Will Fulwider 0:01
So, we use sometimes we start with a joke. Does anyone have a good joke apropos to the current topic? It doesn’t. I mean, it can be about farming in general. But it’s, it’s nice when it’s apropos to the topic.

Jason Cavadini 0:15
I mean, if Michael came without a joke, I’m gonna be very disappointed.

Michael Geissinger 0:22
And waiting to see if Mike has a good one. Good ones from farmers lately.

Mike Redetzke 0:27
I’m coming up with nothing.

Will Fulwider 0:30
Not a farming joke in sight with that. Welcome to field notes. I’m just kidding. No one has a joke.

Jason Cavadini 0:39
I’m not a very funny guy. So

Will Fulwider 0:46
I knew that about you. But now it’s really coming into focus.

Michael Geissinger 0:50
I’ve got one that’s stupid. It’s not really about far. I mean, it kind of is.

Will Fulwider 0:55
Okay, well, we can just start not have a joke. Okay, Michael, do you want to do the introduction? And I can do the first question. I can

Michael Geissinger 1:04
introduce. Yeah. Okay. Fine.

Welcome to field notes. Today we are talking grazing dairy heifers in Wisconsin with Jason Cavadini, who is the state grazing specialist for Wisconsin with UW Extension, and Mike Redetzke, a farmer by Colby Wisconsin running a custom Dairy Heifer raising and multi faceted operation. Jason, Mike, great to have you guys on looking forward to the conversation. And without further ado, maybe we’ll just kind of jump right in thing, jump right into things here. So there’s kind of a lot of talk about grazing covered a few different times on the podcast. But you really don’t have to look very far in Wisconsin to see that there’s not a whole lot of grazing happening on dairy operations. And so maybe I’ll volley that to Jason to start out. So why is that the case?

Jason Cavadini 2:07
That is a very good question. Something that we’ve been focusing more on lately, as we’ve been conducting grazing programming around the state and talking to dairy farmers about how grazing can fit into the operation, we’ve kind of had to pump the brakes a little bit on that, because we we’ve been successful in drumming up interest around grazing dairy heifers, but we haven’t been as successful, convincing current dairy farmers that it’s a practice that they should consider. So we’ve kind of a little bit gone back to the beginning and started asking questions, why aren’t more people choosing grazing and trying to identify what some of those reasons are, and which ones are consistent from farm to farm. And it’s a really complicated thing. And I think we’ll probably, maybe unearth, some more of those in this conversation. But a couple of the biggest reasons are, number one, that the dairy industry as a whole, for several decades now really became ultra focused on efficiency, especially feeding efficiency. And with that focus, it grazing just fell out of favor over time. And really what grazing is, is working with biological systems kind of in their natural state and figuring out how to manage them the way they are. And, as we all know, in agriculture, and a biological, biological system, there’s just so many things that are out of our control. And so it’s hard to really ultra focus on efficiency when there’s all these things that are out of your control. So people have just gone away from grazing and move toward building confinement operations, where there’s just a lot more things in our control. So that’s really what’s at the heart of it. But as we’ve talked more about grazing, what we’ve realized one of the greatest barriers to adoption, that’s the term we use for basically, that’s the fancy way of saying why people don’t choose grazing is because they primarily don’t understand the kind of grazing that we’re talking about. So when we talk about really well managed grazing, there’s a lot of people who, what they picture in their mind is not that it’s some other previous experience they had with it, what their neighbor does a poor example of it somewhere down the road, or the lot that they had behind their barn as a kid, something like that. And so a lot of people have an idea of what grazing is that doesn’t really match the kind of grazing we’re talking about.

Michael Geissinger 5:01
Yeah, that’s great. I think that does a great job like capturing what I see and what a lot of people see when they’re going around the state for programming and things like that. So we also have on the episode today with us, Mike. So Hi, Mike, welcome. Maybe if you just want to start, like, introduce yourself and your farm a little bit more, and then maybe just discuss you integrate grazing quite a bit on your farm, right. So you could just discuss why you choose to do that.

