Planning

The committees responsible for deciding how the budget is divided to assist farmers and ranchers are meeting now and they’re wondering if you really need on farm/ranch visits or personal assistance from NRCS staffs. What do you think?

We’d like to meet up with all our readers and go for a nice pasture walk to talk about grazing management. (Here’s the link to last week’s video.) Unfortunately we’re all spread across the planet, and given everyone’s location and work schedule, it’s hard to coordinate. Instead, we’ll do it by video. Last week we […]

You’re a grazier, so you know some of these things, but it never hurts to take another look at the basics, especially if you’re thinking of making a change to your management.

Where are my grasses’ growing points?  What is “boot stage” and what happens to growing points that I should know?  What happens to my pastures if I don’t graze them until they’ve finished producing seed? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand what your grasses are going through as they work to […]

Contributor Troy Bishopp has been tracking how his spring grazing has gone so far so that you can see his adaptive grazing management in progress and how he uses his grazing chart to best advantage. Troy is a great photographer, and pictures are worth a thousand words, so this story has lots of them. Click on them when you’d like to see them larger and enjoy!

It’s the time of year when we’re all chomping at the bit to head out to green pasture.  We can see the grass coming up, we’re tired of feeding hay and our stock is tired of eating it.  We know that hitting our pastures too soon could come back to bite us later and might […]

One of the toughest grazing management periods for livestock producers is spring green-up. It offers all kinds of challenging variables. It is hard to imagine a more optimistic feeling when everything is turning green after a long dreary winter of brown. The buds of the trees are starting to form, flocks of robins grace our […]

Greg Judy is well known for his ability to graze profitably while managing to improve the soil and his pastures. In this article he describes how he has continued to graze through two years of drought while others in his area are looking at dried out, desert-like pastures.

If it’s just a dry spell, or a real drought, you may need to adjust your stocking rate in your pastures. A plan on paper will help you think ahead, be proactive and make better decisions.

The National Weather Service is trying to help us manage our livestock and pastures by issuing drought forecasts for the United States.  This map can help you as you plan where, when and how many animals to graze, and where other forage might be available.  Most of the drought challenges are now rooted in the western […]

These grazing charts were developed as part of a project I led called “Utilizing Holistic Planned Grazing as a Regenerative Engine for Sustainable Agriculture.” Thanks to the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education for funding this project! We created these grazing charts for use on different size operations, with different numbers of paddocks.  We added […]