HMI’s Online Learning Series Getting Started Holistic Management® Grazing Planning course began in January 2019 with 44 participants from the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Thailand. This course focused on key grazing planning principles and practices. Professional Certified Educator, Ralph Tate, led participants through exercises where they experimented with critical grazing considerations, determining forage inventory, animal needs, and grazing and recovery periods. They finished off the module by putting all these calculations into a written grazing plan. Featured Participants:
"The Holistic Grazing Management Course with HMI has aided in creating a confident and solid foundation for planning an effective and stress-free grazing plan for my bison herd and ranch. The course provides easy step-by-step tools to build and maintain a grazing plan with effective long and short-term goals, element and environment considerations, personal schedule conflicts, drought & supplement planning, how to correctly measure rest variances within the same and different pastures, considerations of fence boundaries, and so on. I look forward to additional courses with HMI and their easy-to-use tools and training platform." Brad Anderson, Cape Town, South Africa
"We are on the brink of moving out of the city onto a farm where we want to establish a regenerative farm along with Holistic Management principles. This movement of Holistic Management is barely present in the state/province in which we live in South Africa. There are hardly any people engaging in this way of farming. So I don't have much of a network to lean on here in South Africa. So this course has been so valuable for me to be hearing in person from others who are experienced personally in these principles. I appreciated hearing Ralph talk through the numbers and formulas, I learn by examples, so all these numbers have really helped me understand the figuring and equations. I feel like this course has given me courage to implement this Holistic Management in a context that is a very brittle environment at the moment. So, although I haven't practically been able to implement much of the learning immediately onto a farm, I feel that in this key time of preparation, the content has been so valuable for me. As we look for land, I have been better equipped to consider what I need to be looking for in a farm that we can establish. I also have felt incredibly empowered to engage with others around the principles of holistic management. Being able to share and hopefully transform the way people think - especially around the potential for farming this way to turn the tide of ecological issues. We are living in a context where most people around us don't care where their food comes from, how it is produced or what impact that farming is having on our environment. I want to be a voice for change and a shift in our cultures thinking around these critical issues. This course has giving me concepts, language and information to engage with people around these issues."
94% of people were satisfied with this course!
Based on the survey responses, here are the changes that occurred: