The Kickapoo Grazing Initiative (KGI) is committed to promoting managed grazing and grass-based agriculture as one of the most important and economically viable landuse practices to protect the water quality and sustain the small farmers of the Kickapoo River Valley. The KGI has been supported by The Pasture Project of The Wallace Center of Winrock International for the past three years.
The KGI believes that the Kickapoo Valley is a model for this mission. A simple message: Farms that have healthy, managed pasture areas will increase organic matter in the soil and reduce runoff to our streams and river. At the same time, farmers and landowners can produce a value-added product that will sustain their farm and the local economy. The topography, market availability, interest in healthy food and sustaining small farms, and commitment to finding the practices that protect our river and its world class trout streams all contribute to the success of this project.
The Kickapoo Valley has one of the highest concentrations of organic farmers in the nation, has several grass-fed beef market alternatives including the Wisconsin Grass-fed Beef Coop, and local and federal commitment to cost-sharing assistance and programs such as the new NRCS Driftless Area Landscape Conservation Initiative.
In 2013, KGI produced a Managed Grazing of Grass-Fed Beef toolkit for farmers and landowners (Toolkit Introduction). Please contact us if you'd like to receive a copy and schedule a visit with one of our Grazing Specialists.
The KGI believes that the Kickapoo Valley is a model for this mission. A simple message: Farms that have healthy, managed pasture areas will increase organic matter in the soil and reduce runoff to our streams and river. At the same time, farmers and landowners can produce a value-added product that will sustain their farm and the local economy. The topography, market availability, interest in healthy food and sustaining small farms, and commitment to finding the practices that protect our river and its world class trout streams all contribute to the success of this project.
The Kickapoo Valley has one of the highest concentrations of organic farmers in the nation, has several grass-fed beef market alternatives including the Wisconsin Grass-fed Beef Coop, and local and federal commitment to cost-sharing assistance and programs such as the new NRCS Driftless Area Landscape Conservation Initiative.
In 2013, KGI produced a Managed Grazing of Grass-Fed Beef toolkit for farmers and landowners (Toolkit Introduction). Please contact us if you'd like to receive a copy and schedule a visit with one of our Grazing Specialists.
| toolkit_intro.pdf |
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
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Key External Partners and Funders for Kickapoo Grazing Initiative include:
The McKnight Foundation |
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