 I'm Miranda Meehan, the Extension Livestock Environmental Stewardship Specialist at North Dakota State University. Today we're going to be talking about the grazing monitoring stick, a tool that was developed by NDSU Extension in collaboration with the North Dakota NRCS and the North Dakota Grazingland Coalition. This tool is a modified yardstick with information to help producers determine and monitor utilization. Why is it important to monitor utilization? Well, utilization can be used to determine livestock removal dates and prevent overgrazing of our rangeland and pasture resources. Utilization measures the amount of forage that has been removed by grazing livestock. Now, how do we go about measuring utilization? There's a few simple steps. The first thing is that we need to determine the dominant or key forage species in the pasture unit that we are monitoring. And this will vary across the pasture, so in different areas of the pasture we might have different key species that we are evaluating or monitoring. Then we need to take measurements, at least a minimum of 30 measurements of each key species is recommended. We want to measure on-graze species and compare them to graze species and pick these measurements at the same period in time because we want the species to be at the same stage in growth. First we'll take a measurement of the graze species. This species that we're going to look at now is Kentucky bluegrass. We want the stick to be firm against the ground and level, and then we take the leaf and take a measurement of the height. So the height of this species, Kentucky bluegrass, would be two and a half inches. Then we want to measure on-graze species. Here we have an on-graze species. We do not want to measure to the top of the seed header in fluorescence. We want to measure to the top of the leaf. So the height of this on-graze plant would be five and a half inches approximately. We would take 30 measurements for each on-graze and graze plants, and we would take the average of those on-graze and graze plants. Then to calculate our utilization, we take that average graze height divided by the average on-graze height, subtract that number from one and multiply it by 100. That gives us the percent of forage that has been removed. But this is by height. When we look at utilization, we're looking at forage removal by weight. So we then go to the height-to-weight utilization conversion chart in which we look at the percent of the height removed. And say we had 75 percent removal of Kentucky bluegrass by height, then we'll go down to our species, Kentucky bluegrass, and over under the 75 percent. And we're at 40 percent utilization of that species by weight. Our target is 50 percent utilization that we do not want to exceed. As we exceed that level, we begin to damage our forage resources, and they have a difficult time recovering from our grazing pressure. The chart in the publication is also on the grazing stick. The grazing stick has all the information regarding grassland management, including grazing management guidelines, minimum height for introduced species, how to calculate utilization, and the height-to-weight utilization chart, some guidelines for evaluating your stocking rates, and then estimating utilization of our native rangeland visually. One of the tricky things is that often it's difficult to find on-graze plants in a pasture. So we recommend that if you are not unable to find on-graze plants in your pasture to go to an adjacent pasture or grazing unit that has the same species composition. Another key species that we're going to check the measurements on or utilization of is western wheatgrass. If our percent height removed was 75 percent again, we go down to western wheatgrass on the grazing stick in the chart, and we need to remove livestock at this time because we have overutilized our western wheatgrass, because 70 percent removal by height is our 50 percent utilization of western wheatgrass. If you're interested in using a grazing monitoring stick to monitor your utilization, you can order a stick on the NDSU Eat Marketplace. Grazing sticks are $5 apiece and come with the publication explaining how to use grazing stick and the information in the charts. If you want a personalized stick, there's an additional fee of $50, and this can be done for orders of $150 are greater. Thank you for watching, and if you have any questions on monitoring utilization, contact myself or one of your county agents.