FAQ
Want to email Charley Orchard with a different question or comment? Contact us or call 1-888-450-LEKG (5354).

Do you have examples of how monitoring has helped people?
There are a bunch of examples where monitoring has helped out folks, but here are a few highlights. On my home place, monitoring helped to save the ranch + $200K in alternative grazing costs following a large public land  fire. The Canterbury Ranch in Colorado, based on their monitoring info to the USFS  has been able to increase their FS permit grazing numbers by about 500% from the first permitted use. One ranch in MT and one in NM are using their own monitoring info to receive carbon offset payments totaling +  $150K in income.  Glen Barlow in Wyoming was awarded $10,000  for his stewarship practices based on his own ranch monitoring, and the Sims Ranch in Wyoming was awarded a national stewardship award based on their monitoring and management practices.

How much time is required to monitor?
The time required to monitor really depends on the goals and objectives of your monitoring program, which ultimately dictates the type of monitoring you will apply.  I encourage landowners to take from 1-5 days (depending on scale) to go back to the land and monitor the results of their practices. That represents 0.5% - 2% of their working time.   The basis of Land EKG is time efficiency combined with repeatability. Once sites are established on a property, we can usually read 6-10 sites per day during annual monitoring. 

When is the best time to monitor?  
Each season has advantages and disadvantages regarding the information you will collect. My first response is to monitor when you can make time to go out. More precisely however, I usually prefer the fall to go out and evaluate what has occurred during the growing and grazing season. It is harder to identify plants, and species diversity will appear lower, but more realistic “energy flow” attributes will be found. 

I don’t have a good way to track my moisture, what should I do? 
Tracking annual moisture across landscapes is extremely important. And most folks list 1) freezing breakage, 2) evaporation, and 3) physical damage to the gauge as the main reasons why gaining reliable information is unfeasible across vast areas of their properties.  We heard these reasons and tried to address these valid concerns. Land EKG has developed economical “lifetime, all- weather precipitation gauges” which can be placed virtually  anywhere and left to be checked as little as once per year. They are designed to be freeze, critter, and evaporation proof and will still provide reliable year round precipitation information. 

Is there an easier way to keep my data and reports organized.
Because good organization is oftentimes difficult for time- starved land mangers, Land EKG developed EKG DataStore. This online service allows a user to log in, key in a bit of data and log out, and the information will be automatically organized and stored ready for reporting. Additionally, these users have 24/7 access to the data anywhere there is internet.