Gonçalo Pereira Miguel — Zero hay costs and a 700-hectare Montado managed with precision grazing at 24

Gonçalo Pereira Miguel is 24 years old and the first person in three generations of his family to return to their 700-hectare Montado farm in Portugal’s Alentejo. The farm had been degraded by decades of continuous grazing, treated as an inheritance rather than a business. In 2023, a severe drought made the damage impossible to ignore. Two years after introducing 85 cows and a precision rotational grazing system, the results are striking: hay costs that once consumed half of a farm’s operatin...