Introduction

Beef Herdshares:#

Herdshares are custodial real assets stewarded together at scale. You own the cow(s), the farm runs them with our herd in our system, and then we split the calves. The important part is that all cows are subject to the same genetics and management program.

Why this works#

With low-input, grass-only systems, the marginal cost of managing each cow is low. The bulk of the labor is being done already and minimal variable inputs are required besides the land itself.

How this works#

You own a number of cows in the herd (ownership is of a cow in the herd, not of a particular animal) and semiannually, in perpetuity, we split the calf crop per a pre-agreed-upon percentage. The farmer’s split of the calves covers all maintenance expenses, so you – as the herdshare owner – get a share of the semiannual calve distribution with no ongoing costs for as long as the herd is successfully being managed and you choose to be a part of it. Your herdshares never ‘age out’, as a herdshare takes into account the replacement of older stock with younger stock through to generational turnover.

Real granular ownership: what herdshare owners can do with their calves / cows#

Ownership is liquid and what happens is entirely up to the herdshare owner— the animals are yours. Haul them off & pay to have them butchered, sell them, bring them home and fatten them yourself, give them to your friends — it’s your decision.

When the herdshare owner executes a physical claim to an animal(s) in a classification group (see contract for details), the farmer chooses which cow(s) from that group are distributed and it is settled at the next reasonable animal sorting period on a first-come first-serve basis. The herdshare owner is essentially the beneficiary of the herd’s granular production.

Freeing the farmer to farm: bounded trust enables scaled stewardship#

This system equips the farmer with full discretion in management but is bounded by the aligned risks and incentives between the herdshare owners and the farmer, with regular reporting frameworks in place that protect the relationship during this process. The system depends upon the farmer being a competent manager that accurately accounts the data, and herdshare owners that are willing to trust that process as they participate in it together.

The farmer is the steward responsible for the success of the herd as a whole. From time to time the needs of the herd may supersede the granular prerogatives of each owner, including the farmer himself – whose herdshares are affected by decisions in the same way as all other herdshare owners. The ongoing liquidity of high-quality animals inextricably depends upon maintaining the low time-preference health of the unified herd and the land that supports it.

Why herdshares vs a meat box subscription#

Butcher box arrangements – an ongoing subscription for meat – do not encapsulate the collaborative process enabled by the herdshare system. With herdshares, you have a degree of ownership, food security, influence over quality, and trust-based transparency with the farmer that is not captured by a consumer subscription. You own not only the cow, but share in its ongoing production in perpetuity.

The sharing of capital and operational risk with the farmer enables him to lower his time preference and focus on caring for the needs and interests of the herdshare owners better than he could on his own. Our goal in creating this system was to enable deep genetic resilience in the animals, increased nutrition for consumers, and restoration of local soil and ecosystems to a greater degree than is possible in an atomized producer and consumer relationship.

Legal Precedents for Herdshares#

In order to escape the over-regulated marketplace for food, food freedom advocates developed milk herdshares to enable families who depend upon it to get raw milk in areas where it is illegal to sell it. These agreements and systems have consistently been defended and instituted in many states where animals are owned in common, with shared boarding fees, so that the families that own them may receive the weekly milk produced. This beef herdshare system utilizes these legal structures, bringing them into the arena of beef cattle where your boarding fees are paid with the calves split.

Advancing these legal precedents into other animal types is making a whole new paradigm of community-based farming possible.

Our System

Our approach to raising cattle#

Regenerative Agriculture and UHDG Grazing#

Regenerative agriculture seeks to maximize photosynthetic energy capture. This energy is the foundation of a virtuous cycle that balances two seemingly opposing yet synergistic goals of:

• Resilience by capturing and storing carbon in the soil for use in the future.
• High efficiency output of goods produced for consumption today

We mimic nature’s God-given patterns in which tightly bunched, large herds graze intensively and non-selectively, then migrate with the seasons to find fresh food, allowing the grasslands to fully rest and recover before they return. Whereas nature uses the danger of predators and seasons to drive these migratory patterns, we use electric fencing and pasture management plans. The beautiful symbiosisx between ruminant grazers and prairie ecosystems is what built the fertile soil of the great plains, the once deep and rich foundation of our nation’s wealth.

That wealth has been eroded through industrial farming practices and high time preference consumptive societal behaviorx. Restoring our soils is critical for restoring the deep nutritionx needed for the families in our community to thrive as well as re-building a foundation for society to flourish. Enabling such a comprehensive approach is a large part of why this herdshare system is so important.

