This workshop will provide an interactive setting for putting practical agronomy information in the hands of no-till farmers, agronomists, and researchers from Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, the Dakotas, the Canadian prairie provinces, and Australia.
Speakers include Matt Hagny, with 24 years of experience dedicated exclusively to continuous no-till in KS, Okla, and farther abroad. Hagny has been a driving force behind bringing no-till to Kansas and the north-central Oklahoma region, and making it work. Hagny stresses developing ways to increase profits or reduce risk with minimal additional cost or labor, and with his ‘steady at the helm’ stance on improving—not degrading—the soil.
The Workshop will cover numerous topics, including coping with herbicide-resistant weeds (especially triazine/ALS/glyphosate-resistant Palmer pigweeds, as well as glyphosate-resistant kochia, marestail, and waterhemp). This year’s agenda will take extra time to spell out the options of dealing with Palmer amaranth, which have become a major menace now that glyphosate-resistant biotypes have swept across the region.
The Workshop will discuss what amount of mulch cover is optimum, and how crop rotations can be planned around this (and a couple dozen other factors) to enhance yields while reducing production risk. Hagny says, “Cover crops can increase mulch cover, or reduce it, depending on the species chosen and how they are planted and managed. Used appropriately, cover crops can be an economic benefit, although there’s also the opportunity to go backwards.” Hagny continues, “There’s a lot of disinformation out there about cover crops reducing fertilizer costs. In many cases, that simply isn’t true—at least not out here on the Great Plains where decomposition is relatively slow, and leaching less of a problem than back East. And if the cover crop is a grass species, which it usually should be in these regions where we can’t keep enough mulch cover, this really compounds the problem of nutrient deficiencies in the following cash crop.”
The Workshop also brings in Leland Baxa, Aurora Co-op (Neb.), who Hagny says is “a highly regarded, straight-talking agronomist, and staunch no-till advocate and good teacher of those practices.” Baxa has immense experience from 22 yrs spot-checking fields in northwest KS, southwest NE, CO, and western OK. Despite working quite apart from each other, Baxa & Hagny have reached similar conclusions on many topics.
Co-host John Grove, Ph.D, at University of Kentucky will bring his tremendous knowledge of soil properties, fertilizers and chemistry to the Workshop, with most of his research in the past couple decades being in continuous no-till, including looking at crop rotations and crop establishment. Grove and Hagny will also provide a report on the research that’s been done on various fertilizer ‘enhancement’ products and biologicals, and whether any of them are profitable to use.
Various detailed handouts are provided. Complete list of topics at www.agronomypro.com.
The Workshop runs from 9 AM to 6 PM on Monday, 29 January 2017 at the Drury Plaza Hotel, Wichita, Ks., with a noon meal, snacks, coffee, tea provided. Tuition is $200/person in advance, or $275 if received after January 17th. To enroll, payments by check may be mailed to Pinnacle Crop Tech Inc., P.O. Box 298, Kechi, KS 67067-0298, or pay by credit card by calling 316-303-2040 (credit card pmts will have a $7.65 convenience fee added). Enrollment is limited to 150 people.
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