a month of meetings
Agronomy night, North Central Cropping Systems Academy, WRAPS, and poultry informational gathering round out this month
O
n December 13, we hosted our Annual Agronomy Night Meeting in Independence with 75 in attendance. The focus of this year’s event was Dicamba as it has dominated the cropping systems news for the past year or even more. We were pleased to have Roger McEowen, Kansas Farm Bureau Ag Law and Taxation Professor at Washburn University and Doug Shoup present. Roger spoke about the law implications of off target movement and Doug presented on how to properly use the products in a weed management system. In addition, I presented some of our preliminary data on the Corn Emergence Study I have been working on this year. A post survey instrument was given to those in attendance and I was quite pleased to receive 37 responses. I believe producers are getting more used to filling these out which is great for us. Of those who responded, there were over 33,000 acres represented. One of the questions asked is how much impact would the meeting have on a $/Acre basis. Using the 16 responses that answered both the amount per acre and how many acres questions, the average benefit from the meeting was from $3,276/farm to $13,412/farm for a total of $52,420 to $214,590. If you apply the average per farm across all 37 survey respondents, the dollar impact would be $121,221 to $496,239. In all honesty, I had assumed this meeting topic would not generate these numbers as it was mainly educational about a controversial topic, not about how to improve farming practices. In addition, 86% of respondents rated the meeting valuable or very valuable.
- On December 4-7, I attended the last of the four North Central Region Cropping Systems Academy meetings in Minneapolis, MN. On the project side of this trip, my group presented essentially an infomercial for our project tools that we have developed. These include two PowerPoint slideshows (a full length 45 minute presentation and a short 10 minute presentation), four factsheets, four videos, as well as four newspaper columns. In the next few months we will finalize these tools and release them in the spring of 2018. As with all of these trips, some professional development opportunities were also available. The focus of these were on the end use of the agricultural products that we focus on which was a very interesting point of view. We met with the Sustainability Team at General Mills Headquarters as well as toured a former flour mill. In addition, we met with the director of the Agricultural Use Research Institute which focuses on startup companies and how they may thrive.
- On December 14, I attended the Middle Neosho Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy (WRAPS) committee. As the name suggests, this group focuses on the Middle Neosho watershed which covers quite a bit of the Wildcat District. At this particular meeting Peter Tomlinson, State Environmental Quality Specialist presented an update on his poultry litter research taking place in Crawford County. In addition to his presentation, the discussion over the poultry industry dominated the conversation.
- Immediately following the WRAPS meeting, I attended the Poultry Meeting in Coffeyville. I learned a ton from the meeting, but my baseline knowledge was extremely limited. Though we did not host the meeting, we promoted the meeting through our marketing channels including Constant Contact and the live radio shows. The crowd was quite good with 80+ in attendance. The speakers were extremely knowledgeable and even though they truly were salesman, they presented unbiased information to the crowd. One of the questions that came from the meeting centers on the water system we have in southeast Kansas and whether or not this will keep the our area from being able to support an industry like this. Research is currently proceeding on this very topic.