2017 NACAA Animal Science Pre-Conference Tour
The Utah Association of County Agricultural Agents is excited to host the 2017 NACAA Animal Science Pre-Conference Tour on July 6th-8th. This year’s tour will take place in the south-central part of Utah. This area is a good example of Utah’s livestock industry with a wide variety of livestock enterprises. The landscape ranges from sagebrush steppes at 5,000 feet elevation to alpine meadows on mountains that exceed 11,000 feet. Livestock production in this area is as diverse as the landscape.
Tour participants will fly into Salt Lake City on Thursday the 6th for an evening orientation at a hotel close to Salt Lake International Airport. The next morning, we will board a bus and travel approximately 2 ½ hours south of Salt Lake City to the beautiful Sevier Valley.
Our tour will begin on the 7th by travelling by SUVs up onto Monroe Mountain to discuss public land ranching and a unique area known for its’ Quaking Aspen and Conifer forests and a project designed to increase the Aspen through a variety of methodologies. We will discuss how changing animal populations have impacted the resource and how changes in livestock management is working to assist land managers to improve the health of the land.
We will then travel to the Johnson Mountain Ranch where the Johnson family will discuss their cattle operation which uses both private and public lands for year-round grazing and their Cooperative Wildlife Management Unit allows them to have a wildlife enterprise on the ranch. The Johnsons will host us for dinner before we return to Richfield for the night.
On the 8th we will see some of the diversity Utah agriculture has. We will begin by visiting a large dairy that milks several hundred cows, followed by a heritage farm which produces organic milk and pork for sale in high-end stores in the Salt Lake metro area. We will then visit Producers Livestock Marketing which is Utah’s largest livestock market offering a variety of marketing services throughout the area. We will conclude the central Utah portion of the tour by visiting a roaster hog operation which direct-markets roaster pigs to the Polynesian population along the Wasatch Front.
We will then travel back to Salt Lake County for our final tour stop which will feature the East African Refugee Goat Project, a meat goat operation which is providing prescriptive grazing to area land owners as well as goat meat to three African refugee communities in the Salt Lake Valley.
We hope you will take the time to join us on the Animal Science Pre-Conference Tour and see the rich diversity of Utah’s livestock production. See you in Salt Lake City!