This weekend at the Tilth Conference 2019 in Yakima, WA I realized something about change. There are so many issues and projects that need support: advocating for fair wages and treatment for farm workers, protecting and providing for loca…
Wow! What a lot of information, perspectives, experiences, and interesting conversations packed into one weekend. From the Swan Dance performances by the Yakama Nation to the keynote speakers Javier Zamora and Valerie Segrest, to eating those tasty mini kiwi…
Before attending the Tilth Alliance Conference I was unsure what “tilth” even meant. I am currently a senior studying organic and sustainable agriculture at Washington State University. I grew up on my family’s dairy farm in Southern Idaho where the majority of the farms are commodity crops and there is not much farm-consumer interactions. I knew that there would be great food and people who shared a…
“Honeybees are not as great as you might think.” This was said by a representative of the Xerces Society, Eric Lee-Mader. The Xerces Society, according to Wikipedia, is a non-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates. Eri…
A frequently used—at least, by soil scientists—definition for soil health is “the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living system to sustain biological productivity, maintain the quality of air and water…
Written by Antoinette Avorgbedor, Intern at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center and the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. Did you know that people indigenous to the hotter equatorial regions have much lower sweat rates than people in cooler regions of the world? Similar to the ability of the human body to adjust to different climatic conditions, plants have evolved various mechanisms to survive extreme weather conditions. Besides long-term evolutionary modific…
Written by Antoinette Avorgbedor, Intern at WSU’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center and CSANR. More likely than not, you have passed large apple orchards in your travels around the Pacific Northwest area and observed nets spanning wide areas of apple trees. Sometimes the entire top and all the sides of orchards are enclosed. A 2017 survey conducted in Washington State to assess the exte…
Soil health – the pursuit that launched a thousand soil tests. I have not actually counted them, but many people are working on many ways to evaluate soil health. Some are looking at indicators of soil biology status, others…
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…
Managing crop residue is essential to reduced and no-till farming systems that enhance soil health and reduce soil erosion. And growers in different parts of the dryland Pacific Northwest are likely seeking different residue characteristics. In most areas with less than 12 inches of annual precipitation, wheat is grown every other year, and land is fallowed in between to…
