The No-Till on the Plains 27th annual Winter Conference is January 23-25, 2023, in Wichita, Kansas. Aaron Sawyers is the executive director of No-Till on the Plains, and he talks about the upcoming event.
“No-Till on the Plains Winter Conference, in my opinion, is one of the better conferences in the country to attend with kind of a grassroots board that always strives for education to meet you where you’re at. So, if you’re just starting or you’ve been in it for longer than the organization, it’s a really neat, special organization to me, so we’ve got a nice speaker lineup to challenge the whole paradigm of your operation.”
He talks about some of the workshops and speakers.
“At the early hands-on workshop, there’s an advanced session where guys are using biology to decrease inputs, increase profitability, and then there’s a fundamentals workshop going on the same day for people who are just newer and maybe not as far along in their journey. Just to highlight a few of our speakers, we have Tom Robinson, a farmer from Australia, and Blake Vance, a farmer from Canada. Those are both kind of our bigger keynote speakers.”
The Central Plains have been hit hard by drought, and he says no-till is one tool to make soils a little more resilient against the impact of drought.
“We had this drought start here last year and intensify this year, and even if you are no-till, it still has to rain. But it seems like we’re more insulated against drought or flood. We were 45 percent of our average rainfall here this year, and it came in about three different rain events. So, we have to have more resilient soils to be able to capture that, so we can get through drought. No-till is a good tool to help with that.”
For more information, go to notill.org.
