interfere with the cropping aspect. So you might wanna go to, well, we'll graze for five years, and every sixth year, we'll alley crop it because there's gonna be a lot of fertility.
You're gonna get a bumper crop out of that thing. So is it every two years? Is it every three years? Is it every four years that you decide to rotate out of grays and go into something like alley cropping? Again, just to reiterate, the the way that I look at the system, I would only do grays. I would have I would not really want to do any kind of cropping whatsoever because I'm more about production of using solar energy captured by the system to produce meat and animal proteins and animal fat than anything else. So I wanna touch back on this 640 acres. Where does that come from?
K. You got a thousand acres total. And when you have if you if you do the the lane sizes the way that I'm talking about, the length of which I'm talking about, you end up with with 23 tree lanes. And if you subtract from a thousand acres, the acreage of all the trees, including the perimeter, the roads, the tree lanes, the hedgerows, if you subtract all of that out, you're gonna end up with roughly around 640 acres, which is exactly one section of land on an acre. 640 acres is one section of land, which is about one mile by one mile wide. That's pretty much exactly what a section of land is, And it gives you six forty acres.
So that's what we have to work with on grazing, which is what I'm going to talk about today. We're not going to talk about alley cropping. That may actually end up being a completely different episode. But for grays and 640 acres, we're not gonna exactly end up with 640 acres. We're gonna end up with slightly less than that because we're gonna need to sacrifice some acreage for machines, not mobile machines, but like drying silos, conveyor belts. There's a whole set of mechanical infrastructure that goes into this whole thing, and that could, in fact, include a state inspected meat production facility, like an abattoir where you kill animals, you you skin them, you get the hide off of them, you eviscerate them, You hang them. You let them cool down. If you do it properly, you get excellent meat out of the whole deal, and then you've got to cut the meat into steaks for either boxing or packaging, however it is. And, again, that ends up being a completely different episode.
But there will be sacrificial land for a couple of buildings, some silos, other things that go into this system. So it's not going to be exactly 640 acres. I'm gonna say it's probably gonna be more like 620 because that gives you 20 acres to do composting, to do all the rest of the stuff that I'm going to be suggesting as this series develops. So let's say it's right around six hundred and twenty acres. Again, it's this maze like continuous flow of grays. So you enter the animals in from, like, let's say, the and it doesn't have to be the east side. Could be the west side if you wanna go the different direction. It doesn't really matter.
But whatever side you choose to insert the animals into, that's where they start the maze. And they go, like, I don't know, like, from south to north, and then they go west, and then they go back down to the south, and then they go west, and they go back up, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah until they exit the system in about a year. So that that's the primary grazing cycle it in as an overview. Let's let's look at this in a little bit more detail. I have spoken about this grazing part of the system as a what's called a leader follower. Greys system, which is standard fare. It's it's not something that I came up with, but it's something that I think about.
All the time. Because one of the things that I see a lot is that you'll get like you'll get ranchers, small ranches, especially in West Texas, that have nothing but cattle on them and nothing else. And I've been on some of these pasture fields where I've seen cow pads that which are their their manure, which have been dried to a crisp, are still completely whole and have no grass sticking out through them whatsoever. It ends up killing the grass right where it's at. Now, this is the reason for that is a couple of things. One is There's no there's no macro insect life or, you know, worms or dung beetles in the soil that can take care of these cow pies as they drop.
Now that in in a lot of times in West Texas where there's never been farmed, it's it's it's only been grazed, that the there's so there's not any pesticide or herbicide usage, not not at scale. So what's what's wrong with the soil? Why is why is there no earthworms? Well, it's dry and there's not a whole lot of organic matter left. And that that goes back to the history of grazing the Great Plains. And I really am right now in my mind, I'm really looking at the system as centering into the Great Plains. It doesn't mean that it doesn't work elsewhere. I'm just saying for for purposes of these earlier discussions of cathedral, let's look at it from the standpoint of the Great Plains.
And in the panhandle of West Texas, especially, it is dry as a bone, and there's not a whole lot of carbon left in the soil to soak up and hold on to the water when it does rain. Why? Because we don't graze this shit properly. You know, back in the day, it thousand hundreds of thousands of bison and and elk and all kinds of shit out there grazing this grass to the ground. In fact, there were stories about people when they had when they were starting to explore, and I think it was Lewis and Clark was one of the expeditions that had was one of the first people to make note about this as they were leaving. I guess they probably left from they staged in Saint Louis, and then they kinda, like, went out, went off over the plains from there to end up discovering the Northwest Passage up through Washington state. And one of the things that they noted was that the if you got behind one of these herds of bison and you did not have feed that you were hauling for your horses, your horses were going to starve and you were probably going to end up dying because your transportation is gone. There's no nothing to pull the wagons. There's nothing that you can you're just gonna be walking.
Why? Because if you got behind one of these herds, there was nothing left. Nothing. Nothing. I mean, every forb, every legume, every grass plant was mowed to the ground, and there was nothing left for horses. No scraps either. You completely cleaned. A lot of times, there's a lot of grazers. There there there's several different ways that people think about grazing. One is the notion of you graze until half of the plant has been eaten, and then half of the plant is left on the ground, and then you move the cattle. And this is rotational grazing. Okay.
John Kempf is he has a podcast called the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. He is also the, the founder of I think it's it's called AEA Agroeco agroeconomic solution, something like I can't remember exactly what the name of it is right now. But Jon Kempf, k e m p f, if you and this guy, I love this dude. He calls that complete bullshit. He literally calls complete bullshit on the great leave half or take half, leave half for various reasons. One of the other grazing patterns for rotational grazing that I've heard is you take a third, you trample a third, and you leave a third.
And then you make sure that your cattle are off of that and you don't you don't see it again for some set of time, which has lots of factors behind as to how much time you leave, you know, that that you that you, let the the pasture rest before you bring the cattle back. Neither one of these systems looks like what happened in the Great Plains. When the bison would come through, they would mow everything to the ground. Almost every conventional grazer that I've ever talked to is kinda like they would kinda like go, well, we can't do that. We'll destroy it. It'll be that's an overgrowth situation that will destroy our pastures.
They don't want they're not going to want to do that. Consequently, according to John Kemp, and like a whole bunch of other people that I've read that are in, like, sort of, I guess, you could call it the progressive, and I hate using that word, but the progressive, style of of rotational graze management, would say without doing that, without grazing these plants all the way to the ground, you're going to end up with a shitty pasture anyway. And indeed, there's lots of examples of grazers who have said ask themselves the question, we've been doing take half and leave half for twenty years. Our soil carbon content isn't getting any better. And why do you want soil carbon? Because the more carb for every 1% of carbon you have in your soil, you hold 17,000 gallons of water. It may be more than that. I think let's just say let's say 25,000 gallons of water per acre you hold in the soil chemically.
It doesn't evaporate for every 1%. So if I have two percent carbon and I get millions of gallons falling on one acre, I'll be able to hold 50,000 of that. Three, I'm gonna get to be able to hold 75,000 gallons of water per acre for for that 3% carbon. Right. That's why carbon in the soil is so is is so critical. When you graze something to the ground, 25% of the root mass of grass plants die off. And what this does is not only does it put carbon into the soil, it allows forbes to grow. And why is that? Well, if you only take half and you leave half of the plant or, God forbid, to take one third, trample one third, and and leave one third, you don't really affect the roots of the of the grass plant, sloughing off into the soil.
And that has other implications other than how much carbon you're going to put in the soil. The other implication is is that grasses store their energy in their roots. And and all all all plants and shit do that. But grasses have a tendency to be able to spring back very, very quickly. Forbes, which are not grasses and not legumes, and many people consider them have called them weeds, but they're very they've got a lot of nutrition in them. You want Forbes and you want grass and you want legume, but you do want forbs. If you allow the grasses to use all of their root energy, they will spring up much, much faster than the forbs.
And over a period of time, you will end up with less legumes, less forbs, and more grass. And your nutrition on your grazed paddocks will be changing to just carbohydrate. You and and and you'll get some minerals and stuff, but not like what Forbes can bring up because their roots go down a lot a lot deeper. If you graze the grass to the ground, not only do you allow a lot of carbon to be imparted into the soil through the roots sloughing off, but you also graze it so hard that it takes the grass a lot longer to come back. And that gives Forbes a lot more access over a period of time to access sunlight, minerals, waters, water so that they can have a chance to compete with the grass when they do come back. And they will come back as long as you don't do one of the other things, especially that I see in West Texas when grazing, is what's called set stocking, where you stock your paddock, like like, I've seen people just they just put, like, a 100 cows on one section of land, and they just leave them there. They don't rotate them through.
They just let them wander. As long as there's a fence or or some other way that that the the rancher knows that those cattle are gonna stay put, they don't they don't run them around the field to make sure they access everything. What that does is that allows the cattle to only select and eat what they want to eat, which means that those particular items never get to go to seed, and the things that they don't like get to go to seed. So what you end up with is a pasture where the cattle are basically engulfed in shit they don't wanna eat. And that's why rotational grazing is so critical.
You've got to figure out a way to have enough animals on enough acreage that they essentially graze everything to the ground whether they like it or not. Because if they if they're sitting there going, I don't know, man. I don't really wanna I don't really wanna eat that. Yeah. Well and then here comes the cow right in front of him and eats it. Because that cow's smart and says, I need calories. I don't care what it tastes like. And then all of a sudden, all the rest of the cows are like, maybe we should just eat what's here. And as you move them through and you let them eat everything to the ground, they don't get to select, and everything gets eaten. So everything has a chance. And especially if you get it down to the ground, the forbs will be able to compete with the grasses, the legumes will be able to compete with the grasses, and everything is in check. And you get carbon in the soil, and year after year, you hold more water.
That's one of the reasons why the soils in West Texas are so dry. Everything is either not being grazed at all because of confined animal feeding operations or set stocking. But either way, we're the the Great Plains that are not being farmed in coin or soybean or whatever. The parts of the Great Plains that are being used for what people call ranching is just becoming drier and drier and drier. And without that moisture, you don't get earthworms. You don't get dung beetles. And without that, the cowpats that are on top of the ground are not helping. They're actually hurting because they dry out. They don't get broken up.
And because they don't get broken up, everything underneath it dies because it's dry, and it will dry out, and it will end up being like a little little cement pad. And there's nothing that there's no earthworms to to tunnel through it and break it apart. There's no dung beetles to dig a hole and and and ball up some of this manure and take it down into the ground, and we'll get into to more of that activity later on in probably a different episode. But just understand that in the conditions, especially, like, if I'm just looking at the at West Texas as an example, it's not exactly the greatest thing in the world to have all this this cow dung directly on the soil when it's not going to be able to be broken down, which gets me back to my original point.
The leader follower grazing method. Two different kinds of animals. So cattle rotation. You move them daily, And we'll we'll get into that here later in this episode. But from every single day, they've gotta be taken off of the roughly, like, acre and a half. Let's say let's just call it you give them you fence them in with an electric fence or will your or or some electronic GPS e collar thing in either event you you essentially describe an acre and a half and you put all of your ruminants on that acre and a half. Let's say you do that at 06:30 in the morning. You've moved the cattle. They're on their new paddock at 06:30 in the morning. You go do all your other stuff. You go to sleep. By the time you wake up, you better have your happy ass up and you better get down to where the animals are and you've got to move them from the paddock that they're on to the brand new paddock.
That's that is the essence of rotational grazing. And they depending on what kind of soils you have, depending on your moisture content, depending on USDA zones, depending on rainfall, depending on all manner of things, you in general, people will say there should not be another grazing animal on that same piece of land for at least one year. Now that is that is debatable. Very debatable. Again, because of climate, because of rainfall, because of what kinds of plants are in your pasture to begin with. How are you managing it? Over time, if you're managing it correctly, you should be able to put more animals on the same amount of land because your forage is going up in mass and nutrition.
