Livestock and Drought Workshops to Prepare for Dry Conditions

Ag producers will have several opportunities this month and next to take in workshops on drought planning and preparation, and wood from the San Juan National Forest is warming homes on the Navajo Reservation. You're watching the Local News Roundup, brought to you by Big-O Tires in Cortez and Fast Signs. I'm Deborah Urodah. A series of late winter ag workshops will be available to area producers in February and March. A livestock/forage grower update will start with a virtual presentation at 9:00 AM on Thursday, February 17th, and will be followed by an in-person meeting at the Colorado State University Extension Office in Dove Creek. The morning's topics will cover wolves in Colorado, market updates, tax implications of drought, and a NOAA climate outlook. Afternoon topics will be relative to the area. That same day, an ag water workshop will be offered by the Colorado Ag Water Alliance and the Dolores Water Conservancy District from 11:00 AM to 2:30 PM at the Montezuma County Annex Building. Topics will include multipurpose crop insurance, irrigation infrastructure needs, salinity grants, building healthy soils during drought, and information on the drought advisors program. The same program will be offered from 9:00 to 11:30 AM on Friday, February 18th at the Mancos Community Center with sponsorship from the Mancos Conservation District. Then, on Tuesday, March 1st, the Agrability Project will host a free, in-person workshop on aging in rural America and ag tax issues. The workshop runs from 8:00 AM to noon at Pueblo Community College in Mancos. For more information on these and other continuing education events, visit the Montezuma County Extension Office at montezumacounty.org/csu-extension. Residents of the Chinle Chapter House on the Navajo Nation will stay a little warmer this winter, while the San Juan National Forest grows a little healthier. The Dolores Ranger District has partnered with the Chinle Chapter House, the National Forest Foundation, and Weston Backcountry to provide Navajo residents with a sustainable source of firewood from forest-thinning projects. The San Juan Wood For Life program will deliver six log truck loads of wood, equal to about 84 cords of wood, this month to the Chinle Chapter House, where it will be processed into firewood and delivered to elderly and other vulnerable populations. The wood comes from vegetation management projects in Lake Canyon and Lone Pine on the Dolores Ranger District. The thinning operations increase forest resiliency to disturbances from bark beetle infestations and wildfire. Markets for the kind of small diameter, low value wood that's removed are scarce. The National Forest Foundation established the Wood For Life program in 2018. Since its inception, the program has delivered more than 7,000 cords of wood to tribal governments and non-profits that process the wood and distribute it to community members throughout the Southwest. To learn more, visit nationalforests.org. Fort Lewis College and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus will partner to create a four-year undergraduate degree in nursing. In a news release, Fort Lewis said, "The program will combine hands-on, culturally sensitive patient-centered healthcare with the latest trends in medicine, like telehealth." The Durango-based program will fuse Fort Lewis College's liberal arts core with the nursing curriculum at CU Anschutz. The courses will be aligned to rural and indigenous healthcare perspectives. The Karen and Jerry Zink Family Foundation of Durango will support the program with a $1 million challenge-match grant, and Steve Short, former chairman of the FLC Board of Trustees and his wife, Jane, will contribute $30,000 to a nursing scholarship fund. The first cohort of nursing students is expected to enroll in fall 2023. To learn more, visit fortlewis.edu. Thanks for watching this edition of the Local News Roundup. I'm Deborah Urodah.

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