To understand why the Forever Green Initiative is so important to the future of Minnesota’s landscape, one has to consider this: there is a big difference between agricultural productivity and agricultural efficiency. In states like Minnesota, the spectacular productivity of our corn-soybean system is evident: bin busting yields are the norm. But there’s a lot… Read more »
Posts Tagged: perennials
Our Nitrogen Pollution Solution? Livestock, Land & People
By Jim VanDerPol In October, I told the Minnesota House Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture Finance Committee that we had begun to listen to our farm, an assertion lawmakers heard with some surprise. The occasion was testimony around the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s presentation of its “Nitrogen in Minnesota Surface Waters” report, which showed among… Read more »
Nitrogen Pollution’s Farm Policy Roots
By Adam Warthesen, Land Stewardship Project Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room. When Minnesota environmental officials announced the results of a new major nitrogen pollution study on Thursday, they were surprisingly frank about how bad the problem is, but just as surprisingly hesitant to name a major underlying cause: federal farm policy. Recommend… Read more »
Troubled Waters Remain Troubled
A three-hour drive separates the rolling hills of Minnesota’s Douglas County from the front steps of the Bell Museum of Natural History. But a year after the controversy over Troubled Waters—the Bell’s Emmy award-winning film on farmland pollution in the Mississippi River basin—brought words like “dead zone,” hypoxia” and “nitrogen fertilizer” to the attention of… Read more »
Stripping Erosion Control to its Bare Essentials
While walking through a knee-high prairie planted on a central Iowa hillside Tuesday, I happened to look down. Trapped amongst all that vegetation was an impressive amount of rich, black glacial soil, the kind that produces record crop yields. And just a few feet away was the source of that soil: a soybean field planted… Read more »
The Local Bias of Biomass
In a recent LSP podcast (episode 84), James Barbour provided a nice explanation of why an energy system based on biomass has a lot to offer local economies. Recommend on Facebook Share on google plus Tweet about it
Profits from Perennials
One bright spot in the dust-up over the showing of the film Troubled Waters is that it highlights an important water quality issue: we need more perennial plant cover on the land if we are to keep soil, chemicals and other contaminants out of our rivers and lakes. But how do we make those perennials… Read more »