Author: Andrew McGuire

Does synthetic nitrogen fertilizer burn up soil organic matter? Whether you are focused on soil health, soil sequestration, or soil carbon credits, this is an…

You may know that it is difficult to increase soil organic matter, but how difficult is it, with numbers? First, your crop harvest removes up…

In a 2012 book, Donald Maier asked, “What’s so good about biodiversity?” He describes how difficult it is to critique principles of biodiversity because all…

Although I work in irrigated agriculture, the views on my morning commute are all sagebrush, or the shrub-steppe as this native plant community is called.…

In a realistic scenario, where not everyone gives up eating meat, where some in the developing world eat more like us, and where food waste…

I have been called a reductionist quite a few times. I never know how to respond. Am I a reductionist? If so, is that a…

I have seen it work. As a graduate student, I researched cover crops in a California dryland wheat system, comparing a wheat-fallow system to one…

Long-term cropping systems research is expensive, difficult to manage, and therefore rare, especially for vegetable crops. So when results are published for potato cropping systems,…

As I wrote in my last post, the focus and excitement around soil biology leads many to believe that they have a soil biology problem.…

I am not sure of the causes. Perhaps it’s the demand for soil health information which far surpasses the supply of science-based content? Or maybe…