Mike Redetzke 5:29
Yeah, sure. I’m a Mike Redetzke I custom raise dairy heifers year round. We are in western Marathon County, Wisconsin, near Colby. We got a capacity for about 200 head of dairy heifers. We get them right off of milk, weaned calves and we raise them out until they’re springing heifers. So just just prior to calving. And yeah, like I said, year round, we’re we’re raising for conventional dairies. So they are calving year round. They’re not seasonally calving. So that brings a couple of challenges to grazing that we have had to navigate. But we also do some direct market beef, I got about 12 cows, so far have been able to sell all of that direct to market mostly by word of mouth. We do have a Facebook page, Peaceful Creek Acres is our farm name. We do pasture raised poultry, pastured eggs. We’re gonna get into some pastured pork this year. So just a little dabbling into everything. Now the question of why do I choose to graze that really has the answer to that has to two answers to that question in my book. The first is really just personal conviction. I feel that very deeply about conserving the land that we’ve been given so that it’s here for future generations taking good care of it. And managed grazing is the gold standard as far as conservation is concerned. The second answer to that question on my farm is completely economic. I’m a real numbers nerd. I live in spreadsheets, I love them I track everything has to do with money on my farm to try and make a profit so it it it just makes sense. And I I did not grow up on a grazing farm. I’ve been farming all of my life except for three months. For three months, I took a job on an over the road stainless steel welding crew and I I hated it. My my brother jokes that farming is an incurable disease. And well, I’ve got it. Welded for three months, got back into farming. And my first exposure, I guess, to managed grazing and the only experience that I had with it when I started farming on my own was three days of doing relief chores for my brother in law who is a longtime grazier for like 10 to 15 years, milks, cows raises heifers, you know, grass based grazing dairy farm. And just being that I’m a number nut and I saw the animals out, you know, harvesting to feed themselves like it, it just makes sense. You’re these are all of the, the passes, if you will, that the heifers are doing themselves. They’re cutting the hay, chopping the hay, hauling the hay home, putting it in the bag, unloading it out of the bag with the skid steer loaded into the TMR mixer to feed it to them, then they eat it. They poop it out. You take the skid steer again and you push that manure into the manure pit. And then you pay the custom guy to come and pump the manure pit out like you cut all of that out just by putting the animals out on the grass and they do all of that themselves. I think that about covers it.

Will Fulwider 9:02
But yeah, that’s pretty convincing argument to me. That’s a lot of steps that you that you’re skipping for sure. And you know, you’re a numbers guy in it, you know, immediately makes me think of the fact that raising dairy heifers is one of the highest costs that dairy production has in Wisconsin, because they’re not giving you anything back in that moment. You know, it’s the future of your dairy production. But at that moment, they’re not making you any money. And especially from kind of the feed aspect of it the high cost of that feed. And so maybe this is more of a question you for Jason initially, because with your statewide perspectives, how are farms in Wisconsin adapting to this high cost of feed in this high cost of raising dairy heifers in the moment? And like, is there is this the opportunity because of this high cost to integrate grazing as a as a solution.

