Prepping for the Manure Applicator Training Advisory Meeting

Generally, when I’m writing it is about the science of manure, but I thought today I’d write something a little different. Today is the Manure Applicator Training Advisory meeting for the 2019 Iowa Manure Applicator Training Program. Every year we get to interact and share information on manure with about 5000 individuals in this program, help them understand the current state of the industry and the science, and hopefully encourage them to make the best possible decisions on how to utilize their manure.

I consider it a great privilege to help provide this program. Manure is an important topic in Iowa and one that touches on technology and machinery, agriculture and the environment, human and animal safety, soil science, and so many more. There is great diversity in the topics each individual farmer or manure applicator will find important, and the challenge is how do we take what we know about them and their farms, there application companies, current and future regulations, and provide them with knowledge that they find useful, interesting, and engaging.

While I by no means have it figured out, we have been working on engaging, exploring active learning. Last year one activity we explored using active learning was compaction. Those present were divided into teams and set around to discuss and answer four questions related to compaction and how it impacts the manure business. This provided a great chance to stretch their legs, but also some peer-to-peer discussion and a chance for sharing of their experience. You can get an idea of what was happening in the photo below, and while discussion may have started slow, as we went along it picked up and we got plenty of great comments. As we are planning for the upcoming year I thought it would be fun to look back on the activity and see what we heard.

 Figure 1. Groups discussed and provide answers to each question, spending 5-7 minutes discussing and summarizing.

The four questions we asked were: 1. What causes compaction? 2. Why do we care about compaction? 3. What are your or your client’s expectations about compaction? And 4. How can we reduce compaction (primarily related to manure application)? For each of the questions we compiled the answers as a “wordle.” For those of you like me who may not know, a Wordle is a toy for generating word clouds from test that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text, or this case the answers provided at all the different sites. The important thing is that the give a quick and elegant way of providing a visual clue summarize what people were talking and discussing in their answers to the questions. So let’s take a look at what they had to say.

Figure 2. What causes compaction?

Figure 3. Why do we care about compaction?

Figure 4. What are you or your client’s expectations about compaction?

Figure 5. How can we reduce compaction?

My goal here won’t be to dissect these answers, but you can see that there were themes that emerged and we’ll try to focus more on those, how they relate to the science we do know on compaction, and more importantly how the mitigation strategies they mentioned rely on that science. Overall, though the activity proved worthwhile, provided a few smiles, and we well received, so something we’ll continue to pursue and work on.