(Radio Iowa) – Northwest Iowa crops specialist, Joel DeJong says it’s a chance to brush up on your knowledge. “Farmers like every industry need to continually learn and improve. Any industry that doesn’t improve and doesn’t get better has a tendency to die,” DeJong says. “And although people will still need to eat — we need to be productive, we need to be competitive and we need to look at that on a world basis. So, we need to get better at that all the time, and that’s one of the goals of what we do.”

DeJong says each of the Crop Advantage seminars for northwest Iowa will feature entomologist Erin Hodgson. “Erin is going to talk about corn rootworms. We had a lot of issues with corn rootworms this past year — particularly corn-on-corn acres have had a huge amount of problems — and some of the treatments aren’t working as well as they used to, and she is going to talk about that,” he says.

Joel DeJong. (ISU photo)

Agricultural economist, Chad Hart will try to look into what’s going to happen with the commodities market. “He’s going to try and look ahead. And as Chad says sometimes when you are really high his job is to kind of bring you back down a little bit — and when it is really low — his job is to help you back up. He gets to work with the high end of that price scale this year,” DeJong says.

He says you can contact your local extension office or go online to CropAdvantage.org. Sheldon will host the first seminar, scheduled to take place on January 4th at the Northwest Iowa Community College. Other seminars to follow include Storm Lake, Burlington, Okoboji, Ankeny, Cedar Falls, Mason City, Chariton, Webster City, Atlantic, Davenport, Coralville, Le Mars, and Denison