Soil Health Bootcamp and Applications to Sustainable Vegetable Cropping: Professional Development for Local Agriculture Educators

Webinars: We developed 8 brief introductory webinars as “prerequisites” for the hands-on workshops. A main goal of the webinars was to cover all the “classroom” material ahead of time to maximize the hands-on, field-based activities for the workshops:

1. Soil Physical Properties
2. Soil as a Living Ecosystem
3. Cover Crops I – Functions of Cover Crops
4. Cover Crops II – Specific applications to Vegetables
5. Vegetable Production -Equipment, Fertigation, No-till
6. Diseases
7. Pollinators and Beneficials
8. Insect Pests

Workshops:

We held two hands-on workshops in 2017, to build on the three we did in 2016. One was at a KSU research/extension center (north central Kansas - Hays), one was at a private farm (Southeast Kansas – Fort Scott). We initially had one planned for south central, but only 4 individuals pre-registered and they were contacted and were able to attend another site as an alternative, so they were able to meet their training goals . We held three workshops in 2016. One was at a KSU research/extension center (northeast Kansas), one was at a private farm (North Central), and one was at a community college (Southwest). Participants greatly appreciated having the workshops close to their locations in the state, with a focus on their local climate, growing conditions, etc. We provided copies of the SARE books Building Soils for Better Crops and Managing Cover Crops Profitably to all participants.

Soil health and vegetable crops resource display table

We added a face-to-face professional development engagement opportunity that arose during 2017. At K-State, nearly all the local/county educators/agents were coming to the main campus for a multi-day conference. We were able to use this opportunity, on October 31 2017, to talk to an estimated 40 individuals at a high-traffic 1.5 hour resource fair/poster session using a simple display table set-up. At this resource fair, we provided them with the SARE books Building Soils for Better Crops and Managing Cover Crops Profitably along with the Midwest Cover Crops Field Guide, and walked them through the books so they would know what was there and how to use them. In addition, we had a laptop to show people our website, including how to find and view the webinars, our online collection of resources, and our team contact information. The URL’s were all provided on a short handout to refer to later. Several individuals we interacted with were brand new (within a couple of weeks!) extension educators who had not even been on staff when the face-to-face workshops were offered. They were disappointed to learn that the workshops would not be offered in 2018, but they were very excited to receive some printed resources and to find the online webinars to view at their own pace. Many others were individuals who had not been able to attend the hands-on workshops due to scheduling conflicts, and they too were excited to gain at least some of the information. This was a very effective strategy to reach people who had missed the workshops, and it may be responsible for some of the extra web hits we saw on certain webinar topics.

Sustainable Vegetable Disease Problem-Solving Training

Based on anecdotal feedback from agents at the previous workshops and display table mentioned above, we developed and implemented a vegetable disease hands-on problem-solving activity for county agents to build on their ability to help producers manage diseases and enhance their confidence in using the Midwest Vegetable Production Guide to make sustainable IPM decisions. We developed ten detailed “case studies” of tomato health problems for the agents to work on in groups. We conducted this 1.5 hr training on Friday, January 19 2018 in Emporia KS (24 agents) and January 16^th in McPherson Kansas (10 agents).

Online professional development in soil health

Based on feedback from agents at all the events mentioned above, we developed and delivered an online “Soil Health Series” to deliver using the already-existing Horticulture Newsletter. Agents had consistently told us they wanted soil health information in an easy-to digest format that they could use at their own pace. They also requested it to be accessible to their Extension Master Gardeners. The Horticulture Newsletter already was being sent to all agents and Extension Master Gardeners, plus many others, with a total subscriber base of about 2,700. We developed a set of 13 topics in spring 2018 and then delivered them during summer 2018, roughly one per week:

1. Why is soil important?
2. Soil is alive, part 1
3. Soil is alive, part 2
4. What makes soil soil?
5. What is soil texture
6. Roots need to breathe! (Soil pore space)
7. Organic matter “The living, the dead, and the very dead”
8. OMG! - Organic Matter’s Great!
9. Composting- Where to begin and how it works
10. Compost- Do’s, Don’ts, and Usage
11. What is nutrient cycling?
12. Soil pH- What is it and why does it matter
13. Beware of Soil Degradation

For each topic, we developed a brief article that has also links to 1-2 short sections of the SARE book Building Soils for Better Crops for further reading plus links to 1-2 short videos from NRCS, the Soils Science Society of America, and others. We posted the links using our own “Bitly” links so that we could track how many people we directly drove to the content. Engagement has been high. For each of the 30 bitly links we have provided across the 13 articles, the average number of hits is 91, and the total is 2747. The average number of hits for each of the Building Soils for Better Crops sections for our unique links is 109, with a total of 1428. That means this SARE online resource has gotten an additional 1428 hits directly due to our outreach efforts over just one summer. The highest number of hits for one single bitly was 212, for a video called “Soils Sustain Life” from the Soil Science Society of America, in our very first post.

Academic outreach

A summary of the project will be presented as a poster at the 2018 joint meeting of the Agronomy Society of America, Crop Science Society of America, and Canadian Society of Agronomy. It will be in the Education and Extension poster session.

Presley DR, Cloyd RA, Rivard CL, Oxley K, Day C, and Kennelly MM. 2018. Flipping the Classroom in Extension: Vegetable Crop IPM and Soil Health Webinars and Workshops. Poster 1136.

The abstract can be accessed here: https://scisoc.confex.com/scisoc/2018am/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/111388