But, again, we'll get to that. But, essentially, it's making sure that animals are in a confined space and that there's enough animals to eat all the grass, forbs, and legumes right to the ground. And by the time you get to them, they're saying, I we need more food. And you say, I'm happy to oblige their little cow and move little cow off into their brand new paddock where they go, oh, ho. Holy smokes. That's a whole new smorgasbord. And then you don't let them back into that paddock. And, again, debatable for at least one year. But there is something else that I can do with that same piece of land.
I can put chickens on it, Especially when especially when the system is kind of first starting out, you're gonna need that because you're probably especially if we start out with a blown out hayfield or a a really mismanaged, plot of soil that was used for conventional farming of any kind, corn, maize, soybean, cotton, whatever. Right? It's probably gonna it's probably a a chemical waste dump at that point, and there's not gonna be a whole lot of life in the soil. Not gonna be earthworms, not gonna be dung beetles. So you're going to have to have a way to break up all those cowpats, and you can do that with chickens.
Now this is this is one of the things that I I I love about not just this system, but the the leader follower grazing system to begin with is I've got let's say let's say I'm able to put, I don't know, 100 cows on one acre for one day because I've got that much grace. No. No. No. People are gonna go, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The like, in when I mean a 100 animals on one acre, I mean for twenty four hours. I don't mean all year long. That no. That no. We won't even get into that shit. That's just dumb. But a 100 a a 100 animals on one acre on one day, if you don't have enough grays, you're going to screw up that piece of land. So all of this has to be in balance depending on how much grays there is. And, again, we're not gonna get into that right now. But let's say I got enough graze to support a 100 animals for one day.
That's a lot of poop. That's a lot of urine, and it's all hit the ground. If I'm in a very dry environment, I could really screw that paddock up. If those pats dry out too fast and we already have determined there's not enough microbiology in the soil, not enough earthworms, no dung beetles, then they're gonna dry out and they're going to basically smother grasses, forbs, and legumes altogether. It's not gonna be pretty. But if I drag chickens right behind them and put a whole bunch of chickens right on that same paddock, chickens will scratch and completely tear apart every single cow pat that's on that property or or in that paddock.
The reason they do that is they're looking for all kinds of stuff. They're looking for anything that maybe the cow didn't digest, that they might be able to eat. And chickens, they will eat they will eat stuff out of out of dung and manure. And I know it's it's gross because most people don't think about it, but that's that's a chicken. You gotta let the chicken do the job that the chicken does. Because all these animals have a job, a specific job. Cows are mowers. Chickens are scratchers. So now think about think about how much poop will be on an acre of ground, which is about the size of a football field for those you know, in The United States, a United States American football football field, not not soccer. Right? That's that's a lot bigger than one acre.
That's a lot of poop. Right? So let's say I drag 1,500 chickens into that same paddock, And their their whole nature is to scratch the ground because they're looking for worms. They're looking for any kind of insect that they can get. They scratch. They're gonna scratch the manure, and they're going to basically be pulling it all apart. But here's the caveat. I don't want to do it like if like if you're thinking, okay, so so he's coming in, he's moving the cows and then goes and gets the chickens and moves them right behind the cows. No. I wait because I'm patient.
Right? In fact, I'm going to wait exactly three days. Why? Why? Why not do it now? I I mean, shit, you're right there. The the the the chickens are right there. Why not move them right behind the cattle? Ah, because I can get extra protein and extra fat if I wait three days. Extra protein and extra fat for the chickens to eat. I can grow chicken feet. And you might ask how? Flies. One always remember, as we go through the cathedral system, one system's waste is another system's input, and the waste from that system is another system's input, and the waste from that system is another system's input.
So I got cows. They poop all over an acre. I move them off. I've got poop on an acre. What likes poop? Flies. Why? Because there's still nutrition and warmth and moisture, especially moisture in those cowpats. It's a great growing environment for their eggs to turn into fly larvae or, as you know it, maggots. It so happens that, generally speaking, across The United States and in lots of temperate regions in the world, flies, field flies, which are basically just flies, have a three day life cycle. So the the the animals are on the paddock, and flies are buzzing around them, and they're laying eggs as they poop.
And they're especially laying more eggs after those animals are off of that paddock because their tails aren't swishing around and the flies are anyway, now the flies really get on there. Right? They really start digging in there and laying their eggs, thousands, hundreds of thousands of eggs, and then they essentially go away. Where are they going? They're going to the cows because they just they're they they hang around cows. We're gonna get to why all this matters here in a second because it's more than just nutrition for the chickens. So in three days, those maggots have eaten what they're gonna eat, and it's about time for them to emerge as more adult flies.
And those are bothersome. They they they cause cattle and other animals and humans problems, right, if they're not kept in check. And that's why if you don't have these kinds of controls or thinking about it in this way, you can end up with cattle that have so many flies that they end up with something called fly strike. And I've seen some really bad cases of fly strike. In fact, in a lot in some cases, it's so bad that it can kill the animal. Right? You don't want that. You don't want losses on your cattle. It's hard enough as it is.
So what happens here is now you're breaking the fly cycle. So you if you can be patient and you wait three days and you move the chickens from where they were to the paddock where the cows were three days ago, when they start ripping through that cow dung, they're gonna rip and they're gonna find maggots. And one of the favorite things for 1,500 chickens, if not a lot more to eat, is maggots. Why? Lots of protein, but a lot of fat. And they're going to literally chew through every single maggot in those cowpats, which means they are never gonna be able to merge as an adult fly.
Maybe a couple will escape enough to cause, you know, for us to have breeding stock for the next cycle, but not enough flies to cause something like widespread fly strike on a hundred, two hundred, 300, 500 head of cattle. We're using the chicken to do two things all at once. Actually, we're using the chickens to do three things all at once. One, to break apart all the cowpats so that there's they essentially mix it into the very top half inch of soil. So now all the nutrition is in soil contact and all the grass plants are going to be able and and forbes and legumes will be able to access sunlight. So as they start growing again, they won't be shaded out. They won't be smothered because all of this is broken up. Two, I get fat chickens for free. Well, okay. I'm gonna have to supplement their feed with something, but they're going to end up with that nutrition inside of them, and it's gonna go to either egg production or meat production, whichever way you want it done, whatever it is that you're trying to do. Maybe you're doing both. Who knows? We'll get to it all.
But three, I have integrated pest management. IPM is another way to term it. It's integrated pest management. The flies, their their life cycle is completely shut down. Well, again, maybe a few escape, but not not enough to cause problems. The majority of those flies are eaten before they ever emerge as an adult fly that can cause problems. So I get I get three for one. I get I get free food. I get I get slight soil tillage surfaces and the incorporation of manure. I I I get I also get the fact that I'm not gonna have smothered plants in the pasture. I I I get integrated pest management. Man, I'm getting it all. And guess what?
I don't not only do I not have to pay the chickens to do it because they're more than happy to do it by themselves, I get to sell them later. It's, like, it's amazing. It's it's an amazing thing. Right? So what's what's the result of all this this what's the result of this impact? Well, the root period the rest periods on the plants allow, as I said, roots to get deeper. We get soil carbon building. We get plant diversity increase from not only the seed bank that's already in the soil, because as the chicken scratch and as the hooves of the cattle start pounding that soil, it starts it shifts what is available to to access moisture, sunlight, pressure, any of the other triggers of the seeds that already exist in the soil and there are thousands per square inch.
And then all of a sudden native grasses, native forbs, native legumes that haven't been seen on pastures start to come back. And we've seen that time and time and time and time again. There's reports of you you can go to, like, Will Will Harris in Georgia and the White Oak Pastures Farm. He talks about this. He's like, we're seeing we're seeing forbs and grasses and legumes that we thought were extinct, that the USDA thought were extinct, but yet here they are. And it's because of the animal impact. And then you got the chickens who are mixing the grass seed with the soil and fresh manure and urine, even if it's dried at that point, and they're mixing it all together. And then all of a sudden, they're pooping all over the ground with very high nitrogen poop.
I'm getting free fertilizer. That's like, what, number five that I'm getting out of out of chickens is their poop. So all of a sudden, what's left after we move the chickens off is a paddock that is completely tilled inched from from square inch to square inch, from end to end, from top to bottom. It's been tilled lightly, maneuvered, urine upon. The flies are gone. And that you've now basically got a seed bed of all the ancient seeds that are there. Plus, you've got the roots of all the plants that were already growing there. You've got everything mowed to the ground, so everything has equal access to air and sunlight. And when it rains, to water, and you've increased the soil carbon content.
This system makes pasture better and better year over year over year. More grasses grow. Roots are deeper. Water infiltration gets better. And you keep moving this system. When you move the cows, you make sure that the chickens move to where the cows were three days later, and you move them again and you move them again. So when you like, the next day you come out, you move the cows, you move the chickens you move the cows up one, you move the chickens up one. And as long as the chickens are three paddocks away from or two paddocks away from the cows, you can be assured that where the chickens are now is exactly where the cows were three days before.
And you just move them both, day after day after day. So now we talk about cathedral. We start talking about movement inside a static system. And this is where I want to introduce something called sacred geometry. Oh, you're gonna go woo woo on us. What are you what are you gonna, like, get a voodoo doll out here next and start stabbing pins into it? You gonna say some shamanistic prayers on us? You gonna you gonna pull down the mysticism of the ages? No. Not really. Sacred geometry is kinda interesting. And, no, it's not a religion. And, no, it does not represent devil worship. It's not that at all.
It's like when it's like when in the seventies, all of us were all of us kids were really, really excited to go see KISS because KISS was coming to town. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Ace Fraley and whatever. I can't remember the other guy's name. I do we do it? KISS, the band, and this is the hairband, the original glam band in the seventies. Well, the town I grew up with, they there are a lot of fundamentalists there, and they had so many Christian fundamentalists that they said that KISS was evil, and they were devil worshipers, and they were teaching kids through their music how to worship the devil.
It was all bullshit. But I didn't get to go see KISS because they canceled the concert because of it. So please please please do not be the psychotic parent that's like oh my god sacred geometry you open up opening a portal to hell no we're not opening a portal to hell this is just ancient wisdom. This is just ancient symbology that represents stuff to the human species as we have moved through the human history. So happens. Cathedral is built on the basis of a square. The square in sacred geometry is one of the most fundamental and one of the most symbolic shapes that there is. It represents stability and structure.
It's got four equal sides. It's got four right angles, and it creates a sense of, you know, order and and permanence and represents balance. It also represents something called the earth element. You know? I mean, it's like like I said, sacred geometry is not something about opening a portal to hell to let demons come through, like, I don't know, like, some kind of weird sci fi movie about, what, event horizon. It's not that. It's just not. The earth element in sacred geometry and many traditions, different traditions that had no contact with each other, all saw the square as something that connects to the physical, the grounded, the material world, soil, stone, you know, things like that. Plus, human built environments like cathedral, that's going to actually end up being human built.
It represents containment, but it also represents foundation. It's a boundary, the square is, and it defines a space. It frames an activity. An activity is a very important concept here. We'll get to it here in a second. It creates a platform for us to build on. These these are things that that I've when I was researching this, I started going, holy shit. Because when I was thinking about cathedral, I was not ever thinking about sacred geometry until last week. I mean, I've thought about it before. Danny Carey is the drummer for tool. He's big into sacred geometry.
His drum set is set up in a sacred geometric pattern. I don't know what it is. You'd have to ask Danny Carey because I just see a drum set, but whatever. One of his own bandmates made a made a joke about his sacred geometry drum set and said every once in a while when they were playing live that they weren't were worried whether or not he was going to open up a portal to hell and demons were gonna come and eat all their fans. And, of course, he was joking because people always have the wrong idea about things just like they had the wrong idea about the band, Kiss. They were just dressed up like demons and star men and and and cats. I mean, it was like it was and they made a million dollars out of it. It was brilliant. Hey.
