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PFI is Hiring a Livestock Coordinator

April 11th, 2012 @ 5:10 pm by Tamsyn

PFI Grazing Coordinator Kevin Dietzel is headed for greener pastures — his new grass-based dairy Lost Lake Farm, and a job closer to home. We’ll miss your expertise, warm personality and tasty in-house cheese sampling Kevin!

To fill that vacancy, we are hiring a new Livestock Coordinator. Check out the job description below and spread the word!

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POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT — LIVESTOCK COORDINATOR

Practical Farmers of Iowa is seeking a bright, motivated, and personable individual to join our staff as Livestock Coordinator. The selected person will work with Practical Farmers’ wonderful group of farmers who have beef, pork, poultry, sheep, goat and other livestock operations.

Please submit your resume, cover letter, and references by *April 30*. Both email and snail mail applications accepted.

Sample duties for this position include:

  • Organize and staff PFI’s grazing cluster events;
  • Arrange for dynamite farmer-led livestock programming at PFI conferences and workshops;
  • Lead PFI’s livestock-related on-farm research and demonstration projects, including facilitating project selection, working one on one with participating farmers, and writing research reports;
  • Serve as liaison for use of PFI’s portable scales for livestock producers;
  • Provide staff support where needed.

Minimum qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree in animal agriculture preferred;
  • Experience working with livestock;
  • Experience organizing events;
  • Ability to work well with others;
  • Ability to meet deadlines;
  • Ability to manage several tasks at once;
  • A commitment to sustainable farming;
  • Excellent communication skills; this person needs to be outgoing, willing to pick up the phone, initiate contact with farmers, and have good interview skills.

Some weekend and evening work and travel are required. Candidate must have a valid driver’s license, be able to do light lifting, and lead pasture walks and field days.

PFI offers a flexible, fast-paced work environment with opportunities for independent initiative and professional development. The position will be located at our office in Ames.

This is a full-time position at a family-friendly employer. The position includes full health care benefits, a flex plan, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, and generous Paid Time Off. Employer contribution to a 401k retirement plan is offered after one year of employment. Salary is competitive, based on experience and qualifications.

Please apply with resume, cover letter and references to:

Teresa Opheim, Executive Director
Practical Farmers of Iowa
600 Fifth Street, Suite 100
Ames, IA  50010

teresa@practicalfarmers.org

Please direct phone inquiries to Teresa at (515) 232-5661.

Cover Crops are really growing!

March 28th, 2012 @ 2:28 pm by Sarah

Cover crops are growing! If you’ve seen some bright green fields around the countryside then you are probably seeing some winter rye or winter wheat cover crops that farmers planted last fall. This picture was taken near Malcom, IA March 27, 2012. 45 farmers, NRCS and FSA personal joined the Iowa Learning Farms and PFI staff at the farm of Joe Kriegel to learn about cover crops. Joe spoke about seeding cover crops following corn silage harvest. He was able to get good growth from tillage radish and sweet clover last fall when drilled after corn silage harvest. Joe also plans to harvest the winter rye for grain this summer and then have seed for his own fields and fields he custom drills. He is planning to grow tillage radish after rye harvest and then plant corn in 2013 without any nitrogen. Joe invited everyone back to his farm to see how things turn out.

 

COVER CROP FIELD DAYS Will continue Thursday March, 28 in Calumet; Tuesday April 3 at Nashua; Wednesday April 4 at Crawfordsville and Thursday April 5 at Lewis. Please contact the PFI office if you have more questions: 515-232-5661

Pasture walk at Garth Lloyd’s

November 23rd, 2011 @ 5:12 pm by Kevin

Fourteen hardy folks gathered on Garth Lloyd’s farm in Scotland County, Missouri to go for a stroll and look at grass and cattle.

Garth showed us around his pastures and shared some of his experiences. Garth is a cooperative seedstock producer for Pharo Cattle Company in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. He practices high-density grazing on his farm, meaning he moves his herd to a new paddock 4-6 times a day during the growing season. This results in stock densities of 300,00-500,000 lbs. of live animals per acre, and rest periods around 150 days.

