“How to create a better grazing management plan.” This topic has headlined countless professional development sessions and articles since Billy Cook entered the industry fresh out of graduate school, ready to change the world.
More than 30 years later, the industry’s approach to grazing management hasn’t improved much, Cook notes. Now Enriched Ag’s vice president of producer relations, his career has primarily focused on forage-based beef cattle production which includes creating grazing management plans. These plans are often fixed, written documents that inevitably are read once and put on a shelf to collect dust.
“The static nature of which we’ve undertaken grazing management is a problem,” he says. “What we want to do is take the work out of grazing management planning, and put that information right in front of a producer with our insights tool so they have the current and dynamic information to make adaptive management decisions on the fly.”
And with Enriched Ag’s Insights tool, producers can do just that.
In a nutshell, Enriched Ag Insights is a versatile decision support tool for grazing management. The online platform provides continually updated information like:
• Days of grazing available by pasture
• Planned and suggested herd movement to next pasture
• Sorting animal units by class
• Forage utilization rate
• Pounds of forage produced
• Crucial proactive decision points based upon multi-year pasture level forage growth model
• Weekly updated current and future forage situation and how that impacts planned rest periods and effective recovery
Whereas static systems require land managers to calculate pasture sizes, grazable acres, grazing days, etc. by hand, this low-touch tool replaces that with readily available grazing insights.
“Our ability to bring data sources together and put it in a platform takes a lot of the workload and time requirement from grazing management, bringing an additional dimension of efficiency,” Cook says.
With Enriched Ag Insights, users can create a preliminary grazing schedule, and use it as a baseline as they adapt to changes throughout the production year. Additional software like Enriched Ag Vision provides ground-truth data in the form of imagery to make further improvements to the grazing insights with locally collected data.
“What you think you see and what you can represent with real data can be two different things,” Cook says. “We feel like this platform can become that tool that validates and verifies management practices. It’s an opportunity to prove to our consumer with data and imagery that we are responsible stewards.”
— The Enriched Ag Team