08/14/07 Grazing academy

The Nancy Cummings Center north of Salmon is the site for the Lost Rivers Grazing Academy. University of Idaho extension's Jim Hawkins is one of the practicing grazers who teach livestock operators with irrigated pastures how to increase productivity and forage while decreasing costs. HAWKINS "Any ground, whether its farm ground or they have crop ground, pasture ground, we can show them how they can essentially double their production on the same amount of acreage. Student-teacher ratio we try to keep that fairly low. That's why our enrollment is limited. We want to have the students feel like they got hands on experience and they also have someone there to kind of help them walk through the whole deal." The grazing school is held September 11th through the 14th and gives workshop attendees plenty of time to apply classroom concepts into pasture improvement. HAWKINS "Spend about four hours inside in the morning and then another four hours out on the ground learning about what we talked about that morning." The workshop's pre-registration deadline is Sept. 4. Voice of Idaho Agriculture Bill Scott