By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Each year conventions and classes are held covering both small gardening projects and major farm operations, but it feels like nothing is geared toward the medium-sized producers. Utah State University Extension aims to solve this problem through its annual Homestead Expo, which is scheduled to take place on Saturday, Feb. 22.

Rowe Zwahlen and Steven Price from Extension joined Castle Country Radio to discuss what the expo has to offer and what purpose the event holds for the local agricultural community.

“We’ve had our Castle Country Crop School, which has been great. And it targets production agriculture. And then we’ve always had our horticultural series, master gardeners, our beginning gardening courses and things like that. But we haven’t had anything for the small, diversified farm things where maybe people have a small agricultural operation as a business and not just providing for themselves,” explained Price. “That’s really how we wound up here is having something diverse where people just have maybe an acre or less or a couple of acres trying to teach them about different things that we weren’t covering before.”

As for what attendees can expect from the event, Zwahlen explained,” We’re excited for the classes that we’re going to have. We’re going to be talking about beginner beekeeping. We’ll have somebody talk to us about worm composting. Then we’ll get into high-quality animal fiber production and then to go with that, we’re going to be talking about plant-based dyes.”

In closing, Zwahlen shared,” We’re excited for this. We hope you’ll join us. It should be a fun Saturday.”

USU-Extension’s Homestead Expo will be held on Saturday, Feb. 22 from 8 a.m. to noon in the USU Eastern Alumni Room. To register, you can purchase tickets online through Eventbrite.