Get ready for a down-to-earth journey with three farmers who share practical strategies for keeping your farm’s topsoil right where it belongs—on your land.
Changing farm management to use soil health practices like cover crops and no-till can be complicated. But these on-farm changes show some clear benefits for preventing erosion and improving soil for generations to come.
Feed is the biggest cost for dairy farmers. Could using cover crops and no-till improve their sustainability and provide nutritious feed for dairy cows?
Improving soil health takes time, but trying agroecosystem management is a great first step. Watch Marshall McDaniel explain three tips for getting started with agroecosystem management.
Virtual fence can create invisible, movable boundaries to help manage cattle herds. It's a new technology, and the possibilities are exciting. But there are a few learning curves--listen in as a producer and researcher talk about the benefits and hurdles of using virtual fence.
Biological soil testing--also called soil health assessment--is a great way to understand the whole soil ecosystem. Dig into the potential benefits of biological soil testing, including improved yield, reduced farm costs, and more!
Soil microbes decompose plant matter, help aggregate soil particles, cycle nutrients, and much more. Discover the seven functions of soil microbes: read on.
Turfgrass is everywhere--is it providing benefits to the people who use it? Read on and discover all the potential upsides of turfgrass, including economic, environmental, and societal benefits.
There are three pillars of agriculture: Soil chemistry, soil physics, and soil biology. New techniques for measuring soil biology are popping up, but what can they actually tell you? And will they give you a better bang for your buck on the farm?
The soil, crops, climate, plants, microbial, and animal life are all intertwined. Help them work together and reap the benefits of agroecosystem management on your farm.
Agroecosystem management takes the whole agricultural system into account. Watch as Marshall McDaniel describes some of the co-benefits of this holistic approach to managing a field.
Integrated Pest management (IPM) is a strategy to manage pest and disease threats to your crops. But it could have bigger benefits—it’s also an important part of your toolkit to improve crop resilience in the face of extreme weather events and changing conditions.
When a host plant, virulent pathogen, and favorable environment are all in the same place at the same time, diseases can pop up. And nothing is worse than losing healthy plants to disease. Luckily, there are ways you can reduce disease pressure on your crops.
The words “ecosystem services” capture all of those tangible and intangible ways in which human beings depend on, use, and benefit from the natural environment.
Climate-smart agriculture relies on coordinating a complex suite of agricultural practices to provide ecosystem services, but measurement of these benefits is scattered. A national ecosystem services monitoring network could help.
One barrier keeping farmers from adopting cover crops is the cost. But Mitchell and Brian Hora have turned their cover crop into an additional cash crop by harvesting mature standing rye over a growing soybean crop.