Soil-Con 2025

March 18, 2025

Doors open at 8:00am-3:30pm EST

Oakwood Event Center, 849 E. Lake View Rd, Syracuse, IN 46567, USA

Registration is capped at 350. When we reach this enrollment, registration will close.

Free: This event is funded by the Kosciusko County SWCD in collaboration with our partners, Clean Water Indiana (CWI), Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative(CCSI), The Watershed Foundation (TWF), Wawasee Area Conservancy Foundation (WACF), Hoosier Ag Today (HAT), Louis Dreyfus Company-Regen Ag Program, Soil and Water Outcomes Fund, ADM, Purdue Extension, Purdue On the Farm, American Farmland Trust & our USDA-Natural Recourse Conservation Service (NRCS) along with Farm Service Agency (FSA) .

About the Event-Registration Required

Led by our new district Soil Health Specialist, Soil-Con is designed as a working meeting to provide a roadmap for collaborative exploration into the connections within soil health, the soil food web, and ecological risk of pest management strategies and developing long-term solutions for regenerative food systems. This all-day event will have three specialized speakers from across the U.S.

Speakers include:

Dr. Neal Kinsey, owner and operator of Kinsey Agricultural Services, Inc. Neal will talk about basic fertility management and how it should be one of the principles used to improve soil health. You cannot have a functioning soil health system without balanced soils. His talk will focus on positive effects of correcting soil fertility as part of management on farms. Neal will have local soil sample results and will share how he would suggest correcting these soils for optimal production.
John Tooker, professor and extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at The Pennsylvania State University. His research group studies relationships among plants, invertebrate herbivores, and natural enemies to understand factors that regulate populations of herbivorous insects and slugs. The long-term goal of his research is to exploit ecological interactions for sustainable insect pest management.
RJ Rant, owner of Terraform Ag and Nutrilink Biosystems. Rant will discuss the key principles to soil health management strategies that can improve nitrogen use on the farm through C:N ratios. You will learn how to grow your soil, feed your plants, and analyze your nitrogen use in relation to carbon in the soil.

Tentative Agenda (All times Eastern):