Ashley Pierce
Rensselaer County
Grazing season is right around the corner, are you and your animals ready? What are your goals for the upcoming year? Besides just the bottom line, many farmers have started to factor in quality time with family, personal time, and environmental concerns into their planning process. Wait a second, planning process? We are grazers, we don’t need to plan ahead, do we? Yes we do!
Planning ahead helps you to prepare for difficult grazing years and helps you to make smarter decisions. Think back to some of the extreme weather in recent years and you can see why we need to start challenging ourselves to be proactive. A grazing chart is one way you can start this process, a tool which many farmers have found to be very useful.
Here’s what folks said about learning the process of pre-planning their grazing season using a grazing chart: “This tool helps you to think along lines you traditionally haven’t, breaking through mental block[s] and view[ing] the grazing system from a different and fresh perspective. Planning with the chart gives you a picture of the grazing season to come and will serve as a tool to assess success and failures of the past grazing season. I love how it takes into account life and how it is vital to plan around those things that are important to our families. I believe this is a must have tool for anyone grazing cattle.”
Are there specific goals that you have in mind? For example, do you want to:
- Graze more animals?
- Use less stored feeds?
- Have time to take a vacation?
- Diversify your farm?
- Expand your farm’s land base?
Pre-planning in these scenarios will help to make these goals more attainable. Don’t worry if everything doesn’t go according to plan, things often don’t. The important point is that you are more aware of what you can do on your farm with the resources that you have. If you have been planning and recording events, you will be able to make decisions in a quicker and more logical way. If you have any questions about the planning process or would like a grazing chart (available for purchase for $5.00), contact Ashley at arp253@cornell.edu or (518) 272-4210.
Check out this 2-minute video from a recent meeting featuring The Grass Whisperer, Troy Bishopp, and his innovative grazing charts.
