(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Atlantic FFA Chapter competed in the Iowa FFA Horse Career Development Event held at Kirkwood College on June 14, 2022. The Atlantic FFA Chapter team included: Callee Pellett, Colton Rudy and Joaquin Wailes. Their agriculture education instructor and FFA advisor is Mr. Eric Miller. Callee Pellett said, “I really enjoyed the contest. It was a lot of fun to judge horses for the first time. I also had fun meeting lots of new people.”

FFA teams from 38 chapters participated in this year’s Career Development Event designed to provide the student an opportunity to display their agricultural knowledge and skills in the area of Equine Science. The 121 individual contestants evaluated halter and performance classes. They also answered questions over the classes and gave oral reasons to explain their placings. A written examination was included along with a team problem solving competition. Joaquin Wails said, “I had a lot of fun. This was a good experience and hopefully will help us build a better team in the future.”

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Colton Rudy, Callee Pellett, Joaquin Wailes (photo & story submitted by FFA Advisor Eric Miller)

The team placed 26th in the Halter Classes, 25th in Performance Classes, 19th in the Reasons & Questions class and 9th in Problem Solving and Team Test. Atlantic FFA member Colton Rudy said, “This year’s contest was an interesting experience to say the least. My favorite part was the team test and tac ID.”

The Iowa FFA Horse Career Development Event was made possible with support through the Iowa FFA Foundation Gold Standard Donors. The Horse Career Development Event was coordinated and held at the Iowa Equestrian Center in Cedar Rapids. The official judge was Nikki Ferwerda, Associate Professor of Teaching at Iowa State University.

(Atlantic, Iowa) – Each year the Southwest FFA District and Iowa FFA officers plan and facilitate Chapter Officer Leadership Training (COLT) Conferences for FFA members in the Southwest District. Atlantic High School welcomed 140 FFA members from 29 FFA chapters from all over the Southwest district on Monday June 6th. While at Atlantic, district and state officers lead four interactive workshops for FFA Chapter leaders, many of which are officers, for the annual COLT Conference. The workshops facilitated were local FFA Chapter program focused in the areas of advocating for the agriculture industry, connecting with stakeholders, recruiting for the local chapter, and working as a cohesive team. FFA leaders also received training relative to their specific officer duties within the local chapter.

Atlantic FFA Secretary Claire Pellett said, “the day was very fun. I learned a lot about my role as a chapter officer and what I can do to improve my abilities in that area.” Iowa FFA President, Sam Martin, stated, “COLT conference provides a chance for FFA members to learn more about their responsibility as a local leader and is a conference for members to meet and connect with state, district and other chapter officers.”

Front row left to right
Claire Pellett and Charli Goff
Back Row Left to Right
Dylan Comes, Jackson McLaren ,Daniel Freund, DJ Shepperd, Colton Rudy (photo & story submitted by FFA Advisor Eric Miller)

COLT conference programming is designed as a two-year rotation of local leaders training. The focus areas of next year’s program include agriculture literacy, time management, professionalism, and self-confidence. The goal is to engage FFA members in learning about the tools that would allow them to be successful in anything they are part of through high school and beyond. COLT conference is made possible with support from Farmers Mutual Hail Insurance of Iowa through the Iowa FFA Foundation.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa is now part of an international network of radio receiver stations, stretching from Canada to South America, tracking long-distance migration patterns of birds, bats and insects. Anna Buckardt Thomas, an avian ecologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says it’s called the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, “motus” being the Latin word for movement.

“The focus of this system is to track small animals with large movements,” Buckardt Thomas says. “So it focuses on birds and bats, dragonflies, they’ve also been put on monarch butterflies before, so the size of the animal will determine the size of the tag it can receive and how long that tag will be emitting a radio signal.” Iowa now has seven of the receiving stations scattered statewide, with an eighth going online this fall, and plans to add four or five more.

Trackers in Iowa have recently picked up signals from birds that are migrating from Jamaica and even as far away as Columbia. “The system is integrated with basically any other researcher in the hemisphere,” Buckardt Thomas says. “There’s folks in Central and South America all the way up to Canada and we’re all operating on the same frequencies. So anyone could put a tag on a bird or bat or an insect, and if it moves through Iowa, it would be detected.”

