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:
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.