Four States Ag Expo set for Feb. 8

By Tracy Courage
U of A System Division of Agriculture

TEXARKANA, Ark. – Growers and producers from Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma will find the latest research-based information on row crops, livestock and forages, forestry, horticulture, integrated pest management, pollinators, mushrooms and more at the Four States Ag Expo on Feb. 8.

EXPO TIME — The Four States Ag Expo in Texarkana brings together ag industry professionals from Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. (UADA graphic)

The expo is scheduled from 8:30 a.m.–3:15 p.m. at the Four States Fairgrounds, 3700 E. 50th St. in Texarkana. The event is a joint project of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. Experts from both agencies will host workshops throughout the day.

 “We’ll be offering a variety of educational sessions to help our growers and producers learn best practices for their operations,” said Jennifer Caraway, Miller County extension staff chair and one of the organizers. “It’s also a great time to network with others in the agriculture industry.”

Organizers are expecting 350 attendees, Caraway said. She and Arkansas extension agents in Lafayette, Little River, Miller, Sevier, Polk, Howard and Hempstead counties served on the expo planning committee along with agents from Bowie, Morris, Cass and Red River counties in northeastern Texas.

“We’re proud to partner with Texas A& M AgriLife Extension on this event that has been growing in scope for the past several years,” said John Anderson, director of the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service. “Our collaboration helps us both of our agencies get research and resources for best practices into the hands of those who make their living in the agriculture industry.”

The expo is free, open to the public and includes a hamburger lunch. Texas Restricted Use Applicators can obtain up to five continuing education units (CEUs) at the expo.

Concurrent sessions will begin at 8:30 a.m. and include the following topics and speakers:

8:30 a.m.

• Controlling Biting Flies through Cattle Minerals containing IGRs — Dr. Shane Gadberry, Livestock and Forestry Station director, UADA

• Managing Common Household Pests around the Farmstead — Dr. Jon Zawislak, entomology and plant pathology instructor, UADA

• Native Plants for Pollinators — Phyllis Ballard, Texas Master Gardener

9:45 a.m.

• Growing Cucurbit Crops — Dr. Joe Masabni, assistant professor and extension horticulturist (vegetables), Texas A&M

• Easy Cattle Forage Calculator, Dr. Shane Gadberry, Livestock and Forestry Station  director, UADA

• Corn and Wheat Insect, Disease and Weed Updates — Dr. Jason Kelley, extension wheat and feed grains agronomist, UADA

11 a.m.

• Oak and Loblolly Pine Tree Decline, Dr. Vic Ford, associate vice president of agriculture and natural resources, UADA

• Controlling External Parasites of Livestock — Sonja Swiger, professor and extension Entomologist, Texas A&M Greenhouse Management

• Joe Masabni, assistant professor and extension horticulturist, Texas A&M

1 p.m.

• Mushrooms in the Wild — Dr. Vic Ford, associate vice president of agriculture and natural resources, UADA

• Reversing Declining Forage Stands — Dr. Vanessa Corriher-Olson, professor and extension forage specialist, Texas A&M

• Controlling House Flies around Livestock Barns — Sonja Swiger, professor and extension Entomologist, Texas A&M

2:15 p.m.

• Following the Pesticide Label to Ensure Applicator Safety — Ples Spradley, pesticide assessment specialist, UADA

• Arkansas Restricted Use Pesticide Applicator Training — Jennifer Caraway, Miller County extension agent, UADA

• Texas Auxin Training — Dr. Brian Triplett, Red River County agent, Texas A&M

For more information, visit https://www.uaex.uada.edu/farm-ranch/4-states-ag-expo.aspx.

To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on X and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu. Follow on X at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on X at @AgInArk. 

New recommendations for soybean producers have potential to boost profits

By Nick Kordsmeier
U of A System Division of Agriculture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Soybean producers surveying their fields may see green leaves and no problems. But an invisible enemy may be concealed in the plants — “hidden hunger.”

