The KGLC Board of Directors
Stay in touch and subscribe to our newsletter.
I’m Russell Blew and I’m currently serving as the Vice Chairman on the Kansas Grazing Lands Coalition (KGLC) Board of Directors. I’ve had the privilege of serving on the KGLC Board of Directors since the fall of 2018.
KGLC was organized in 1991, shortly after the formation of the National Grazing Lands Coalition (NatGLC) Initiative. NatGLC works with individuals from leading agricultural organizations across the country to establish local, state, and regional partnerships to foster grazing lands conservation and stewardship. They are partnered with nineteen state coalitions, with one being Kansas Grazing Lands Coaltion. KGLC works to improve Kansas grazing lands through collaborative education. KGLC’s mission and vision is to regenerate Kansas grazing land resources through cooperative management, economics, ecology, production, education, and technical assistance programs.
Throughout my last three years on the board, myself and my fellow board members have worked to create networking opportunities for collaboration throughout the state of Kansas. KGLC holds numerous meetings, special events, tours, implements three adult range schools each summer, and interacts with regional grazing groups such as the Tallgrass Legacy Alliance, Comanche Pool Prairie Resource Foundation, Smoky Hills Graziers Association, Kansas Graziers Association, and the Clark-Comanche-Meade Counties Grazing Group to support local efforts to solve priority grassland issues and concerns, primarily through educational efforts often keying on grassland wildlife species.
At these networking opportunities and events, producers are able to present ideas and converse about each other's operations. There’s always an opportunity to take something beneficial away from those conversations. Even though you might not apply it that day on your ranch, you can consider and ponder the ideas for future use.
We can certainly learn a lot from our peers, so creating opportunities for ranchers and agency professionals to come together is essential to the future of agriculture and grazing practices. There are a variety of approaches that can help us reach the same goal. By gathering with individuals who share similar objectives, we can advance through sharing experiences, proposing different methods, and asking questions.
Ultimately, the Board of Directors works to create connections between ranchers and agencies in order to work together to achieve mutual goals. The board is diverse and represents all the grass regions in the state of Kansas. Kansas Grazing Lands Coalition is currently seeking board members. Please email info@kglc.org if you are interested.
You can view the current KGLC Board of Directors at https://www.kglc.org/board-of-directors.cfm
You can listen to Russell Blew share his experiences on the Board of Directors in an episode of our Grazing Management Minute video series. Watch the video here: https://www.kglc.org/kglc-news.cfm?id=562
*Partially funded by USDA-NRCS agreement with National Grazing Lands Coalition https://www.grazinglands.org/.