DAIRY GRAZING APPRENTICESHIP LEADS PARTNERSHIP FOR CLIMATE-SMART COMMODITIES TO QUANTIFY AND MARKET THE BENEFITS OF MANAGED GRAZING DAIRY

Published: Jun 2024
By: Bridget O'Meara

Managed grazing dairy production is one of agriculture’s best kept secrets. In managed grazing systems, cows are rotated through paddocks of diverse perennial forages that are given a chance to rest and regrow. Managed grazing helps mitigate the impacts of climate change, protects natural resources, contributes to rural economies, and produces high-quality nutrient dense milk. Because this practice works with natural systems, it can also improve farm profitability and resilience by reducing costs and building long-term productive capacity. Despite managed grazing’s potential as a climate solution, the inability of the managed grazing dairy sector to scale has resulted in farms that are widely dispersed and largely overlooked by not only dairy industry but also government entities, impact investors, and emerging ecosystems service markets.

Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship (DGA) aims to change that through a new five-year $4.7 million USDA-NRCS Partnership for Climate Smart-Commodities entitled “Implementing Precision Ag Tech to Expand the Participation of Small Grazing Dairy Farms in Climate-Smart Commodities.” The project will measure, monitor, report, and verify (MMRV) the environmental and climate benefits of managed grazing and provide 30 farmers with $900,000 in direct payments as well as technical assistance and new business development opportunities. To assess the impact of these early adopters of managed grazing, the project will use farm histories, soil analysis, and modelling to develop a correlation of above ground biomass measured by PaddockTrac with below ground carbon storage and projected sequestration. Additional ecosystem services will be estimated for every acre in managed grazing. Each of the individual farms will have verification of their unique climate impact that can be traced through supply chains to consumer markets. The project also supports a multi-stakeholder marketing campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of managed grazing dairies.

About PaddockTrac

PaddockTrac is a precision technology that helps farmers improve their grazing management by providing access to accurate real-time data. The mobile application uses sonar to measure and store forage height 50 times per second along with GPS location on the user’s smartphone. The phone uploads data to a GIS-based website and then an online tool accurately assigns the data to an individual paddock. Once completed, a producer can login to see the Grazing Wedge showing forage yield in each paddock, which allows for proactive decision-making.

Image: a PaddockTrac sensor mounted to an ATV. Blue triangle simulates cone of influence for soundwaves sent to pasture canopy and recorded. Yellow sketching mimics data transmission by Bluetooth to phone mounted on handlebar. Top right is the user interface on the mobile phone app showing the stop button, GPS lat/long, and measurements that occur in real time. Bottom left is a validation map emailed by our server to producers after they upload data. It affirms that data was successfully uploaded and recorded. Bottom right is a grazing wedge output graph generated on our website after producers log in to their account and process the uploaded data from the phone. The grazing wedge figure ranks pastures from high to low forage yield availability. It directs producers to the proper grazing sequence in a forage system and allows for adaptive management to occur.

Project Partners

Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship (DGA) – Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship is an innovative 501c3 non-profit organization that partners with established grazing dairy farmers, universities, community-based organizations, and other stakeholders to deliver work-based training in managed-grazing dairy production. Currently, DGA has more than 200 approved training farms in 16 states. As lead on the project, DGA will manage partnerships, provide on-farm technical assistance to 30 participating farmers, and conduct stakeholder outreach.

University of Missouri (MU) – The University of Missouri developed PaddockTrac with support of a 2017 USDA-NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant and has since partnered with DGA to beta test the technology on managed grazing dairy farms. For this project, MU will oversee the on-farm deployment of PaddockTrac, calibrate sonar to diverse plants species used in three ecoregions, and export the data needed for correlation.

Dillon Analytics, LLC – Dr. Jasmine Dillon, President and Owner of Dillon Analytics, LLC, is a systems analyst who uses life cycle assessment and system dynamics modeling tools to help organizations tackle complex problems. She will also bring her scientific background in food systems with a specialty in livestock production to bear in careful interpretation of the data to correlate above ground biomass with carbon stores and project future sequestration.

Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) – The Institute of Food Technologists is an organization whose mission is to connect global food system communities to promote and advance the science of food and its application. For this project IFT will develop an EPCIS-based, interoperable, publicly available dairy traceability standard through an inclusive consensus-building process to enable actors across the supply chain to sell and buy climate-smart dairy products with integrity.

Stiel Ventures – Tera Johnson, the President of Stiel Ventures and the lead marketing consultant, successfully launched the first national brand of grazed whey protein, teraswhey (now Simply Tera’s). Steil Ventures is a business development consulting firm that specializes in working with innovative value-added farms and food brands. For this project, Stiel Ventures will contract with multiple marketing services providers that specialize in working with farms and food companies.

If you’re interested in learning more about this project, please contact Ashley Hughes at ashley@dga-national.org.