the magazine that is by graziers, for graziers
By Janet McNally
Recently I heard a fellow grazier advocating that we should be grazing the stems of pasture forages.
His reasoning is that with the leaves gone, the stems pull energy from the roots. With no photosynthesis from the leaves, the plant cannot replace that energy. So the plant is better off with the stems gone. He admitted he was in the minority with that opinion.
Continue reading “Why you should avoid grazing coarse stems”
All of it is anecdotal
By Allen Williams
The British statistician George E. P. Box stated that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
This has become an oft-quoted statement in scientific circles. Box was referring to the fact that in science there is a growing trend to develop theoretical models with the purpose of predicting some type of behavior or outcome based on data assumptions used in the model.
While no model can predict the exact outcome of any singular event, models can be useful if the assumptions are good and the output is close enough.
Having been a scientist and a farmer for more than 30 years now, I often hear people talk about “anecdotal” research or data. Their point is that if the research was not peer-reviewed and published, it has no value. This is particularly insinuated with observational data.
Continue reading “Taking research with a grain of salt”
By Allen Williams
By the time you read this we will be fully into summer 2020, and full bore into the grazing season. Many of us had a cool spring season, but who knows what’s to come?
Here are my “Top 10 Tips” for grazing success, no matter what the weather throws at us. The first two offer advice for spring planning and grazing, so save those for next year’s planning.
Continue reading “Ten tips for summer grazing success”
By Allen Williams
Consumers are being bombarded with ads for various forms of what are being boosted as “clean proteins”, but what I call “fake meat”.
It’s pretty much impossible not to see, hear or read about fake meats. There is much publicity about these plant-based proteins and their supposed benefits for human health and animal welfare, the environment and climate change.
Continue reading “Telling the real story about fake meats”By John Arbuckle
Grazing multiple species provides many benefits, not the least of which is enterprise stacking that allows each acre to create more than one saleable product in the same growing season.
Our topic here is how to make multi-species grazing regenerative in the biological sense. We custom graze replacement heifers in front of our pigs, with 37 heifers and slightly more than 100 finisher pigs moving in a leader-follow pattern.
Continue reading “Regenerating soils by grazing cattle and pigs”
by Allen Williams
When you ask American farmers what they are doing on their farms, they will often tell you they are “feeding the world”.
This is stated with considerable pride. We feel we are doing the world a huge favor through the sacrifices we make as farmers. We are continuously told that by some not-too-distant date there will be 10 billion mouths to feed, so we have to ramp up production even more. Continue reading “The fallacy of ‘feeding the world’”