LEXINGTON, Ky. – The University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment (UK) isn’t letting the pandemic stop them from educating beef producers. While the college has been offering online courses for many years, the teaching tool has gone into overdrive during COVID-19 with the absence of face-to-face interactions.

“We’ve had to get really creative to reach producers in the past year,” said Les Anderson, UK beef specialist. “Many of our programs are traditionally hands-on, but we’ve had to pivot and come up with different ways to reach our clientele such as podcasts, videos and webinars.”

One such podcast is BeefBits which began in August and has included such topics as calf value, reproductive management and current market news, among a host of other subjects.

“BeefBits has been a great opportunity for us to share information and create a way to collaborate with our colleagues while we are apart,” said Jeff Lehmkuhler, UK beef extension specialist and podcast host. “We’ve talked about doing this before, but the pandemic pushed us to dive in.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, when many businesses and universities were developing plans to comply with healthy-at-home guidelines, the UK beef group decided to start a weekly series for beef producers called Reaching Out While Locked In.

“Our plan was to provide this to replace our normal in-person county meetings until we could get back to normal in a few weeks,” said Darrh Bullock, beef extension specialist. “When it appeared that the pandemic might last longer than we initially expected, we expanded the program and invited some of our colleagues in the department and college to participate including forages, health and economic topics for additional sessions.”

The series has reached more than 300 people from more than 70 counties for the program via Zoom and Facebook Live and archived recordings on the Animal and Food Sciences website.

Those looking for opportunities to learn more about weaning can now access the Weaning 101 workshop online. The course consists of eight weekly sessions and is approved by the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy to fulfill the educational requirements for the County Agricultural Improvement Program. Producers should contact their county extension agent to ensure their local CAIP committee will accept the program.

Beef Minutes rolled out last summer as a video series and was created to remotely address topics important to beef production. “The Beef Minutes videos address timely topics for beef producers,” said Katie VanValin, UK beef specialist. “We want Kentucky producers to have the research-based information they need for each season of production. Episodes thus far have included topics such as calving, genomics testing, nutrition and feed efficiency.”

In an effort to enable beef and dairy producers to enhance their product, maximize marketability and strengthen consumer confidence, the university hosts the online Beef Quality and Care Assurance program. Cattle producers can now become BQCA certified through the online program.

“There’s no reason that the pandemic should stop us from relaying information to beef producers,” Anderson said. “In fact, it has just made us see how important it is to reach them in a variety of ways. In pre-pandemic times, we were sometimes limited as to how many we could host at in-person events. I am sure we will always offer virtual options to reach out to more people. Specialists and agents are continuing to be more innovative and use social media and online platforms to reach our audiences.”