Jason Cavadini 9:51
So the last time that we really took a deep dive into what farmers are spending to raise a dairy heifer back in 2017, it was like the average in the state was like $2.55 per head per day it was costing to raise a dairy heifer. Well, it’s only, it hasn’t only gone up since then it’s skyrocketed since then, and it hasn’t really slowed down. And so last year, I was shocked to hear there were farmers paying $3.15 per head per day. And now people would be happy to pay that because it’s continued going up since then. And I think what you’ll hear from Mike is, this is no different than the conversation about the price of food in the grocery store, like we’re always appalled when it goes up. But then really, when you like, dig into it, you find out it’s probably just becoming more close to what it should be. And I think that’s what you’ll find if you if you really allow Mike to nerd out on his economic values. And he tells you like, why he charges what he does like that. That’s just the cost of raising these animals. So we know that the cost of raising dairy heifers is continuing to go higher and higher. There’s many things playing into that now. There’s the fact that there’s like a shortage of dairy heifers, that’s even contributing to this as well. But the greatest portion of that cost of raising a dairy so so just to take one quick step back, raising dairy heifers is probably one of the top two or three costs for any dairy farm outside of labor. Of dairy heifers, the greatest portion of that cost is feed. So like 55 to 57% of that costs. And so if you look at this dairy industry, that’s really been hyper focused on efficiency for years, they’ve pretty much trimmed as much fat, if you will, from their operation as they can, like, there’s just not a lot of other opportunities for them to improve that profit margin. And dairy heifers might be the one remaining, like glaring opportunity, if they could, and that’s why we talked so much about like, kick those animals outside and that that’s not a good way to say it, because that sounds very much like it’s an afterthought, like just kick them outside and see how they do but take those animals outside for six months and reduce that cost of feed when you have the opportunity to and that may be one of the greatest costs to improve profit margin on a dairy farm.

Will Fulwider 12:40
And these, a lot of these dairies, especially the larger dairies, you know, they’re sending them out west, which is, typically it’s been the cheap way to go. And I mean, you know, this is not my specialty, but I know that those costs are rising, you know, how does how do those costs compared to kind of, you know, what Mike is doing and raising his dairy heifers out on grass for so much of the season versus, you know, all of the costs of shipping all the way out there and feed them out there and then bring them back?

Jason Cavadini 13:09
Well, I’m gonna let Mike chime in on that more than me. But the thing I’ll say, from my perspective is, even if the cost is equal, if Mike raises heifers for the same, that I would have to pay, if I sent them out west, there’s still reason to consider that because they’re raised here, the if you just look at the conditions that they’re raised on, and compare those Western, I mean, most of the time, it’s going to be like a dry lot or something like that. So the farmers are happy that those animals are off concrete for a while, but they’re not on a well managed pasture. And it’s also becoming more expensive for them to feed them out west because of the ongoing environmental conditions there. They’re in a weather trend that’s not really favorable for growing good forages. And normally, the cost for having animals raised out west also does not include the cost of trucking, which is a significant cost as well. And then the last thing is, a lot of farmers as we’ve had these conversations do place a value on being able to physically see those heifers. Sometimes, like when you just put them on a truck and they disappear to Nebraska until the day they come back. You’re putting a lot of faith in those growers out there without ever being able to lay your eyes on it to see how it’s going. So, Mike, why don’t you elaborate on that maybe?

Mike Redetzke 14:47
Yeah, I’ll chime in a little. I guess I’m gonna cite there’s a local farmer here that Jason and I both know pretty well that has his heifers raised out west and what he pays per head per day is less than what I’m charging. However, Jason mentioned trucking, from what he tells us that has went just nuts in the last few years. So if you add the cost of trucking in, you know, basically average it out with your per head per day rate, then he’s a fair bit over what I’m charging. And he’s having trouble even finding trucks to put his animals on. So you have to figure that trucking two ways into the picture. If you don’t, the feedlots out west are beating me if you do, and beating them, that’s, that’s really the, the factor the distance to the market, if you will, in that

Will Fulwider 15:39
And, I think that’s a good way of looking at it is because we need to capture all of the costs associated with certain operations in order to really truly compare them, you know, if we’re only capturing the cost of feed for a confinement operation, and not the cost of the building, the cost of the manure hauling all these other associated costs that you don’t have when you’re out grazing, to the same extent, at least, that we’re not doing a true comparison. And we’re not really dig into the, to the financials of it to see which, which one do you end out on top of. And so that trucking aspect, adding that and making sure that you’re really, truly copy capturing your costs are pretty dang important.

