DECORAH, Iowa — Soil erosion comes at a cost. Andy Herringshaw, an Iowa State University economics graduate student who is working with the Iowa Learning Farm, discussed that cost at a recent field ...

Several reduced tillage practices include vertical-till, strip-till, zone-till, and no-till. Reducing tillage means exactly what you think — making fewer passes through the field and/or decreasing the ...

Among the reasons healthy soil produces higher yielding crops is that healthy soil can take in and store more water. One way to create healthier soil is to refrain from tillage. That’s not exactly ...

One of the most important parts of any conservation or farming operation is establishing goals to work toward. It is easy to do the same thing year after year because of limited time or finances. What ...

For the past several decades, farmers have been abandoning their plows in favor of a practice known as no-till agriculture. Today, about one-third of U.S. farmers are no longer tilling their fields, ...

As the adoption of no-till practices has spread widely across parts of the U.S. over the past few decades, the approach has been touted as an important means of storing carbon in soil—and a key ...

HASTINGS, Neb. -- Bob Johnson began using the no-till farming method on his central Nebraska farm 10 years ago as an experiment. Today, he says it is a necessity. A drought that has lasted more than ...

TULSA, Okla. - The blade is king in agriculture. Crop producers are surveying a lot of wet, weed-infested fields out there and can't wait to plow deep and heavy this planting season. The positive ...

Tilling is as synonymous with farming and gardening as compost and muddy boots. It’s used to eliminate weeds and break up hard soil so that tender seedlings may grow. So, it may come as a surprise ...

The Department of Agriculture’s campaign to stop farmers from digging up the soil is running into an obstacle: the chemicals the agency promotes to kill weeds. The Department of Agriculture’s campaign ...