Every time you visit On Pasture, you see our tagline, “Translating research and experience into practices you can use NOW!” I thought it was a pretty good tagline when I wrote it because it describes the kinds of articles you’ll find here. But what it doesn’t tell you is WHY that’s important. The why is the reason I get up every morning to put together another issue. It’s what has motivated me for the last three decades:
I want you to make money.
Yes, I want the other things a good grazier can provide: good food, healthy soil, clean water, wildlife habitat, beautiful open spaces and prosperous rural communities. But if you don’t make money, you won’t be around to provide all those things.
There are also things I don’t want. I don’t want you to work so hard. I don’t want you to spend your time and money on practices and products that don’t work. So, I spend time reading and learning and sharing what works and doesn’t, so you can keep your money in your pocket and spend your time on what’s most important to you.
I’ve been working on this for about three decades now – long before I started On Pasture. When I worked for the Bureau of Land Management, it was what I was thinking about when I promoted public lands grazing and worked with grazing permittees. It’s why I figured out how to teach cows to eat weeds. After all, if livestock eat the weeds, you don’t have to spray them and that reduces your workload, saves you money, AND you have about 43% more forage so you can raise more animals and make more money. And today, helping you be more successful and prosperous is at the root of every article I publish at On Pasture.
While I can provide you with all kinds of practices that can help, developing a profitable business requires something more than knowing how to grow grass and raise livestock. It requires knowing how to run a business that does those things. To help you with that, I’m bringing in a specialist – Dave Pratt and his latest book. Turnaround: A Rancher’s Story, will give you new ways to think and the tools you need to create a prosperous business.
I truly believe we all do better when we all do better. This is just my small way of making things better for us all.
Thanks for reading,
Kathy