As yet, the Iowa D-N-R isn’t tagging any flying creatures, but that’s something that’s being planned for the near future. For now, experts in Iowa tracking stations are keeping an eye — or an ear — on many thousands of creatures that have been tagged elsewhere. While we may already know a lot about the big picture of migration patterns, Buckardt Thomas says these stations will help us to understand even more about where various species winter and threats they may face.

“Learning more about individual species and individual animals will tell us about how fitness plays into migration,” she says, “how different resource availability plays into migration, exact kind of flight speeds and patterns of migration on the finer scale, which can help us be more effective in our conservation of those species.” Iowa’s seven tracking stations are located in areas that met elevation requirements and were placed on buildings owned or leased by the Iowa D-N-R.

There’s one at Lewis and Clark State Park, with six more near the towns of Early, Boone, Swisher, McGregor, Wapello, and Burlington. The state started installing the stations in August of 2021.

https://motus.org/

(Radio Iowa) – While Iowa’s largest water utility is spending up to ten-thousand dollars a day to remove nutrients from drinking water, a small town in northeast Iowa is exploring a cheaper alternative. Manchester City Manager Tim Vick says the city council is moving forward with creating a meandering wetlands area to help control flooding and to improve water quality. “This will be the first one in the state of Iowa that is situated the way it is,” Vick says. “It’s going to be an example for the communities of what they can do, and if this works out really well, we want to do a couple more of them.” The Storm Water Wetlands Project is to be developed on Manchester’s east side and will cost around 233-thousand dollars.

“We have a lot of stormwater that comes in and runs through the community,” Vick says. “We can clean up the water, do some better water quality with that because it’s coming from runoff and so if we can take care of that, that’ll help. It won’t necessarily address flooding, so if you get the 100-year flood, we can’t necessarily address that, but we can help out with the 25-year flood.” Vick hopes construction can start on the wetlands project this fall.

“The idea here is to slow the water down so it has time to drop the nutrients out of the water, so things can settle,” Vick says, “What we’re trying to do is get some plants and some vegetation that will take up those nutrients and use those before they get into the groundwater.” Late spring rains are washing nitrates off farmland upstream. Last week, the Des Moines Water Works fired up its nitrate removal equipment as nitrate levels spiked in the rivers that are the source of drinking water to 600-thousand central Iowa customers. A Water Works official suggests Iowa needs up to 15-million acres of cover crops and hundreds of wetlands to make real improvements.

(Reporting by Janelle Tucker, KMCH, Manchester)

ATLANTIC, IA – Produce in the Park is expecting another busy market today, June 16. Market Manager Brigham Hoegh says Over 20 vendors, food trucks, and increased activities from visiting organizations have been drawing more visitors to the park. The increase in participation and attendance has been great for vendors, but the sidewalks at the park have become more crowded.

Produce in the Park is working with vendors to reduce sidewalk crowding, and there will be a new layout at the park June 16. All vendors and visiting organizations will still be found in the Atlantic City Park, but the market footprint will expand to use more of the sidewalks and shady spaces available in the park. Additionally, today’s June 16 market will host the Atlantic Elks’ Bike Rodeo for kids age 12 and under, which will be set up on 6th Street. To keep the bike rodeo safe for everyone involved, there will be no senior parking available on 6th Street on June 16. Senior parking on 6th Street will be available again on June 23.

Visitors at Produce in the Park June 9

Produce in the Park thanks customers for the feedback and support as the farmers market continues to grow.

(Radio Iowa) – Researchers at Iowa State University using satellite data have found an impact from city lights on trees and plants. Yuyu Zhou, says the impact is significant. “The artificial nighttime lights can advance the start of the (growing) season of the trees, and also delay the end of the, of the trees or plants,” he says. They concluded the lights advanced the date of breaking leaf buds in the spring by nearly nine days and delayed the coloring of leaves by about six days in the fall. He says it’s the first large-scale look at the impact. Those who suffer from allergies could be feeling the impact on the growing season for what it produces.

