Intensifying and diversifying cropping systems in the High Plains offers great potential for improving soil health, precipitation use efficiency, and enhancing the productivity and profitability of dryland farming enterprises. However, balancing these different goals can also be challenging in water-limited regions. This session will provide producer perspectives and results from on-farm research investigating the potential of grazed forage (cover crop) mixtures as a practice to balance soil health and profitability goals.
Lucas Criswell was a no-tiller before it was cool to be planting green to build armor on the soil . He is constantly adapting equipment to ever changing practices. One innovation is his mounted cover crop roller coupled with the custom"Criswell Comb" to help part the large cover while planting. This innovation gives Lucas NO hair pinning what so ever at the row unit. He is able to plant through lodged covers no matter the condtions.
Some of the biggest problems in agriculture are rooted less in what we do, than in what we think. In this provocative, interactive session, Montgomery and Biklé will share several mini-case studies, drawn from their Dirt Trilogy. They’ll look at the legacy of conventional wisdom that hampered the adoption of new practices that seemed counter-intuitive yet proved powerful agents of change. The first step in changing your practices is changing your mind, and Montgomery and Biklé draw on new science to challenge conventional thinking about mainstream farming practices.
Geologist David R. Montgomery and biologist Anne Biklé will share insights and discoveries from their book The Hidden Half of Nature about humanity’s long and tangled relationship with the microbial world. Moving through twists and turns of history, science, and personal experience, they’ll share the journey that brought them to the strange twin worlds of the human gut and the roots of plants. New microbiome science reveals the common ground and parallel purpose of these twin organs.
Life as we know it would not exist without microbes. But microbes cannot act alone. They behave both competitively and cooperatively by communicating through an array of chemical signals. Further, many actions performed by microbes require that their populations reach a certain critical mass. When there are only a few individuals, their behavior is different to when there are many. Research into density-dependent coordinated behavior - termed ‘quorum sensing’ - has increased exponentially in recent years.
