When Joe Tomandl and his wife Christy learned they were going to be parents, they wanted to raise their family on a dairy farm, just as they had grown up. In 1998, they bought land near Joe’s home, on the rolling hills and green pastures of north-central Wisconsin near Medford. Today, Joe helps other farmers realize their dreams and works to build the dairy grazing industry for generations to come.

Joe leads Dairy Grazing Alliance (DGA), the nation’s first formal agricultural apprenticeship to be recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor. With a $4.7-million Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant from the USDA, DGA is now teaching farmers how to measure the positive impacts of dairy grazing, so that future dairy graziers will be able to aid their bottom line — and save time — by implementing these practices. 

Dairy grazing is hard work. Besides the unrelenting schedule of twice-a-day milking, farmers move cows to new pastures up to three times per day. This brief, intensive grazing mimics wild grazing, and gives the grass rich fertilizer for regrowth while the cows move on to greener pastures.  

“Whenever this grass is growing, we’re sending your cows out there to do the harvest of it, and bringing milk back to the parlor, and leaving the manure out in the field,” Joe said. “So it’s cutting all the mechanical pieces out of it.”

Dairy cows that aren’t grazed are kept in barns, with feed hauled into the barn and manure hauled out. These are both time-consuming processes that require expensive equipment.

Joe wants dairy graziers to be able to make money off the benefits of their farming practices for people and the environment. “We’re losing farmers at an incredibly rapid pace,” he said. “Ten years ago, we decided to help fix this problem  by having more farms on the ground, just by training the next generation.”

Today’s dairy markets encourage consolidation – leaving small graziers with a difficult path to grocery shelves. “It’s harder and harder to find markets,” Joe said. “However, if we could find the true value of managed grazing, and that would be the environmental value, and the value to rural communities, and if we can harness that value through more dollars in those farmers’ pockets, we could keep more of these farms on the ground.”

DGA’s grant from USDA will provide direct payments and technical assistance to dairy graziers, teaching them to use the University of Missouri’s PaddockTrac, a portable sonar that can attach to an ATV and take 50 measurements of grass length per second. Data is uploaded to Grazing Wedge, where farmers can check growth rates, quality and other metrics. “As a farmer, we can manage our farms better,” Joe said.

With that data, “we can start to really identify and monetize the real value of managed grazing in the market system,” Joe explained. “It’s the first shot at correlating that above-ground biomass with the carbon sequestered and retained underground, to start basically building out those formulas for the value of managed grazing.”

Managed grazing has lots of environmental benefits: soil retention, phosphorus retention, pollinator and other wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration. Pasture doesn’t leach nitrogen like tilled soil treated with fertilizer. “It’s got a real value that’s not noticed anywhere in the market,” Joe said.

In the future, this work could be used to explain the environmental value of managed grazing to consumers, allowing dairy graziers to charge more for their milk.

Joe and Christy worked together as ag teachers before starting their farm “on a shoestring.” Grazing allowed them to put their money into cows and fencing instead of equipment and buildings.

It also aligns with the values they want to pass on to their children. “It’s a real biological integration of livestock and plants, and weather systems, and it’s always moving and changing,” Joe said. “And you’re right out there. You’re walking the fields. It’s a more intimate relationship with the land and the cattle, and the whole family, too.”