This Changes Everything. That is how everything is presented in today’s media. New cars, new policies, new science. An example of the latter are the recent advances in the field of soil microbiology, or…
Since my 2016 post, “Cover crop best bet is monoculture, not mix,” I have continued to follow the research on cover crop mixtures looking for evidence contrary to my prior conclusions. However, I found much the same as when I wrote the 2017 update of the post. In this 2018 update, I cover all the research I found published during the past year, give some guidelines for conditions under which mixture research should be done to match…
In a previous post, I argued that green manures require big biomass to achieve benefits that outweigh the damage done by tilling the crop into the soil. This is the point-in-time need, but…
Green manuring is the lesser-used option in cover cropping. Most cover crops are killed and left on the soil surface, but green manures are tilled into the soil. That is where they have their unique effects. They feed …
It is often thought that nature is diverse and that the move to agriculture reduces that diversity which results in reduced function, or ecosystem services. Here…
Australian minnows, or Mountain Galaxias, part of a 15-species cryptic hyper-complex. Photo: CC http://fishesofaustralia.net.au/home/species/3677 Imagine this. You are an avid fisherman in south-eastern Australia. You relish getting away to the many lakes in the nearby…
What is regenerative agriculture? Why is it different from sustainable agriculture? And how do I reconcile what practitioners of this system are claiming with the scientific evidence? These were all going through my mind when, a couple weeks ago at an advisory committee meeting of the WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, we watched a YouTube video of Gabe Brown’s TEDx talk in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Brown farms near Bismarck, ND, and has become the American face of regenerative agriculture in the past decade. Here is what I learned.
Green manures have a lot in common with the other kind of GM crops (GMOs), though there are also some differences. Both green manures and GM crops produce pesticides in their plant cells, yet green…
About a year ago I declared in a post, “Cover crop best bet is monoculture, not mix.” It stirred up quite a few comments and discussion, but no scientific evidence that countered my assertion. Nevertheless,…
There is not enough manure. Not enough to supply nutrients to our crops, not enough to maintain our soils. Those were the conclusions in my last two posts, but before we see what this means for agriculture, let’s look to other organic amendments. Is there enough of any of them?