A LONG-TIME strip-tiller, Marty Weiss has been conservation-minded for years. But he’s taken inspiration from the recent widespread focus on soil health and in the past few years tackled several new practices, including no-till, strip cropping, interseeding cover crops in both 30-inch and 60-inch corn, planting green and even seeding covers for regenerative grazing.

Results of the first annual Cover Crop Benchmark Study show a healthy level of enthusiasm and success among farmers with cover crops as they seek to protect their farms from erosion, reduce input costs and improve soil health on their operations.

FOR BRIAN MARTIN, it’s not hard to see that having a no-till system keeps soil in place on his farm’s sloping terrain. But Martin also has a thirst for looking beyond the anecdotes for data that spells out what practices benefit the bottom line.

Good ideas have a way of resurfacing, even if “progress” seems to have left the ideas far in the past.

Gail Fuller has always been driven by erosion. He decided to give no-till a try not long after he began farming full-time in the 1980s, because he hated seeing soil leave his farm in Emporia, Kan., where slopes range from 1-5%.

Grazing livestock in the fall is a well-known method for livestock producers to go a few weeks longer without having to resort to feeding their stored hay and forage