Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Megan Vollstedt “In a perfect world that university staff dream about, you would treat every field separately according to its soil test,” says Dick Wolkwoski, Extension soil scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the Conservation Tillage Conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota, this week, experts covered a variety of soil health topics, but throughout all discussions […]

By: Gil Gullickson Corn farmers wrestled with old and new corn diseases in 2019 that likely will again be present in 2020. These included the usual suspects, such as gray leaf spot. One new one, though, is Physoderma brown spot. Symptoms of this fungal disease include numerous lesions that appear on midcanopy leaves. Nodal infection from […]

By: Darcy Maulsby Troublesome weeds are nothing new, but farmers on the western plains of Kansas knew something was changing when kochia became even tougher than normal to manage in 2010. Then, not long afterward, herbicide resistance took the state by storm. “We saw our first resistant Palmer amaranth around 2012,” says Colten Katz, a partner […]

By: Tharran Gaines With annual rainfall averaging around 25 inches on his farm in western Oklahoma, Dustin Donley certainly knows the value of center pivots. Consequently, he’s already installed 17 pivots on the 5,000 acres he manages just south of Mooreland. However, while one might expect the pivots to be pumping water onto corn, soybeans, or […]

By: Neil Sass No-till is one of the most popular and effective conservation practices but making the switch from tilling to not can be intimidating. No-till allows farmers to grow crops with minimal disturbance to their fields and the organisms that live in the soil. This increases soil health while also reducing the cost of fuel […]

By: Tyler Harris If you’ve been paying attention to news surrounding soil health, no-till and cover crops, you’ve likely heard by now about the recent meta-analysis conducted by University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers that compiled data from 89 studies around the world to help quantify the benefits of different alternative practices on soil water infiltration. In the […]

By: Steve Groff As much as we all try to get cover cropping right, things don’t always turn out the way we expect. Sometimes issues arise that can be solved with a little adjusting, but other times we find ourselves dumped right into “Plan B” territory. So, what can we do when things really go off […]

By: Chrystal Houston The crop at the Project GROW (Growing Rotational crops on Wellfields) demonstration plot is thigh-high, the rows of fuzzy bean pods a muted golden brown. Leininger pulls a pod from a plant and pops it open to reveal three perfectly shaped milky-white ovals. “These are ready to cut, ready to combine. They’re dry […]

By: Kansas Farmer A new community-based awareness initiative is informing growers about the risks of waterhemp and Palmer amaranth and teaching them how to fight back. Weed scientists with The Ohio State University have worked with the United Soybean Board and the Ohio Soybean Council to launch a “No Pigweed Left Behind” campaign in their […]

By: Ron Smith Producers interested in planting cover crops this fall should select species based on what they expect to achieve. Options for erosion control, for instance, vary from those that improve soil structure, scavenge and cycle soil nutrients, alleviate hardpans or increase organic matter. “Having a clear objective for planting a cover crop aids in […]