How you manage your soil: The soil is a biological system … it only functions as well as the things living within it.
Humans have been tilling the soil and practicing agriculture for quite some time. W. C. Lowdermilk’s classic agricultural report of 1939, “Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 Years,” gives us a basic history of human-induced degradation of the soil. Even though tillage has been used for a long time to control weeds and facilitate the […]
Oftentimes, the opportunity to add both diversity and living roots feeding your agricultural soil occurs after cash crops are in the bin.
Cover crops are receiving a lot of attention by nearly everyone involved in agriculture. They are once again becoming a very versatile tool that can provide many ecosystem services while also improving a producer’s bottom line. Cover crops are loosely defined as something planted to serve a multitude of purposes while not typically being harvested […]
Continuing to prop up dysfunctional soil by more accurately meting out inputs is not the path to a prosperous future for anyone.
The renewed capacity of our soils to infiltrate water and cycle nutrients will harness the natural efficiency that was present in the past.
The more we understand about how the soil is designed to function and manage it accordingly, the more the soil does for us.
For agriculture to happen, people, water, sunlight, plants, and animals must all successfully intersect in the soil.
Current observations of the state of many agricultural soils indicates that the number of good farmers outpaces the number of good stewards.