They laughed all the way to the bank on that shit, but getting back to this so we've got a square. It defines I I've explained it many times in these in this series. Cathedral is based on a square. It doesn't mean it always has to be a square, but it, generally speaking, is going to have a very rectangular aspect to it. Well, I've described activity inside that square, The rotational grazing rotation the rotational grazing activity activity. We're talking about something occurring over time. Rotation should put you into our next symbol of sacred geometry, and that's the circle.
And the circle, again, in many different traditions, is usually considered the most fundamental and universal form. It represents infinity. It represents eternity. It represents completeness. Symbolically, it often stands for the one. Now you could say the one being God or the one in mathematics is like there's only zero and one in mathematics. I'm sorry, but really everything else is just a decimal point that exists somewhere between the number zero and one. You know, like, oh, well, what are all prime numbers? Take whatever prime number you want and and take the and and add a decimal point right in front of that prime number. It's still a prime number, and it exists between zero and one. So it could be the universe being the whole. It could be God being the whole. It it depends. I'm not gonna get you into a situation where you've gotta pick one. Whatever one you want, you make the decision. But the circle represents a whole.
Right? In agriculture and even cosmological context, circles remind us that everything moves in repeating patterns. Now, cathedrals functions, which is animal movement, seasonal cycles, harvesting patterns, they trace out repeating sinusoidal rhythms. So what are we doing? And what what do I mean by sinusoidal? Let me let me let me back up because I wanna make sure everybody understands this. A sine wave, as you hear my voice, it is a mixture of harmonic sinusoidal waves. There's a like, the the amplitude goes up and then it crests and then it comes back down and it goes to a trough and it comes back up. And it's like, that's a sine wave. And if you still don't know what a sine wave looks like, just type in s I n e wave on whatever browser you want and you'll you'll find a picture of a sine wave.
It so happens that if I were to take a circle and I was rotating that circle and I attached a pin to the very edge, doesn't matter which edge of that circle, but like at the very edge of that circle, and I drag a piece of paper underneath that pen as that circle's moving, you know what it traces out? A sine wave. The circle represents that movement. Even if you just see a circle and it's just static, inside that, it represents movement. We've got movement inside of cathedral, which means what? We've got a circle inside of a square. And historically, this ends up having deep roots.
Mandulas, temples, cathedral floor patterns, cathedral. You know, we often use a square to define sacred sacred ground. And the union of heaven and earth is represented very clearly in several context, in several different traditions with a circle embedded firmly inside the square. Not a square inside the circle, that's different, but a circle inside the square. It is the union of heaven and earth. It it unionizes time and space. It unionizes diam dynamic flow and stable boundaries. That's an important aspect to all this. Because, again, when I started thinking about cathedral as a system, I was never actually building it off of sacred geometry.
But it so happens, which I don't think is really when we pull it apart, I don't think is surprising. As a human being, I've come up with a system because I've read about all these other systems of embedding a circle inside of a square. These other people have embedded sir like, the the other silvopastures that are, you know, that are not doing what this particular system does is still a circle inside of a square. We're just doing what humans do. Chickens do what chickens do. Cows do what cows do. It doesn't mean that I'm saying that we're just as important as a cow or that a cow is just as important as as a human, but I am saying that as part of this particular existence, we continuously end up looking at things like sacred geometry without realizing we're actually looking at something like a circle inside of a square. It just happens. It's natural. It's like learning how to walk or learning how to eat.
We just do it. And it's happened again right here. And I thought that it was important to bring that up. But now I wanna get back down to actual soil and earth and start talking about the fact that those cows are probably going to need a whole hell of a lot more food than just what I can put grazing, especially in the first few years. We've talked about the honey locust trees. We've talked about the black locust trees. We talked about that them being fodder for animals in the grazing lanes during last episode, which was cathedral part two. Let's let's get into that a lot more.
Okay? Let's talk about the black locust tree and the pollarding. Okay. Let hold on. A little bit of an aside. I am getting pushback for the for my selection of locust trees. Thornless honey locust tree and the black locust tree. I'm getting a lot of pushback because there's a lot of people that are like, oh my god. It's so invasive. It's a management issue. It's not a it's we're not going to set stock black locust trees and thornless honey honey locust trees. Remember when I was talking about set stocking where you just like you got a section of land, you put a 100 cattle on it, you just let them do whatever they want? No. That's not management.
You have to manage these trees. Otherwise, they will probably get away from you. And I do not think that the labor involved because animals perform certain functions, I do not believe that this would all be nothing but 100% human endeavor to make sure that the invasiveness of at least a black locust tree is kept in check, and it needs to be kept in check. But I also want to admit that there's probably different species that can function the same way for different purposes in different climates. I just wanna be able to start talking about what these trees can do for you without people going all the way to in a hundred years, you're gonna have nothing but black locust trees.
No. That's not true. But you're not seeing what I'm trying to say if that's your if that's your first if that's the first place you go, then you're not saying, okay. Look. I see a problem with this. Because of my experience in my particular climate, it could go this way, but let's see what he's trying to say first, and maybe I can come up with a solution that fixes it for my climate. Because, honestly, I've got a lot of experience with black locust trees. They are not as invasive as people make them out to be, but then again, I was in USDA zone six b with not a lot of rainfall, a whole shit ton of sun, and very, very, very, very hot. I was in Lubbock, Texas, and then I was in Canyon, Texas, and I've never had that much of an issue with black locust trees being that invasive.
Not like some other trees that I've seen. That caveat said, let's talk about pollarding the black locust for tree fodder for animals, specifically, the cattle that are going to be in the field. In one study, black locust trees over three meters produced four kilograms of dry matter per tree in the eighth year after planting. So let's just talk about an eight year old black locust tree. It's like nine feet tall. If I take the top off of that entire tree where most of the leaves come down with the branches that I saw off or something else saws off. And again, we'll we'll get into the science fiction aspect in a different episode. But let's say that I've got all the branches off and you don't just chop that chop the tree off at the neck when you pollard. You basically leave some some of the branches, parts of the branches coming out at the top, but you take most of the foliage and the foliage branches off of the tree. That's pollarding.
Right? If I were to shake all of the leaves off and separate the wood from the leaves, I'm looking at four kilograms dry. Holy shit. Four kilograms of black locust leaves. If I dry them down and I don't I don't really have to, but we'll get into it here in a sec. I don't really have to. But four kilograms per tree of an eight year old tree is a lot of matter, especially when we're considering 15,000 black locust trees on a thousand acres in the cathedral system. What does that turn out to be? Well, I've done the math. 60,000 kilograms per year of leaf fodder that represents between 2025% pure protein.
But I don't want to take the tops off of every single tree every single year. I only want to take one fifth. So one out of every five black locust trees, that's that's what I want. That's still 12,000 kilograms of 20 to 25% protein. That's a lot of protein, man. That's a lot of protein. Now the pollarding would occur in late spring and early summer to get the best leaf fodder, and it gives the pollarded trees time enough depending on where you are, especially in like something like Lubbock, Texas or Amarillo, Texas, or somewhere around USDA zone six and seven, somewhere around there. You're going to get enough time for those trees to start putting out new branches and new leaves so that they can continue to grow.
It won't it won't be a full spread, but it will definitely bounce back the next year. Right? Because you'll have enough sunlight, you'll have enough heat, you'll have enough of everything for those black locust trees to say, oh, shit, man. I lost all my leaves. Emergency situation. Put out new leaves. And that also might actually help the invasive nature because the tree is not going to expend a whole lot of energy into putting root suckers out, which is one of the ways ways black locust invades. It's going to say, I I can put leaves up, and it's going to direct that energy up, not out. So that's one management tool that helps the invasive nature of black locust. It doesn't mean that it's a perfect solution. It's not. It's just it's going to help, and you're not gonna kill that tree. It's really hard to kill a black locust tree, by the way. So you pollard in late spring and early summer for the leaf water.
We're rotating which trees are cut, and we do that because we only want to take one out of every five trees. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that after year five or year six or something like that, I want to coppice the black locust tree all the way down to the ground. And I want to harvest the trunk because it's straight, hard, has fungicide already in it because it's naturally produced by the plant. And I can make fence post out of it and I can either use them on-site or I can sell them as rot resistant wood fence posts. But that's that's another that's another issue. But 12,000 kilograms is a lot of fodder that I can put out into these fields. Let's talk about the honey locust pods.
Now we were talking about black locust, spring to early summer. Let's go way past the end of summer when we get the honeylocust pods dropping in November to January. In another study, between three and eight year old trees produce between twenty and seventy five kilograms of pods per tree every year. Now, there have been other studies that looked at mature trees, mature thornless honey locust trees. And they're talking about a 180 kilograms per tree dropping between November and January, which is at the last part of the year. That's when the grasses are starting to go again, depending on where you are, go dormant and stop producing.
You still got cattle. You still gotta feed them. You still gotta fatten them. Turns out, honey locust pods, well, honey locust pods got a lot of sugar and protein in it. But first, let's run through a couple of other numbers. In the cathedral plan, the support trees for the tree lanes are honey locust, thornless honey locust trees, and black locust trees. We've gone through how much protein we can get out of the black locust trees. Alright. Let's talk about the the how much fit the other 15,000 trees of the support trees because we're looking roughly at around 30,000 support trees. Half of them are black locust, the other half are honey locust. 15,000 honey locust trees.
If we were to go midway between the three and eight year old tree and say that the pod mass drop is between twenty and twenty and seventy five kilograms, let's just think of 50 kilograms per tree as an average. That's 750,000 kilograms per year from trees producing 50 kilograms per tree. 750,000 kilograms. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds, just so you know. So, like, double that number. 750,000, multiply it by 2.2, that's how many pounds. Divide that by 2,000, that's how many tons of sugary, protonacious pods that these things are dropping every year without having to kill the tree, without having to do anything. I don't I don't even have to shake the trees. The pods will just fall off. All we gotta do is rake them. And there's machines that do that, by the way.
So what happens if it's a 180 kilograms per tree like in in mature trees? 2,700,000 kilograms on 15,000 trees in a thousand acres of cathedral. 2,700,000 kilograms. Multiply that by 2.2, that's how many pounds. Divide that number by 2,000, that's how many United States tons. I'm I'm just saying. I just I've that's a lot, and it's mostly sugar. But let's let's look at that. I I've got this thing, from onpasture.com. It's a it's a website that's looking directly at honey locust pods as part of a complete livestock fodder. And it's not exactly complete. I wouldn't feed cattle directly only solely upon this, but but finishing them off, this is this this stuff is great. Check the check this shit out.
Honey locust pods are particularly high in sugar. Why is that? I mean, think about that. What are we feeding cattle in confined feeding animal operations? Corn. Generally, grain. That's, nothing but carbohydrate. What is carbohydrate? It's long chains of sugars. They're eating sugar. I mean, just because they're long chains of sugars, amylase alpha amylase and beta amylase in mammals are produced in saliva. It is specifically designed to take long chains of carbohydrate and bust them up into their individual sugars called glucose. These pods can be as high as 37.5% sugar.
But grain has a doesn't have that much well, I mean, grain that you're feeding cattle don't really have all that much protein in it. But the the protein content in the seeds of the honey locust pod can be as high as 12 to 13% pure protein, along with anywhere between 2037% sugar. The more protein you have, the less sugar you're gonna have. The less protein you have, the more sugar you're gonna have. But this this crop happens to be dropping right around the time that I need a lot of supplemental energy to get the cattle through what? Winter when it's freaking cold and they're burning through calories like nobody's business. And all of a sudden, here comes God saying, oh, look. Here's a honey locust pod. It's got 37% sugar. You can grow this, by the way.