“Early pollen season and also longer pollen season,” he says. Zhou says the urban heat island effect — where urban areas heat up faster than rural areas also contributes to the growing season changes. He says the change in the growing season can mismatch different trees and mess with the natural cycle. “It will cause the problem of the pollination service. And also another issue is because of the early start up — it can have high vulnerability to the spring frost damage.” Zhou explains.

Zhou is an associate professor of geological and atmospheric sciences at Iowa State. He says there is a positive to extending the season for some plants. “Because we can have a longer growing season in an urban area for an urban farm,” he says. The study compared seasonal changes in plants at around three thousand urban sites.

(Radio Iowa) – Out of state visitors at two western Iowa parks will have to keep paying an entrance fee for at least two and a half more years. Lake Manawa State Park in Council Bluffs had three million visitors last year and Representative Brent Siegrist, of Council Bluffs, says the fee may be a way to thin the crowds.

“Lake Manawa is the most heavily used park in the state park system, particularly because it’s next to Omaha and there are tons of Nebraskans that come over,” Siegrist says. “…Waubonsie State Park also is down near the Missouri border in Fremont County and they have a lot of traffic and visitors there.” In 2019, the legislature authorized an entrance fee of five dollars per out-of-state vehicle at both parks. It was a pilot project, to see if visitor traffic would change.

“The COVID years dramatically affected those parks at that time,” Siegrist says, “so they didn’t have a particularly good read about whether this is something they wanted to extend into the future.” This week Governor Reynolds approved the bill that keeps the fee in place until the end of 2025. Senator Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs says the fee can be a tool for keeping the peace in the park that’s just 10 miles from Omaha.

“When they have a crowd coming over to our parks to use it for purposes that you and I or anyone else here might not enjoy to take our families there and just enjoy the day — whether they want to drink or tear up the park or go off-road or so something like that, this is one more tool to try to maybe redirect some of our non-residents back to their state,” Dawson says.

There’s a daily fee for every vehicle entering a NEBRASKA state park. It’s six dollars for Nebraskans and eight dollars for everyone else. The State of Iowa began charging a 10-dollar yearly park user fee in 1987, but it was repealed two years later. During debate of the continued entrance fees for Lake Manawa and Waubonsie State Parks, legislators said they were not interested in imposing entrance fees at the other 81 state parks and recreation areas in Iowa.

• KJAN, Atlantic  1.95″
• 7 miles NNE of Atlantic  2.51″
• 3 miles N of Atlantic  2.5″
• Elk Horn  1.92″
• Exira 2.55″
• Anita  .56″
• Avoca  1.85″
• Oakland  2.33″
• Audubon  2″
• Guthrie Center  1.9″
• Neola  2.23″
• Manning  1.33″
• Missouri Valley  1.37″
• Logan  1.64″

w/Kate Olson.

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(Radio Iowa) – Dozens of Farm Service Agency offices across Iowa are seeking new employees. Matt Russell, the Iowa F-S-A director, says they’re hiring for a host of positions in dozens of Iowa communities. “One of the things this administration is really committed to is filling these positions all across rural America in USDA,” Russell says. “We’re in a hiring time at FSA, and I’d also say at NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service), which shares our office spaces in the counties, and Rural Development, which is only about eight counties in the state. They’re also hiring.”

There are 97 F-S-A offices statewide, nearly one in every county, and Russell says the need is great for new workers. There was a big hiring push in 1985 after the new farm and conservation bills, and many of those people are now retiring. “We’re now at a similar time where we’re having to ramp up what USDA does because American farmers are needed on the front lines, for fuel, for food, for conservation and ecosystem services,” Russell says, “and that’s part of what we’re seeing as well.” It’s a challenging time to be in agriculture, he says, because while commodities prices are at near-record high levels, so are input prices.

“There’s a lot of money coming in and a lot of money going out,” Russell says. “This year should be a pretty good year for income for farmers — if they had their inputs purchased ahead of time. Going forward, interest rates, input prices that could be challenging, but the expectation is that the prices are going to continue to be pretty strong as well because the demand is high.” He says the U-S-D-A plays a big role in helping to manage all of those ups and downs.

Learn more about the job opportunities at your county’s nearest Farm Service Agency office or visit: www.usajobs.gov.