Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Laurie Bedford Soil sampling has always been an important management tool to ensure a crop gets the nutrients it needs. Yet, the technology that unearths the critical details in the dirt has changed little through the years. “While we have seen some advancements in areas like zone management and determining where to take samples, […]

By: Jerry Nelson At this time of the year, most people are ready for winter to be over. Winter has become like an old college buddy who dropped by unexpectedly and ended up staying for several months. It was fun at first. Getting reacquainted, recalling those adrenalin-charged sled rides down Busted Skull Hill. Guffawing over […]

By: Raylene Nickel The results of Iowa State University’s (ISU) long-term Marsden Farm experiment showed the soil-saving benefits of adding forage legumes and small grains to a corn-soybean rotation, even when tillage was part of the production system. Add no-till to the equation, and the results are magnified. That’s the finding of the Union of Concerned […]

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 […]