Upcoming eOrganic Webinars – Bees, Dairy, Chickens

Join eOrganic for many new webinars as well as next week’s live broadcast from the Organic Seed Growers Conference! We’ve made some exciting additions to our program, such as a presentation by bakers on using local organic grains, updates on a pastured poultry research project from Michael Lilburn at Ohio State, and a webinar on cultivating resilience on organic farms by Laura Lengnick. We’re also hosting two webinars on food safety practices on organic farms by Chris Blanchard of Purple Pitchfork and Erin Silva of the University of Wisconsin.All the webinars require advance registration, so use the links below to register and find more information and details about the times! You can also view the full schedule here.

Wild Bee Monitoring, Education, and Outreach in Organic Farming Systems
Date: Wednesday, February 10
Time: 1pm CST
Cost: Free
Registration: Register online

In this webinar, we deliver basic wild bee identification and monitoring tools for organic farmers, and discuss how these tools can be implemented as part of the Organic Systems Plan. Furthermore, we will specifically address our outreach methods for wild bee monitoring and identification, the results of these efforts, and future directions for this program.

Grazing Systems and Forage Quality of Grasses for Organic Dairy Production
Date: Thursday, February 11
Time: 1pm CST
Cost: Free
Registration: Register online

Pasture management and forage species selection within a farm can influence the feed quality of pasture forage for grazing dairy animals. In this webinar, Brad Heins will describe a multi-year grazing project aimed at enhancing in-field and landscape level species diversity of grasses across the grazing season. He will discuss forage quality of cool-season and warm-season grasses (Teff and BMR Sorghum-Sudangrass) and present performance of dairy cows grazing in these pasture systems designed to maximize seasonal forage yield and quality and extend the grazing season.

A Novel Nutritional Approach to Rearing Organic Pastured Broiler Chickens (Part 2)
Date: Tuesday, February 16
Time: 1pm CST
Cost: Free
Registration: Register online

This webinar will include updated findings from the NIFA OREI project “A whole farm approach incorporating pasture raised organic poultry and a novel cereal grain (Naked Oats) into an organic rotation.” In 2013, this research project group presented an eOrganic webinar which discussed how novel grains and pastured organic broiler chickens could be valuable additions to a multi-year organic rotation program on small-scale farms, as well as results from experiments in which pastured organic broilers (commercial, RedBros) have been fed diets containing 75% naked oats.