Comanche Pool announces coffee shop meetings schedule
The Comanche Pool Prairie Resource Foundation once again has planned an “out of the box” series for their annual Coffee Shop Meetings. These meetings will be held in Ashland, Protection and Wilmore, Kansas. Registration for the programs begins at 11:30 a.m. with a meal, speakers and time for producers to ask questions.
The first meeting of the series, “What is Soil Health?” will be held in Protection on Feb. 2, starting at 11:30 a.m at the Protection Township Library. Doug Peterson, NRCS regional soil health specialist for the states of Missouri and Iowa will be the featured speaker of the day. Peterson has been an NRCS employee for over 29 years. He started his career as a soil scientist. He has been a district conservationist in both a grassland based county in south Missouri and a large cropland county in north Missouri. He has also been a state grassland conservationist and a state soil health specialist. Currently, he is a regional soil health specialist for Missouri and Iowa teaching NRCS staff and producers around the midwest about soil health, how it impacts virtually all natural resource processes and what type of management it will take to effectively improve our soils health, function and productivity. There will also be a local producer panel provided for a question and answer portion. RSVP for the Protection meeting by Jan. 26.
The second meetingwill be hosted in Ashland on Feb. 8. This meeting will feature, “Cover Crop Economics,” presented by Gail Fuller, a third generation farmer from Emporia. Fuller will be presenting on implementing cover crops and the benefits of soil health. Please RSVP for the Ashland meeting by Feb. 2.
The Wilmore Community Center will host the Feb. 15 meeting. The topic of the day will be cow efficiency. David Lalman is a professor and Extension beef cattle specialist at Oklahoma State University. Lalman holds the Harrington Endowed Chair with split extension and research appointment. He works primarily in the beef cattle industry focused on cow/calf and stocker cattle production. His extension and applied research program includes beef cattle nutrition and management with emphasis on beef cattle grazing and genetics by environmental interactions in beef production systems. His program goals are to provide producers with information and decision-making tools to facilitate production system profitability, improve cow herd efficiency and product quality. At Oklahoma State, Lalman serves as the animal science extension program coordinator and the supervisor for the Range Cow Research Center. RSVP for the Wilmore meeting by Feb. 9.
The Coffee Shop Meetings are a joint effort of The Comanche Pool Prairie Resource Foundation and Kansas State University Extension. Additional sponsors include the Conservation Districts of Barber, Clark, Comanche and Kiowa Counties, NRCS, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.
To RSVP or to learn more information on any of the programs listed above, please contact Aaron Sawyers at [email protected] or 620-582-2411. If you haven’t made time to attend one of these meetings yet, I challenge you to make it a point this year. Many times we have tradition on the brain and it’s hard to see value in the things our neighbor does differently. The speakers at these meetings definitely think outside of the box and challenge the norm.
