Kansas State Research and Extension and Nebraska Extension have teamed up to offer two crop insurance workshop dates for farmers, ranchers, and insurance and lending professionals. The first will be Oct. 23, at the Heartland Event Center, Grand Island, Neb. The second will be held Oct. 24 at Tony’s Pizza Event Center, Salina, Kan.
These one-day workshops will feature experts from K-State and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln offering insight into the farm bill debate, current climate trends, high coverage policies in a low margin environment, Risk Management Agency updates, the market outlook for 2025 and more.
Registration is $100 to attend, and will increase to $120 Oct. 18 for the Nebraska workshop and Oct. 19 for the Kansas workshop. Find more information and registration at 2024 insurance update.
Hiland Dairy earns multiple honors
at World Dairy Expo
Hiland Dairy earned top honors in several categories of the 2024 World Dairy Expo Championship Dairy Product Contest.
Hiland Dairy earned first place in seven categories: Whole Chocolate Milk-Premium Chocolate; Low Fat Chocolate Milk 2%; Fat Free Chocolate Milk; Peach Cereal Smoothie; Pecan Cereal Smoothie; Low Fat Sour Cream-Lite Sour Cream; and Black Cherry Yogurt. The company also earned second- and third-place finishes in other categories such as low-fat cultured buttermilk, heavy whipping cream and other smoothies and yogurts.
Hiland Dairy is a farmer-owned dairy foods company headquartered in Springfield, Mo., with locations in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.
Climate Smart Cotton Program
Level 2 applications open
U.S. cotton growers can now enroll in Level 2 of the Climate Smart Cotton Program. This program, led by the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, gives Level 1 growers the opportunity to receive the financial options added this year, increasing the number of growers eligible to participate.
To qualify for Level 2, growers must meet Level 1 requirements, adopt a new Climate Smart Agriculture practice, verify practice adoption, participate in soil health target-setting, and quantify greenhouse gas emissions on all practice change acres. Email [email protected] to be connected with the Grower Enrollment Specialist for your region.
National Science Foundation awards
$1 million to expand K-State bee project
The National Science Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to researchers at three U.S. universities to further advance a Kansas State University project that K-State’s entomologists hope will help conserve one of nature's most important pollinators.
K-State entomologist Brian Spiesman launched the website BeeMachine.ai and a mobile app in 2020 to help track trends in bee populations across the world. Spiesman said a recent update substantially improves users' ability to contribute to the citizen science effort and communicate their sightings. The update was funded by a K-State Game-changing Research Initiation Program for exploratory research, or GRIPex, award for nearly $250,000. The NSF grant will allow the researchers to continue that work.
"We are now able to identify 354 types of bees from around the world, and this number will continue to grow as we develop our image data set with the NSF project to include more types of bees," Spiesman says. There are an estimated 4,000 bee species in North America alone and more than 20,000 worldwide. According to Spiesman, BeeMachine.ai currently contains tens of thousands of images of bees submitted from mobile app and website users.
Since the launch of BeeMachine.ai four years ago, 4,000 users have contributed more than 14,000 sightings from all continents except Antarctica. However, to fully unleash the power of artificial intelligence technology, more images and information are needed. Spiesman said the NSF awarded K-State $372,442 to continue the work and add improvements.
"You improve artificial intelligence algorithms by adding more images, but image availability is the main limiting factor in developing reliable algorithms," Spiesman says.
K-State has formed partnerships with the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin — which also received money from NSF — to photograph collections of pinned bees for improving AI algorithms. Spiesman said KU has more than 500,000 bee specimens that can be added to BeeMachine; Wisconsin has several thousand as well.
"K-State will use NSF funds to support personnel who can conduct imaging, which will allow us to continue existing partnerships with other groups, such as USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Logan, Utah, which holds more than 1 million bee specimens," Spiesman says.
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