New Extension Agent, 4-H Youth Development
After four long months, we now have a 4-H Agent!! Meet Amanda Gann! Amanda is the daughter of Arnold and Amy Childress. She grew up on her family's farm in the Fairview community. Amanda attended Dobson Elementary, Central Middle, Surry Central, and Surry Community College. She obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education from Lees-McRae College in 2002. Amanda taught elementary grades for 12 years in both Stokes and Surry counties. She has homeschooled her daughter for the past 10 years and participates in the homeschool community in Surry County. Amanda is active in her church, Fairview Baptist, where she teaches Sunday School and works with the Youth. She resides on the family farm in Dobson with her husband, Jamie, and their daughter, Lizzie.
Amanda is excited to be the new 4-H Agent for Surry County! She looks forward to teaching and working with the children and youth in our county!
There will be a floating “Meet and Greet Our 4-H Agent” on Monday, April 24 from 4-6 pm for folks to meet Amanda. We hope to see you there!
New County Extension Administrative Assistant
We are excited to announce Lisa Johnson as our new Administrative Assistant. She was born and raised in Surry County and attended North Surry High School and Surry Community College. She grew up on a family farm and is no stranger to hard work. She has two wonderful children and three beautiful grandchildren who live and work here in Surry County. Here are a few words from Lisa.
“I am excited to join the NC Cooperative Extension, Surry County Center team as their Administrative Assistant. I look forward to supporting the County Extension Director, 4-H, EFNEP, Family and Consumer Sciences, and Agriculture and Natural Resources programming. I am passionate about helping Surry County communities and residents. I understand the vital role that Extension brings to our local communities and look forward to helping our agents improve our future and future generations”.
Welcome Lisa!! We are so happy to have you on our team!
Amanda Royall, EFNEP - Youth
Family Meals
Eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Enjoying meals together helps anchor and build valuable memories. Use these tips during your family mealtime.
Make shared meals a priority.
- Mark “family meal” dates on the calendar
- Family meals can be shared at home, at a restaurant, in a park, or near a playing field
- Enjoy each other
- Turn off the television, radio, and cell phones
- Encourage sharing comments about “good things that happened today”
- Dish up variety
- Use My Plate and family preferences as a guide when planning meals
- Save elaborate menus for occasions when you have time to prepare and enjoy them
- Share responsibilities
- Give each person a task for each meal, such as choosing the menu, setting the table, pouring the drinks, or cleaning up
- Giving children some responsibility for preparing part of the meal increases their feelings of being part of the family
Bottom line…. Eating together has benefits even when it isn’t possible daily.
Steps to a Healthier Family
Spring has arrived! This is a wonderful time of the year to renew yourself with the outdoors. Take a family walk and look at all the new plant life that is beginning to grow. When you exercise as a family, you increase your family time, strengthen relationships, and create great memories. As we know, to build healthy bodies, we must not only exercise, but eat the right kinds of foods every day. It is important to keep our bodies healthy. Make sure you and your family are eating variety of foods to get all the vitamins and minerals you need.
Seydel Cropps, EFNEP Educator
Gardening for Our Health
Are you looking for a different and fun way to be more active? Are you trying to get your children away from the television and to enjoy the outdoors? Are you an older adult trying to be a little healthier? Well then planting a vegetable garden this spring might be just what you need.
Research has found that those of us who plant a vegetable garden consume more vegetables than those without gardens and children are more willing to try a new vegetable if they are involved in gardening. Additionally, older adults can increase their self-esteem, purpose and life satisfaction.
We can decide whether we do this in a small area in our yard or a few containers on our porch. The benefits will not just be that we eat healthier, think about all the physical activity we will get while we dig, plant, water and weed our garden.
Finally, gardening will give us the opportunity to share with others, many hours to bond as a family and happy memories that will last a lifetime!
Food Waste Prevention
Did you know according to the Food and Drug Administration, between 30-40 percent of the United States food supply goes uneaten. Each year, the average American loses $375 to uneaten food. If you are a family of four, think about what you could do with an extra $1,500. Start practicing habits that are good for your health, your wallet, and the environment. Here are 10 ways you can help reduce the amount of food wasted:
- Shop the refrigerator before going to the store. Use food at home before buying more. Designate one meal weekly as a "use-it-up" meal.
- Move older food products to the front of the fridge/cupboard/freezer and just-purchased ones to the back. This makes it more likely foods will be consumed before they go bad.
- Keep your refrigerator at 40 °F or below to prolong the life of foods. Foods frozen at 0 °F or lower will remain safe indefinitely, but the quality will go down over time.
- Take restaurant leftovers home and refrigerate within two hours of being served. Eat within three to four days or freeze. Ask for a take home container at the beginning of the meal if portions look especially large. Remove take home food from your plate at the beginning of the meal so leftovers are as appetizing as the original meal rather than the picked-over remains.
