Five Tips for Successful Field Days from Fellow Watershed Leaders

In agriculture, once planting season is over, another season starts: Field Day Season. A classic event for demonstrating practices and technologies to agricultural producers and farm advisors, field days are a bread-and-butter outreach method in conservation and watershed management.

We asked The Confluence community for their tips for a successful field day. Here are some of the tips we received:

Design your event wearing the lens of impact.

You are probably doing a field day because you want attendees to learn and/or do something differently. So make sure the event is designed to make that impact. This new planning guide from our collaborators at Mississippi State University Extension Service provides a checklist for planning field days that make an impact. It includes advice such as get input from your target audience on what they’d like to learn, clarify your goals and learning objectives, and develop an evaluation tool to track progress toward your goals. 

If you want to draw farmers, include farmers as speakers.

Shannon Moeller with the Soil Health Institute says farmer speakers always seem to draw a crowd. “Typically, the farmer speakers will tell their neighbors, local co-op, etc. about an event they’re hosting.”

She also brings in relatable partners, such as from local and state commodity groups, NRCS, and university extension. “With several organizations putting an event on their website, social media pages, and newsletters, the word can spread far and wide,” said Moeller.

Meanwhile, Moeller has found that events without farmer speakers or farmer-led discussions tend to have lower farmer attendance, but good attendance from organization staff or others looking to get continuing education credits.  

Make sure the host farmer is excited.

“If they’re not, tweak the agenda so there’s something in it that really interests them and they think they will learn from,” said Tara Daun of Wisconsin Farmers Union. “A gregarious and excited host farmer on the horn can do more for bringing in a wider audience beyond the usual suspects better than 20 flyers posted around town.” 

Do as much prep work as you can in the days prior.

“Use checklists for equipment/supplies as well as tasks,” said Corey Hanson, who is a water quality coordinator with Red Lake Watershed District in Minnesota.

Are the batteries charged? Is the truck loaded? “Stay focused on the task at hand. Save emails and returning calls for when you’re back in the office,” Hanson adds.

Kristen Dieterman, who is a watershed project manager at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, creates a template in her field notebook to making notetaking easier. “I also write out my sample bottle labels and pre-fill my chain of custody/lab forms ahead of time,” she said.

Keep your expected outcomes realistic.

“Field days commonly are ‘speaking to the choir,’” said Marcelle Lewandowski of University of Minnesota’s Water Resources Center. “This isn’t necessarily bad—the ‘choir’ needs opportunities to talk amongst themselves. If you are trying to reach ‘middle adopters,’ a field day might not be the right approach.”

Indeed, attracting middle adopter farmers to field days and other outreach events is a common struggle among conservation outreach professionals. A study of farmer networks in Indiana by Pape and Prokopy (2017) validates this struggle, finding that the farmer networks were not reaching the farmers who need to make changes – in that case to nutrient management.

Their recommendation is to use methods that include both influential adopter farmers and non-adopter farmers. To design such methods, we suggest checking out the Grow More outreach toolkit created by National Wildlife Federation, another collaborator of The Confluence for Watershed Leaders.

Good luck with your next field day!

Header image credit: Wisconsin Discovery Farms