A recently completed five-year study of conservation tillage practices in the 4.9 million acre Western Lake Erie Basin watershed reveals that most fields in the watersheds are either tilled conventionally or stirred with mulch tillage at least once every three to five years.

So often, phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) are used in the same sentence when people talk about banded fertilizer applications, as if both were different verses of the same song

Managing editor John Dobberstein and I are visiting two western Iowa no-tillers today on the final day of a 3-day farm tour around Omaha, Neb. We started with two visits near Lincoln, Neb., on Monday; then visited no-tillers in southeast Nebraska, northwest Missouri and southwest Iowa on Tuesday.

Hardin County Kentucky farmer Bob Wade Jr. has always been a good conservation steward of the land. He says, “my dad was conservation minded and he passed those values on to me.”

Terraces are protective infrastructure that should be maintained regardless of tillage, because they provide a layer of protection from large rainfall events.

Most of the potential new growers are interested in soybeans, and there's also scattered interest in no-till corn, and even cotton in areas where cotton has not been grown since the 1950s.

A recent ARS New Service story says that an inch of water in an acre of soil is worth $25 to $30 per acre in lost yields