My grazing posse is tired of writing about fences – where to put them, how to set them up. They don’t want to write about how grass grows, and even soil health is a tired topic.
Why? Because it doesn’t seem to be leading to the success they’d like to see in their community of graziers. After decades of covering these topics, they’ve independently all come to the same conclusion at the same time:
Graziers without goals that include profit and their own health and well-being are neither successful nor sustainable.
My grazing posse is focused on making a positive difference in the lives of the people they work and write for. It’s why I started On Pasture. I saw all this great information out there that needed to be translated into practices you could use to create successful, profitable operations. And for almost nine years now, I’ve sent out about 8,500 words a week to do just that. That’s about 3.8 million words in about 3,000 articles – the equivalent of 54 self-help books. If you count the rest of my career, I’ve been doing this for graziers and my community since 1991. It’s taken me 30 years to figure it out, but it turns out that knowing how to do something doesn’t really matter if you don’t know what to do to get where you want to be.
It doesn’t matter if you know how to put up a fence, move cows, grow great forage and improve soil health if you don’t know where you are and where you want to be. Knowing how to grow the best forage for your operation is only a means to an end, and you need to know what that end is and how it provides you with what you really want out of life and your business. If you’re running yourself ragged, or if you’re not making money, you are not sustainable or regenerative.
If we want to make a difference, we have to do something different.
We’ll continue to put out great how-to information because that’s important. But we’re also going to be focusing on helping you do that hardest of things – develop goals that ensure a happy, healthy life, and a grazing operation that gets you there. Our goal: by the time spring grazing arrives, you’ll have a start on your vision and you’ll have some ideas about options for implementing it and how a grazing chart can help you stay on track.
We’ll start with this Month’s Grazier’s Focus with Troy Bishopp sharing his example of a grazing vision, what it takes to make good decisions, and why he quit doing some things.
Thanks for reading!
Kathy
