Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey announced today that cost share funds are available to help farmers install nutrient reduction practices. The initial practices that are prioritized for funding this fall are cover crops, no-till or strip till, or using a nitrification inhibitor when applying fertilizer.

Although Iowa does not have a deadline for reducing its nitrate and phosphate levels of surface water, researchers urged farmers Wednesday to do their parts sooner, rather than later.

Is there a fallow period in your crop rotation after wheat harvest? If so, you have an excellent opportunity to seed various legume cover crop species to supply nitrogen (N) to your following crop.

A report has just been released with detailed results from a farmer survey on cover crops. The survey was carried out in partnership between the USDA North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC).

Mark Bauer, strip-tiller in Faribault, Minn., talks about building confidence in strip-till with a two-pass system methodology and how it's allowed him to expand his operation to include grid sampling and potential cover crops.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service's Conservation Stewardship Program will provide about $175 million in funding for up to 12.6 million additional acres enrollment this year. Although applications are accepted all year, farmers, ranchers and forestland owners interested in CSP should submit applications by June 14 to their local NRCS office to ensure they are considered for this year's funding. The deadline was extended from May 31.

Currently in West Texas, we are in one of the worst droughts since the 1930's and 1950's. We are now entering the third year of this drought. Recently, I did some research on the drought of the 1930's and 1950's. In my hometown of Plainview, Texas (average annual rainfall = 20.17 inches), our rainfall for 2011 and 2012 was 5.63 and 10.48 inches respectively. In comparison, the two lowest years of precipitation during the 1930's was 10.16 and 13.75 inches in 1933-1934 and for the 1950's was 11.29 and 10.39 inches in 1953-54.

Using a strip tillage system in combination with cover crops benefits vegetable farmers as well as the land, according to long-term research by Dan Brainard, a Michigan State University (MSU) horticulture researcher.

After hearing detailed questions from farmers about fall strip-till during the recent Big Iron Farm Show, Thurston Mfg. Co. chief marketing officer Nick Jensen and Bob Saunders, a territory sales manager for Asgrow and De Kalb, decided to hold several meetings and strip-till demonstrations in the area last October.

in MSU strip-tilled sweet corn trials, plots with rye residue on the soil surface had approximately 5 percent greater water content in the top 10 inches then plots without rye mulch.