Graze Better, Get Paid
At Kateri, two things matter most to us. Helping producers graze better, and ensuring producers get paid for grazing better. It’s just that simple.
America’s producers know that their profitability is determined by many factors, key among them are stockmanship and grazing management. We recognize that every grazing region presents unique challenges and opportunities. Wherever you are, we provide investment and technology to increase your ability to profit from grazing, adapt your grazing in real time, and improve your grazing over time.
Though we can’t measure all the countless ecosystem benefits that well-functioning grass and range land provide, we do our best to measure what counts in current ecosystem service marketplaces. We also return any and all insightful information back to our partners as a management tool for their grazing operation. All in all, we make it easy for producers to get paid for the important work only they – and their livestock - can do.
Briefly, It’s worth noting some of the measurable improvements that this effort can inform on grass and rangeland.
Optimize stocking rates
Improve range and pasture condition
Improve grazing profitability
Temper extreme weather (fires and floods)
Produce nutrient dense food with few inputs
Create species diversity for hunting and other outdoor recreation
Here are the ingredients required to graze better and get paid.
Ingredient 1: Stockmanship
Stockmanship refers to the skilled and humane handling of livestock, encompassing the knowledge, skills, and practices used to safely and effectively manage cattle, and other grazing animals. It involves understanding animal behaviour, movement patterns, and stress responses to promote both animal welfare and handler safety.
Kateri is looking for producers who understand stockmanship to participate in our program. We supplement this age old art with hardware that can provide our ranchers with resources to help enhance and expand on their stockmanship. This includes 1-on-1 in-person advisory with grazing experts. We also deploy technologies like virtual fencing and animal GPS tracking that can help you unlock insights about your livestocks behavior including forage utilization, watering frequencies, and mating. That’s because virtual fencing works best when combined with your existing expertise. It can further the reach of the intermediate or advanced grazer, and provide valuable real time information to those getting started with grazing. Over time, we’ll help producers invest in ever better systems to influence animal behavior and use them to build more value, together.
We even occasionally host events where people can get together and learn together about virtual fencing and other animal tracking technologies!
Ingredient 2: Good Grazing management:
Grazing management is fundamentally about maintaining healthy pastures while meeting animal nutritional needs. Good grazing above all else requires context and close monitoring. Combining observation with knowledge of plant communities, appropriate rest periods, water placement, and stocking rates can take your property to the next level. Most importantly, our grazing advisors want to give you the knowledge to expand on your own practices and refine your grazing plans. Good grazing starts with a plan, but great grazing is about adapting that plan to the context and conditions.
Do you have a forage analysis on deck? A plant species inventory? Good. If not, we can help you get one as part of our program.
The foundation of good grazing is matching animal numbers to available forage. This means calculating how many animals your land can sustainably support based on factors like rainfall, soil type, and plant species and ecological site potential. A common rule of thumb is to only graze a portion of desired forages, leaving the rest for plant recovery and soil protection, but obviously each ecosystem requires unique approaches and changes to specific approaches each year and inter-year. Some say take half leave half. It’s going to depend, but leaving enough to recover is the standard rule.
For this reason, rotational Grazing Systems are usually greater at stimulating ecosystem services than continuous grazing. Animal movement is critical in response to changing forage availability. Dividing pastures into paddocks and rotating livestock through them offers several benefits, and can be done with precision and iterative learning through the use of virtual fencing and animal tracking systems. Our investments in expertise and grazing data help producers ensure that:
● Plants get the necessary recovery time between grazing periods
● An optimal grazing distribution
● Better manure distribution for natural fertility
● Reduced soil compaction
● Improved forage quality and quantity
Finally, dialing in rest periods can become a data driven exercise with Kateri. Plants need adequate recovery time after grazing to replenish root reserves, regrow leaf area for photosynthesis, develop strong root systems, and set seed when needed for reproduction.
