Monitoring Toolbox

DIY Guide

Author(s): Monitoring Project Team

Organization: Land Stewardship Project

Planning Step: Your Climate Resilience Plan

The Monitoring Tool Box is a resource developed by farmers and natural resource professionals to monitor the sustainability of various land use practices using a whole farm planning strategy. This whole farm approach required new tools to help farm families set clear goals for their farm focusing on quality of life, farm profitability, and the ecological health of their land. Along with making good profits, the farmers identified issues like having fun, reducing soil erosion, improving the quality of their streams, improving animal health, and making sure their farms were welcoming to people and wildlife as important measures of farm success. Farmers needed new tools to monitor the effects of their management decisions in order to help them judge whether or not particular sustainable agriculture practices were moving them towards their stated goals. This resource presents farmer tested and approved tools to support each step of the whole farm planning process and includes directions for simple, easy to measure indicators of quality of life, financial sustainability, soil and ecological health, and pasture quality. Although created by farmers using regenerative grazing practices, these tools are applicable to any farm business. Farmers can use this resource to learn more about whole farm planning and on-farm monitoring, and select some key performance indicators for their climate resilience plan.

Relevant Region(s): All | Farm Scale: All | Farm Type: Grass-based Livestock/All | Markets: All