pollinators
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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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Prepping Prairie Strips for the Real World
Gary Van Ryswyk’s concern for how his farming methods impact the landscape is obvious. A practitioner of a no-till system that avoids disturbing a field’s surface as much as possible, he is…
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Healthy Farms, Healthy Frogs, Healthy Land
While walking a piece of North Dakota landscape under a withering summer sun, one’s thoughts turn to moisture—or rather, the lack of it. So when I and other participants in a soil…
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Corn Planting Sends Tremors Through Bee Country
Sometimes laboratory science and the reality of what’s happening on the ground intersect in a graphic way. That’s what struck me this morning as I was watching a video shot by Minnesota…
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Pollinators in Peril
As last week’s Congressional Research Service report on bee health makes clear, the crisis plaguing pollinators is not a single, big bad bogey man. It’s likely a combination of factors such as…
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Farmland Need Not be a Sacrificial Lamb
During yesterday’s otherwise excellent field day at the USDA’s soil conservation lab in Morris, the “S” word reared its ugly head. “S” as in our best farmland needs to be “sacrificed” in…