HMI’s Online Learning Series Getting Started Holistic Grazing Planning course began in March 2020 with 27 participants from the United States, Canada, Senegal, Germany and Spain. 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 grazing plan.
Featured Participant:
Amy Skezas - Pentaluma, California
"I am a smallholder who read Savory’s wonderful book and was inspired to consider how grazing could help us reach our land management goals. But it is all about the details and despite many attempts, from napkin scribbles to notebooks to calculators, I just could not figure out a grazing plan for our place. This course helped me get there step by step. The tech support and instruction were very helpful all along the way. I still have a lot to learn but feel more confident moving forward. I am in the zone and can fine tune and adjust from here. Many many thanks."
Getting Started Holistic Grazing Planning Survey Results:
The most useful things participants learned:
"There was loads of information in the youtube videos and readings, which were extremely valuable for me! Big up to Ralph for sharing this knowledge base. For me it was handy to follow the step by step approach to do all the calculations, measurements and estimates. But more Importantly it was valuable to understand the background, the how and why! Now I know how to plan and adapt.""How to plan other than a set number of days, the tools for estimating paddock quality and then schedule that based on recovery and grazing days is something I've always wanted to know but by looking at a grazing chart from On Pasture for example I had no clue on where to start and this has explained that.""I think I got a better picture of the differences between grazing choices made for a brittle vs. a non-brittle environment.""How to measure amount of forage in a paddock, how to calculate stock density and stock rate and their difference.""I had already participated in the class before, so this was just reinforcing all the principles""The steps to Holistic Planned Grazing and a lot of the broader calculations/theory it is based on.""Holistic grazing terms and calculations for ADA, Ads, Sau, recovery periods, size of paddocks.""I definitely found the assessments to be super helpful as it took all that I had learned in theory and forced me to put it into practice. Without the assessments the experience would have been helpful still, but probably would have remained as head knowledge rather than a tool I now feel I can use.""I think the grazing calculation worksheet that went step by step with calculating how much forage we have, how many animals can graze, and how many paddocks to set up was worth the entire class in itself."