You see where this is going? Let let's look at let's look at at a full panel of what's inside a honey locust pod. It's roughly half moisture, half dry. In this particular in this particular sample, it was 9.6% crude protein, 1.3% crude fat, 27.4% fiber. And then let's get into, let's get into where the oh, calcium. Half a percent of calcium. Point 15% phosphorus. 1.36% potassium. Negligible magnesium, but it's 0.07%. And then we get to the sugar component. And if you're as low as 9% protein, you're as high as 37.5% sugar. Digestible sugar.
In fact, in like, there's pictures of kids sucking on honey locust pods as treats because they were that sweet. And this is back in, like, the 1800 well, like, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. That would that they would eat them. Not not the seeds because they're hard as a rock, and that will bring that up here in a second. But the amount of sugar that was in them, the kids were not stupid. They wanted something sweet. They go pick up honey locust pods between November and January. This is one of these things where I keep looking at this going, why are we doing this? Why why what and and and, again, I see schools, like public schools.
One of their favorite trees to plant, at least in West Texas, is the thornless honey locust tree. And every year, there are massive, massive piles of the honey locust pods as they rake them up in late fall, early winter. Massive, massive piles. Many of the piles. Many piles. Many massive piles just gonna be thrown away. Gonna be thrown away. Hell, even hog farmers are smart enough to go to breweries and get their spent grains and feed them to their hogs. And yet nobody was coming to get the honey locust pods. And I lived in Lubbock, Texas and Canyon, Texas, which are basically farming communities.
Lubbock is a much bigger city of about 300,000 people. Canyon is about 15,000, but all have ag roots, and nobody was coming to take those honey locust pods away to feed to their cattle or their hogs or their goats or their chickens. It was going into a landfill. And it just it it makes me wonder how we're still fucking alive. I'm just I don't mean to use that language here because I I should have been better about that, but it it it gets me riled up. And I can't I can't help it because we have all this food. And we and and in in another show, in a different show, I will go through how much how exactly how much food does it take to get a calf to go all the way to where it needs to be slaughtered and have good weight on it that it makes sense to actually slaughter that animal? How much time is it gonna take?
You know, how much forage does it take? Are would we be producing enough protein on the grazing paddocks plus the taking the tops off of the black locust trees, plus after seventy five years, 2,700,000 kilograms of 37.5% sugar and 10% protein. Though those those are numbers that we actually have to look at, and I we can't do it here. We're seventy minutes into the show already. I'm actually not done. I'm actually not done. But seventy minutes, I think, is good enough for me to end here and take the part of my outline and do a second show that is going to still be talking about the rest of this grazing. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish this off right now.
I wanna finish this off talking about the labor flow. And we've already we've basically already touched on it. But I I I want I want to go through this a little like, you know, just a little bit deeper. Like, what does the day of the guy look like? You know? Or the the or or the gal, you know? You or you like your daughter or your son or whatever. If they if you're doing something like this, what does their day look like? Well, they better have have their happy ass up at about 05:30 in the morning. And and if they're gonna do that, somebody needs to be making some breakfast because they're gonna be burning some calories. And by the time they are done with breakfast, by 06:30, they are out with the animals getting ready to move them.
What does a move look like? Kinda depends. Do you have fence, like electric fencing that you're building these these portable paddocks out of for for the for the cows? Or are you using something called e collars, which are collars that you put around? Yes, a cow. It is a big old plastic thing and it's like it's got a solar panel on it so it can kind of recharge its batteries, you know, during the day in the sunlight. But what it does is it gives you the GPS position of that particular animal to within like a foot or two foot or something like that. And it respects a digital fence, which means that I can outline on a digital map, on an app, on my phone or on my PC.
I I'm describing the outlines of the paddock that I want these animals to be in. And I put those animal physic. I physically go and I locate locate that paddock through GPS coordinates because I can see where I am versus where I've put the digital fence. And I put the animals inside there and I activate the fence. There's no fence that the animals can see. They walk up to the edge, and by the time they're about 10 feet away from the edge of where I don't want them to go, the collar starts to annoy them by beeping or vibrating or something else. If they don't turn around, it just continues to beep.
If they get closer to the fence, it beeps even louder. And one of the things that you can always be sure about cattle and ruminants, they are prey animals. They do not like being annoyed, and they will do anything in their power to make that annoyance go away because sometimes that annoyance is a predator, and they don't wanna get eaten. So we're prey we're literally leveraging we're leveraging their evolution. It beeps and it beeps and it beeps until eventually they turn around. Yes. Some of these cattle have to be trained to do it. Yes. Bad things can happen. If they cross the line, that's an issue.
Let's not go there. That's a different discussion. Are you using the collaring system to move the cattle, or are you using fencing? That's going to change everything. Or well, it's gonna it's going to impact what the day looks like. So let's say we're using electric fencing with a solar powered, charging a battery and that battery charging the fence. And if you touch the fence, you're gonna get zapped. And cows don't like annoyance, so they stay away from the fence. This is the the older way of doing it. So you go in. You you find the animals. You know exactly where they are. You start building a fence right at in in their direction of travel. If they're going south to north, you get on the north side of those animals and you build another 1.5 acre enclosure with this fence.
After that's done, you connect that that fit that paddock, you connect it to the paddock before it where the animals actually are so that the north side of the existing paddock fence is the south side of the new fence, and you connect all the fencing together so everything is charged. Right? Then when you're satisfied that you've got good charge on the fence, you turn the fence off, you get into the paddock, and you remove part of the fence that is in between the paddocks, and you scoot the cattle into the new paddock. And they are mostly gonna go all by them loan their lonesome. Why?
Because they're standing in a bunch of their own poop and their own pee, and they got nothing else to eat. And all of a sudden, there's fresh grass. Don't worry. You're not going to have to put a leash on all of it. They're going to go by themselves. Once they're in the new paddock, you close the paddock. You charge the fence, and you're done. Well, you're not done yet. You're done with the cattle. They're in their new place. They're out of their old place. But you don't even break down that fence, you that that paddock. And there's a paddock before that to the south of that.
That's where they were the day before yesterday, and you haven't broken down that paddock. Then the paddock behind that is the chicken house with all the chickens. That's a different kind of paddock. When now when we go to move the chickens to where the cows were three days ago, we have to break down the fencing off of that paddock. Then we redo the fencing with something more appropriate for chickens, which would be called electro netting. It's still an electric fence, but it's different and it's it's specifically designed for poultry, like turkeys, chickens, shit like that. You you break down the old cattle paddock, then you moo you break well, you build the new paddock for the chickens.
You move like, and and then you you remove the fence in between the two pet the two chicken paddocks, and then you move the chicken house, you move the chickens, and then you close the fence, and then you break down the the southernmost end of the animal paddocks. You wrap it up. You're kind of done. Not really, but you're kind of done. So that's the way that you move the animals in general. It's it's like a two stage thing or a three stage thing. You build the new cattle paddock. You move the cattle. You don't strip down the old cattle paddock, you don't strip down the one the day before that one, and you don't strip out the day before that one. But you do build you'd well, you do strip out that last one, and then you turn that convert that into a chicken paddock, and then you move the chickens into the new paddock, and then you break down the old chicken paddock.
Should take about two hours. Should I mean, you know, clearly, things are good you know, depending on where you are, what kind of animals you're dealing with, what kind of experience you have, what how comfortable you are doing this. It could take more. Sure. It could take less. It could it might take an hour for somebody who really knows what the hell they're doing, but it should not take that long. And you've got two whole groups of animals moving in unison in a leader follower, great rotational grazing pattern inside a square, and the movement represents the circle, which takes us back to the whole sacred geometry thing.
There's more that I wanna add to the work that needs to be done when you move the animals. But this starts getting into the vagaries, not vagaries, but this starts getting into the more of the nuances of what we're doing. What else are we laying down? We're laying down biochar. We're laying down seeds if we want. We're laying down compost tea if we want, depending on what we're doing. There's there's other and and they don't all get put in the same place. Sometimes maybe they do some sometimes maybe they don't. But I just view the animal paddocks, the cattle leading and the in the poultry following as a movable island.
Because then we're gonna have to worry about where's the water coming from to water these animals? Where's the food gonna come from for the chickens? You know, are we really gonna rake up, like, all, like, by hand all the, a thousand acres of 15,000 thornless honey locust trees, all the pods? No. There's there's there's a lot more to Cathedral. You know? Are we are and and by the way, I'll just leave you with this one. If I feed a whole bunch of whole honey locust pods to cattle, I've said that they're that that those, pods represent 10% protein. You know how much protein the cattle's gonna get out of it?
Almost none. Because the protein's all in the seed. They'll get the sugar. They'll damn well get the sugar and the fiber, but they're not gonna get the protein because the protein is pretty much gonna pass right through their gut, which causes another problem. But I'm going to leave that for cathedral part four. So if you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting the Bitcoin and podcast so I can bring more stuff like this to you. We if you'll notice, we didn't talk at all about Bitcoin, and this is a Bitcoin podcast. That's why it's called Bitcoin and, because there's other things.
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It is 09:33AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025, and this is episode eleven fifty one of Bitcoin. And I'm really excited to bring you this one because this is part three of the Cathedral series. I'm going to try to do Cathedral episodes every Wednesday until I'm done. And God only knows how long that's gonna be because this is it just ends up being kind of an immense thing, and it's gonna take a lot of episodes to get through everything. And then it's probably gonna take a few episodes to get through the pushback that I will be getting on, especially on a couple of tree varieties that I've that I've, talked about on the cathedral series. But will I might say, I'm gonna end up saying a few things about that in today's show.
But today's show, we we've gone through the basic architecture of the whole layout, the the the thousand acres, the the the the square, the 23 tree lanes, and and the the pasture and or agricultural space that's in between the tree lanes. That was that was episode one. In episode two, we talked about the architecture of the tree lanes and the interior of the perimeter trees and the kind of species that we're talking about and what they can do and and the hedgerows and we so we've gone into all that. So now the the next thing to talk about is the grazing lanes and the context of the grazing lanes and the the integration of the grazing lanes, which again are where the livestock goes, and they're in between all of the tree lanes. And the tree lanes define a maze like pattern where the animals move through the cathedral architecture from one end to the other, all the way to the other end, taking right around one year.
Now, we're gonna talk about the grays today. But there's there's another thing that you can do with the pasture or the the lanes in between the trees. And that is agriculture, like row cropping, like you could grow wheat, or you could grow beans, or you could grow, God forbid, corn, you know, or or it it doesn't have to be set as grays. My personal my the way I personally look at it, I don't think there's anything better than you can do that you could do than to graze animals through this system continuously for all time. I I don't I'm not saying that agriculture or row cropping at any given time is necessary for this system to work.
However, your context may vary. You know, one person's grays may be just a waste of space for them. And I I don't want it to be where you should farm the way that I think you should farm. That's not what this is about. So the grazing lanes are a 150 foot wide. And they're and the entire structure, like, even when you're coming around the end of a tree lane to reverse direction for you're going, like, the animals are moving south to north, and they come around and they hang a left. Or if they're going from east to west, let's say, they hang a left at the north side where there's a gap between one of the tree lanes and the perimeter.
And that gap is also a 150 foot wide. Why a 150 foot? Combines. Specifically, the size header on a combine. So so what's a combine? If you're growing wheat or corn or beans or whatever, chances are really good to harvest the those critters, you're gonna be using a tractor, and that's going to be called a combine. And it's got a header on it. So what's the header? At the front of the combine is a great big steel and metal contraption that is about anywhere between and and they make them in all sizes, man. Like, I think there's a header. I think the smallest size is fifteen foot, and that's width. And then there's twenty and twenty five, and then there's there's 30 and there's 35. And it turns out the the most sold size header in The United States is 30 foot long or 30 foot wide, depending on on what way you're going. But what it does is it basically it's a mower.
