A collaborative event between Small-Scale Meat Producers Association and FarmFolk CityFolk. This event consists of intensive rotational grazing techniques and cover cropping.

Join us for an evening about integrated beneficial management practices you can use on your farm. Cover cropping and rotational grazing can help to build soil, sequester carbon, improve pastures and animal health, increase crop yields and create a diversified ecosystem where plants and animals can thrive.

Cover cropping is a sustainable agricultural practice that involves planting crops specifically to improve soil health, increase climate adaptability and promote climate mitigation. Cover crops are grown primarily for the benefits they provide to the soil and the ecosystem and, when carefully chosen and managed, can be hugely beneficial to farmers. Benefits include protecting the soil from erosion, suppressing weeds, reducing soil compaction, increasing soil organic matter, improving soil structure, increasing soil water-holding capacity, and enhancing nutrient cycling. In addition, cover crops can provide a habitat for beneficial insects, such as pollinators and predators of pests.

Rotational grazing is a set of techniques used to control the time aspect of grazing that typically leads to overgrazing in a continuous grazing system. Livestock are moved into a defined area, typically called a paddock, where they have access to graze the plants in that area. They are then rotated to a new paddock while grazed plants have a chance to recover. The livestock are not moved back to that paddock again until the plants there have fully recovered.

We invite farmers to join us online, watch a virtual tour of Fresh Valley Farm and participate in a Q&A with our farm host, Steve Meggait, and Executive Director of the Small-Scale Meat Producers Association, Julia Smith. Julia and Steve are grazing mentors with the Farmers for Climate Solutions and Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association Advanced Grazing Systems mentorship program.

Register for free here.