Foraging for Success

One of the challenges beef cattle producers face is deciding if they are raising cattle or forages.  On October 3, 2019 the Christian County Cooperative Extension Service hosted the Heart of America Grazing Conference.  The grazing conference was a collaboration between the Kentucky Forage and Grasslands Council (KFGC), university specialist, and the local extension service.   The mission of the conference was to encourage producers to not think of themselves as cattlemen, but as forage managers. 

“The keynote speaker, Jim Gerrish, is an independent grazing lands consultant providing services to farmers and ranchers on both private and public lands across five continents. With a BS in Agronomy from the University of Illinois and MS in Crop Ecology from University of Kentucky, he served 22 years of beef-forage systems research and outreach while on the faculty of the University of Missouri-Forage Systems Research Center (FSRC). His research encompassed many aspects of plant-soil-animal interactions and provided the foundation for many of the basic principles of Management-intensive Grazing. He was also a co-founder of the very popular 3-day grazing management workshop at FSRC. Aside from his monthly column in The Stockman Grass-Farmer magazine for over 12 years, Gerrish has authored two books on grazing and ranch management – “Management-intensive Grazing: The Grassroots of Grass Farming” published in 2004 and “Kick the Hay Habit: A Practical Guide to Year-Round Grazing” published in 2010. Today, he is an instructor in the University of Idaho’s Lost River Grazing Academy held twice annually near Salmon, ID. He typically speaks at 40 to 50 producer-oriented workshops, seminars, and field days around the US and Canada each year.”

The conference allowed 125 producers to take a look at their operations and find areas that they could improve their grazing system.   Of the attendees 90% learned of new cultivars that could fit into their operations to increase tons per acre and extend the grazing season.  The participants learned that by becoming better forage managers they could become better cattle producers, and that is foraging for success.