Project Highlight: Grassland Management

The Grassland Management master’s program is a multi-institutional project based on regionalization of a grassland management program that has been partially or inefficiently offered separately by the member universities: Kansas State University, Iowa State University, University of Nebraska, and the University of Missouri. The curriculum development, faculty sharing, and cross enrollments are basic to ensuring the sustainable offering of education programs in grassland management at the member universities. Moreover, the quality of education will be enhanced because a broader array of courses will be offered and a broader array of professors, with expertise and experience in the subject matter of each course, will be teaching the courses than if each university had to rely on its own resources.

Grasslands (including rangelands, pasturelands, and haylands) are the principal land resource in the Midwest, composing more than 50% of the land surface area in Nebraska and Kansas. Grasslands in the region are critically important for providing grazing for beef cattle, wildlife habitat, recreation, high quality water and air, and other environmental services. Grasslands represent a fundamental resource of the region that determines the environmental and economic future of Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri.

The biggest threats to our grasslands are overgrazing and overstocking--often due to a lack of education and foresight. This mismanagement has a severe, long-term environmental and food production impact that is costly and difficult, if not impossible, to correct. Grasslands need to be managed properly to prevent overgrazing, prevent species shift, and maintain healthiness and vitality to produce. The multi-institution Grassland Management Master’s degree program will teach students that what is done to the grasslands now will determine its future.

As is the case with many agricultural and natural resource programs at Land Grant universities, the grassland-related programs at the four universities are relatively small. The recent budget cuts at these universities make a single-institution grassland program at each university difficult to justify. Moreover, grasslands are not represented directly by a commodity group; therefore, there is not a strong outside group to lobby for grassland management programs. The resources that can be allocated to these small programs at each university are declining, vacant faculty lines in grassland management are not being replaced, and the quality of these grassland management programs are compromised because of the loss of critical mass. Walter Schacht, a professor at the University of Nebraska involved in the program, foresees the alliance of universities as beneficial for improving the efficiency and use of limited resources while maintaining and enhancing grassland curriculum.

The IAA’s objective is to guide the four institutions through the development of curricula for the multi-institution Grassland Management Master’s program. In July 2005, faculty from the University of Nebraska, Kansas State University, and the University of Missouri met with a representative from the National Resources Conservation Services and IAA Co-Director Virginia Moxley in Kansas City to plan the development of the online Grassland Management courses. At the meeting, the attendees set a goal for developing four courses in the next year: Forage Quality, Plant Identification, Vegetation Monitoring and Assessment, and Grassland Ecology. Presently, the first draft of the Forage Quality course is near completion, and a teleconference with project personnel is scheduled in January 2006. A workshop is also scheduled in late February for faculty to present their progress and introduce the technology available for the online courses. Schacht feels that through this workshop, the courses will become a reality.