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

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

Summary

The overall goal of this project is to develop, deliver, and evaluate a comprehensive training program about soil health with specific applications to sustainable vegetable cropping. The training involves online learning and face-to-face hands-on workshops. The primary audience is K-State Research and Extension county/local educators who identified this as a professional development need.  Other participants include NRCS educators and a few Extension Master Gardeners.

Objectives/Performance Targets

Broad learning objectives of our targeted audience include: i) Develop an understanding of the structure, function, and biological complexity of soil; ii) Learn and practice skills to measure and assess soil quality; iii) Build a toolbox of various methods including cover crops to improve soil health; iv) Understand the concepts of ecological pest management; v) Practice whole-farm system planning; and vi) Understand sustainable vegetable production.

Accomplishments/Milestones

Initial planning: The project began in October 2015. We accomplished our goals of developing evaluation tools, online webinar content, and developing workshop agendas. We advertised the workshop through various channels to recruit our target participants. We developed our project website, which can be viewed at www.soilhealthbootcamp.org

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. Our webinars and their “hits” so far are:

1. Soil Physical Properties (~16 min) 49 views
2. Soil as a Living Ecosystem (~21 min) 24 views
3. Cover Crops I – Functions of Cover Crops (~23 min) 22 views
4. Cover Crops II – Specific applications to Vegetables (~33 min) 111 views
5. Vegetable Production -Equipment, Fertigation, No-till (~33 min) 32 views
6. Diseases (~31 min) 3 views
7. Pollinators and Beneficials (~15 min) 16 views
8. Insect Pests (~7 min) 10 views

We realized that not all participants are watching all videos, so we will increase efforts to have participants watch them prior to the 2017 workshops. On the other hand, the Soil Physical Properties and Cover Crops II  videos had MORE hits than we had participants. Our website is open, not closed, so people other than participants may be finding and using the videos.

We had planned some additional online learning activities, but interest was somewhat low. Our current plan is to wait until the 2017 workshops are complete, then we will address both the 2016 and 2017 cohorts simultaneously.

Workshops:

As planned, 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, with a focus on their climate, etc. We provided copies of the SARE books Building Soils for Better Crops and Managing Cover Crops Profitably to all participants.

We have two workshops planned for spring 2017, with a third in the works for early fall.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

We implemented an evaluation tool for the hands-on workshops. For all, we used a 1-5 scale: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree

May 11, 2016 – Olathe, KS – 13 Evaluations Completed out of 17 participants

*N/A – was not on the agenda for this meeting

May 26, 2016 – Courtland, KS – 8 Evaluations Completed out of 13 participants

*Was not formally on the agenda for this site

October 5, 2016 – Liberal, KS – 9 Evaluations Completed out of 11 participants

We also asked the open-ended question “Name one concept or practice that you will put into use after participation in the workshop”. The answers below are pooled from all three locations and are also summarized in the word cloud:

• Increased issue diagnostic tools
• Fertilization principles
• Disease ID
• Soil health
• Identify different disease
• Calculating amounts of fertilizer needs
• Fertilizer concepts in vegetable crops
• A green house and high tunnel knowledge learned
• Identifying the soil type, it’s been a long time since I’ve done it last
• Recommending predatory mites for 2 spotted spider mite problem in high tunnels and greenhouses
• Direct sampling methods
• Use rainfall simulator at Kids Ag Day
• Insect scouting techniques
• I thought the rain simulator was a good explanation of runoff and infiltration
• Use of cover crops
• Pest scouting and soil compaction
• Recommended/use of cover crops, beneficial insects, and fertigation systems
• Used beneficial insects for pest control
• Soil infiltration/runoff demo most impactful for me and my job
• Soil probing
• Fertilizing calculations
• Encouraging more conservation tillage/no-till. Retains soil particles, increases infiltration
• Educating on soil health – teaching EMBs/Clients
• Though there are a few people using high tunnels in my area, I will share what I’ve learned about that option – particularly fertigation and cover crop for fallow periods
• Soil runoff and cover crops
• Sampling insect populations. Cover crop management techniques
• Identifying soil type by feel
• The soil ribbon will be a great tool when I give soil lessons
• Bucket method for fertigation
• Continued knowledge building for cover crop wage
• Wanted to learn more about cover crops – learned some. Would like to learn more – which use which crop for which situations

Though we developed an evaluation tool for the webinars, viewers are not filling it out. Therefore we will enhance our efforts to encourage evaluation for the 2017 year.

Collaborators: