HMI’s Online Learning Series Getting Started Holistic Grazing Planning course began in March 2017 with 20 participants from the United States, Canada, Finland, Great Britain and China. This course focused on the key grazing planning principles and practices. Participants practiced the tools to hone in on such as critical grazing considerations, determining forage inventory, animal needs, and grazing and recovery periods before putting all these calculations into a written grazing plan. Featured Participant:
“I completely enjoyed the course and the manner in which Ralph taught it - it encouraged me to think about things to which I did not give enough consideration, and how to see them from a different angle. The comprehensive nature of the software program to provoke thought and better analysis gave me reason to buy it and I am looking forward to using it to plan my future work with Sheep & Cattle. I will be starting out with raw acreage, so this model will be helpful to me as I start my process. I recommend this class to all folks - experienced or just dabbling with the idea of livestock. It is rigorous and disciplined and as I heard from other folks in the course who were experienced livestock farmers, rigor and discipline are 2 aspects of farming of which you can never have too much!” Here’s the best things participant’s learned/experienced:
Based on the survey responses, here are the changes that occurred: