Grazing Network Thriving in Northwest Wisconsin

The latest news from the Grassland 2.0 team on grassland-based agriculture and sustainable agriculture.

Grazing Network Thriving in Northwest Wisconsin

When Paul Daigle, an organizer in Grassland 2.0’s Cloverbelt Learning Hub and longtime grazing consultant, pulled into the parking lot at Shell Lake Community Center, it was overflowing. And he was 20 minutes early. Daigle drove to the northwest reaches of the state to attend the annual Fall Grazing Conference put on by Northwest Wisconsin […]

Thinking as a Community

Grassland 2.0’s Summer Meeting Recap By Greta Landis “Until we build visions and models for the future, we won’t know where we are going, or how to chart our course to get there,” said Randy Jackson, one of the principal investigators of Grassland 2.0. A barn full of 50 farmers, researchers, and conservation and policy […]

The Spring Digital Dialogue Series wraps up with four great presentations

And that is a wrap! This semester’s Digital Dialogue Series brought together over 700 participants to learn about the levers of change needed to bring about a transformational change to our agricultural system. This semester’s series featured four great speakers who discussed policy, populations dynamics and it’s impact on agriculture, watershed adaptive management, examples of innovative partnerships looking to create change, and the interplay of environmental laws and agriculture.

Cattle and Brookies: Making Modern Agriculture and Trout Habitat in Wisconsin

Some 10,000 years ago, glaciers from the last Ice Age were retreating from the Upper Midwest. While much of Wisconsin was scraped into the rolling landscape that is representative of much of the state, a roughly 24,000 square mile piece of land at the intersection of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, was left untouched by continental glaciers. Broad ridge tops with shallow soil, river-formed valleys, and steep, craggy ravines make the Driftless area a geological anomaly. For millennia, this was a fertile Brook Trout habitat but in an evolutionary blink of an eye, these waters became threatened by modern agriculture. Across this region of sandstone and dolomitic limestone bedrock, there is more than 6,000 miles of trout water, with about 1300 miles of public access. But the health of these waters continue to compete with agriculture to survive. 

New podcast episode describes the relationship between perennial ag and water quality

Every couple of weeks, Grassland 2.0 folks get together on Zoom for an informal, project-wide lab meeting. Each meeting features a short presentation, followed by a question-and-answer session, and a group discussion of how the work presented relates to the project as a whole. Presenters have included grazing specialists, grass-fed industry and marketing professionals, and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines.