Match Made in Heaven: Livestock + Crops

Building Relationships – Listening for Common Ground – Integrating Crops & Livestock

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This project was a collaboration among groups that don’t always get to work together: crop and livestock associations, universities, public agencies, and conservation organizations. We found common ground and produced resources to help move shared interests forward. Take a look, and contact us if you are interested in this work!

News

Press Releases:

Articles from GLBW:

Articles Written By Others:

About the Project

“Match Made In Heaven: Livestock + Crops”  began as a 3-year, 6-state grant project that created opportunities for farmers, educators, crop and livestock organizations, and conservation advocates to engage with each other around discussions of crop and livestock integration.   The project engaged 50+ groups in shared work:

  • Created infographics to introduce the benefits and challenges of integration, and showcase the potential for a new generation of farmers.
  • Developed and deployed a survey of crop and livestock farmers across the Upper Midwest to identify their interests, successes, and challenges around integration of crops and livestock.
  • Conducted in-depth case studies of 6 Upper Midwest farms that have successfully integrated crops/livestock in their operation.
  • Used data from 5 case study farmers to create a partial budget and sensitivity analysis framework for understanding the impact of crop and livestock integration on farm finances.
  • Collected a crop and livestock integration resource library with tools and information for educators and farmers

The heart of this project was collaboration among farm groups that don’t always communicate or work together: crop and livestock associations, folks involved with sustainable agriculture and conservation, and farmers themselves.  We found ways to talk to each other and listen to each other, and generated some pretty cool resources in the process!

Case Studies

Livestock and crop integration is happening across the Upper Mississippi River Basin. We are profiling one farm per state in each of the six states involved in this project: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

These farms all operate at least 200 acres and integrate crop production and livestock production. A feature of integration that runs through all these case studies: so much flexibility to tailor systems that work with a particular farm’s location, soils, topography, markets, and skills of the farmers. Integration opens up space for generation-to-generation and neighbor-to-neighbor collaboration: the same farmer need not manage both the livestock and the crop enterprises.

Please feel free to download and distribute these case studies!

Garth Gatson – February 2025

Haubein Farms, Inc – February 2025

Hanson Land and Cattle – February 2025

White Oak Farms, Dave Lubben – June 2023

Schoepp Farms, Ron Schoepp – May 2023

Partial Budget & Sensitivity Analysis

Integrating livestock into cropping systems can have many benefits. Standard enterprise budgets, Schedule F tax forms, and financial databases such as FINBIN typically do not provide a straightforward way to see the synergies that arise from integration of livestock and crops. The Match Made in Heaven: Livestock + Crops project gave us an opportunity to create tools to help farmers and others visualize the financial impact of integrating livestock with crops. The result is a spreadsheet-based partial budget and sensitivity analysis framework.

Survey

Integration of crops and livestock brings both benefits and challenges!  The “Match Made In Heaven” survey collected data from farmers across the Midwest to understand what’s working and what isn’t in integrating crops and livestock. Results are in!

Survey Summary Fact Sheets with Charts
Survey Summary Fact Sheets by State
Survey Summary Reports with Data Tables
Survey Data

The complete survey data set used to generate the above summaries is available and publicly accessible in the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM).

Persistent Link to Match Made in Heaven: Livestock + Crops data set: https://doi.org/10.13020/Y5KA-4C47

Citation for this data set:

Meier, Erin; Jewett, Jane; DiGiacomo, Gigi; Paine, Laura; Fenn, Amy. (2024). “Match Made In Heaven” Integrated Crop and Livestock Farmers Survey, North Central U.S., 2023-2024. Retrieved from the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), https://doi.org/10.13020/Y5KA-4C47

This material is based upon work that is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under agreement number 2021-38640-34714 Am 3 through the North Central Region SARE program under project number LNC21-453. USDA is an equal opportunity employer and service provider. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.