Farmer experience with conservation tillage

Excerpt

Any assessment of the state of the science and art of conservation tillage would be incomplete without portraying farmer experiences. To get some sense of recent experiences, we turned to those who are in touch with farmer innovation on a daily basis—farm magazine editors. We asked them to nominate their best articles on farmer experience with conservation tillage. We selected those that helped round out a picture of what direction farmers currently are taking and those that contributed to an overview of various crops and regions. Many of the articles were condensed considerably, and the selections were supplemented with articles from other sources.—Editor.

Fertilizing: Is injecting the answer?

IOWA neighbors Barry Anderson and Randy Pedersen are firmly committed to conservation tillage. They're also firmly convinced that surface application of nitrogen (N), which has long gone hand-in-hand with conservation tillage, isn't as effective as injecting it.

Anderson and Pedersen are also leery of applying phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) to the soil surface year after year. Their solution: Inject all three nutrients.

Research and farmer experience throughout the Corn Belt make a strong case for incorporating N sources containing urea. Research …