Two Lost Rivers Grazing Academy

Ranchers are you looking to enhance your grazing-management skills and improve your forage and livestock production? Well one of the upcoming workshops with the Two Lost Rivers Grazing Academy in Salmon, Idaho, might just be what you are searching for.

University of Idaho Butte County Extension Educator Chad Cheyney has been involved in these grazing academy sessions since they began in 1985. He says that the intensive workshop can really change the way ranchers look at grass or forage.

Cheyney: “Well we teach operators that their business is capturing the free solar energy from the sun in forages and effectively converting it to livestock products. We teach them there are principles of grass growth and grazing management that they can apply in their specific situations to capture more of this free solar energy and that is what they really have to sell. So they are in the energy business just like Exxon or BP. We give them tools to manage grazing with stocking rates, stock density, estimating standing forage and residuals. Then we let them practice with real pastures and live cattle to prove to themselves that they can really manage these things.”

Participants practice with infrastructure tools like high tensile fencing, cell and paddock design, portable fencing and water development and then determine what tools will work best for their individual circumstances.

The two grazing academies will be held in Salmon, Idaho on June 11-14 and September 9 to 12.

For more information contact: Charles Cheyney at ccheyney@uidaho.edu or (208)-527-8587 or Scott Jensen at (208) 459-6003 or scottj@uidaho.edu.