Seeing is Believing: Improving Grazing Management with Summer Forage Tours 

Chris Teutsch, Jimmy Henning, and Ray Smith, University of Kentucky 

Farmers tend to be experiential learners, seeing, touching, and doing enhances their understanding, retention, and adoption of improved grazing management practices.  For this reason, we initiated the Western Kentucky Summer Forage Tour series. Since its inception in 2018, we have held tours in Ballard, Ohio, and Calloway counties.   These tours have features farms in various stages of their grazing journey.  In 2018, we featured a grass finished beef operation in Ballard County that has been grazing with minimal commercial inputs for more than three decades.  In 2019, the summer tour featured a brand-new farm that was just getting started.  In 2020, an integrated forage, livestock, and tobacco farm in Calloway County was featured.   At each location the UK Forages Extension and Master Grazer program worked with local agents to organize the tour and establish demonstrations.  The demonstrations have included traditional and novel summer annual forages, weed control, fencing, and grazing management.  More than 450 producers from Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas, and Colorado have attended these programs.