2016 Organic Crop Field Day Information
The Ohio State University’s Organic Food and Farming Education and Research (OFFER) program will hold a free public field day featuring new findings and projects related to certified organic research.
The event is from 2 to 6 p.m. Sept. 8 starting at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center’s West Badger farm in northeast Ohio. The tour will then proceed to additional organic research plots located at OARDC’s Fry Farm and Horticulture Unit 1, which together represent more than 75 acres of certified organic research land.
OFFER and OARDC are both part of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. OARDC is the college’s research arm.
The field day will highlight various aspects of agronomic, specialty and cover crops. A featured topic will be soil management using the soil balancing philosophy, an idea described by William Albrecht in The Albrecht Papers which says that ideal soils contain 60-75 percent calcium, 10-20 percent magnesium and 2-5 percent potassium on their exchange sites, leaving them “balanced,” said Doug Doohan, acting director of the OFFER program.