Project Details

Student involvement in the project started in the fall of 2017. The emphasis in this first year was to get students involved in summarizing an applied research project that is being conducted on the farm. Three students agreed to be involved in working on two projects.

Researching Pain Medication

The first project involved the fall beef science class in researching using pain medication during beef calf processing times and its impact on rate of gain. This is a project that was done as part of the fall beef science class and and was completed by the end of class.

Michael Schulte was the student in charge of summarizing this project. A video of his summary is available here.

Researching Four Nitrogen Application Rates

The second project involves our Soil Health Partnership. This project was started in the spring of 2017 and will be an ongoing project for several years. For our part of the partnership we are researching four nitrogen application rates with cover crops and their impact on yield, income, and soil health.

Melody Gossman and Erica Early were the students in charge of summarizing this project. As part of this project we used our drone to collect video and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imaging to help quantify crop health and record plant growth.

In the first year we were not able to fully utilize the drone but it will be used on a more regular basis in the coming growing seasons. For a video summary of the 2017 project click here.

Future Plans

Future plans include continuing the Soil Health Partnership project. It is hoped with the start of the new Agronomy/Crop Science program in the fall of 2018 we can increase student involvement in this project, especially in the area of collection and analysis of the data.

If funding is available we hope to continue using student developed video summaries of projects in Agronomy, Beef, and Dairy.

Member College

Northeast Iowa Member College