197 Enabling Farmers to Be More Efficient Although Organic Valley dairies were already using rotational grazing, this program automates a precision pasture management approach that ensures cows will always be feeding on the best available forage with greater efficiency. A critical component of the pasture reports is a “grazing wedge” that shows the estimated biomass availability for each paddock. Prior to this program, farmers who wanted this information had to estimate biomass with more manual methods. One approach involves walking paddocks with a plate meter to measure the height of the grass, recording figures in a notebook, and calculating grass cover alongside the amount of time the cows were left to forage. Such processes are difficult to repeat at regular intervals, so recordkeeping and implementation were inconsistent. Today’s pasture report automates this manual process, and the algorithms used to estimate biomass continue to improve through regular ground-truthing. “Many farmers have their standard rotation and adjust based on what they’re seeing, but it can be difficult and time consuming to visually cover all those acres,” said Phil Marty, GIS administrator at Organic Valley. Now farmers complement conventional wisdom with insights from imagery to make datadriven decisions that have produced notable increases in pasture utilization. The benefit of a well-informed rotational grazing system is often an increase in harvest efficiency, or the percentage of the forage that goes into the belly of the cow. And this efficiency can be realized without overgrazing. Overgrazing can negatively impact pastures, water retention, and ecosystem health. On the pastures of an Organic Valley family farm, as many as 200 different types of plants grow, including clover, trefoil, brome, ryegrass, orchard grass, and timothy grass. As Organic Valley points out, it’s designed to be a salad bar for cows, ensuring proper nutrition and leading to the best quality of milk. With careful rotation, a critical balance of grasses and legumes is maintained, and cow manure is spread naturally, leading to healthy soil and a healthier herd. With current pasture reports, biomass and what cows have eaten automatically calculate from satellite measurements, allowing farmers to balance supply and demand with less time and effort. The report gives farmers timely information for important management decisions, such as how fast or slow to rotate the cows or whether to cut grass and make hay. Weekly Pasture Reports Made Possible with Imagery and GIS Organic Valley first tapped Esri partner Planet in 2020 to see if its satellites could be used to monitor the health of each paddock. Paddock growth provides a constantly moving target, particularly in Wisconsin near the company’s headquarters where sunny days mixed with generous rains Sustainability The variability of growth across pasture and rangeland systems can be easily visible during certain seasons, such as in this image, but much harder when growth is greatest. Image courtesy of Organic Valley.
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