Project Overview
Annual Reports
Commodities
Practices
- Crop Production: cover crops
Abstract:
Practical Farmers of Iowa and the American Society of Agronomy, together, created and delivered three, one hour webinars on cover crop production practices in 2016 and 2017. The 2017 series was also viewed by an in-person audience as part of a full day of educational programs. Their target audience included Certified Crop Advisers (CCA), Certified Professional Agronomists (CPAg), Certified Professional Soil Scientists (CPSS), Ag Retail personnel, Cooperative Extension personnel along with farmers. The purpose of these educational webinars was to increase the agricultural advisers’ knowledge level of cover crop production practices and enable said advisers to positively influence their farmer clients adoption rate of cover crops. These professionals are effective conduits to educate producers and targeting them with additional educational programs about cover crops was identified as a real way to increase implementation.
The webinars were created and delivered in the first quarter of 2016 and 2017 to over 7,900 participants with 87.7% stating that the webinars “added to my agronomy knowledge” in 2016 and 93.6% in 2017. Surveys were conducted in August 2016 and April of 2017 of the webinar participants to evaluate knowledge level, usefulness of the information and recommendations for future webinars.
Project objectives:
Six, one-hour webinars created and delivered to 2,500 CCAs and 1,500 Ag Professionals about cover crops in the mid-west USA with three webinars concurrently supplementing three in-person events in 2016 and 2017 with the potential to reach 200,000 farmers.