Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop set for Feb. 11-12, 2025

It’s almost time for the 2025 Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop, geared for ag professionals like farmers, crop consultants, agronomists, Extension agents, and ag businesses who work with farmers. Individuals may attend while some companies send a handful of staff. Some people attend the workshop for the first time while many familiar people register year after year.

The Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop runs two full days at the Holiday Inn in Fargo, February 11 and 12. If you participate fully, you could earn 10 continuing education credit hours for Certified Crop Advisers. But you don’t need to be a CCA to attend! Register online now to reserve your seat.

Let’s review this year’s agenda. A popular topic (probably because it’s unpopular whenever it occurs!) is plant disease. Sessions will discuss diseases in corn, soybean, and hard red spring wheat. One breakout session looks specifically at economic thresholds and reviews tools to help with pesticide application decisions.

Speaking of pesticides, another session looks at pre-mixtures. They’re convenient, all-in-one, and compatible with each other from the start. But is *that* AI – active ingredient – at the right quantity in the product?

NDSU has a new soils team on campus, and we’ve invited them to introduce themselves and share their goals. What key soil health principles should be foremost in your mind and what about potassium fertility? Then we added an economist to round out another discussion, this time on carbon programs.

Ag finances are tight, so what do top farmers do to rise above the rest? A Farm Management instructor aggregates the best practices from across the upper Midwest, so you can add profitable new strategies for 2025.

This wouldn’t be an Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop without emerging topics! Along with the discussion on the economics of carbon trends, we’ve invited industry and Extension to look at drones for pesticide applications. 

In the land of soybeans and corn, it’s refreshing to offer sessions for wheat and canola growers. Along with the HRSW disease session, there’s one on controlling broadleaf weeds and grasses in wheat while still maintaining a robust crop rotation. And it’s time to look at canola again – things have changed since canola first arrived on the US side of the border. Review the basics and hear about the successful strategies long-term canola producer’s trust.

We’ve assembled a ‘dream team’ panel to focus on dry bean production, looking closely at weed and disease management.

Because this in an in-person Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop, we’ve added a new hands-on feature – an ag pest identification quiz. We promised the Holiday Inn that we wouldn’t bring live bugs, but we’ll sure have them preserved in little jars! We’ve already planted live weeds for samples, and photos and plant mounts will round out the tables. There’s even a traveling prize for top score! 

These things don’t happen by themselves. The Advanced Crop Advisers Workshop is co-hosted by NDSU Extension and the University of Minnesota Extension. There is a ten-person planning committee led by: 

• Angie Peltier, Regional Crops Educator with University of Minnesota Extension, based in Crookston
• Alicia Harstad, NDSU Extension ag agent for Barnes County in Valley City
• Jeff Stachler, Extension Cropping Systems Specialist at the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center 

Linda Schuster
Linda.Schuster@ndsu.edu
Administrative Assistant