HMI’s Online Learning Series Getting Started Holistic Cropping Planning course ran from January to February 2017 with 41 participants from the United States, Australia, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, and Peru. This course focused on giving participants the tools to grow healthy crops, healthy soil, and healthy profits. In this course participants learned how to effectively manage their cropland and cropping practices to increase soil fertility and resilience as well as increase production and profitability from their cropping practices. They learned how to complete crop production planning all in the context of regenerative and conservation agriculture. This curriculum was developed with input from master farmers and educators and explains key cropping concepts such as no-till, cover cropping, cocktail seeding, mulching, intercropping, shelterbelts, perennial crops, and integrating livestock. This course provided numerous planning worksheets and templates as well examples of completed worksheets and a long list of multi-media resources for further study.
Featured Participant:
Amanda Kasparek
This course has impacted my life in a positive way by increasing my self-confidence in what I know about good farming practices and educating them on how to improve their own managing systems. I learned this through the discussion part of the course where a few students had some questions and I gave them some ideas and they said that they would pursue my suggestions. Being a recent college graduate and a young female, I feel apprehensive sometimes giving farmers advice because I’m afraid I may steer them in the wrong direction or appear incompetent. So this course has let me break out of my shell a bit and made me feel more confident in what I’m saying. This course has also given me some different ideas on how to manage farm land in a beneficial, cost-effective, non-traditional way that I believe many farmers around my area could benefit from like different planning strategies, cocktail cover crops, etc. So I wanted to say THANK YOU for helping me be a better employee by gaining more knowledge and raising my self-confidence.
Here’s the best things participant’s learned/experienced:
I love all the resources provided, especially the videos and webinar. I like the discussion component of the course.
“I have learned so much more about cropping, especially cover crops and their importance. I am eager to finalize the plans I began during the course.”
“I learned a great technique for preparing an annual plan. It is very easy to look at and see all sorts of information. I also learned a little bit more about some sustainable practices that I have been interested in.”
“I enjoyed it. The class was great and the software made for a great online classroom setting.”
“I learned the many steps in putting this all together into one crop plan and all the considerations that go along with it.”
“I thought it was informative and the subject matter interesting. I have had no other training about this before.”
“The most useful thing I learned was to use the forms that we filled in to complete the content was great and I will use many of them to formulate plans for clients and my own farm one day.”
“For newcomers it is a great platform to work from to plan out covers to cash crops.”
“This was all new to me. I appreciated the resources and the step by step progress of developing a holistic cropping plan.”
“The most useful thing I learned was creating strategies for farming that can help the environment and your wallet.”
“I think the tools have the power to be effective.”
“I think this is a great course. “
“The succession of worksheets, one building on the next was very useful. This class gave me a great process for developing soil and crop plans.”
Based on the survey responses, here are the changes that occurred:
Getting Started Holistic Cropping Planning Course Survey Results
Knowledge/Behavior and Confidence Increase | % Increase |
Soil fertility building principles and practices | 100% |
How to integrate livestock into cropping practices | 100% |
How to identify crop management issues and address them profitably | 95% |
Understanding how key practices like cover crops, polyseeding, permaculture, interplanting, and perennial crops can work together to create resilient and profitable landscapes. | 95% |
Create a crop plan that addresses both cash crops and ecosystem strategies | 95% |
Create a field map for ease of management | 94% |
Prioritize management decisions to integrate ecosystem strategies with cash crops | 93% |
Develop a crop sequence | 92% |
Learn how to implement crop plans and address crop management issues | 92% |
Learn how to integrate crop plan with financial plan | 92% |
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