Kelly Craven, Ph.D., is a native of Phoenix, Arizona and has been working with endophytic microbes for 25 years. He received his B.S. in Zoology at Arizona State University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Plant Pathology at the University of Kentucky. He joined the Noble Research Institute in 2006 as a faculty member and currently serves as Associate Professor. His main research objective(s) are applied in nature, focusing on the use of microbial symbiosis to facilitate low-input agriculture.
If Brad Palen wasn’t an accountant, he’d be a farmer. To him, just as to the ag producers he helps, success is not only short-term financial management and oversight, but also involves passing on legacies from generation to generation without strife and unnecessary financial consequences.
Keith Berns combines over 20 years of no-till farming with 10 years of teaching Agriculture and Computers. In addition to no-tilling 2,500 acres of irrigated and dryland corn, soybeans, rye, triticale, peas, sunflowers, and buckwheat in South Central Nebraska, he also co-owns and operates Green Cover Seed, one of the major cover crop seed providers and educators in the United States.
Darin and Nancy Williams live in Waverly, KS. Their 2,000-acre operation includes a complex rotation of non-GMO corn and soybeans, grain sorghum, cereal crops such as wheat, triticale, rye and barley, and cover crops that include sudangrass, millet and sunflowers. They also raise grass-fed British White cattle and Katahdin hair sheep, as well as small flocks of heritage turkeys and chickens — both broilers and layers. They purchased the cattle in 2013 and have grown to about 70 head, with the hope to raise many of the animals to sell as direct market, grass-fed beef.
Bret Margraf is a seventeen-year veteran of the Seneca Conservation District in Tiffin, Ohio. His most recent work has involved educating farmers in Seneca and the surrounding counties about the benefits of conservation cropping systems to reduce soil erosion and minimize nutrient losses from farm fields. For almost two decades, Bret has been practicing these efforts on his own farming operation with his dad and three sons. Innovative methods of combining no-till, cover crops and manure has made him a trailblazer of conservation.
Russ Jackson grew up on the family farm in Mountain View, Oklahoma. After graduating high school, he attended Cameron University and Southwestern Oklahoma State University. From an early age he worked alongside his father using conventional heavy tillage on a wide variety of soils. After hitting a wall with a decline in yields and even in fall grazing on wheat pasture he realized pH levels, along with fertility, weren’t the only problems facing the farm.
Byron is the Senior Program Director for the Savory Institute. His role involves providing training in Holistic Management for the worldwide network of Savory Institute Hubs and Accredited Professionals. He also provides farm and ranch management consulting for Savory Institute. Byron is a Savory Institute Master Field Professional.
John Stigge and his family have been early pioneers of regenerative farming, even before they knew there was such a thing. They have continuously used cover crops for the past the past 23 years and practiced never tillage for 35 years. John introduced “graze cropping” in 2007, using livestock grazing to accelerate the benefits to the soil.
Jacob Miller is a 26-year-old third-generation Nebraska rancher from Culbertson. Since his return in 2013 he has helped implement some big changes on his family’s 300-head cattle operation, and not long after buying his grandfather’s portion of the business, Miller added an instrumental cover cropping system to his family’s grazing rotation. With close to 4,000 acres of native grass and 600 acres of farm ground, Miller and his family have been able to do some pretty spectacular things with their management.