We need a better cow#

After generations of farming subsidies and foolish breeding practices, modern cows are no longer capable of functioning within this system. Most cows of today require outside feed, selective grazing, and medicinal support in order to survive and breed, all to the detriment of the soil itself. This has driven a vicious cycle where raising a calorie of food requires more petroleum energy than caloric energy that is contained within that food. To fix the soil we also must fix the cow herself by returning to older genetic strains that allow her to fulfill her dual purpose as a tool for ecosystem management and the production of beef.

We are using Pineywoodsx cattle crossed with good SouthPollx, Mashonax,y, and Aubracx,y genetics to develop a custom breed that is early-maturing, disease-resistant, requires no medical input, and can be grazed intensively and non-selectively to the betterment of the land.

Our Breeding Program#

We accelerate natural selection by putting all of our females under pressure where they must:

• Have high inherent body condition with little to no supplementary feed.
• Graze non-selectively on fescue-dominant pastures in the heat of the summer, then walk to water without being allowed to stand in the ponds for extended periods to cool down.
• Handle wide temperature swings including low temperatures during the winter with little to no windbreaks or shelter.
• Thrive on rough stockpiled forage.
• Maintain immune and hormonal health with no allopathic medical care.
• Birth and raise their calves autonomously with no assistance.
• Raise a calf successfully every single year of their life.
• Have a balanced temperament conducive to working with the herdsman.
• Be precocious and early sexually maturing.

We select for this through:

• Multi-siring all yearlings
  • All reasonable quality females are given a chance to breed and calve at 2 years of age, targeting having her second calf on the ground before she turns 3.
  • These yearling females are run in a separate herd with all of our yearling bulls out of the best 2+3 moms.
    • A 2+3 mom is one that successfully weans 2 calves at 50% of her bodyweight by 43-45 months of age. If, under the pressure of our system, a mom can gestate and wean calves while growing herself then she should easily be able to do it every year after as a mature cow.
• We DNA test all calves in the yearling herd to see how many calves were sired by each yearling bull. The most early maturing and sexually precocious ones will have sired the most.
  • All major performance traits that we care about are upstream of early sexual maturity and fertility. Using this as the metric, we guarantee that they have high hormonal balance, good inherent body condition, strong parasite resistance, and more.
• Strong genetic concentration of a targeted 40:1 cow to bull ratio with rapid generational turnover
  • Bulls:
    • Only the bulls from the best 2+3 moms (top ~20%) are given a chance to breed as yearlings.
    • Only the top ~10-20% of the yearling bulls as 2 year olds breed the main herd. This is measured by the number of calves sired as a yearling.
    • Only the top ~50% of the 2 year olds are kept to breed the main herd again as 3 year olds
    • Only in exceptional cases will we run any bulls as 4 year olds.
    • Every generation should be better than the last, which is why we quickly replace every bull with the best of his sons.
  • Cows
    • Every female is given a chance to prove herself as a yearling.
    • Females who fail to calve by ~31-33 months are sold or butchered before ever joining the main herd.
    • Then, balanced against land carry capacity we sequentially cull:
    • All females that were late to breed as yearlings.
    • All females that bred on time as yearlings but missed breeding back for their second calf, failed to raise their second calf, or were slow to conceive their second calf.
    • All females that succeeded as young moms but failed to breed back in a later year.
    • All females that lost calves.
    • All females that are not successfully weaning a calf every year at 50% of her body weight.
    • The oldest females that are still successfully weaning calves at 50% of her body weight every year.

The Purpose of Ranching: Beef for Our Families#

This system will inherently select animals that genetically express the optimal frame size and phenotype for our local climate, forage, and management system, all built upon the backbone of the hardy heritage genetics with which we started the composite breed. The animals removed from the breeding system will fatten easily with minimal care, thus accumulating all the nutritional components and phytochemicals that are missing from modern beef. To even further enrich the nutrition provided to our customers and herdshare owners we:

• Work to maintain diverse pastures of grasses, forbs, native species, herbs and even wildflowers.
• Focus on living, biologically active soil.
• Butcher at a later age than most ranches with a specialized system of animal and carcass handling.

Working with Herdshare Owners#

Real Community Style Agriculture#

With the ongoing collapse of the productive capacity in Americax, especially as it relates to farming – and the adversarial political, cultural, and economic climate surrounding it – we believe a new paradigmx must emerge. This paradigm needs to undo the atomization and restore the intimacy between producer and consumer, reconnecting us in participation with where our food comes from.

We believe we have been given the vision of this herdshare system as the flagship of this new approach, which we are calling “commissioned stewardship.” It is a distributist approach for how to scale delegated authority while still maintaining granular and liquid freedoms at the family level of those choosing to be a part. For this to work we must leave the world of imaginary paper assets behind – submitting to wisdom as we return to the hard constraints of reality and protecting the collaborative relationships with well reconciled, transparent accounting systems. Integrating these principles is another of the key components that makes herdshares work.

