Sheldon, Iowa — Every year in January, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach experts host a popular seminar in Sheldon called the “Crop Advantage Series.” But, to no one’s surprise, January 2021 is going to be a little different.
That’s from Extension Crop Field Specialist and Agronomist Joel De Jong, who says that doesn’t mean they’re leaving farmers high and dry, however.
(as said:) “With the issues we have going on in the world, putting 200 people in a room right next to each other probably is a little too risky for what we want to accept for exposure this year. So we decided we’re not going to do the Crop Advantage meetings across the state during the month of January like we normally did. We miss it. We miss seeing people. We hope to see them again in a year, but we pivoted a little bit and we’ve got something called CropsTV. We’re doing that online. It’s virtual.”
He says there are 45 different topics.
(as said:) “Every week… we started the first week of December… we’ve got an agronomy topic every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, at 9:00 a.m. We’ll do that all the way through early February. So there’ll be 45 different topics. And even if you can’t make those time periods, they will be archived and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going back and watching them later. So it’s another opportunity to still learn. Although it’s not a Crop Advantage meeting, which I’m going to miss.”
De Jong tells us you do have to register.
(as said:) “There is a fee to it. It’s $45 because you know even producing it to go online, there are fees that cost to it that we’re trying to recover. We have good sponsorship from the Iowa Corn Growers and Iowa Soybean Growers to help keep the costs down. But to get access to it… The easiest way is to do what I do. I go onto my computer search engine and I type in ISU CropsTV or Iowa State CropsTV (and CropsTV is one word) and you’ll find like the link and you can register if you follow those links. If you have problems contact your local extension office they’ll help take you through that process, too.”
He says there are 45 different available topics, and he tells us about the one that he’s leading — about the research farm near Sutherland.
(as said:) “I’m going to be doing one, it’s kind of a… what I’ve done a Crop Advantage is an update of what’s going on in the Northwest Research Farm and some of our farm projects. We’ve had a lot of our state specialists who are going to hit their specific research areas. I think the first one dealt with gall midges and soybean aphids and we’ve done things on cover crops and we’ll be doing things on soil health and weed management and the whole range. What’s nice about this is instead of seeing just Iowa State stuff, I think we’ve got six speakers that come from other states in the Midwest that have expertise are going to share with us also. So the range is very wide and I’d encourage people again to go look at the CropsTV web page… take a look at it… and if they’re Certified Crop Advisors out there, you can get Certified Crop Advisor credit for all the way up to 45 credits if you’re going to watch them, so it’s reasonably priced I believe, and huge amounts of information we can learn from this year.”
De Jong says whether you watch one session or all of them, it’s the same price, $45. For more information, you can contact your local extension office or visit http://www.aep.iastate.edu/cropstv/.
