Public-Private Partnerships

By Kurt Lawton Farmer ingenuity, sometimes in tandem with equipment company innovators, has long succeeded in expanding a practice or making a widget work better. It’s especially intriguing if an idea brings an old piece of seldom-used machinery back to life. Remember that rotary hoe, parked in the tall grass somewhere behind a shed? Mark…

By Kurt Lawton Photo credit: Joe Murphy, Iowa Soybean Association Creating precision fertilizer granules from animal manure, agricultural crop wastes like peanut and rice hulls, and even wastewater treatment organics, is a first-of-its-kind innovation ready to feed crops sustainably. The Florida-based ag-tech company, Anuvia Plant Nutrients, created a unique fertilizer product called SymTRX, produced in…

By Kurt Lawton Despite Covid-19 and hot weather, an impressive turnout — more than 150 farmers and other soil-loving attendees — gathered at the Hora family farm in southeast Iowa to experience hands-on soil health demos, cover crop experiments, and creative cropping systems. Continuum Ag founder and soil health consultant Mitchell Hora (shown above in…

By Elizabeth Ripley, Iowa Learning Farms Iowa Learning Farms (ILF), a conservation-focused education and outreach program for Iowa farmers and landowners based at Iowa State University (ISU) Extension and Outreach, is collaborating with Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) to provide an online Cover Crop Boot Camp in July. Billed as an event where ag retailers…

By Jim Jordahl A one-day, deep dive into cover crops for more than thirty ag retail managers and their agronomists was held at the Iowa Soybean Association in March. This in-depth workshop was designed to help ag retail agronomists field questions on cover crops and soil health from their farmer-customers. The workshop featured top national…

By Kurt Lawton Ask Iowa cattleman and farmer Bill Couser about how his conservation journey began. He humbly and proudly mentions the values instilled in him by his conservationist father, Dick Couser. “He got us going down the right path — wanting to do conservation right, or not at all,” he says. “Then, there was…

By Kurt Lawton “If you want to succeed at cover crops, you will. If you want to fail at cover crops, you will.” These are examples of some of the honest, direct, farmer-to-farmer wisdom shared at the recent Cover Crops Boot Camp held in Ames. Finding success, considering challenges, and exploring solutions were among the exercises…

By Kurt Lawton Seeding cover crops early to improve growth before winter drives the water and soil improvement goals of this partnership effort by Montag and Hagie.  Farmers truly appreciate small town, equipment-fixing talents, which harken back to the days of local blacksmith shops and the seemingly-magical methods used to bring parts and equipment back…

By Kurt Lawton Ask Iowa cattleman and farmer Bill Couser about how his conservation journey began. He humbly and proudly mentions the values instilled in him by his conservationist father, Dick Couser. “He got us going down the right path — wanting to do conservation right, or not at all,” he says. “Then, there was…