Tracking and Accounting#

We use ultra high frequency RFID tags as a unique identifier for each animal born in our herd and an area monitoring scanner in the water corridor for a daily count of every adult animal (it is on the road map to make this readily accessible to hershare owners).

Twice a year, at weaning, a herdshare report will be emailed to all herdshare owners. This report will include all adjustments to stock type as well as all herd growth that occurred during the previous period. These reports will use a sha-256 hash of each herdshare owner’s user ID so that transparency is granted while privacy is still respected. Users can self disclose to each other their holdings to authenticate veracity but only to the extent each individual chooses.

Herdshare owners will also be granted access to a private chat room where we will disclose any time we are:

• Transporting a batch of animals to the sale barn and have space to include any herdshare owners’ animals that they may want to cash out (transport and sales fees to be paid by Herdshare Owner).
• Scheduling butchering slots and have space for herdshare owners’ animals that they may want to physically collect (butchering and transport fees to be paid by Herdshare Owner).
• Making new herdshares available for sale.
• Pre-selling the farm’s meat animals, giving priority to herdshare owners above the public.
• Making executive whole-herd decisions that quantitatively impact the herdshare owners.

We are also developing a database to keep real time data on the entire herd that will track:

• Stock of all physical animals in the herd.
• Events of import at the animal level that occur during herd management.
• Physical herdshare claims as they are bought and sold, as well as pending herdshare animals projected to become available over time.
• All requested actions by the herdshare owners in reference to their holdings which will be served on a first-come first-serve basis.
• Deep genetics, lineage, and animal performance data on each animal in the herd.

What decisions can be made as a herdshare owner and how to execute them#

Twice a year herdshare owners will receive an Accounting Report detailing how many animals of each classification are being stewarded for them. These are the animals that a herdshare owner can withdraw from the system (barring any early contractual timelocks). The main classifications are:

• Breeding Stock by age (accounted at 6 month intervals up to 30 months old).
• Male and Female Meat Stock by age (accounted at 6 month intervals up to 30 months old).

At any point in time, Breeding Stock may be converted to Female Meat Stock of the same age in order to facilitate physical withdrawal if so desired. All withdrawals must be requested during the previous 6 month reporting period and may take until the end of the next 6 month reporting period to be settled. As a herdshare owner, you can choose to:

• Pick-up your stock from the farm.
• Request they be hauled to a location of your choosing.
  • Some hauling costs may be incurred to the herdshare owner.
• Request that it be hauled to the sale barn and sold.
  • Some hauling costs may be incurred to the herdshare owner.
  • Farm has the first right of refusal to buy at a fair market price.
• Request that they be hauled to the butcher and processed.
  • Some hauling costs may be incurred to the herdshare owner.
  • Herdshare owner is responsible for butchering costs.

These requests must be made to the official ranch email address or to the official ranch chat account on Matrix and confirmed by the ranch with a Sha-256 hashed agreement posted to the main herdshare chat room on Matrix. Withdrawals have a quarter cow minimum (pending other animals being processed in the same way to fill it up to a full cow) and can be topped up by buying up to the size required as long as we have available inventory.

Herdshares, as an agreement between herdshare owner and farm, are non-transferable. If you have friends that would like to join the herd (especially if you want to downgrade the size of your breeding stock), introduce them to us and it is likely we can help facilitate.

Conclusion

The nation’s food supply is in a state of severe disrepair. Due to a confluence of factors including government subsidies and regulations, poor breeding practices, irresponsible degradation of the soil, soaring input costs, and an incredible high time-preference pressure to extract as much value as possible, the cattle industry is facing a failure cascade. The ability to purchase and consume quality meat is no longer a reliable assumption.

The herdshare system was designed to address this problem in its totality. Combining a strict genetic program selecting for animal hardiness and resilience, a regenerative approach to grazing and land management, and an economic paradigm that places collaboration and granular ownership at the forefront, the herdshare owner is able to acquire what the market has thus far failed to provide: security.

And as a byproduct, this system allows for the restoration of a key facet of America’s wealth and resilience – the ability to make small local farms work.

How to Get Involved

If you don't want to use email, just DM me and i'll coordinate contact with untappedgrowth

Herdshare Sign Up#

Review the contract and email us at cattleco-op@untappedgrowth.com

Steer Pre-Sale System#

Review the information here and email us at cattleco-op@untappedgrowth.com

Volunteering and remote financial support / donations#

Email us at cattleco-op@untappedgrowth.com with why you are interested and what kind of support you wish to offer, if volunteer time be sure to include your skills and availability.

Key Files#

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