SITUATION: 

People, animals and plants are dependent on our Earth’s natural resources. Everything from the air that we breathe, to the water that we drink, to the soil that we use for food production- these resources are vital to our existence. Therefore, it is important that we care for and respect these resources.

Success Story

In the fall of 2017, the Agent for Horticulture for McCracken County, who is also covering the ANR Agent position, worked to follow through on the idea of a free soil test for farmers as proposed in the 2016-2020 Plan of Work. The program was named, “Cheaper than Dirt” with the idea that a free soil test would encourage farmers to use the Extension Service outreach and also save some input of production.

Agent crafted a plan for farmers to benefit from the program and also provide equal chance to apply. Funding the program was the next step.  Agent created a coupon to be placed in the ANR newsletters sent regularly to farmers. Guidelines were included of name, address, and farm number to make sure the farmers were residents of McCracken County. A deadline of 1 April 2018 seemed to be helpful in the program. Limit of two soil samples per farmer was also put into place.  When all of the details were worked out, the Agent met with the Extension District Board for both approval and funding.

Extension District Board set a limit of the amount to be spent on the free soil sampling coupons for resident farmers of McCracken County. Agent and Staff Support created a list of the number of coupons available in the database for keeping up with who, what, when and where the coupons were dispersed. Each coupon was numbered and the numbers corresponded with the name/farm number, with the limit of two per farm number.

Newsletters went out at the end of 2017. Farmers responded quickly at first, and brought in soil samples.Heavy rainfall in the months of January and February made getting into the farm fields a hardship. In March 2018, flood waters receded and folks who had reserved a pair of coupons were reminded of the deadline.

At the end of March 2018, 13 farms/farm numbers were represented by the Soil Test Coupon from the “Cheaper than Dirt” program. This was a showing of 25 soil samples that were offered at no cost to the farmer.  The soil test results gave guidelines to allow farmers to use the correct amounts of N, P and K plus to know if lime needed to be added.This soil testing from The UK labs saved inputs for the farmer and helped them to know about the services of McCracken County Extension Service.