We were invited to attend a field day just south of Greenfield at the Iowa State University Neely-Kinyon Research and Demonstration Farm in Adair county. There were several great topics on No-Till practices, cover crops, and miscanthus grass. Interesting to me the John Deere 2510H was exhibited for its low disturbance NH3 application. In a previous position as and engineer at John Deere, I had the opportunity to work on that machine when being first introduced to the market. The information is available at the Iowa learning farm website:
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/ilf/
We were able to speak a short bit about out experience of farming miscanthus, and it was great to see how interested the attendees were on the topic.
There is also a like to a great Webinar on the site above by Emily Heaton from Iowa State University covering growing miscanthus grass as a dedicated bioenergy crop.
Lots of good sunshine, heat, and rain on the miscanthus plot. With the weeds knocked down, it is performing well. When we were at the field day mentioned above, it was great to see second year and first year miscanthus side-by-side. Sadly, my camera only saved blank images when I was there, so none to post today. It was good to see how our plants compare - they look like great first year plants. All we can expect now is for the plants to continue to do well, go dormant well in the fall, and really produce come biomass next year.