Garth uses temporary fences for paddock divisions, and uses a piece of PVC with a notch at one end to lift up the fence for a temporary “gate” (as shown in the photo above).

It is amazing how much green grass is still in these pastures, especially considering that they received almost no moisture from the end of June until the week before the above photo was taken. Most of the stockpiled grass is tall fescue, which stockpiles well but is not so great in the heat of the summer. Due to the drought, Garth has less stockpile available to him this year than normal. He will need to decide whether to buy hay or sell animals, as he does not make any hay himself.

When grazing stockpiled grass, Garth moves twice a day, saying that high stock density can cause damage when the pastures are not actively growing.

Garth’s only culling criteria for cows are whether they wean a calf or not. Using that criteria and by selecting smaller-frame bulls, his average cow size has decreased drastically over the last nine years, with most of his cows weighing around 1,000 pounds now. Many of his remaining older cows that were black and weighed closer to 1200 pounds aborted calves during the heat this summer, and have therefore been culled.

Garth also pointed out places where he has healed gullies through his management, and other places where new gullies have formed. He says water is a constant battle with his hilly farm.

A humbling lesson about bloat

October 4th, 2011 @ 10:24 am by Kevin

This past weekend I lost a heifer to bloat. My first reaction was to keep this to myself, as this was a painful and embarrassing experience, especially considering that my professional title is “Grazing Coordinator” and I sometimes even get called “Grazing Specialist”. But after further reflection, I decided to share my experiences, in the hope that someone else can learn from my bad experience, or that I might get some good advice from others.

I only have seven animals, all heifers of various breeds and crosses, what I hope will be the start of my milking herd. I keep these animals on a pasture at my in-laws’ farm, about a fifteen-minute drive from our house.

Svanhild and Kevin this September

The heifer who died was named Svanhild. I bought her, along with her half sister Gunnhild last year when they were about six months old. I am currently in the process of having them bred; Svanhild was due to come into heat this coming Friday. She was raised on a nurse cow, so she was always on the wild side, but had just learned to enjoy some scratching in the last few weeks.

I started grazing them on alfalfa last Monday. I knew this was potentially risky, but I had grazed the same field of alfalfa last year, and I was easing them into it slowly. I wanted to graze the alfalfa now while it is still good quality forage, saving my remaining grass pastures for grazing later in the fall or hopefully even into winter. I started by giving them a strip that was only about 20% alfalfa, since a lot of it drowned out in 2008. They still had access to a portion of the perennial grass pasture as well. I gave them a new strip of the alfalfa every day, with the percentage of alfalfa in the strips gradually increasing. By Friday, the new strip they got was probably over 90% alfalfa (Actually, on Friday they got out of the fence minutes before I arrived in the morning, and I fenced around them so they were no longer “out”. Polywire and step-in posts are great!).

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Frantzen field day held; discussion of succession, energy, and purchasing a farm acreage

September 26th, 2011 @ 2:10 pm by Luke

What does a beginning farmer need to do to get started with a small farm acreage? If you ask James Frantzen, of rural NE Iowa, near Elma, he may respond, “Plenty,” with a straight face and a serious gaze for a moment. Until a smile quickly breaks across his face vibrating from a hearty laugh from deep inside. “Enough to keep you out of trouble, anyways.”

James looked for years for a home nearby where his folks farm. In 2009, he purchased a property three miles up the road.”When I bought this place, it was a mess,” remembers James. “the previous owners kept nearly every kind of livestock except maybe a black bear.”

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Mob Grazing Tour

September 2nd, 2011 @ 1:36 pm by Kevin

On August 9-11, PFI partnered with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Iowa Forage and Grassland Council to put on five different pasture walks in southeast Iowa, featuring graziers who have been implementing high-density, or “mob” grazing.

Stop 1: Kraig Van Hulzen, Rose Hill

Kraig’s father Ken explained what kind of materials they use to build fence.

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