Agriculture Education
Agriculture Extension Agent: Fara Currim
Here at Warm Springs, fewer than 500 acres are utilized for cropping systems.
Instead of "Agriculture", the more appropriate term here may
be "Forage-Livestock Systems". Our goal is to provide practical
information that farmers or ranchers can use to develop new or improve
established forage-livestock systems.
A forage-livestock system is the combination of forages, livestock,
management, and marketing that a manager uses to meet personal and business
goals. An effective system optimizes the strengths and minimizes the
weaknesses of the social, economic, and ecological environment in which
it functions.
A forage-livestock system should be viewed in the three dimensions
of components, production centers, and sustainability.
The first view is of the four components on which a forage-livestock
system is built.
Goals
Resources
Market
Each farmer/rancher has a unique vision of what it wants to achieve
and goals for achieving that vision. Each individual and each land holding
provide a unique set of social, economic, and ecological resources that
can be used in developing a system. It is the management of these resources
to provide a product for a specific market that constitutes a forage-livestock
system. An understanding of the interplay of these components is needed
in developing an improved system.
A second view of forage-livestock systems is of the four production
centers.
Forage harvesting
Animal production
Marketing
Agriculture is one of the few industries that create new wealth. This
is done by plants capturing the energy in sunlight and converting it
into a product of use to people. Forages are the predominant crop on
40 percent of the land surface of the United States. They are used for
livestock feeds and wildlife habitat. Forages can be harvested and sold
to others. However, producers often use animals to add value to forage
crops. How efficiently the system converts solar energy to forage, utilizes
the forage and converts it to an animal product, and how well the animal
product is marketed, determine the profitability of the system.
A third view of a forage-livestock system is that of it being a sustainable
agricultural system.
Social
Economic
Ecological
An individual farming or ranching system should be sustainable socially,
economically, and ecologically at the field and farm scale. When taken
as a whole the forage-livestock systems of a community should be sustainable
on the same three points at various regional scales. What a forage-livestock
system is not -- Remember that a grazing system is not a forage-livestock
system. Fencing is only part of a grazing system; a grazing system is
part of a 12-month forage program; and a 12-month forage program is
part of a forage-livestock system.
Thanks to Ed Rayburn, West Virginia University Extension Forage Agronomist
for the use of this philosophy.
Agricultural Web sties:
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