poultry 2.5:1 grain to meat

beef 7:1 (grain fed beef)

With that said, let's look specifically at the production issue. Roughly speaking, land that will produce 100 bushel-per-acre corn, will produce 400 cow-day forage (one cow day is what one cow will eat in one day--cow-days are to graziers what inches are to carpenters and board-feet are to lumberjacks). If 100 bushels (average 60 pounds per bushel, weight 6,000 pounds), that will produce about 857 pounds of beef.

At 400 cow-days we can carry 600 stocker calves (400-800 lb.) gaining at least 1.5 pounds per day, yielding 900 lbs. (600 X 1.5 = 900) of beef per acre. Fairly close, wouldn't you say? The same computations can be made for dairy, but I will not belabor the point.

The way to get 400 cow-days on this acre of forage, of course, is through management-intensive grazing, or MIG. What you call it does not really matter: intensive grazing, intensive rotational grazing, controlled grazing. The point is to move the stock to mimic grazing patterns of native herbivores.

1 acre = feed for 100 hens (Gene Logsdon)