Indiana NRCS Soil Health Specialist Stephanie McLain to share proven ways to measure and manage soil function to ensure a healthy cropping system at the 2019 National Strip-Tillage Conference.

For the past 3 years, researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and University of Wisconsin-Madison collected survey data from producer soybean fields planted in four growing seasons (2014-2017) in 10 states in the North Central region of the U.S. — Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Kansas and Minnesota.

Demonstrating yet another way farming and sustainable agriculture are making headway into popular culture, a new podcast will be released next month to give listeners insights into the daily lives and experiences of agriculture producers.

Holtwood, Pa.-based grower and veteran cover crop coach Steve Groff announces new enhancements this year to Cover Crop Innovators, an online educational resource for cover crop education and management.

It’s not so difficult to do seeding rate trials with today’s planting equipment and yield monitors, and it’s even possible to do several of these within a field in order to get an idea of how much responses vary within the field. The difficulty is that responses within parts of a field are not consistent across years: they are often more dependent on weather conditions than on soil zone or soil type.

Soil biology plays a key role in building healthy soils, providing nutrients to crops and naturally controlling some soil-borne pests and diseases. It is difficult to assess the soil biological properties in a lab, but the PLFA test serves as a good indicator of soil microbial communities.