By Mary Hightower
U of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture

These meetings, held between harvest and planting, are a time when land-grant extension and research personnel can share their findings and latest best practices with farmers in hopes of improving the following year’s crop.

Winter production meetings are an off-season staple to earn about new research and find ways to improve the next season's crop. (U of A System Division of Agriculture image)

UNDATED — Winter production meetings are a long-held tradition of agriculture’s off season, combining information, conversation and digestion — usually of catfish or barbecue — but sometimes even the most well-planned agendas can go up in smoke.

Jeremy Ross, extension soybean agronomist, and Scott Stiles, extension economics program associate for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, are both veterans on the winter production meeting circuit. Over the decades, the two have made dozens of appearances, and traveling thousands of miles to these county meetings, speaking to farmers across the Delta and the Arkansas River Valley.

“Over the years, we have had meetings in all types of venues,” Stiles said. “We've had meetings in warehouses, restaurants, churches, extension offices and research centers, country stores and country clubs, hunting clubs, civic centers, grain elevators, fire departments, community colleges, airports, armories, cotton gins, fairgrounds, and farm shops.

“If it had a roof and four walls, we've had a meeting in it,” he said.

Technology changes

PowerPoints and videos may be the current standard for presentations, but that wasn’t always the case.

“For my first meeting, I went to the Oil Trough Country Store for the Independence County meeting. That was so long ago that we used transparencies and an overhead projector,” Stiles said.

“We met kind of off to one side of the store while lunchmeat was sliced for customers and the local quilters met in another corner of the store,” he said. “It was a hoot.

“I recall we had a meeting in a chemical warehouse down in south Arkansas once,” Stiles said. “We sat on boxes of chemical instead of chairs. Some of us got our pants all messed up with Prowl or some yellow herbicide. We all realized it when we were driving home and wondered what the smell was.”

Quite alarming

However, there is one meeting in Cross County in the early 2000s that brings a twinkle to the eyes of both Ross and Stiles.

The meeting took place in an almost-new fire station. In a previous year, the presentations went on in an adjoining meeting room and lunch tables were set up in the bay with the fire engines. This time, the usual meeting room was in use, so the production meeting took place in the fire engine bay. This proved awkward, as light streaming through the garage’s big windows washed out the slide presentations, Ross said.

Being scheduled in January or February, “it was really, really cold outside, and cold inside the garage, even with the doors closed,” Ross said.

Two or three presenters had given their talks, and then Trey Reaper, who was the soybean verification coordinator at the time, stepped up to speak.

“Trey was about halfway through his talk, when the alarms went off,” Ross said. “And if you’ve ever been in a fire station when the alarms go off, it’s pretty loud.”

Then, “the firemen come out and put their gear on, and then they started the trucks,” he said. “They didn’t open the garage doors before they started the trucks. So here are these diesel engines just sitting there producing exhaust.”

Stiles said “the trucks had filled the station with a blue cloud of diesel exhaust and we all coughed the rest of the meeting. Nobody heard a word we said.”

“They finally opened the doors and this cold blast of winter air comes through and we’re all grabbing papers and stuff and coughing, and it’s about 20 degrees cold than it was,” Ross said. “It was pretty comical.”

“That was about the funniest experience I've had at a production meeting,” he said.

2025 winter schedule

With any luck, the 2025 slate of meetings will be less eventful.

Please note that the meeting times may be subject to change due to inclement weather or other factors. Be sure to contact the local county extension office for location, times and other details.

JANUARY

Jan. 9 – Conway County – corn and soybeans
Jan. 10 – Poinsett / Craighead counties – rice and soybeans
Jan. 16 – Greene County – technology
jan. 24 – Miller / Little River / Lafayette counties – corn, cotton, soybeans and rice
Jan. 30 – morning: Cross County – corn, rice and soybeans
Jan. 30 – afternoon: White County – corn, rice and soybeans
Jan. 31 – morning: Greene County – corn, rice and soybeans
Jan. 31 – afternoon: Clay County – corn, rice and soybeans

FEBRUARY

Feb. 5 – Clay / Greene counties – cotton and peanut
Feb. 6 – morning: Arkansas County – rice and soybeans
Feb. 6 – afternoon: Jefferson County – corn, rice and soybeans
Feb. 6 – Mississippi / Crittenden counties – corn, cotton and agricultural economics with Hunter Biram
Feb. 7 – Jackson / Independence counties – corn, rice and soybeans
Feb. 10 – Woodruff County – corn, rice and soybeans
Feb. 11 – morning: Ashley / Chicot counties – rice and soybeans
Feb. 11 – afternoon: Lincoln / Desha / Drew counties – rice and soybeans
Feb. 12 – Crittenden / Mississippi counties – soybean, rice and agricultural economics with Hunter Biram
Feb. 13 – Prairie / Lonoke / Pulaski counties – rice and soybeans
Feb. 14 – Craighead/Poinsett counties – corn and cotton
Feb. 18 – Ashley / Chicot / Desha / Drew / Lincoln counties – corn and cotton
Feb. 20 – Phillips / Monroe / Lee / St. Francis counties – corn, cotton and agricultural economics with Scott Stiles
Feb. 21 – Randolph / Lawrence counties – corn, rice and soybeans
Feb. 27 – Clark County – cotton, corn, rice and soybeans
Feb. 28 – Phillips / Lee counties – rice and soybeans

MARCH

March 4 – Craighead / Poinsett / Greene / Mississippi counties – peanuts
March 4 – Arkansas River Valley – rice and agricultural economics with Ryan Loy
March 6 – St. Francis / Monroe County – rice, soybeans and agricultural economics with Ryan Loy.

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.