The Garden City Telegram
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Experts in the field
Published 8/28/2009 in Local News : Business
By MONICA SPRINGER
Getting the word out about new products and getting those products to producers makes yields go up, which helps everyone from Main Street on up, according to K-State Southwest Research-Extension Center staff who helped organized Field Day on Thursday.
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Brad Nading/Telegram — A group of attendees fill a trailer during one of the K-State Southwest Research-Extension Center agriculture field day tours Thursday through one of the center's milo fields.
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Brad Nading/Telegram — Kent Martin talks about the nitrogen rate for grain sorghum yields Thursday during one of the Field Day tours at Kansas State Southwest Research-Extension Center. Martin is a SWREC extension crops and soils specialist.
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Brad Nading/Telegram — Norman Klocke, right, talks about crop yield vs. the amount of irrigation Thursday during one of the sessions in the K-State Southwest Research-Extension CenterÕs annual Field Day. Klocke is a SWREC water resource engineer.
About 200 producers, K-State Extension Center staff and others gathered at the research center to go on field tours, visit agriculture booths and attend seminars.
The event is held each year, along with a wheat Field Day in March, to help keep producers in the loop about new and upcoming products, said Randall Currie, a weed scientist at the Research and Extension Center.
Currie said the turnout for the Field Day is attributed to the fact that producers in western Kansas want to know how to increase yields. On Thursday, producers learned about three new herbicides, as well as yield vs. irrigation amounts and converting Conservation Reserve Program land to crop production.
Currie said he was happy with the turnout. He said the nice weather meant producers sacrificed working in their fields for a day to attend Field Day.
Steve Parr, Garden City, grows corn, wheat, milo and soybeans.
"I figured I'd take a day off work and learn a little something," Parr said.
Producers aren't the only ones who attend and benefit from Field Day.
Monty Spangler, agricultural technician in crops for the extension center, and Pat Evans, who works for the Northwest Research Extension Center in Colby, said it's easy to get wrapped up in your own research and not read other people's research.
Evans was in Garden City on about the Field Day, he decided to come. He went on field tour two, which highlighted nitrogen rates in grain sorghum and timing effects on grain yield and biomass, grain sorghum with resistance to post emergence grass-control herbicides and plant population effects on nonstructural carbohydrates in sorghum.
Lunch was provided for 200 Field Day participants after the field tours. The time also allowed for producers to visit agriculture booths.
Lisa Currie, Garden City, said she's interested in the research the scientists and specialists do at the center.
Her husband, Randall, works for the extension center and they have CRP land northeast of Garden City.
"A lot of times when people do research, it's years before that research is published," she said. "Or you can come to Field Day and get current research."
Because the crops the specialists and scientists do research on haven't been harvested, it's not yet known how those fields will yield, Lisa said, but it's still worth a visit to field day to see the research.
"Our community is so agriculture related it's interesting to learn something about it," she said.
Learning about new products is what drew Dennis Moser and Jeremy Ellsaesser, who live in Moscow in Stevens County, to Field Day.
Moscow is minutes away from Hugoton, where the nation's first cellulosic ethanol plant is being constructed and will be finished by 2011. Moser said he is interested in using switchgrass for ethanol, which was a topic at one of the tours.
Moser and Ellsaesser, who farm both together and separately, farm corn, wheat, sorghum and sunflowers.
Moser said he's always interested in research on weed control, and has land in CRP land and wanted to hear the seminar on converting it to crop production.
On the Web:
Kansas State Research and Extension: http://www.ksre.ksu.edu/
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