Baby Gets Brix

I took my grandbaby out for a walk today. It was a beautiful day; a gentle warm breeze rippling the waving and verdant grass, an occasional cloud scudding across an azure blue sky, and the windowpane clarity that betrayed the previously cloud-covered secret of snow streaked mountains. 

She’s only four and a half months old, and not even a crawler. But she’s a smart little whipper-snapper, and gets really angry at her lack of mobility. She sees us walking around, and wants nothing more than to be ambulatory. 

So it was up to Papa to make that happen. 

I carried her in the “football” hold. The cattle were about a half mile away, and I hadn’t gone through them yet, like I try to every day for a wellness and weight gain check. I occasionally carry the tike on my hip like her curvy mother does, but I am fairly hipless. I have carried all of my own seven daughters in this way of the “pigskin”, perhaps inspired by none other than childhood hero Larry Csonka (the greatest running back of all time–Dolphins of ’72). Little Kate fell right into my hold, and off we went for the half mile. 

New Fathers, take note: the football hold almost guarantees a happy baby.

The beeves lifted their heads from the deep graze, and watched us approach with more than a little interest. They had never seen a tiny human before. At first, they backed off. Kates big blues stared unblinking at the massive animal forms before her, but she never squawked. She just peered at them across the grass.

Then, we knelt down. Little Kate sat between my knees in the lush grass, barefoot. That got their attention. They edged in closer and closer, until they paused, just 8 feet away from us. Thousand pound steers nonchalantly sniffed the air, transfixed by the clean, white innocent presence of tiny Kate. 

She just stared back. 

One massive and well-muscled steer pushed his way through the frontliners. They all immediately made way for him when they saw who it was and the weaponization he presented. He would intentionally point a horn-tip at anyone who didn’t immediately yield and step aside. It was Jose’, the great Corriente cross, with an intimidating horn spread of nearly 5 feet.  

He was of the wild strain of Mexican, formerly Spanish Conquistador introduced cattle, that successfully became feral in the most intimidating climes of the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of North America. No other breed of cattle could have survived. The Corriente are beasts with an attitude. Tenacious, stubborn, and sometimes fearsome, and certainly fearless. 

I watched a single Corriente mother, Myrtle by name, leave a herd of 250 head of black angus mama cows on our pasture one day this spring. She sprinted out of the herd full on, bellering loudly at an unseen intruder that I couldn’t pick out from my vantage point. 

Suddenly, her baby, an unbelievably cute spotted calf, half the size of the rest of the black calves sprinted after her mother with an inspired-by-mother raging, tiny beller, with the same objective in mind: kill or be killed.

The interlopers turned out to be a pack of coyotes. They didn’t even yip. They simply spun around and formed a streak of gray lightning trying to get away from bovine terror. 

Never saw that one coming.

Jose’ was Boss Steer. And he wanted to find out what all the crowding was about. Slowly, the cattle encircled me and little Kate, with Jose’ clearly in charge. And you, dear reader, are probably now concerned. And you should be. Jose’ is nothing to sneeze at or disregard. He demands attention. When you see the horns, you immediately picture what it would be like to have one in your guts.

But I know Jose’. He’d never threatened any of us on foot or on horseback. And now, he obviously softened when he saw boss human–but even more, tiny baby on the turf. 

Kate wasn’t impressed by him in any shape or form. Instead, she was impressed by the object at hand: it was thick orchardgrass, big bladed and robust after several gentle fall rains followed by intense, high-altitude sun. Certainly there were many other species of grass in this sward, but for whatever reason, the orchard, Dactylis glomerata, fully captivated her 4.5 month old attention span, even with Jose’, boss steer, just 8 feet away, twitching his horns. 

She had her mouth around several blades of the lush grass that offered itself up all around her face. And she closed her mouth and chewed it, working it against her newly teething gums like no other human. 

I wondered why, but only for a moment. 

And then I tried it. The very same leaves of grass. And I knew. And I knew that she knew: it was sugar. Pure and unadulterated, right from the source, just like sugarcane itself. After all, cane is indeed a grass, in the same family as orchardgrass, the stem which Kate happily sucked on. 

Kate was grazing in the sugary-est time of year. It was after we’ve had repeated high 20 degree frosts, and the brix, or sugar content, was at the very highest measurable amount during the grass year. I knew, because I measured it with a glass-prism refractometer, the same measuring device winemakers and beer brewers use to measure the dissolved sugars in their grapes, or their wort. And orchardgrass in October, after frost, can score at a pretty consistent 15 to 25 percent brix, meaning that percentage of the sap has dissolved solutes like sugars, proteins and fatty acids. Ripe and sweet blueberries will test at 20%. And Kate was sensing something that sweet.

And that’s the fuel cattle need to grow. It’s even the fuel we need to grow, especially at an age like Kate’s. 

But here’s the sad truth about most grass: if those grasses are not growing on a living soil–a breathing, cell-dividing, tumult of thousands of species of microbes and arthropods reflecting a diversity of life–brix isn’t very impressive, even in October. Most grasses in the US sit at around a very modest 5%. 

And that means that the cattle who graze that grass don’t gain weight. Their coats won’t glimmer with that natural oily shine; they will be dull. They don’t have the ability to fight off disease. 

And tiny Kate doesn’t gnaw on it. Because it is all fiber. 

It took us 10 years to get there, but now, our grasses can carry the masses. It could be the roots of revolution: cattle production could fully shift to regenerated grasslands all across our country, and the verdant swards of waving-in-the-wind green could feed protein to a nation. 

The numbers work. I’ve done them. And the bison proved it. Our nation used to raise more bison that we currently do cattle. 

On just grass. That thrived on a living soil, not a mined and extracted from one.

Ask Kate. She knows the difference.

Happy Trails.