It just it it literally mows down the crop and then separates stock and leaf and like corn cobs or stock and leaf and grain heads. And it sends the essentially, it's a contraption that is a sorter. It just cuts everything down. It intakes everything, and then it basically says this is chaff and this is grain or this is corn and it it's it's we won't get into how it works. Just understand that that's what happens. So that's what a combine is. And the standard size header in The United States is about 30 foot wide. So if I've got like, you know, if I got 30 feet wide of a header and I want to do row cropping instead of grazing inside these lanes, then I can get a 30 foot header, put it on a combine, and it would take five passes from end to end running around the lanes to be able to harvest all 150 foot of width throughout the length of the cathedral system.
That's why it's a 150 foot wide. Right? So I I do need to make mention here. I am not married to any of these numbers. What happens if somebody says, need a 100 200 foot? Okay. You're gonna have less tree lanes. Okay. We only want a 100 foot between the tree lanes. Well, you're gonna get quite a bit of shading as the day, you know, from morning to tonight or to evening because the trees are going to shade portions of the field. I'm looking at a 150 feet as a pretty good a pretty good average size as to sunlight striking those lanes versus the shade of the east trees in the morning and the shade of the west trees in the evening.
And I think a 150 feet actually works because you can get, well, roughly about 640 acres of grays or of cropping, whichever one you want to do. It's it's that's up to whoever takes any part of these ideas and decides, well, I don't like this other stuff, but I kinda like this idea and and and so we'll keep. So so if you are the person that wants to incorporate something like this or or, you know, wanna tell your friend about it and and they're trying to wrap their head around it, you could say, well, you don't have to graze. It's it's actually built to to do cropping as well. And I I think that that is a way to service as many potential people looking at this system as an answer to doing agriculture a different way that that is possible. And and I like I like the ability to have possibilities involved in almost everything that I think about. Because otherwise, it just ends up being, well, just too structured and and it's it's inflexible. And and with systems without flexibility are are just essentially you're designing to fail because at one point or another, it's going to need to be flexible. And if it's not flexible, it's going to bend and then it's going to break.
And I don't I don't like that system. So that that's why it's a 150 foot wide is simply to accommodate somebody who wants to alley crop. And then there's here's here's the other thing. You could do both. You could alley crop every other year. You could and then graze every other year. Except there ends up being a problem with, well, you have to completely reseed the pasture every time you wanna graze. And then you've got to make sure that you're not putting in you're not putting in grasses that grow so damn tall that it's gonna interfere with the cropping aspect. So you might wanna go to, well, we'll graze for five years, and every sixth year, we'll alley crop it because there's gonna be a lot of fertility.
You're gonna get a bumper crop out of that thing. So is it every two years? Is it every three years? Is it every four years that you decide to rotate out of grays and go into something like alley cropping? Again, just to reiterate, the the way that I look at the system, I would only do grays. I would have I would not really want to do any kind of cropping whatsoever because I'm more about production of using solar energy captured by the system to produce meat and animal proteins and animal fat than anything else. So I wanna touch back on this 640 acres. Where does that come from?
K. You got a thousand acres total. And when you have if you if you do the the lane sizes the way that I'm talking about, the length of which I'm talking about, you end up with with 23 tree lanes. And if you subtract from a thousand acres, the acreage of all the trees, including the perimeter, the roads, the tree lanes, the hedgerows, if you subtract all of that out, you're gonna end up with roughly around 640 acres, which is exactly one section of land on an acre. 640 acres is one section of land, which is about one mile by one mile wide. That's pretty much exactly what a section of land is, And it gives you six forty acres.
So that's what we have to work with on grazing, which is what I'm going to talk about today. We're not going to talk about alley cropping. That may actually end up being a completely different episode. But for grays and 640 acres, we're not gonna exactly end up with 640 acres. We're gonna end up with slightly less than that because we're gonna need to sacrifice some acreage for machines, not mobile machines, but like drying silos, conveyor belts. There's a whole set of mechanical infrastructure that goes into this whole thing, and that could, in fact, include a state inspected meat production facility, like an abattoir where you kill animals, you you skin them, you get the hide off of them, you eviscerate them, You hang them. You let them cool down. If you do it properly, you get excellent meat out of the whole deal, and then you've got to cut the meat into steaks for either boxing or packaging, however it is. And, again, that ends up being a completely different episode.
But there will be sacrificial land for a couple of buildings, some silos, other things that go into this system. So it's not going to be exactly 640 acres. I'm gonna say it's probably gonna be more like 620 because that gives you 20 acres to do composting, to do all the rest of the stuff that I'm going to be suggesting as this series develops. So let's say it's right around six hundred and twenty acres. Again, it's this maze like continuous flow of grays. So you enter the animals in from, like, let's say, the and it doesn't have to be the east side. Could be the west side if you wanna go the different direction. It doesn't really matter.
But whatever side you choose to insert the animals into, that's where they start the maze. And they go, like, I don't know, like, from south to north, and then they go west, and then they go back down to the south, and then they go west, and they go back up, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah until they exit the system in about a year. So that that's the primary grazing cycle it in as an overview. Let's let's look at this in a little bit more detail. I have spoken about this grazing part of the system as a what's called a leader follower. Greys system, which is standard fare. It's it's not something that I came up with, but it's something that I think about.
All the time. Because one of the things that I see a lot is that you'll get like you'll get ranchers, small ranches, especially in West Texas, that have nothing but cattle on them and nothing else. And I've been on some of these pasture fields where I've seen cow pads that which are their their manure, which have been dried to a crisp, are still completely whole and have no grass sticking out through them whatsoever. It ends up killing the grass right where it's at. Now, this is the reason for that is a couple of things. One is There's no there's no macro insect life or, you know, worms or dung beetles in the soil that can take care of these cow pies as they drop.
Now that in in a lot of times in West Texas where there's never been farmed, it's it's it's only been grazed, that the there's so there's not any pesticide or herbicide usage, not not at scale. So what's what's wrong with the soil? Why is why is there no earthworms? Well, it's dry and there's not a whole lot of organic matter left. And that that goes back to the history of grazing the Great Plains. And I really am right now in my mind, I'm really looking at the system as centering into the Great Plains. It doesn't mean that it doesn't work elsewhere. I'm just saying for for purposes of these earlier discussions of cathedral, let's look at it from the standpoint of the Great Plains.
And in the panhandle of West Texas, especially, it is dry as a bone, and there's not a whole lot of carbon left in the soil to soak up and hold on to the water when it does rain. Why? Because we don't graze this shit properly. You know, back in the day, it thousand hundreds of thousands of bison and and elk and all kinds of shit out there grazing this grass to the ground. In fact, there were stories about people when they had when they were starting to explore, and I think it was Lewis and Clark was one of the expeditions that had was one of the first people to make note about this as they were leaving. I guess they probably left from they staged in Saint Louis, and then they kinda, like, went out, went off over the plains from there to end up discovering the Northwest Passage up through Washington state. And one of the things that they noted was that the if you got behind one of these herds of bison and you did not have feed that you were hauling for your horses, your horses were going to starve and you were probably going to end up dying because your transportation is gone. There's no nothing to pull the wagons. There's nothing that you can you're just gonna be walking.
Why? Because if you got behind one of these herds, there was nothing left. Nothing. Nothing. I mean, every forb, every legume, every grass plant was mowed to the ground, and there was nothing left for horses. No scraps either. You completely cleaned. A lot of times, there's a lot of grazers. There there there's several different ways that people think about grazing. One is the notion of you graze until half of the plant has been eaten, and then half of the plant is left on the ground, and then you move the cattle. And this is rotational grazing. Okay.
John Kempf is he has a podcast called the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. He is also the, the founder of I think it's it's called AEA Agroeco agroeconomic solution, something like I can't remember exactly what the name of it is right now. But Jon Kempf, k e m p f, if you and this guy, I love this dude. He calls that complete bullshit. He literally calls complete bullshit on the great leave half or take half, leave half for various reasons. One of the other grazing patterns for rotational grazing that I've heard is you take a third, you trample a third, and you leave a third.
And then you make sure that your cattle are off of that and you don't you don't see it again for some set of time, which has lots of factors behind as to how much time you leave, you know, that that you that you, let the the pasture rest before you bring the cattle back. Neither one of these systems looks like what happened in the Great Plains. When the bison would come through, they would mow everything to the ground. Almost every conventional grazer that I've ever talked to is kinda like they would kinda like go, well, we can't do that. We'll destroy it. It'll be that's an overgrowth situation that will destroy our pastures.
They don't want they're not going to want to do that. Consequently, according to John Kemp, and like a whole bunch of other people that I've read that are in, like, sort of, I guess, you could call it the progressive, and I hate using that word, but the progressive, style of of rotational graze management, would say without doing that, without grazing these plants all the way to the ground, you're going to end up with a shitty pasture anyway. And indeed, there's lots of examples of grazers who have said ask themselves the question, we've been doing take half and leave half for twenty years. Our soil carbon content isn't getting any better. And why do you want soil carbon? Because the more carb for every 1% of carbon you have in your soil, you hold 17,000 gallons of water. It may be more than that. I think let's just say let's say 25,000 gallons of water per acre you hold in the soil chemically.
It doesn't evaporate for every 1%. So if I have two percent carbon and I get millions of gallons falling on one acre, I'll be able to hold 50,000 of that. Three, I'm gonna get to be able to hold 75,000 gallons of water per acre for for that 3% carbon. Right. That's why carbon in the soil is so is is so critical. When you graze something to the ground, 25% of the root mass of grass plants die off. And what this does is not only does it put carbon into the soil, it allows forbes to grow. And why is that? Well, if you only take half and you leave half of the plant or, God forbid, to take one third, trample one third, and and leave one third, you don't really affect the roots of the of the grass plant, sloughing off into the soil.
And that has other implications other than how much carbon you're going to put in the soil. The other implication is is that grasses store their energy in their roots. And and all all all plants and shit do that. But grasses have a tendency to be able to spring back very, very quickly. Forbes, which are not grasses and not legumes, and many people consider them have called them weeds, but they're very they've got a lot of nutrition in them. You want Forbes and you want grass and you want legume, but you do want forbs. If you allow the grasses to use all of their root energy, they will spring up much, much faster than the forbs.
And over a period of time, you will end up with less legumes, less forbs, and more grass. And your nutrition on your grazed paddocks will be changing to just carbohydrate. You and and and you'll get some minerals and stuff, but not like what Forbes can bring up because their roots go down a lot a lot deeper. If you graze the grass to the ground, not only do you allow a lot of carbon to be imparted into the soil through the roots sloughing off, but you also graze it so hard that it takes the grass a lot longer to come back. And that gives Forbes a lot more access over a period of time to access sunlight, minerals, waters, water so that they can have a chance to compete with the grass when they do come back. And they will come back as long as you don't do one of the other things, especially that I see in West Texas when grazing, is what's called set stocking, where you stock your paddock, like like, I've seen people just they just put, like, a 100 cows on one section of land, and they just leave them there. They don't rotate them through.
They just let them wander. As long as there's a fence or or some other way that that the the rancher knows that those cattle are gonna stay put, they don't they don't run them around the field to make sure they access everything. What that does is that allows the cattle to only select and eat what they want to eat, which means that those particular items never get to go to seed, and the things that they don't like get to go to seed. So what you end up with is a pasture where the cattle are basically engulfed in shit they don't wanna eat. And that's why rotational grazing is so critical.
You've got to figure out a way to have enough animals on enough acreage that they essentially graze everything to the ground whether they like it or not. Because if they if they're sitting there going, I don't know, man. I don't really wanna I don't really wanna eat that. Yeah. Well and then here comes the cow right in front of him and eats it. Because that cow's smart and says, I need calories. I don't care what it tastes like. And then all of a sudden, all the rest of the cows are like, maybe we should just eat what's here. And as you move them through and you let them eat everything to the ground, they don't get to select, and everything gets eaten. So everything has a chance. And especially if you get it down to the ground, the forbs will be able to compete with the grasses, the legumes will be able to compete with the grasses, and everything is in check. And you get carbon in the soil, and year after year, you hold more water.