Jason Cavadini 16:17
Well, and yes, like to add that, when all we do is talk about grazing dairy heifers as a cost savings opportunity, then we fall that the conversation falls a little bit short. Because you know, there’s a lot more to it than that, as we’ve talked, as we’ve had conversations with nutritionists, and dairy farmers, we’ve learned that longevity is a value that really wasn’t as much on my radar before these conversations, as it is now like these farmers, one of the issues as the cull rate and just how fast those animals are turning over. And so there’s a value for longevity. So and, and there’s a lot of other things as well. But my point is, is the cost savings for a farmer to consider putting heifers on pasture for a part of the year, that’s a real conversation, but it’s not the only conversation. And so, if, if a farmer is able to find if a dairy farmer finds a custom heifer raiser in the neighborhood who’s grazing, and there’s no cost difference there, I think there’s still reasons to, for that farmer to consider doing it. And that’s, you know, I don’t even we don’t even have enough time to even go into all that data. But we have a growing body of data supporting raising dairy heifers on pasture and how well those animals do once they hit the milking herd. So there’s value there as well.

Mike Redetzke 17:57
You know, like I said, I’m raising for two conventional dairies. So that’s, that was a big plus for them. When I mentioned grazing, they, they had some concerns for performance. So I, I’ve done a lot of data collection, as far as you know, tracking rate of gains to make sure we’re doing what we need to do hitting the performance standards that they have set out for me what what they expect of their heifers. And it’s there, they’re pretty high like the the growth recommendations for Holstein heifer are 1.8 to two pounds per head per day. And they’re bringing me a calf that’s off milk at two months old at about 200 pounds, and they want her bread at 13 months to 13 and a half months old at 850. So I’ve only got 11 months to put that 650 pounds on her I gotta get 1.97 Like, top top of the growth recommendations for that animal. And we are able to do that in our managed grazing system with our we do a little supplementation in the younger animals to hit those growth goals. The bred heifers put them out on grass, they do great. And like, you know, the biggest the biggest thing these farms were excited about was those health benefits. Like what Jason was saying there. Once they leave my farm, they’re going back into both farms have robotic milking facilities. They’re both conventional, they will be on concrete the rest of their lives. So we, you know, we don’t have any hoof rot problems when we’re outside, which comes from you know, lesions on their feet gets infected. No problems with that when we’re on grass. The biggest thing that I see is traction related issues, just animals on concrete, you know, they’ll slip they’ll fall, most of them their, their heifers, their kids, you know, they can handle a lot more than we can, but still, sometimes they’ll pull a muscle, tear a ligament or something and it’s there. There’s no traction related issues when we’re outside. And another big thing was corkscrewing how the front feet, they get that from the push at the headlocks to reach the feed their their front toe was will kind of start growing and curling together, they call it corkscrewing. And when the toes get long like that, their feet naturally roll back, you know, like you’re walking on your ankles because their toes are too long. And when that starts to happen, it actually changes the bone structure in their ankle and in their leg and there’s no reversing that. So if you can reduce that, that’s another key to longevity, you know, hoof health in a conventional setup is hate, you have to have that if you have a feet a cow that doesn’t have good feet, she’s worthless. So if you have a heifer that’s corkscrewed, and our front legs are screwed up before she even starts milking, that’s, you know, that’s a big deal to reduce that to the guys that I work with.

Michael Geissinger 20:46
Yeah, definitely appreciate that conversation on like performance concerns in that aspect, because that is something that I’ve seen come up before to be started introducing a little bit and I want to drill down and do it a little bit more. So you, you’re working right now, with a couple of more conventional dairy producers, it sounds like to help raise their heifers for them. And also want to just add in really quick here, as an aside, we’re talking about all these benefits, like performance and cost savings and things like that. But I do want to jump back quick to what Mike had talked about the conservation benefit of grazing and like increasing grazing acres and things like that, because it was like an asset there too. So, like in your situation, you know, how do people get started grazing heifers with someone like you? Or, you know, what would be some steps for a farm to start grazing heifers like, on their own farm? Maybe we can just start diving into that a little bit like what are some practical steps or like helpful tips for people that would consider getting started into this?

