Besides building healthy soil, living roots are the tool to fix marginal lands. Salt-affected soils are an example of a hard-to-fix marginal land situation in South Dakota. There are annual and perennial plants that can tolerate more soil salts

The seed mixture options for full and late-season grazing could include cool-season cereals (oats, barley, triticale), warm-season grasses (sorghum-sudan, sudangrass, pearl millet), brassicas (turnips, radishes, kale), broadleaf plants (sunflowers, buckwheat) and legumes (forage peas, clovers, vetch).

Cover crops can offer a number of benefits to a cropping system including increased biodiversity, crop/livestock integration, erosion control, or water management. One of the greatest risks to cover cropping is failure to establish, and in North Dakota that often is the result of insufficient moisture. What can be done to reduce the risk of cover cropping?

Cover crops are typically used by producers in dryland no-till cropping systems to improve soil health, reduce soil compaction, enhance nutrient cycling, improve soil structure, and improve water infiltration. Producers may be able to realize some income from cover crops by grazing or haying them. But is this a good idea or will it cancel out any benefit the cover crops would otherwise have on soil properties and residue cover?

In the past month, dust storms have been making headlines across the western United States. Blowing soil has created driving hazards due to low visibility, and accumulated wind-blown silt even forced boat ramp closures near Fort Pierre. The good news is that land can be managed to minimize erosion.

Meanwhile, restructuring to Illinois's conservation programs did not pass in Springfield.

The study looked a pumpkin plots in Kansas, where the Halloween staple is frequently grown in rotation following soybeans, and are a staple of agritourism, according to the study published in the Soil Science Society of America Journal.