That's one of the reasons why the soils in West Texas are so dry. Everything is either not being grazed at all because of confined animal feeding operations or set stocking. But either way, we're the the Great Plains that are not being farmed in coin or soybean or whatever. The parts of the Great Plains that are being used for what people call ranching is just becoming drier and drier and drier. And without that moisture, you don't get earthworms. You don't get dung beetles. And without that, the cowpats that are on top of the ground are not helping. They're actually hurting because they dry out. They don't get broken up.
And because they don't get broken up, everything underneath it dies because it's dry, and it will dry out, and it will end up being like a little little cement pad. And there's nothing that there's no earthworms to to tunnel through it and break it apart. There's no dung beetles to dig a hole and and and ball up some of this manure and take it down into the ground, and we'll get into to more of that activity later on in probably a different episode. But just understand that in the conditions, especially, like, if I'm just looking at the at West Texas as an example, it's not exactly the greatest thing in the world to have all this this cow dung directly on the soil when it's not going to be able to be broken down, which gets me back to my original point.
The leader follower grazing method. Two different kinds of animals. So cattle rotation. You move them daily, And we'll we'll get into that here later in this episode. But from every single day, they've gotta be taken off of the roughly, like, acre and a half. Let's say let's just call it you give them you fence them in with an electric fence or will your or or some electronic GPS e collar thing in either event you you essentially describe an acre and a half and you put all of your ruminants on that acre and a half. Let's say you do that at 06:30 in the morning. You've moved the cattle. They're on their new paddock at 06:30 in the morning. You go do all your other stuff. You go to sleep. By the time you wake up, you better have your happy ass up and you better get down to where the animals are and you've got to move them from the paddock that they're on to the brand new paddock.
That's that is the essence of rotational grazing. And they depending on what kind of soils you have, depending on your moisture content, depending on USDA zones, depending on rainfall, depending on all manner of things, you in general, people will say there should not be another grazing animal on that same piece of land for at least one year. Now that is that is debatable. Very debatable. Again, because of climate, because of rainfall, because of what kinds of plants are in your pasture to begin with. How are you managing it? Over time, if you're managing it correctly, you should be able to put more animals on the same amount of land because your forage is going up in mass and nutrition.
But, again, we'll get to that. But, essentially, it's making sure that animals are in a confined space and that there's enough animals to eat all the grass, forbs, and legumes right to the ground. And by the time you get to them, they're saying, I we need more food. And you say, I'm happy to oblige their little cow and move little cow off into their brand new paddock where they go, oh, ho. Holy smokes. That's a whole new smorgasbord. And then you don't let them back into that paddock. And, again, debatable for at least one year. But there is something else that I can do with that same piece of land.
I can put chickens on it, Especially when especially when the system is kind of first starting out, you're gonna need that because you're probably especially if we start out with a blown out hayfield or a a really mismanaged, plot of soil that was used for conventional farming of any kind, corn, maize, soybean, cotton, whatever. Right? It's probably gonna it's probably a a chemical waste dump at that point, and there's not gonna be a whole lot of life in the soil. Not gonna be earthworms, not gonna be dung beetles. So you're going to have to have a way to break up all those cowpats, and you can do that with chickens.
Now this is this is one of the things that I I I love about not just this system, but the the leader follower grazing system to begin with is I've got let's say let's say I'm able to put, I don't know, 100 cows on one acre for one day because I've got that much grace. No. No. No. People are gonna go, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The like, in when I mean a 100 animals on one acre, I mean for twenty four hours. I don't mean all year long. That no. That no. We won't even get into that shit. That's just dumb. But a 100 a a 100 animals on one acre on one day, if you don't have enough grays, you're going to screw up that piece of land. So all of this has to be in balance depending on how much grays there is. And, again, we're not gonna get into that right now. But let's say I got enough graze to support a 100 animals for one day.
That's a lot of poop. That's a lot of urine, and it's all hit the ground. If I'm in a very dry environment, I could really screw that paddock up. If those pats dry out too fast and we already have determined there's not enough microbiology in the soil, not enough earthworms, no dung beetles, then they're gonna dry out and they're going to basically smother grasses, forbs, and legumes altogether. It's not gonna be pretty. But if I drag chickens right behind them and put a whole bunch of chickens right on that same paddock, chickens will scratch and completely tear apart every single cow pat that's on that property or or in that paddock.
The reason they do that is they're looking for all kinds of stuff. They're looking for anything that maybe the cow didn't digest, that they might be able to eat. And chickens, they will eat they will eat stuff out of out of dung and manure. And I know it's it's gross because most people don't think about it, but that's that's a chicken. You gotta let the chicken do the job that the chicken does. Because all these animals have a job, a specific job. Cows are mowers. Chickens are scratchers. So now think about think about how much poop will be on an acre of ground, which is about the size of a football field for those you know, in The United States, a United States American football football field, not not soccer. Right? That's that's a lot bigger than one acre.
That's a lot of poop. Right? So let's say I drag 1,500 chickens into that same paddock, And their their whole nature is to scratch the ground because they're looking for worms. They're looking for any kind of insect that they can get. They scratch. They're gonna scratch the manure, and they're going to basically be pulling it all apart. But here's the caveat. I don't want to do it like if like if you're thinking, okay, so so he's coming in, he's moving the cows and then goes and gets the chickens and moves them right behind the cows. No. I wait because I'm patient.
Right? In fact, I'm going to wait exactly three days. Why? Why? Why not do it now? I I mean, shit, you're right there. The the the the chickens are right there. Why not move them right behind the cattle? Ah, because I can get extra protein and extra fat if I wait three days. Extra protein and extra fat for the chickens to eat. I can grow chicken feet. And you might ask how? Flies. One always remember, as we go through the cathedral system, one system's waste is another system's input, and the waste from that system is another system's input, and the waste from that system is another system's input.
So I got cows. They poop all over an acre. I move them off. I've got poop on an acre. What likes poop? Flies. Why? Because there's still nutrition and warmth and moisture, especially moisture in those cowpats. It's a great growing environment for their eggs to turn into fly larvae or, as you know it, maggots. It so happens that, generally speaking, across The United States and in lots of temperate regions in the world, flies, field flies, which are basically just flies, have a three day life cycle. So the the the animals are on the paddock, and flies are buzzing around them, and they're laying eggs as they poop.
And they're especially laying more eggs after those animals are off of that paddock because their tails aren't swishing around and the flies are anyway, now the flies really get on there. Right? They really start digging in there and laying their eggs, thousands, hundreds of thousands of eggs, and then they essentially go away. Where are they going? They're going to the cows because they just they're they they hang around cows. We're gonna get to why all this matters here in a second because it's more than just nutrition for the chickens. So in three days, those maggots have eaten what they're gonna eat, and it's about time for them to emerge as more adult flies.
And those are bothersome. They they they cause cattle and other animals and humans problems, right, if they're not kept in check. And that's why if you don't have these kinds of controls or thinking about it in this way, you can end up with cattle that have so many flies that they end up with something called fly strike. And I've seen some really bad cases of fly strike. In fact, in a lot in some cases, it's so bad that it can kill the animal. Right? You don't want that. You don't want losses on your cattle. It's hard enough as it is.
So what happens here is now you're breaking the fly cycle. So you if you can be patient and you wait three days and you move the chickens from where they were to the paddock where the cows were three days ago, when they start ripping through that cow dung, they're gonna rip and they're gonna find maggots. And one of the favorite things for 1,500 chickens, if not a lot more to eat, is maggots. Why? Lots of protein, but a lot of fat. And they're going to literally chew through every single maggot in those cowpats, which means they are never gonna be able to merge as an adult fly.
Maybe a couple will escape enough to cause, you know, for us to have breeding stock for the next cycle, but not enough flies to cause something like widespread fly strike on a hundred, two hundred, 300, 500 head of cattle. We're using the chicken to do two things all at once. Actually, we're using the chickens to do three things all at once. One, to break apart all the cowpats so that there's they essentially mix it into the very top half inch of soil. So now all the nutrition is in soil contact and all the grass plants are going to be able and and forbes and legumes will be able to access sunlight. So as they start growing again, they won't be shaded out. They won't be smothered because all of this is broken up. Two, I get fat chickens for free. Well, okay. I'm gonna have to supplement their feed with something, but they're going to end up with that nutrition inside of them, and it's gonna go to either egg production or meat production, whichever way you want it done, whatever it is that you're trying to do. Maybe you're doing both. Who knows? We'll get to it all.
But three, I have integrated pest management. IPM is another way to term it. It's integrated pest management. The flies, their their life cycle is completely shut down. Well, again, maybe a few escape, but not not enough to cause problems. The majority of those flies are eaten before they ever emerge as an adult fly that can cause problems. So I get I get three for one. I get I get free food. I get I get slight soil tillage surfaces and the incorporation of manure. I I I get I also get the fact that I'm not gonna have smothered plants in the pasture. I I I get integrated pest management. Man, I'm getting it all. And guess what?
I don't not only do I not have to pay the chickens to do it because they're more than happy to do it by themselves, I get to sell them later. It's, like, it's amazing. It's it's an amazing thing. Right? So what's what's the result of all this this what's the result of this impact? Well, the root period the rest periods on the plants allow, as I said, roots to get deeper. We get soil carbon building. We get plant diversity increase from not only the seed bank that's already in the soil, because as the chicken scratch and as the hooves of the cattle start pounding that soil, it starts it shifts what is available to to access moisture, sunlight, pressure, any of the other triggers of the seeds that already exist in the soil and there are thousands per square inch.
And then all of a sudden native grasses, native forbs, native legumes that haven't been seen on pastures start to come back. And we've seen that time and time and time and time again. There's reports of you you can go to, like, Will Will Harris in Georgia and the White Oak Pastures Farm. He talks about this. He's like, we're seeing we're seeing forbs and grasses and legumes that we thought were extinct, that the USDA thought were extinct, but yet here they are. And it's because of the animal impact. And then you got the chickens who are mixing the grass seed with the soil and fresh manure and urine, even if it's dried at that point, and they're mixing it all together. And then all of a sudden, they're pooping all over the ground with very high nitrogen poop.
I'm getting free fertilizer. That's like, what, number five that I'm getting out of out of chickens is their poop. So all of a sudden, what's left after we move the chickens off is a paddock that is completely tilled inched from from square inch to square inch, from end to end, from top to bottom. It's been tilled lightly, maneuvered, urine upon. The flies are gone. And that you've now basically got a seed bed of all the ancient seeds that are there. Plus, you've got the roots of all the plants that were already growing there. You've got everything mowed to the ground, so everything has equal access to air and sunlight. And when it rains, to water, and you've increased the soil carbon content.
This system makes pasture better and better year over year over year. More grasses grow. Roots are deeper. Water infiltration gets better. And you keep moving this system. When you move the cows, you make sure that the chickens move to where the cows were three days later, and you move them again and you move them again. So when you like, the next day you come out, you move the cows, you move the chickens you move the cows up one, you move the chickens up one. And as long as the chickens are three paddocks away from or two paddocks away from the cows, you can be assured that where the chickens are now is exactly where the cows were three days before.
And you just move them both, day after day after day. So now we talk about cathedral. We start talking about movement inside a static system. And this is where I want to introduce something called sacred geometry. Oh, you're gonna go woo woo on us. What are you what are you gonna, like, get a voodoo doll out here next and start stabbing pins into it? You gonna say some shamanistic prayers on us? You gonna you gonna pull down the mysticism of the ages? No. Not really. Sacred geometry is kinda interesting. And, no, it's not a religion. And, no, it does not represent devil worship. It's not that at all.