- Check product dates on foods. Many consumers misunderstand the purpose and meaning of the date labels that often appear on packaged foods. Confusion over date labeling accounts for an estimated 20 percent of consumer food waste.
- Look for recipes on websites that can be searched for by ingredients to use up food at home. USDA's MyPlate Kitchen website offers several tools for searching for recipes with specific ingredients, nutrition themes and meal course.
- Buy misshapen fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets and elsewhere. They taste just as good and are just as nutritious as those with a "perfect" shape but are more likely to get thrown away.
- Rather than buy a food for use in only one recipe, check if there might be a suitable substitute already in the home. Check out this Basic Ingredient Substitution webpage.
- Check the garbage can. If the same foods are constantly being tossed: Eat them sooner, buy less of them, incorporate them into more recipes or freeze them. For more information on the recommended storage periods for pantry, refrigerator, and freezer, check this guide for Home Food Storage.
- Donate safe, nutritious food to food banks, food pantries and food rescue programs.
Sources: FDA and the University of Nebraska Lincoln Cooperative Extension
Carmen Long, Family and Consumer Sciences
Dial Gauge Pressure Canner Testing
Now is the perfect time to get your dial gauge pressure canner checked for accuracy before the canning season starts. Call the Extension office at 336-401-8025 and schedule your appointment for this free service today!
Free Online Home Food Preservation Series
Try New Recipes & Learn More About Diabetes
Where is Your Money Going? – Make a Budget
April is Financial Literacy Month and the perfect time to discover where your money is going. Track your transactions! This is the best thing you can do to make your budget work for you. Tracking helps you stay accountable to yourself and your money goals.
Your budget is not a set-it and forget-it task, stay on top and adjust if needed. If your electricity bill is higher than the budget, adjust another line to make up for it. If your water bill is less, celebrate and move the extra money to your money goal.
You will need to make a new budget each month. Your budget should not change a lot from month to month, but no two months are the same. There are always other expenses such as birthdays, anniversaries, back to school, annual bills or seasonal purchases. A great way to handle these types of expenses is to create another category like, alternating expenses or discretionary funds.
It takes about three months to really get the hang of budgeting, but it is how you will make your money goals happen! Budgeting tells your money where to go—instead of you wondering where it went.
Medicare Workshop Fun
Carmen Long, Family and Consumer Science Agent, shares information on Medicare and adds a little fun to her workshop by serving “April Fools Day” food.
Ryan Coe, Area Field Crops Agent
Fertilizer Decision Survey for Farmers
Everyone knows that the world we live in right now is constantly facing problems with inflation. The same problems that you are facing when going to the gas station to fill up your vehicle, or going to the grocery store, is the same problem that farmers are facing with input products they need to grow their crops. Some examples of input products include fertilizer, seed, diesel fuel, and pesticides.
During this time last year in 2022, farmers were faced with the challenge of having to pay anywhere from double to almost quadruple the prices for common fertilizers they need to grow their crops. Which is concerning considering there are some crops grown by farmers that will require some amount of fertilizer applied throughout the growing season, no matter the production practices a farmer will adopt. Some farmers last year purchased fertilizers at these inflated prices, whereas others were not, which forced them to either grow different crops, or change some of their production practices.
There has been a quick 5-minute survey that was developed to gauge the understanding of how these inflated fertilizer prices have influenced farmers’ decisions to fertilize their crops within their farming operations. This survey will not only serve the purpose to gather production information to help farmers but to also help with a research project that is being developed in the Soil Fertility Extension Program, from North Carolina State University, by Dr. Luke Gatiboni. If you are a farmer that is interested in completing this short survey you can either go to the website below or scan the QR code using your smartphone’s camera.
Planter Technology Factsheet
Revised from Dr. Rachel Vann, Soybean Extension Specialist from North Carolina State University, and Jenny Carleo, Area Specialized Extension Agent- Grain Crops by Ryan Coe
Planting season for traditional row crops like corn and soybeans is right around the corner, which means farmers are devoting time to make any necessary repairs or consider implementing upgrades on their equipment before the first seed is planted here in 2023. Equipment manufacturers have developed technology that has resulted in both high and low-tech solutions for farmers in an effort to improve the planting process. Some of this technology is as complex as running software to help with GPS guidance systems, or as simple as implementing a better closing wheel on the planting unit, to help with better seed-to-soil contact and reduce compaction during planting.
Recognizing the impact of all the different improvements in planting technology offered by various equipment manufacturers, the national Science for Success Team has developed a new factsheet. This factsheet covers anything from using downforce on your planter, how to properly make an in-furrow application during planting, to choosing the correct row cleaner, or closing wheel for your planter. To explore the planting technologies this factsheet covers, you can use the link below:
Factsheet Planter Technologies
The national Science for Success Team is a collaboration of various university Extension specialists from across the United States, that strive to provide the best soybean management practices to farmers. Science for Success is funded by the Qualified State Soybean Board in each state, which provides funding for research through the Soybean Checkoff.
