2013 Region V Soil Judging Competition - Settling into Springfield...

We arrived safely in Springfield, MO around 4pm. We spent the afternoon talking about the competition scoring sheets and recalibrating ourselves to sand fractions (particularly the fine and very fine side of things) as we anticipate these will be critical in loess/eolian caps over residuum in southwest Missouri. We made a quick stop at the grocery store and then on to Missouri State's Darr Agricultural Center for our initial meeting with the other teams and coaches.

Seven teams will be competing in the Region V competition this year. We received our local briefing from John Preston of the Springfield NRCS office. He emphasized residual soils, argillic horizons, and fragipans - two of which are steep learning curves for Minnesotans. Luckily, we spent some time in our pre-trip meetings talking about and looking at samples of both and think we have a good foundation to build on. Our team is short two members who could not participate due to last-minute conflicts, but we are seven strong and ready to get to work.

We have 5 practice pits tomorrow and hope to get a lot of the initial local learning curve out of the way. We are at one with our textural triangles...

Discussing contest scoring sheets and strategies (Andrew Krinke, Wyatt Behrends and Nic Jelinski)

Listening to John Preston (USDA-NRCS) at the Darr Agricultural Center