The Campbell County Cattleman’s Association meets annually and typically boasts an attendance of 70 or more people at this gathering. There are 65 registered members with the Kentucky Cattleman’s Association. This audience is a good representation of the majority of farmers and operations in Campbell County since the soils within the county are basically Eden clay loam with approximately 60,000 acres with slopes between 12 and 35%. Due of the steepness of the land, cultivated crops are limited to a small number of acres with most land being best suited for pasture or hay which lends themself well to cattle pasture. Traditionally, Campbell County Ag Extension has contributed to the event with an educational update, upcoming events and assistance with coordinating the event. In 2023, Campbell County ANR Agent, Michelle Simon, approached the meeting with a different strategy to move forward with educational programming for 2024. Since the audience is a good representation of the ag community Michelle used the opportunity to survey the audience with the website tool “Poll Everywhere”. This website allows you to create interactive surveys that are easy to use, don’t require downloading an app and the survey results are shown in live time as people answer the survey questions. Michelle used a variety of questions requiring yes or no answers, open-ended questions and numerical ratings to determine the challenges farmers are facing. This survey worked wonderfully and more information was submitted at that meeting via the Poll Everywhere survey than any written survey had produced. The overarching theme of all the survey responses were forages. Forage production, forage equipment and improving forages. 

Campbell County ANR Agent took these survey results and planned the Forage Focus Series. This series consisted of a monthly forage focus throughout 2024 that touched on every forage related topic and/or species that is relevant to Campbell County and was planned timely, so every topic was covered the month prior to when it would need to be implemented on the farm. Every topic that was requested in the interactive survey was addressed at one of the Forage Focus Series programs. The list of programs is as follows: 

February- Frost Seeding, Spring vs Fall Grass Establishment, Equipment for Successful Seeding

March- Soil Testing & Fertilizing

March- Alfalfa “The Queen of the Forages”

April- Warm Season Annuals & Native Warm Season Grasses

May- Weed Control in Pastures & Hayfields

June- Intensive Grazing Strategies

July- Baling Haylage & Establishing Warm Season Native Grasses

August- Fescue “the Wonder Grass”

Each of these programs were well-received with attendance averaging 25 people. Speakers were called in from UK Forages and UK Ag Engineering and were hosted as classroom sessions and as on-farm field days with demonstrations with as much hands-on learning as was possible. As a result of the programs that have occurred thus far, there was a 62.5% increase in soil tests processed at Campbell County Extension since 2022. Alan and Matthew Seiter used a drone to spray, Kevin and Keith Bezold purchased a 300-gallon boomless sprayer and sprayed Prowl to prevent foxtail in their hayfields and eliminated 98% of foxtail in the field. This increased the quality of hay to market to horse farms. Tim Lauer and Scott and Alan Pfefferman incorporated warm season native grasses into their operation to fill in the summer slump and renovated a field that had been taken over by bluegrass. Alan Ahrman and Steve Spenlau were able to jump start newly established hayfields by utilizing a new strategy of controlling winter annual weeds before fertilizing and doubled their forage production. Farmers changed their fertilizer schedule and rather than fertilizing once in the spring with 19-19-19, they applied a split Nitrogen application throughout the summer to improve forage production and plan to apply phosphorous and potassium this fall according to their soil tests results. The Forage Focus Series has made a huge impact on Campbell County farms and increased production during a year that made a drastic impact due to weather challenges. If these practices hadn’t been adopted, forage production would have suffered but reports from farmers show that first-cutting hay production increased by 60% since last year.