Mike Redetzke 21:56
I think the easiest place to start is going to be with a group of pregnant heifers. Like I said, they do awesome on grass, and nothing else, it’s, they’re going to be fairly forgiving, if you’re not managing your pastures, right. You know, after you get a heifer pregnant, provided, she’s decided she needs to be when she gets bred, they kind of just, I don’t want to say coasting, that’s not really the right word. But you’re you don’t really have to maximize those gains, like you do to get them to breeding age, it’s there, it’s just a lot easier to take care of, they’re bigger, they can eat more, you know, dry matter intake is up so they can eat enough grass to get what they need. Start there, for sure. And then just tech support is going to be big, you know, get a depending on where you’re at, that might look a little different here in Marathon County, we’ve got awesome resources for graziers, we have a county grazing specialist, I guess that works for Marathon County, she’s I work with her quite often, we are expanding our fence and doing that with her in the planning phases and stuff, you know, surrounding yourself with people like that, or it may be NRCS in your county, but just get someone that can be out there, help you get started, show you what you need to do if you’ve never done it before. And it’s Yeah, start with a group of bred heifers and you’ll be fine. I

Will Fulwider 23:19
I think that’s great advice. And one thing that I’ve heard from, you know, folks, especially younger people that maybe aren’t from that area, where they’re trying to set up a grazing operation, they see, you know, dairy heifers as a potential way to go is like, kind of establishing that relationship with a dairy and maybe convincing is not the right word to use. But how do you go about working with a dairy to be like, you know, grazing is an option. It’s what I think we should do. And, you know, how do you kind of manage that relationship to allow you to do what you want to do, which is graze dairy heifers,

Jason Cavadini 23:56
The most important thing you said there is relationship. And I think that’s one point that we can’t emphasize enough is you this resource or whatever you want to call it, these, these animals are like the most critical part of these operations. And so we have to understand that this isn’t just a simple like plug and play type of thing. We can’t just like have a conversation with a farmer for the first time and expect that farmer to send us some of their most prized possessions and for us to you know them to completely trust that we’re going to take care of them and everything’s going to come out okay, like there’s a lot of conversations that need to be had first and and maybe even before the conversation turns to grazing dairy heifers. It needs to just be building a relationship and trust and somehow proving to that farmer that you know, how to do this. And I’ve done a little bit of grazing dairy heifers in the past on my operation, I can tell you that it took a lot of conversations to even get to that point with the farmer to build up trust, to show that I know a little bit about something than to have conversations with that farmers nutritionist, or there’s just a lot of layers to it. So it isn’t easy. But really, building any enterprise on any agricultural operation isn’t easy, you have to come to a point where you’re determined to make this work. And then you do what it takes. And the first step in that is building the relationship with the farmer. And then the other thing Mike said that I just hands down can’t emphasize enough is the technical support. grazing is unlike a lot of other agricultural practices, like you just can’t open up a cookbook and find the recipe and make it work. There’s so much nuance to it. And if you look at the pockets of Wisconsin, that have the most successful grazing, it’s very closely correlated to where the best technical support exists. And wherever there’s good support, there’s more successful grazing. And so that’s going to be a major component of it as well.