For producers, success here means reduced hay costs, reduced mineral feed costs, improved livestock health and more. All of these contribute to improving bottom line profitability.
Ingredient 3 Technology-Driven Solutions
Sadly, there is not an abundance of range riding expertise accompanied by border collies to manage all the livestock in the US. If there were, we could achieve grass and range land's maximum potential in no time flat. We’re still hoping for this future, secretly.
Absent that labour pool expanding (like we said, we’re all for it!) technology has a role to play to further the human expertise that has proved capable of delivering immense ecosystem services from grazing.
Today, by utilizing advanced technologies such as virtual fencing and GPS tracking ranchers can optimize their grazing patterns and extend their abilities. Geospatial imagery, low cost cameras that capture forage growth, remote controlled watering troughs, and even farm management software helps our producers improve and extend their capabilities.
Producers further benefit from joining with Kateri by:
Gaining live insights on your cattle location to reduce gathering time
Leveraging near infinitely customizable pastures to adapt to pasture conditions without rebuilding fence
Analyzing animal behavior to better evaluate placement of minerals and water
Robust, digital evaluations of forage across thousands of acres, not just relying on a few photos or human memory
Situational awareness for the modern grazing operation can take advantage of digitization to stay competitive.
Kateri recognizes that these tools need to work for producers not create new headaches, and supports the most seamless technology use cases only where they make sense. Only carbon financing from Kateri can make all this possible in one, easy, move.
Folks using virtual fencing describe new found abilities to take cattle off pasture at just the right time and also know better where to move them. Others using virtual fencing describe getting a full year of grazing on a pasture that used to require tremendous rest, simply because of operator skill being augmented by this new, digital tool.
Across grass and rangeland, we know that undergrazing and overgrazing are key issues. We support a package for willing producers to expand and refine their stewardship across these areas, helping overcome the limited labor pool and limited time of these experts in the field with data, hardware, and cold hard cash to enrich their efforts and profit from addressing over and undergrazing.
We measure what makes sense today and can be sold, namely soil carbon credits. However, we’re always open to collaborations to articulate and sell new types of natural capital and have already included credits from the avoided conversion of grasslands, and already feature premiums for those producers in our cooperative who partner to build biodiversity with the Audubon society.
Ingredient 4 Financing and Incentive Payments
Kateri Carbon works with ranchers to significantly increase soil carbon storage. We take all the measurements required to activate this new revenue and transparently broker the sale of soil carbon credits. Though yields vary, many graziers can expect ~ 0.5 tons of carbon yield each year on each acre. This carbon increase has serious co-benefits in terms of ecosystem services: improving soil health and productivity. This can translate into tens of thousands of new revenue for producers each season in – simply for grazing better. That’s the main requirement of the Kateri program: a long term interest in improving grazing outcomes on grass and range land.
Kateri's program creates a clear, actionable financial incentive for adopting and furthering good grazing practices while contributing to exceptional range and grassland resilience. Over time, in addition to carbon revenues, we will work with our partners to turn on new revenue streams wherever they emerge adjacent to the many beneficial outcomes from grazing.
The Future of Grazing
As we move forward, it's crucial that we recognize the value of ecosystem services and work collectively to protect them. Americans who trust in beef should extend their courtesy to the producers who know how to produce it alongside the ecosystem services that good grazing can foster.
Whether through supporting sustainable agriculture, conservation efforts, or innovative carbon markets, each of us has a role to play in safeguarding the natural systems that sustain us all. Kateri dedicates its’ efforts to support the producers who in turn support our nation's natural capital and secure nutrient dense domestic food supplies.
As we face growing ecological challenges, such as the proliferation non-native cheat grasses and woody juniper encroachment, Kateri and our friends and partners are helping to ensure that grass and range land ecosystems continue to provide vital services for generations to come.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Kateri captures and translates these natural processes into support and profitability for producers after reading this, please reach out to one of our rancher support specialists.