Field Day returned to the Powell Research and Extension Center last month, after taking a year off due to COVID-19 restrictions throughout the University of Wyoming system.
The free agri-tainment event featured displays, games, a community meal, and tours of the research being done at the center.
The Powell center (PREC) performs a variety of research every year. These involve a range of crops grown here in the Big Horn Basin, including beans, corn, barley and more.
The center spreads its research across 200 acres. There are three other research and extension centers in Wyoming, but the Powell facility focuses primarily on irrigated crops.
The two tours, which were conducted by Sam George, farm manager at PREC, drove people around through the acres of crops, in a trailer pulled by a tractor.
Dry bean trials are spread out far and wide this year at the center. These include a fertility study, where they don’t put down as much nitrogen. They have a seed increase trial. And they are growing a few types of novelty beans (rare beans sold in niche markets) to see how well they perform in the Big Horn Basin’s soil and climate. Some bean varieties include tiger eye beans — which the center staff calls Wyoming beans — and southwest red beans.
Last year, PREC grew beans from France, the first time the beans were grown in the U.S. An early freeze hit those trials, but they still got some useful data.
The center also has a planting date study to determine how outcomes are influenced by the time beans are planted. They have a lot of different varieties of dry beans, and each variety is planted on dates about 1.5 weeks apart through May and June.
The center is also doing a number of studies on weeds.
“Those are our favorites,” George joked.
Whereas most farmers avoid weeds like the plague, PREC sometimes creates weedy fields to see how to better manage the problem plants.
Tyler Hicks, a graduate student who is completing his master’s degree at UW, explained how some of this year’s trials look at problems bean farmers are having with pigweed, kochia, venice mallow and nightshade. They’re not the prettiest of the center’s trials — “It looks like a weedy mess right now,” Hicks said — but they could yield valuable data.
PREC personnel are also conducting experiments on sugar beets with biochar, which George explained is spent trees and straw, and coal-char, which is spent coal. The fertilizers tie nutrients into the soil so water doesn’t leech them out.
They are also doing trials with herbicides on sugar beet fields, where farmers are seeing weeds sprouting up that are resistant to some of the herbicides used in the area.
The tour also showed off some irrigation trials, where center staffers simulate drought conditions. In one such trial, they found that chickpeas did better with 80% of the usual amount of irrigation.
The tour also showcased trials launched with PREC’s industry partners, such as Briess Malt & Ingredients Company, Coors Brewing Company and J.R. Simplot Company.
The center sells its produce to help support its work. Some of the center’s production is grown to facilitate research, so one year’s trial that leaves residuals in the soil doesn’t influence the research done on the same field the following year. Other times, the produce comes out of a completed trial.
Some experiments demonstrate what doesn’t work, which is a critical way that PREC helps farmers. George showed a field where they tried to grow organic safflower, but the crop couldn’t out-compete the curly dock.
“It looked like a curly dock production field,” George said.
The center plans to follow that up with some organic alfalfa and sainfoin to see if they fare better against the weedy plant.
“We’ll see how it will work,” George said. “That’s what we’re here for, to have failures like that so producers don’t have to eat those costs.”