North Dakota State University is hosting a series of free webinars on the topic
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
North Dakota State University (NDSU) is providing an opportunity for livestock producers to learn about grazing cover crops during a free webinar series.
Extension specialists and researchers will make live presentations and answer questions during the series webinars. Each event is one-hour long and the first in the series is scheduled for Tuesday, April 7.
Two webinars will be offered on some days, and the presentations will begin at 11 a.m. CST.
The topics represent a mix of extension research and information producers are looking for, said Miranda Meehan, livestock environmental stewardship specialist with NDSU Extension.
“For the past few years we’ve been doing café talks on soil health and one of the things that keeps coming up is grazing cover crops and getting livestock integrated into crop systems,” she told Farms.com.
Marisol Berti, a forage and biomass crop production professor, will lead the first webinar on April 7.
Her presentation will focus on cover crop seeding regulations, a topic that producers may be unfamiliar with, Meehan said.
“It’s a really interesting conversation because those seed sources aren’t as regulated as some of our crop species,” she said. “There’s a higher chance you get weed seeds in those cover crop seeds, so (Berti) is going to talk about some of the precautions producers can take.”
Producers are interested in the information the presenters are going to share.
“We’re always open to more education and suggestions,” Erika Kenner, a Simmental producer from Leeds, N.D., told Farms.com. “We used cover crops in the past by seeding it into a crop we had harvested already. We found it was great for grazing in the fall and winter.”
The webinars will be broadcast using Zoom and are limited to the first 100 participants.
NDSU will record each webinar and post them online for later viewing.
