Success StoryKATS Training



KATS Training

Author: Edwin Ritchey

Planning Unit: Plant and Soil Sciences

Major Program: Grain Crops

Outcome: Intermediate Outcome

Kentucky Agriculture Training School (KATS) was developed from the Wheat Field School that started in 2016. We transitioned from the Wheat Field School to KATS in order to bring additional crops and participation to the trainings. The trainings are focused towards crop advisors, managers, government employees, and other individuals involved with production agriculture to provide realistic scenarios that would be experienced in their operations. Training the trainers provides us with a large information multiplier so the information we provide gets to many more than those that attend the sessions. We hired a full-time coordinator, Lori Rogers, for this program and she is doing a great job with organization and event planning. Lori has created a new website devoted to KATS and has Twitter and Facebook followers for KATS information. We have had attendees from multiple states outside of Kentucky attend the KATS training session. Many of the training sessions are videotaped and then posted to the UK YouTube site so others can view the information. Survey results indicate that the attendees feel like they are getting a good value from the training. We typically have a 50% return on completed surveys so the values reported below only represent 50% of the clientele present. The 2018 spray clinic had 76 attendees that represented 161,524 acres and a total value of information of $4,189,990. The late season KATS training had 26 attendees with 170,600 acres represented for a total value of $2,760,000. The early season KATS training had 31 attendees that represented 83,965 acres with a total value of $871,150. These survey results clearly show the monetary impact three KATS trainings have had on program attendees.






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