The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is hosting a professional development opportunity on April 27 at 10 am Central time to introduce “Selecting Land Applications Sites” curricula for managing animal manures. We’ll meet for about two and a half hours, and share our experiences with helping farmers recognize the potential benefits and risks of manure applications on any given field. By the end, we hope you’ll have had some fun and learned enough to take the curricula back to your state and use it with your clientele.

A group of Extension professionals from Nebraska and Minnesota have developed a  highly interactive learning experience to help farmers and their advisors plan for identifying preferred fields to receive animal manures. Participants work in groups of 6 to 8 individuals gathered around large table top maps and are guided through activities that examine manure benefits such as agronomic $ value and soil health benefits for individual fields as well as challenges such as managing neighbor odor concerns, water quality risks, and cost of transportation. As discussion proceeds, participants place happy and sad face poop emojis on fields to weigh individual field’s advantages and disadvantages.  These interactions regularly lead to additional audience discussions about individual decision factors such as local infrastructure, logistics of moving manure, visual cues for identifying fields benefitting from manure, etc.

Because we intend to have you go through the exercise, we’ll need to limit numbers so you get the full experience. For that reason we’ll be limiting registration to 24 participants, so register early at https://go.unl.edu/lamap.

If you have other questions, see the flyer or contact me at: leslie.johnson@unl.edu.