49 Adaptive Grazing Masterclass with Allen Williams

As part of our adaptive grazing management series (if you haven’t listened to the podcasts with Justin Thompson and Candice Mizera, we highly recommend the listen, especially if you are in South Dakota and want to understand more about cool season invasive grasses) Joe Dickie and Buz Kloot sat down with Allen Williams who is an adaptive grazing management practitioner, consultant and former academic. Allen grew up and went to school in the south and after his PhD, continued for 15 years in academia. Around the year 2000, Allen left the safe environs of a tenure-track professorship to start on his own in regenerative farming and ranching consulting. Since then, Allen has consulted for regenerative agriculture all over the country and the world. After exploring Allen’s interesting background, we dive into some of the basics of adaptive grazing management principles and practices. Adaptive grazing is not about a formula or a prescription, but rather a practice that is profoundly dependent on observation and constant adjustment. Allen also does a great job of demonstrating why the time invested in daily observation is ultimately less labor intensive than the labor required to feed hay all winter long, for example. Allen walks us through what we need to observe in the field, and also some of the more recent developments in the relationships between healthy soils, healthy forage and of course the health of the animal as well. Another key set of thoughts that Allen walks us through are the three rules of adaptive stewardship, namely the rules of compounding, diversity and disruption. Allen’s explanation of these alone are worth the listen. In addition to the generalities, we bring some of the examples back to practical applications that may be found in South Dakota, including the grazing of annuals and applying adaptive stewardship to the controlling of cool season invasive species (Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome and crested wheatgrass). We hope you enjoy this podcast a much as we enjoyed talking to Allen! Notes: Fact Sheet that outlines three rules of adaptive stewardship along with the six soil health principles and the four ecosystem processes: https://understandingag.com/resources/fact-sheets/ Please search “Allen Williams Adaptive Grazing” for fact sheets, magazine articles journal articles, videos and more on Allen’s work. Take the soil health challenge: https://www.growingresiliencesd.com/challenge-gr