Grassland 2.0 accomplishments

(updated 16 Dec 2025)

Our research findings, fully or partially supported by Grassland 2.0 and published in >60 peer-reviewed articles, include:

1. Exploration of the actual carrying capacity for dairy livestock in Wisconsin and the ramifications for milk production of a grass-only Wisconsin dairy sector – America’s Dairy Grassland (Jackson 2024). Sufficient land exists in the US to meet current demand for beef with well-managed grassland grazing (Jackson 2022) (CSA News Outstanding ‘Perspective’ Paper (2022) and national finalist 2022 Frontiers Planet Prize).
2. Mid-sized grass-fed Wisconsin dairies can be 4x more profitable compared to confinement operations of similar size (Winsten 2024). Results build on 14-years of empirical work led by Tom Kriegl summarized in Hoard’s Dairyman piece calling for real innovation in dairy (Wiedenfeld et al. 2022).
3. US EPA-mandated water quality goals in southern Wisconsin’s Yahara River watershed will only be met if a) livestock numbers are halved, b) half the ag land is restored to perennial grassland, and c) these changes are in place for 50 years (Campbell et al. 2022). Grazing perennial grassland results in very little P and N loss and is minimized with adaptive rotational grazing (Young et al. 2023, Jackson 2020). Agro-IBIS model demonstrated N and P retention in perennial grassland (Wepking et al. 2022) and the model was improved with addition of cover crop (Orfanou et al. 2025) and rotational grazing (Mackin et al. 2025) modules.
4. Soil C is likely to increase or be maintained in perennial grasslands, but lost from row crops on Mollisols of southern Wisconsin (Dietz et al. 2024, Becker et al. 2022, Sanford et al. 2022), the mechanisms for this are related to lack of soil disturbance (Augarten et al. 2023) and particular grassland soil microbial communities (Rui et al. 2022, Xuefeng et al. 2020), but partly driven by the changing climate. Demonstrated that soil C-change accounting must be done over time, across full soil depth, and accounting for equivalent soil mass for C markets to be effective (Raffeld et al. 2024, von Haden et al. 2024).
5. Developed the Collaborative Landscape Design framework and process (Strauser et al. 2025) as an applied approach to what we have called Agroecological Innovation (Gratton et al. 2024)–the intersection of technological, ecological, and social innovation–as a means for achieving our vision of regenerative agriculture (Reynolds et al. 2021)
6. Showed declines in the relative frequency of pollinators strongly associated with reduction in diversity of crops grown in the landscape (Hemberger et al. 2021). Grazed pastures host to almost half of Wisconsin butterfly taxa and rotationally grazed pastures had greater butterfly abundance than pastures that were continuously grazed (Harnsberger et al. submitted).
7. Articulated local, state, and federal needs for policies that incentivize grassland agriculture (Rissman et al. 2023) and produced white paper calling for and describing so-called Just Transitions (Lowe & Fochesatto 2022) in North Central US agriculture indicating needs and practices that can help promote social justice.

Our outreach efforts to help shape the narrative about ‘what’s possible’ in upper Midwest agriculture included:

On the education front, Grassland 2.0 had immense influence on people and programs including:

1. Partial or full support and training of 16 graduate students (5 MS, 11 PhD) and 4 postdocs.
2. Development of decision support tools, models that allow users to explore alternative configurations of landscapes (SmartScape^TM), farmscapes (GrazeScape^TM), and farm enterprise calculators (Heifer Compass, Beef Compass, Pasture Project’s Grass-fed Beef Calculator).
3. A new BS in Agroecology that called for development of new and re-shaping of existing courses: Agroecology 103-An Introduction to the Ecology of Food & Agriculture, Agroecology 303-Agroecological Systems, Agroecology 503-Agroecology Capstone, and Agroecology 370-Grassland Ecology.
4. Because the Wisconsin Idea is to extend the walls of the university to the boundaries of the state, we collaborated with USDA NRCS, UW-Madison Extension, Wisconsin Land+Water, and GrassWorks. to build the Grassland 2.0 Academy providing grazing planning certification to >120 technical service providers working in USDA NRCS, county agencies, and NGOs and supporting ~90 new grazing plans in Wisconsin in the past 2 years.