no-till
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Crop Insurance: Good Enough for Monsanto-Good Enough for Sustainable Ag
From the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction department: In 2007, Monsanto talked the USDA’s Risk Management Agency into giving farmers a discount on crop insurance premiums if they planted the company’s triple-stacked GMO corn. Reportedly, some…
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A Graphic View of Diversity’s Power
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a good infographic can be the equivalent of thousands of pounds of soil. That thought occurred to me recently while viewing the cool…
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Agriculture: How Not to Be Tools of Our Tools
One recent August day, I stood in a field in North Dakota watching soil being spaded up and listening to farmers talk about the optimal cover crop seeding mixes, how long to…
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Purebreds, Pluggers & Profitable Soil
On a recent August evening in south-central North Dakota, soil scientist Kristine Nichols laid out what I like to call the “purebred vs. the plugger” approach to farming. “With healthy soil, you…
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Flash Flood? Flash Drought? Time for a Little Slow Soil
The U.S Drought Monitor released its latest figures yesterday, verifying what we already knew: Minnesota is extremely dry. In fact, 55 percent of our state now falls under the “severe drought” or…
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No-Till Farming’s Chemical Roadblock
An alarming number of stories are appearing in the farm press about how Roundup-resistant weeds are forcing conservation tillage farmers to take a serious look at plowing up their fields—in effect throwing…