05/02/07 Multi-Species Grazing Conference next week

Washington Ag May 2, 2007 Washington State University Extension's multi-species grazing conference is coming up next Tuesday May 8th at WSU Tri-Cities in Richland along with a related field day at the Barker Ranch near Richland on May 9th. Don Nelson with WSU's Department of Animal Sciences says the conference will cover a wide range of topics. Nelson: "Grazing and browsing principles using goats, how to plan for creating a landscape, things like fencing, water, minerals, use of guard dogs. One of the target species we had at the Barker Ranch was Russian olive and the graduate student that worked on that will report on that during the conference and will also be at the field day. Another area of great interest is goat marketing. In other words how do you market the goats. Even if you are using them as a tool to create a landscape through grazing you still have the offspring and that is a potential revenue source and there are some skills there that are necessary at being successful at doing that." The three-year study at the Barker Ranch has been funded by a grant from USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program. If you haven't done so, Nelson recommends pre-registering through the WSU Animal Science website. I'm Bob Hoff. You can pre-register or register at the conference site for one or both events. Fees vary. Visit http://www.ansci.wsu.edu/ and click on the link for the Multi-Species Grazing Conference and Field Day under the events heading.