About Southeast Grazing Exchange
The Southeast Grazing Exchange website is a new tool to connect producers and landowners throughout the Southeastern States and make the cooperation accessible. The mission is to promote the use of integrated crop-livestock systems through the partnership among land owners, row crop producers, and livestock producers.
Integrating crop and livestock systems seems to be the best strategy to overcome the fallow season, improving nutrient cycling, soil fertility, and leading to greater crop production with reduced costs. Livestock systems might also benefit because of higher forage quality and the potential to achieve greater gains when grazing cool-season cover crops. Finally, nitrate leaching is reduced when cattle graze cover crops, compared to fallow.
The Southeast Grazing Exchange, funded by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS), Office of Agricultural Water Policy, is free to users and seeks registrants with all livestock and field types, from Florida as well as neighboring Alabama and Georgia. Account creators are asked a few details about their herd or field – size, grazing season and fencing and water availability, for example – and then a pin appears on the service’s interactive online map. Selecting a pin reveals those details, with contact information protected via a messaging tool hosted on the platform.
