MINNEAPOLIS — The Midwest Perennial Forage Working Group (MPFWG) was awarded a SARE Research & Education grant for the proposed project, “Match Made in Heaven: Livestock + Crops.” The project will survey producers in six Midwestern states about the opportunities and barriers related to integration or re-integration of livestock and crop production with the goal of identifying strategies to capture the environmental, economic, and social benefits of diverse crop rotations and integrated systems.
The three year project will create opportunities for farmers to speak about their interests, challenges, and needs, and allow the crop and livestock organizations that they engage with to adapt their programming to meet current and future interests and needs.
Project activities will be guided by a working advisory team of representatives from mainstream crop and livestock organizations, sustainable agriculture-focused organizations, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) farmers’ organizations across the six states involved: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. This team will meet online regularly throughout the project and will be tasked with guiding the development, advertising, and distribution of survey instruments to collect input from farmers. The grant will provide per-meeting honoraria to farmer-members of the advisory team and to representatives of up to 20 organizations to support their participation.
The grant will fund a complementary activity to explore the economics of re-integrating crops and livestock production. Project team members will develop in-depth financial case studies of up to 8 farmers practicing crop and livestock integration across the Midwest. One output of this work will be an integrated crop and livestock enterprise budget format suitable for use by farmers pursuing integrated practices.
The MPFWG and other core project team members will be working to stand up this project in the last two months of 2021. If you are interested in participating in the working advisory group, or would like more detailed information about the project, or a presentation to a farmer organization, please contact:
Laura Paine, GrassWorks, lkpaine@gmail.com
Or
Jane Jewett, Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, jewet006@umn.edu
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–Green Lands Blue Waters