Mike Redetzke 26:22
Yeah, I would, I would add to that, and speak to the dairy farmers. And that is just, you know, think about how you’re running your current operation. Now, what do you do with your nutritionist, he’s probably out on the farm a couple of times a month talking over what you need to do, what changes you need to make what concerns you have the same with your agronomist, he’s probably out in the spring talking about what seeds you need to plant and in the summer scouting fields, and we’ve got weeds, what do we do here? How do we manage this situation, it’s, it’s no different with grazing, there are people out there to do exactly the same thing as your agronomist, your nutritionist, your vet, like it’s no farming is really a team sport, and just having someone on the team to, you know, to walk with you through that is, is really important. And I want to add, like what Jason was saying, with the, with the relationships, you know, if if you were a guy wanting to do this custom, and just trying to convince a farmer to let you graze his heifers, just, you know, laying out, like I said, those performance standards that this is what that farmer expects of you, you as the custom, your service provider, whatever you want to call yourself, you have to be able to gather data to make sure that you’re meeting those standards and be transparent with that which in my case, all of my personal cattle records or whatever is all on a Google spreadsheet. And it’s shared to my farmers, they can look at it as much or as little as they want. You know what that animal weighed when it got here, I waited at this age, and it was this weight. And this was our rate of gain at it. And we did this and that and the other thing to it when we vaccinated and when they were bred and, you know, just being very transparent with all of that. And at the same time. And I know this is I don’t know, if it’s a pill, though it’s hard to swallow is the right term. But you as the custom service provider, have to be able to assume some risk, if you say you’re going to meet these standards, and you don’t there needs to be a plan there. You know, if you’re going to take this group of heifers for the summer, and you’re going to put this much weight on it and you didn’t even get the ball in the ballpark, you need to be on the hook a little bit. And it’s as a farmer myself when someone else is willing to assume some risk and some responsibility that really goes a long ways because it usually the farmer is at the bottom of the totem pole there all of the risk gets kicked down and kicked down and the farmer carries most of it in most situations. So that’s if you’re confident yourself that you can do what you say you’re going to do, and you have the people around you to make that happen. I don’t see any reason that that shouldn’t be in the agreement that you would have with the farmer that if you don’t meet his performance standards, granted, as long as they’re reasonable standards, if he wants you to put three pounds today on his dairy heifers, that that’s not going to work. But you know, it’s I think that would go a long ways.

Jason Cavadini 29:29
That’s where I think this all comes back down to where we started the conversation about people’s understanding of what we’re talking about. When we say grazing. We’re talking about well managed grazing. It’s different than a lot of what you see out there. When you see a very well managed grazing operation, it stands out to you as being exceptional. And that’s really what we’re talking about. So really what the starting point for a lot of that says is learning how to manage grazing well how to manage that forage well. And just all the nuance of rotational grazing and and how to do it at a high level. And then there was one other thought I had. And this is a little bit of a pivot. But Mike, when you were talking about like, a starting point with bred heifers, so I just wanted to mention one thing, like, we have to acknowledge the things that are difficult about this as well. And one thing that I’ve learned from experience that I took for granted at first was I thought you could just take animals, you know, we think, well, they’re they’re ruminant animals, they were made to graze, so let’s just throw them outside, and they’re going to do awesome. Well, that’s not a hard and fast rule. The smaller the heifer is, the more attention you have to pay to transitioning them over to pasture if they weren’t started on pasture. So if they’re an animal that’s in a free stall, and they’ve been on a mixed ration, and you’re gonna send them out to pasture, the second week of May, you need to do some things to transition them over from TMR to pasture. Now, it’s not hard. But it’s just something that if you totally ignore it, they may fall apart for a while. So that’s something to think about, the larger the animal is, the more forgiving they are, I would say if they’re bred heifers, you might not have to do anything to transition them over. Then the other thing is, is these animals haven’t been bred for grazing, for a long time, they’ve been bred for being under a roof standing on concrete. And so the other part of it is, is they actually need to learn how to graze, they have to learn how the system works, they have to learn that that wire hurts if they touch it, they have to learn that they can’t just run wherever they darn well, please. So you have to be intentional about training them to the system. And some of them, it takes them a while to even learn how to graze efficiently. And it always works better if there’s a couple animals in the group that have done it before they show everyone else the ropes. So just a few other things as an aside, but