How Do You Get a Pesticide License?
If you are considering getting your pesticide license there is no need to worry. It is a pretty straightforward process. The first step is to determine what type of pesticide license you will need. There are two different types of pesticide licenses, a private pesticide applicator license, and a commercial pesticide applicator license. Private pesticide licenses are for pesticide applicators that grow and raise their own crops. They would like to purchase and apply restricted use pesticides. Commercial pesticide licenses are for applicators who work for a company or entity that requires them to apply pesticides. If an applicator is spraying for “pay”, they need a commercial pesticide license. There are multiple different commercial pesticide license categories such as, ornamental and turf, pesticide dealers, right-of-way maintenance, and aquatic pest control, just to name a few. Applicators must be certified in the correct category and that category depends on the purpose of the pesticide application.
Once you determine which type of pesticide license you will need, the next step is to purchase the necessary study manuals to pass the associated exams. To purchase the study manuals, you can go to Pesticide Manuals. After you have received your study manuals you can sign up to attend a Pesticide School, that is offered at Extension offices throughout North Carolina, where attendees learn about pesticide safety, pesticide usage, and pesticide licensing categories before taking their associated exams. There is also the option to take your pesticide exam without attending a Pesticide School.
For commercial pesticide licenses, after you pass your pesticide exam you will need to pay the annual license fee. Continuing education credit hours can then be obtained to maintain the license. For private pesticide licenses, fees will also need to be paid and is valid for three years. Continuing education credit hours will also need to be obtained to maintain the license. If you are interested in obtaining a pesticide license, or have any questions about your pesticide license, contact your local Extension office.
Bailey Wood, Livestock Agent
Antibiotic Regulations - Coming June 2023
Antibiotics are important tools for treating sick animals to ensure their well-being. This coming June, medically important antibiotics for livestock will no longer be available “over-the-counter” and will be under veterinarian oversight. This means a veterinarian will need to write a prescription for a producer to obtain an antibiotic. This does not mean the antibiotic has to be purchased through the veterinarian, although you can, it just means that the prescription is required in order to purchase. If you do not currently have a Veterinarian-Client-Patient relationship (VCPR) established, it will be beneficial to begin the process prior to this change. A VCPR is defined as: the veterinarian making medical judgements on the health of the animal and the need for medical treatment where the client has agreed to follow this instruction, there is enough knowledge of the animal by the veterinarian to make an informed diagnosis, and the veterinarian is available to provide follow-up when needed. This means you are established with a veterinarian and they know you and your operation. The goal of this regulation is to cut down on antibiotic resistance in animals and humans so that they stay effective. These products will not be unavailable so there is no need to stock up on products as they do have expiration dates and through your veterinarian you can obtain them when needed. If you have questions, contact your veterinarian or the Extension Office. For more information: Fact Sheet
Pasture Stocking Rate
There are many things that aid in having a productive pasture. One thing to consider is your stocking rate and typically it is recommended to have 2 acres of pasture per animal unit. An animal unit is 1,000 pounds and can be applied to multiple livestock species which are listed below. The stocking rate will depend on the condition of the pasture and how it has been managed in the past, but the goal is for the livestock to have plenty to graze and the ability to leave enough behind so that the forage can continue to grow and come back year after year. When we have more livestock on pasture than what it can handle, it can be hard to maintain good stands of forage as they become overgrazed. It is important to remember that the Animal Unit Equivalent (AUE) values are approximate as each operation and herd are different and should be based on the size of animals in your herd. However, this can serve as a good starting point when trying to assess your pastures.
Soil Testing for Pastures
Soil testing is a great tool available to aid in pasture management decisions. By knowing exactly what is needed to amend your soil, you can apply only what is necessary which can result in reduced costs, increased yields, and better environmental stewardship.
It is recommended to take samples 3 to 6 months prior to planting and around every 3 years or prior to establishing a new crop. This is especially important for pH as it can take several months for any pH amendment, like lime, to take effect for your soil. Fall may be a great time to do sampling for that reason. The pH of the soil affects the way that nutrients are available to the plant so if the pH is too high or low for the forage you’re growing, the nutrients we apply may or may not have the ability to be used by the plant.
To take an accurate soil sample, randomly collect 15 - 20 cores or slices (using a soil probe or a trowel) 4 inches deep for pastures. Avoid taking samples when the ground is too wet. Mix the random samples in a bucket and fill to the line of the soil sample box. Mark the box with the required information using a permanent marker. You will need to complete and mail the form with the sample to the address listed. Samples sent from April to Thanksgiving have no fee required while other times of the year have a fee of $4 per sample. The results will come via email and have all of the information listed on the report including the amount of lime and nutrients to apply based on the current values of your soil and the type of forage you have. If you have any questions about reading your report, please call our office. For soil sample boxes, feel free to stop by the Extension Office and pick some up!
Rental Equipment
Reported By: Lisa Johnson
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