It's like when it's like when in the seventies, all of us were all of us kids were really, really excited to go see KISS because KISS was coming to town. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Ace Fraley and whatever. I can't remember the other guy's name. I do we do it? KISS, the band, and this is the hairband, the original glam band in the seventies. Well, the town I grew up with, they there are a lot of fundamentalists there, and they had so many Christian fundamentalists that they said that KISS was evil, and they were devil worshipers, and they were teaching kids through their music how to worship the devil.
It was all bullshit. But I didn't get to go see KISS because they canceled the concert because of it. So please please please do not be the psychotic parent that's like oh my god sacred geometry you open up opening a portal to hell no we're not opening a portal to hell this is just ancient wisdom. This is just ancient symbology that represents stuff to the human species as we have moved through the human history. So happens. Cathedral is built on the basis of a square. The square in sacred geometry is one of the most fundamental and one of the most symbolic shapes that there is. It represents stability and structure.
It's got four equal sides. It's got four right angles, and it creates a sense of, you know, order and and permanence and represents balance. It also represents something called the earth element. You know? I mean, it's like like I said, sacred geometry is not something about opening a portal to hell to let demons come through, like, I don't know, like, some kind of weird sci fi movie about, what, event horizon. It's not that. It's just not. The earth element in sacred geometry and many traditions, different traditions that had no contact with each other, all saw the square as something that connects to the physical, the grounded, the material world, soil, stone, you know, things like that. Plus, human built environments like cathedral, that's going to actually end up being human built.
It represents containment, but it also represents foundation. It's a boundary, the square is, and it defines a space. It frames an activity. An activity is a very important concept here. We'll get to it here in a second. It creates a platform for us to build on. These these are things that that I've when I was researching this, I started going, holy shit. Because when I was thinking about cathedral, I was not ever thinking about sacred geometry until last week. I mean, I've thought about it before. Danny Carey is the drummer for tool. He's big into sacred geometry.
His drum set is set up in a sacred geometric pattern. I don't know what it is. You'd have to ask Danny Carey because I just see a drum set, but whatever. One of his own bandmates made a made a joke about his sacred geometry drum set and said every once in a while when they were playing live that they weren't were worried whether or not he was going to open up a portal to hell and demons were gonna come and eat all their fans. And, of course, he was joking because people always have the wrong idea about things just like they had the wrong idea about the band, Kiss. They were just dressed up like demons and star men and and and cats. I mean, it was like it was and they made a million dollars out of it. It was brilliant. Hey.
They laughed all the way to the bank on that shit, but getting back to this so we've got a square. It defines I I've explained it many times in these in this series. Cathedral is based on a square. It doesn't mean it always has to be a square, but it, generally speaking, is going to have a very rectangular aspect to it. Well, I've described activity inside that square, The rotational grazing rotation the rotational grazing activity activity. We're talking about something occurring over time. Rotation should put you into our next symbol of sacred geometry, and that's the circle.
And the circle, again, in many different traditions, is usually considered the most fundamental and universal form. It represents infinity. It represents eternity. It represents completeness. Symbolically, it often stands for the one. Now you could say the one being God or the one in mathematics is like there's only zero and one in mathematics. I'm sorry, but really everything else is just a decimal point that exists somewhere between the number zero and one. You know, like, oh, well, what are all prime numbers? Take whatever prime number you want and and take the and and add a decimal point right in front of that prime number. It's still a prime number, and it exists between zero and one. So it could be the universe being the whole. It could be God being the whole. It it depends. I'm not gonna get you into a situation where you've gotta pick one. Whatever one you want, you make the decision. But the circle represents a whole.
Right? In agriculture and even cosmological context, circles remind us that everything moves in repeating patterns. Now, cathedrals functions, which is animal movement, seasonal cycles, harvesting patterns, they trace out repeating sinusoidal rhythms. So what are we doing? And what what do I mean by sinusoidal? Let me let me let me back up because I wanna make sure everybody understands this. A sine wave, as you hear my voice, it is a mixture of harmonic sinusoidal waves. There's a like, the the amplitude goes up and then it crests and then it comes back down and it goes to a trough and it comes back up. And it's like, that's a sine wave. And if you still don't know what a sine wave looks like, just type in s I n e wave on whatever browser you want and you'll you'll find a picture of a sine wave.
It so happens that if I were to take a circle and I was rotating that circle and I attached a pin to the very edge, doesn't matter which edge of that circle, but like at the very edge of that circle, and I drag a piece of paper underneath that pen as that circle's moving, you know what it traces out? A sine wave. The circle represents that movement. Even if you just see a circle and it's just static, inside that, it represents movement. We've got movement inside of cathedral, which means what? We've got a circle inside of a square. And historically, this ends up having deep roots.
Mandulas, temples, cathedral floor patterns, cathedral. You know, we often use a square to define sacred sacred ground. And the union of heaven and earth is represented very clearly in several context, in several different traditions with a circle embedded firmly inside the square. Not a square inside the circle, that's different, but a circle inside the square. It is the union of heaven and earth. It it unionizes time and space. It unionizes diam dynamic flow and stable boundaries. That's an important aspect to all this. Because, again, when I started thinking about cathedral as a system, I was never actually building it off of sacred geometry.
But it so happens, which I don't think is really when we pull it apart, I don't think is surprising. As a human being, I've come up with a system because I've read about all these other systems of embedding a circle inside of a square. These other people have embedded sir like, the the other silvopastures that are, you know, that are not doing what this particular system does is still a circle inside of a square. We're just doing what humans do. Chickens do what chickens do. Cows do what cows do. It doesn't mean that I'm saying that we're just as important as a cow or that a cow is just as important as as a human, but I am saying that as part of this particular existence, we continuously end up looking at things like sacred geometry without realizing we're actually looking at something like a circle inside of a square. It just happens. It's natural. It's like learning how to walk or learning how to eat.
We just do it. And it's happened again right here. And I thought that it was important to bring that up. But now I wanna get back down to actual soil and earth and start talking about the fact that those cows are probably going to need a whole hell of a lot more food than just what I can put grazing, especially in the first few years. We've talked about the honey locust trees. We've talked about the black locust trees. We talked about that them being fodder for animals in the grazing lanes during last episode, which was cathedral part two. Let's let's get into that a lot more.
Okay? Let's talk about the black locust tree and the pollarding. Okay. Let hold on. A little bit of an aside. I am getting pushback for the for my selection of locust trees. Thornless honey locust tree and the black locust tree. I'm getting a lot of pushback because there's a lot of people that are like, oh my god. It's so invasive. It's a management issue. It's not a it's we're not going to set stock black locust trees and thornless honey honey locust trees. Remember when I was talking about set stocking where you just like you got a section of land, you put a 100 cattle on it, you just let them do whatever they want? No. That's not management.
You have to manage these trees. Otherwise, they will probably get away from you. And I do not think that the labor involved because animals perform certain functions, I do not believe that this would all be nothing but 100% human endeavor to make sure that the invasiveness of at least a black locust tree is kept in check, and it needs to be kept in check. But I also want to admit that there's probably different species that can function the same way for different purposes in different climates. I just wanna be able to start talking about what these trees can do for you without people going all the way to in a hundred years, you're gonna have nothing but black locust trees.
No. That's not true. But you're not seeing what I'm trying to say if that's your if that's your first if that's the first place you go, then you're not saying, okay. Look. I see a problem with this. Because of my experience in my particular climate, it could go this way, but let's see what he's trying to say first, and maybe I can come up with a solution that fixes it for my climate. Because, honestly, I've got a lot of experience with black locust trees. They are not as invasive as people make them out to be, but then again, I was in USDA zone six b with not a lot of rainfall, a whole shit ton of sun, and very, very, very, very hot. I was in Lubbock, Texas, and then I was in Canyon, Texas, and I've never had that much of an issue with black locust trees being that invasive.
Not like some other trees that I've seen. That caveat said, let's talk about pollarding the black locust for tree fodder for animals, specifically, the cattle that are going to be in the field. In one study, black locust trees over three meters produced four kilograms of dry matter per tree in the eighth year after planting. So let's just talk about an eight year old black locust tree. It's like nine feet tall. If I take the top off of that entire tree where most of the leaves come down with the branches that I saw off or something else saws off. And again, we'll we'll get into the science fiction aspect in a different episode. But let's say that I've got all the branches off and you don't just chop that chop the tree off at the neck when you pollard. You basically leave some some of the branches, parts of the branches coming out at the top, but you take most of the foliage and the foliage branches off of the tree. That's pollarding.
Right? If I were to shake all of the leaves off and separate the wood from the leaves, I'm looking at four kilograms dry. Holy shit. Four kilograms of black locust leaves. If I dry them down and I don't I don't really have to, but we'll get into it here in a sec. I don't really have to. But four kilograms per tree of an eight year old tree is a lot of matter, especially when we're considering 15,000 black locust trees on a thousand acres in the cathedral system. What does that turn out to be? Well, I've done the math. 60,000 kilograms per year of leaf fodder that represents between 2025% pure protein.
But I don't want to take the tops off of every single tree every single year. I only want to take one fifth. So one out of every five black locust trees, that's that's what I want. That's still 12,000 kilograms of 20 to 25% protein. That's a lot of protein, man. That's a lot of protein. Now the pollarding would occur in late spring and early summer to get the best leaf fodder, and it gives the pollarded trees time enough depending on where you are, especially in like something like Lubbock, Texas or Amarillo, Texas, or somewhere around USDA zone six and seven, somewhere around there. You're going to get enough time for those trees to start putting out new branches and new leaves so that they can continue to grow.
It won't it won't be a full spread, but it will definitely bounce back the next year. Right? Because you'll have enough sunlight, you'll have enough heat, you'll have enough of everything for those black locust trees to say, oh, shit, man. I lost all my leaves. Emergency situation. Put out new leaves. And that also might actually help the invasive nature because the tree is not going to expend a whole lot of energy into putting root suckers out, which is one of the ways ways black locust invades. It's going to say, I I can put leaves up, and it's going to direct that energy up, not out. So that's one management tool that helps the invasive nature of black locust. It doesn't mean that it's a perfect solution. It's not. It's just it's going to help, and you're not gonna kill that tree. It's really hard to kill a black locust tree, by the way. So you pollard in late spring and early summer for the leaf water.
We're rotating which trees are cut, and we do that because we only want to take one out of every five trees. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that after year five or year six or something like that, I want to coppice the black locust tree all the way down to the ground. And I want to harvest the trunk because it's straight, hard, has fungicide already in it because it's naturally produced by the plant. And I can make fence post out of it and I can either use them on-site or I can sell them as rot resistant wood fence posts. But that's that's another that's another issue. But 12,000 kilograms is a lot of fodder that I can put out into these fields. Let's talk about the honey locust pods.
Now we were talking about black locust, spring to early summer. Let's go way past the end of summer when we get the honeylocust pods dropping in November to January. In another study, between three and eight year old trees produce between twenty and seventy five kilograms of pods per tree every year. Now, there have been other studies that looked at mature trees, mature thornless honey locust trees. And they're talking about a 180 kilograms per tree dropping between November and January, which is at the last part of the year. That's when the grasses are starting to go again, depending on where you are, go dormant and stop producing.
You still got cattle. You still gotta feed them. You still gotta fatten them. Turns out, honey locust pods, well, honey locust pods got a lot of sugar and protein in it. But first, let's run through a couple of other numbers. In the cathedral plan, the support trees for the tree lanes are honey locust, thornless honey locust trees, and black locust trees. We've gone through how much protein we can get out of the black locust trees. Alright. Let's talk about the the how much fit the other 15,000 trees of the support trees because we're looking roughly at around 30,000 support trees. Half of them are black locust, the other half are honey locust. 15,000 honey locust trees.