POTASH SHORTAGE — Professor of soil testing Trent Roberts, left, examines soybean leaves in a field with doctoral student Carrie Ortel in this file photo from 2021. Roberts and Ortel worked with a team of Arkansas researchers to define new recommendations for in-season soybean tissue sampling, published last month. (U of A System Division of Agriculture photo)

Hidden hunger describes plants that look healthy but are experiencing a nutrient deficiency that could harm yield, said Trent Roberts, professor and the Endowed Chair in Soil Fertility Research for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station. A deficiency in potassium, also called potash, can eat into potential profits for soybean producers.

“You reduce photosynthetic rate and reduce water use efficiency,” Roberts said. “The overall productivity of the plant really drops.

“If you have an 80-bushel soybean crop and you’re losing 10 percent yield, that’s eight bushels of soybean, and you start talking about $14 per bushel, now all of a sudden we’re talking $100 per acre that you’re not able to capture because of this deficiency you don’t know about,” Roberts said.

Last month, Roberts and other scientists with the experiment station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, published research in the Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment journal that gives producers new recommendations in the fight against hidden hunger.

The goal? Maximize yield and boost profits for soybean producers.

“Anything we can do to maintain sufficient potassium availability just means higher yield potential,” Roberts said. “That’s just more profit for the producer.”

The study was conducted by Roberts and Carrie Ortel, a crop, soil and environmental sciences doctoral student in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Other collaborators included doctoral student Kyle Hoegenauer, assistant professor of precision agriculture Aurelie Poncet, professor and soybean extension specialist Jeremy Ross, and Nathan Slaton, associate vice president for agriculture and assistant director of the experiment station.

Roberts said one surprising finding wasn’t an objective of the study, which was conducted on five producer-managed commercial production fields around Arkansas.

“One of the biggest things that we found was 90 percent of these fields were deficient in potash, but they had no visual deficiency symptoms.”

In other words, they were suffering from hidden hunger.

Roberts sees a great opportunity in addressing this nutrient deficiency.

“If we’re able to effectively manage that, then that’s as much as 5 to 15 bushels of soybean per acre across the board that we can increase yields,” he said.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, Arkansas harvested 3.15 million acres of soybean in 2022, with an average yield of 52 bushels per acre.

Tissue sampling is key

What makes hidden hunger so difficult to address is the lack of visual cues in the soybean plant, Roberts said. “A lot of producers assume they’re doing fine because they don’t see visual deficiency symptoms, and they could be losing 5 to 10 percent yield and never know it.”

Tissue testing has emerged in recent years as a way to evaluate fields for hidden hunger. Soybean plant material is analyzed in a lab to identify the concentration of potassium in the plant. If plants test below a certain threshold — called the critical concentration — the plants are suffering from nutrient deficiency and will lose yield potential, Roberts said.

“The purpose of this paper was really to define a sampling protocol for tissue tests in soybean,” he said. “So, what we really set out to do was say, ‘OK, how much variability in tissue nutrient concentration exists in our soybean fields?’”

With that information, the team was able to develop a protocol for producers to collect soybean tissue samples, including when, where and how many samples to collect per field.

New sampling recommendations

The researchers conducted grid sampling in one-acre grids at five producer-managed soybean fields in Arkansas in 2020 and 2021. The samples were analyzed in a lab to determine the average concentration of potassium in each sample at a given time and field location. The measured concentrations were compared against the critical potassium concentrations, Roberts said.

Through spatial analysis of the data, Roberts said the team found no benefit to high-resolution grid sampling. The data showed no indication that concentrations of potassium in soybean tissue varied within a given field management area — a segment of land with similar conditions defined to help fine-tune management decisions.

Roberts said the biggest recommendation coming from the research is that composite sampling is sufficient to capture the variability of soybean tissue samples within management areas.

“The data basically told us there’s no benefit from grid sampling,” he said. Instead, a composite sample consisting of at least 18 of the uppermost fully expanded trifoliolate leaves will be representative of the management area. Trifoliolate leaves are compound leaves composed of three leaflets.

Eliminate the guess work

The next step for the researchers is to develop a set of calibrated potassium fertilizer rates to give producers site-specific recommendations for in-season applications.

