John Bradley rides again!

For those of you who remember - and there should be plenty of us - John Bradley directed the Milan (Tennessee) Field Day after Tom McCutcheon started it in the 1970s. John, a young county agent in West Tennessee at the time, filled a big pair of shoes when he took over as Milan's superintendent in the late 1970s after McCutcheon's death.

Bradley jumped into the job and quickly built on McCutchen's legacy, expanding both the scope of the station's research and its outreach through the field day.

The field day - which came to be known as the "Milan No-till Field Day" - drew visitors from most states and several foreign countries. The field day helped introduce no-till cropping to tens of thousands of Southern farmers and demonstrated that, among other things, cotton could be grown without tillage.

It wasn't just a field day. John turned it into a bonafide tourism destination. The "Milan No-Till" name was attached to all sorts of events. We seem to remember beauty pageants, runs, car shows, concerts, golf tournaments.

The idea was to have as many events tied to the field day as possible so that a farmer would find more than one reason to drive to Milan for the day and maybe even spend the night. At its height in the late 1990s, upwards of 6,000 people showed up at the station for the field day every year, and a fleet of school busses shuttled them from point to point.

Thanks, in part, to those field days there is now a generation of Southern farmers who've never grown crops any other way.

John never quite got out of the field day business. But after leaving UT, he organized small company events while working as an agronomist for Monsanto and, later, Beltwide Cotton Genetics.

Now, though, John is back in the public field day business after several years in ag industry. Last year, he was named director of research at Agricenter International in Memphis. One of his first goals was to build up Agricenter's AgTechnology Field Day.

This year, the event will be held on July 19 at the center. The schedule isn't completed yet, but you can click here for initial details.

John Bradley is once again in his element, with a well-situated venue where he can put more than 2 decades of experience into building another world-class field day. He's come at a good time to craft a field day that stands out and draws a crowd.

Field days still exist, but not to the extent they did 15 years ago. Fewer farmers mean lower attendance. For several years, the newer herbicide technologies reduced the interest in viewing weed control plots. And, let's face it, anyone who hasn't latched onto conservation tillage by now will probably never show up for a field day just to learn about it.

But, there's still plenty to learn about agriculture.

Herbicide resistance, if nothing else, will renew everyone's curiosity about how one herbicide or tankmix compares to standard treatments and the ever-popular untreated check. Precision ag technology opens up whole new areas of learning and demonstration. And Southern growers are making a mammoth commitment to corn, and field days will be a good place to learn more about the crop.

And now, John Bradley is ready. He has a well-earned reputation for thinking outside the box and a native instinct for understanding what farmers want to see, hear and know.

John says he's excited about the field day and assures all of us that "it will be worth your time."

If experience is any guide, it will be.