If we were to go midway between the three and eight year old tree and say that the pod mass drop is between twenty and twenty and seventy five kilograms, let's just think of 50 kilograms per tree as an average. That's 750,000 kilograms per year from trees producing 50 kilograms per tree. 750,000 kilograms. A kilogram is 2.2 pounds, just so you know. So, like, double that number. 750,000, multiply it by 2.2, that's how many pounds. Divide that by 2,000, that's how many tons of sugary, protonacious pods that these things are dropping every year without having to kill the tree, without having to do anything. I don't I don't even have to shake the trees. The pods will just fall off. All we gotta do is rake them. And there's machines that do that, by the way.
So what happens if it's a 180 kilograms per tree like in in mature trees? 2,700,000 kilograms on 15,000 trees in a thousand acres of cathedral. 2,700,000 kilograms. Multiply that by 2.2, that's how many pounds. Divide that number by 2,000, that's how many United States tons. I'm I'm just saying. I just I've that's a lot, and it's mostly sugar. But let's let's look at that. I I've got this thing, from onpasture.com. It's a it's a website that's looking directly at honey locust pods as part of a complete livestock fodder. And it's not exactly complete. I wouldn't feed cattle directly only solely upon this, but but finishing them off, this is this this stuff is great. Check the check this shit out.
Honey locust pods are particularly high in sugar. Why is that? I mean, think about that. What are we feeding cattle in confined feeding animal operations? Corn. Generally, grain. That's, nothing but carbohydrate. What is carbohydrate? It's long chains of sugars. They're eating sugar. I mean, just because they're long chains of sugars, amylase alpha amylase and beta amylase in mammals are produced in saliva. It is specifically designed to take long chains of carbohydrate and bust them up into their individual sugars called glucose. These pods can be as high as 37.5% sugar.
But grain has a doesn't have that much well, I mean, grain that you're feeding cattle don't really have all that much protein in it. But the the protein content in the seeds of the honey locust pod can be as high as 12 to 13% pure protein, along with anywhere between 2037% sugar. The more protein you have, the less sugar you're gonna have. The less protein you have, the more sugar you're gonna have. But this this crop happens to be dropping right around the time that I need a lot of supplemental energy to get the cattle through what? Winter when it's freaking cold and they're burning through calories like nobody's business. And all of a sudden, here comes God saying, oh, look. Here's a honey locust pod. It's got 37% sugar. You can grow this, by the way.
You see where this is going? Let let's look at let's look at at a full panel of what's inside a honey locust pod. It's roughly half moisture, half dry. In this particular in this particular sample, it was 9.6% crude protein, 1.3% crude fat, 27.4% fiber. And then let's get into, let's get into where the oh, calcium. Half a percent of calcium. Point 15% phosphorus. 1.36% potassium. Negligible magnesium, but it's 0.07%. And then we get to the sugar component. And if you're as low as 9% protein, you're as high as 37.5% sugar. Digestible sugar.
In fact, in like, there's pictures of kids sucking on honey locust pods as treats because they were that sweet. And this is back in, like, the 1800 well, like, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. That would that they would eat them. Not not the seeds because they're hard as a rock, and that will bring that up here in a second. But the amount of sugar that was in them, the kids were not stupid. They wanted something sweet. They go pick up honey locust pods between November and January. This is one of these things where I keep looking at this going, why are we doing this? Why why what and and and, again, I see schools, like public schools.
One of their favorite trees to plant, at least in West Texas, is the thornless honey locust tree. And every year, there are massive, massive piles of the honey locust pods as they rake them up in late fall, early winter. Massive, massive piles. Many of the piles. Many piles. Many massive piles just gonna be thrown away. Gonna be thrown away. Hell, even hog farmers are smart enough to go to breweries and get their spent grains and feed them to their hogs. And yet nobody was coming to get the honey locust pods. And I lived in Lubbock, Texas and Canyon, Texas, which are basically farming communities.
Lubbock is a much bigger city of about 300,000 people. Canyon is about 15,000, but all have ag roots, and nobody was coming to take those honey locust pods away to feed to their cattle or their hogs or their goats or their chickens. It was going into a landfill. And it just it it makes me wonder how we're still fucking alive. I'm just I don't mean to use that language here because I I should have been better about that, but it it it gets me riled up. And I can't I can't help it because we have all this food. And we and and in in another show, in a different show, I will go through how much how exactly how much food does it take to get a calf to go all the way to where it needs to be slaughtered and have good weight on it that it makes sense to actually slaughter that animal? How much time is it gonna take?
You know, how much forage does it take? Are would we be producing enough protein on the grazing paddocks plus the taking the tops off of the black locust trees, plus after seventy five years, 2,700,000 kilograms of 37.5% sugar and 10% protein. Though those those are numbers that we actually have to look at, and I we can't do it here. We're seventy minutes into the show already. I'm actually not done. I'm actually not done. But seventy minutes, I think, is good enough for me to end here and take the part of my outline and do a second show that is going to still be talking about the rest of this grazing. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish this off right now.
I wanna finish this off talking about the labor flow. And we've already we've basically already touched on it. But I I I want I want to go through this a little like, you know, just a little bit deeper. Like, what does the day of the guy look like? You know? Or the the or or the gal, you know? You or you like your daughter or your son or whatever. If they if you're doing something like this, what does their day look like? Well, they better have have their happy ass up at about 05:30 in the morning. And and if they're gonna do that, somebody needs to be making some breakfast because they're gonna be burning some calories. And by the time they are done with breakfast, by 06:30, they are out with the animals getting ready to move them.
What does a move look like? Kinda depends. Do you have fence, like electric fencing that you're building these these portable paddocks out of for for the for the cows? Or are you using something called e collars, which are collars that you put around? Yes, a cow. It is a big old plastic thing and it's like it's got a solar panel on it so it can kind of recharge its batteries, you know, during the day in the sunlight. But what it does is it gives you the GPS position of that particular animal to within like a foot or two foot or something like that. And it respects a digital fence, which means that I can outline on a digital map, on an app, on my phone or on my PC.
I I'm describing the outlines of the paddock that I want these animals to be in. And I put those animal physic. I physically go and I locate locate that paddock through GPS coordinates because I can see where I am versus where I've put the digital fence. And I put the animals inside there and I activate the fence. There's no fence that the animals can see. They walk up to the edge, and by the time they're about 10 feet away from the edge of where I don't want them to go, the collar starts to annoy them by beeping or vibrating or something else. If they don't turn around, it just continues to beep.
If they get closer to the fence, it beeps even louder. And one of the things that you can always be sure about cattle and ruminants, they are prey animals. They do not like being annoyed, and they will do anything in their power to make that annoyance go away because sometimes that annoyance is a predator, and they don't wanna get eaten. So we're prey we're literally leveraging we're leveraging their evolution. It beeps and it beeps and it beeps until eventually they turn around. Yes. Some of these cattle have to be trained to do it. Yes. Bad things can happen. If they cross the line, that's an issue.
Let's not go there. That's a different discussion. Are you using the collaring system to move the cattle, or are you using fencing? That's going to change everything. Or well, it's gonna it's going to impact what the day looks like. So let's say we're using electric fencing with a solar powered, charging a battery and that battery charging the fence. And if you touch the fence, you're gonna get zapped. And cows don't like annoyance, so they stay away from the fence. This is the the older way of doing it. So you go in. You you find the animals. You know exactly where they are. You start building a fence right at in in their direction of travel. If they're going south to north, you get on the north side of those animals and you build another 1.5 acre enclosure with this fence.
After that's done, you connect that that fit that paddock, you connect it to the paddock before it where the animals actually are so that the north side of the existing paddock fence is the south side of the new fence, and you connect all the fencing together so everything is charged. Right? Then when you're satisfied that you've got good charge on the fence, you turn the fence off, you get into the paddock, and you remove part of the fence that is in between the paddocks, and you scoot the cattle into the new paddock. And they are mostly gonna go all by them loan their lonesome. Why?
Because they're standing in a bunch of their own poop and their own pee, and they got nothing else to eat. And all of a sudden, there's fresh grass. Don't worry. You're not going to have to put a leash on all of it. They're going to go by themselves. Once they're in the new paddock, you close the paddock. You charge the fence, and you're done. Well, you're not done yet. You're done with the cattle. They're in their new place. They're out of their old place. But you don't even break down that fence, you that that paddock. And there's a paddock before that to the south of that.
That's where they were the day before yesterday, and you haven't broken down that paddock. Then the paddock behind that is the chicken house with all the chickens. That's a different kind of paddock. When now when we go to move the chickens to where the cows were three days ago, we have to break down the fencing off of that paddock. Then we redo the fencing with something more appropriate for chickens, which would be called electro netting. It's still an electric fence, but it's different and it's it's specifically designed for poultry, like turkeys, chickens, shit like that. You you break down the old cattle paddock, then you moo you break well, you build the new paddock for the chickens.
You move like, and and then you you remove the fence in between the two pet the two chicken paddocks, and then you move the chicken house, you move the chickens, and then you close the fence, and then you break down the the southernmost end of the animal paddocks. You wrap it up. You're kind of done. Not really, but you're kind of done. So that's the way that you move the animals in general. It's it's like a two stage thing or a three stage thing. You build the new cattle paddock. You move the cattle. You don't strip down the old cattle paddock, you don't strip down the one the day before that one, and you don't strip out the day before that one. But you do build you'd well, you do strip out that last one, and then you turn that convert that into a chicken paddock, and then you move the chickens into the new paddock, and then you break down the old chicken paddock.
Should take about two hours. Should I mean, you know, clearly, things are good you know, depending on where you are, what kind of animals you're dealing with, what kind of experience you have, what how comfortable you are doing this. It could take more. Sure. It could take less. It could it might take an hour for somebody who really knows what the hell they're doing, but it should not take that long. And you've got two whole groups of animals moving in unison in a leader follower, great rotational grazing pattern inside a square, and the movement represents the circle, which takes us back to the whole sacred geometry thing.
There's more that I wanna add to the work that needs to be done when you move the animals. But this starts getting into the vagaries, not vagaries, but this starts getting into the more of the nuances of what we're doing. What else are we laying down? We're laying down biochar. We're laying down seeds if we want. We're laying down compost tea if we want, depending on what we're doing. There's there's other and and they don't all get put in the same place. Sometimes maybe they do some sometimes maybe they don't. But I just view the animal paddocks, the cattle leading and the in the poultry following as a movable island.
Because then we're gonna have to worry about where's the water coming from to water these animals? Where's the food gonna come from for the chickens? You know, are we really gonna rake up, like, all, like, by hand all the, a thousand acres of 15,000 thornless honey locust trees, all the pods? No. There's there's there's a lot more to Cathedral. You know? Are we are and and by the way, I'll just leave you with this one. If I feed a whole bunch of whole honey locust pods to cattle, I've said that they're that that those, pods represent 10% protein. You know how much protein the cattle's gonna get out of it?
Almost none. Because the protein's all in the seed. They'll get the sugar. They'll damn well get the sugar and the fiber, but they're not gonna get the protein because the protein is pretty much gonna pass right through their gut, which causes another problem. But I'm going to leave that for cathedral part four. So if you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting the Bitcoin and podcast so I can bring more stuff like this to you. We if you'll notice, we didn't talk at all about Bitcoin, and this is a Bitcoin podcast. That's why it's called Bitcoin and, because there's other things.
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I'm the only one that talks about it. Everybody else just talks about Michael Saylor and Bitcoin and macroeconomics. Not that macroeconomics aren't important. They are because they affect things like ranchers and farmers, but it's not the only thing there is. There's always an and component to it. This is Bitcoin, and I am your host David Bennett. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and, and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction to the Cathedral Series
Grazing Lanes and Agricultural Integration
Understanding Combines and Crop Harvesting
Leader-Follower Grazing System
Challenges of Grazing in Arid Regions
Role of Chickens in Grazing Systems
Sacred Geometry in Agricultural Design
Black Locust and Honey Locust Trees as Fodder
Daily Routine in Rotational Grazing
Future Topics and Closing Remarks