“A producer can go out and sample their field and identify whether or not their potassium is adequate. And then based on that tissue concentration, if it’s deficient, we can basically take the tissue concentration and provide a calibrated fertilizer rate,” Roberts said. “The real exciting part is this idea that now we know how to sample, now we know how to interpret it, we can take that tissue concentration and give you a site specific in-season potassium fertilizer rate.”

The researchers hope to develop a decision support tool for producers to use by 2025.

Roberts emphasized that taking the guesswork out of production systems is the goal.

“Whether it’s soybean or any of our other crops, we’ve got a lot of tools out there,” he said. “Whether it’s soil sampling, tissue sampling, there are ways that you can help manage your production system to make sure that yield isn’t being limited and that you’re not spending money you don’t have to.”

This research was supported in part by the Soybean Checkoff Program, administered by the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board.

To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow us on X at @ArkAgResearch. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on X and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on X at @AgInArk.

Division of Agriculture seeking input from sheep and goat producers

By Sarah Cato
U of A System Division of Agriculture

LITTLE ROCK – The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture is looking to evaluate the state’s sheep and goat industry in an effort to make improvements. To do so, extension specialists are requesting input from sheep and goat producers across Arkansas.

RUMINATING ON RUMINANTS — Dan Quadros, extension small ruminant specialist for the Division of Agriculture, is leading an effort to evaluate the state of the sheep and goat industry in Arkansas in hopes of identifying weaknesses that can be improved upon. (Division of Agriculture photo.)

Dan Quadros, extension small ruminant specialist for the Division of Agriculture, has developed a working plan to assess the current production system in Arkansas for sheep and goats, identify issues and challenges within the production system, and organize solutions to existing challenges in the entire value chain. However, each step in this process requires direct input from producers.

“To start, we really want to X-ray our production system for sheep and goats here in Arkansas,” Quadros said. “We want to know the basics of the farms in our state. Are they commercial or hobbyists? How many animals do they have? What are their health management practices? This is the basic information we are starting with.”

To gather this basic data, Quadros and his team have developed an online survey for Arkansas sheep and goat producers. The survey takes about 10-20 minutes to complete, and all responses will remain anonymous.

The survey is open from Oct. 1 – Oct. 30.

Next steps

The next step is to gather more in-depth and informal information from producers, for which there will be two options: interactive webinars and an online open channel.

“In addition to this basic data from the survey, we want to know firsthand from producers what the challenges and the bottlenecks — on- and off-farm — are in the small ruminant industry in Arkansas as well as collect suggestions on how to overcome them,” Quadros said. “Hopefully this will give more context to the basic data collected in the survey and give us a better idea of what issues we should be focusing on.”

The first option to participate is a series of interactive webinars. There will be five webinars, all following the same agenda. Each will involve a presentation, a special guest and open participation.

“We’re hoping these webinars will provide a space where producers can give honest answers about the challenges they face,” Quadros said. “We need to know what their biggest concerns are and what possible solutions we need to pursue.”

The webinar schedule is as follows:

• Thursday, Oct. 12, noon — Special guest: Johnny Gunsaulis, Benton County extension staff chair

• Friday, Oct. 20, 9 a.m. — Special guest: Bryce Baldridge, Lawrence County extension staff chair

• Monday, Oct. 23, 7 p.m. — Special guest: Jennifer Sansom, Little River County extension staff chair

• Wednesday, Oct. 26, 3 p.m. — Special guest: Stacey Stone, Nevada County extension staff chair

Those interested can join the webinar via Zoom at the above times.

For those who are unable or do not wish to participate in the webinars, there is an online, open channel available to give written responses. This allows producers to outline their main challenges – on and off the farm – and provide any suggestions to overcome these challenges and strengthen the sheet and goat value chains in Arkansas. The open channel is available Oct. 1 – Oct. 31.

At the end of this process, we will invite several organizations and representatives of different segments of the small ruminant value chain to discuss the results and build our development program.

Read more about the survey, webinars and open online channel on the Division of Agriculture Small Ruminants Blog.

To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.