From an old rancher! Our family has been in this business for over 100 years and the last 40 of them have been on my shoulders. We have 42 square miles total of family owned ranch. This year I’m running 25 head per square mile (It’s been a good wet year), on a bad year I may run 12 to 14. The only feed I buy is range cubes and that’s only used to get the cows in for a head count. Our’s are about as 100% organic as they come and we never planned it that way, it’s just the way it’s done down here in West Texas. They eat grass, weed’s, cactus and anything else they fine palatable. They also keep the ground broke up so we have good permeability when we do get those much needed rains. Without that a crust forms and the water just keeps running south and we get no benefit. On the other side I’m in the oil and gas business and can verify that methane is a naturally formed gas from decomposition, so present in our life that when we run sniffers over a pipeline looking for leaks we sniff for pentane because methane is everywhere. We naturally produce more methane than the cows will ever be able to accomplish.
We have a much smaller ranch on the Texas Gulf Coast. This has been a very rainy year and our cows are knee deep in green grass. I think I have heard my husband say he can run 6 cows per acre in a good year.