Mike Redetzke 32:25
Yeah, that’s for sure, when you first put a group out in the spring, there’s a handful of them, always, that’ll stand in the corner of the fence crying, wanting you to come and feed them when there’s all kinds of green grass there. And some of them, it takes three days, but they do all figure it out. And you’ve got a really good point about the picture if the handle, the more forgiving it is. And what I’ll add to that is just how they behave inside of a fence. You know, think about heifers as children. If you’d put a seven year old out on a playground, they’re going to run around and be crazy and have all the energy in the world. And if you take a teenager and do the same thing, no, they’re a little more mild temper. It’s not quite an old cow. But there’s a big difference between how a bred heifer behaves inside of a fence and how, you know, say an eight month old heifer behaves and inside of a fence, the big ones are way more forgiving, at least for the first few weeks until they had they all fake, they do all figure it out eventually, just the bigger ones figure it out faster.

Will Fulwider 33:37
Those are all great points. And I think I mean, I think we’ve covered a lot here. And one thing that I kind of want to wrap things up with is Mike, I want you to like really bring us back into your personal experience as like when you’re first starting out with this, like what was the thing that you did? You know, you share these Google sheets with have all of the figures of all the data that you have with the farmers, which I think is excellent, so that they can really see how things are going. I think that that transparency of data is awesome. But what was it that you know, cemented? I think the farmers trust in you to be able to do what you’re doing? Did you start off with a beef herd and you brought them out to their operation? And we’re like, here’s what I’m doing. Here’s the grazing, here’s how I can raise your heifers or what was it that was that a kind of initial, you know, way of being able to persuade them.

Mike Redetzke 34:26
Now we kind of stumbled our way into heifer raising. Actually, when we first bought the farm the plan was to finish out Holstein steers. So we bought a bunch of cattle and had that and my first custom heifers and client was my brother, which probably helps. So, you know, family, you just have more trust in them than anyone else. And then after that, yeah, we just bring the farmer out, show them all around. All of our buildings, our whole setup, this is what we do. This is how we do it. This is the performance that we’re getting, and that seemed to be sufficient for them. But

Michael Geissinger 35:05
Great. Well, I think we got some great stuff here. Before we kind of wrap things up and put a big bow on it. Do you guys have any last things to add? or thoughts that are still lingering that? We want to include now.

Jason Cavadini 35:20
No, the only other thing I had written down that I wanted to share at some point, and I’ll make it super quick. But you, you touched on it earlier, Michael, just talking about the environmental considerations for this whole conversation. And we didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about that. But there’s this program called Smartscape. You can look it up it and the university. And it just, it’s kind of it’s a modeling program that shows you how different management practices have an impact on the land. So in Marathon County, here, there’s a pilot watershed project. It’s the Fenwood Creek watershed. And they’re really focused on reducing the phosphorus load and the Fenwood Creek by and they have a really high goal for cutting it and more than half. And if you were on the Smartscape program, and look at all the land that’s being managed as agricultural land, there’s no way to achieve those phosphorus goals that have been set. With just no till and cover crops, there has to be something a lot more drastic, a lot more of a drastic change to the landscape. Well, it happens to be that we still have some of the highest currents and concentrations of dairy farms in the world in that area. So it just makes sense to whatever our solution for the that phosphorus issue is going to be that livestock agriculture is used to address it. And so manage grazing well-managed grazing seems to be the solution that just keeps rising to the top for how to solve that issue. So.

Will Fulwider 37:09
Awesome. Well, Jason and Mike, we really appreciate you chatting with us today.

Jason Cavadini 37:15
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mike Redetzke 37:18
It was fun.

Will Fulwider 37:25
Thanks for listening. This has been field notes from UW Madison extension. My name is Will Fulwider, regional crops educator for Dane and Dodge counties. And I was joined by my co host, Michael Geissinger outreach specialist in Northwest Wisconsin with the nutrient and pest management program at UW Madison. A big thank you to Joe Ryan for creating our theme music and to Abby Wilkymacky for a logo. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard today, or about your farming practices in general, reach out to the extension agriculture educators serving your region