For years many people worked to promote interest in “soil quality,” a term meant to encompass the physical, chemical and biological properties that make well-managed soils rich, productive, and alive. But to Ray Archuleta, a leading voice for soil conservation within the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, a new approach to soil management was needed, […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Dave Flynn and Cory Carman own and manage one of the wonderful, productive and beautiful grass-based cattle operations in the Pacific Northwest. The fourth-generation, 2,500+ acre Carman Ranch in Wallowa, Oregon is just over the ridge from where I live, near Troy, Oregon. We have bought our beef for years from the Carman Ranch, and more […]
Read More, References, Comment »
This great, long essay on soil health has unusually blunt discussion of the implications of declining soil health. Molly Jahn, a professor of Agronomy at my alma mater UW-Madison, seamlessly merges insights from a helicopter ride outside Des Moines during planting season, to the early crusade to expose and end slavery among sugar plantation workers […]
Read More, References, Comment »
The environmental benefits of organic farming have been widely acknowledged. In a long-term study of organic, conventional, and integrated apple orchards in Washington State, a team of scientists documented several important environmental benefits. In the organic blocks of trees, nitrogen (N) losses to groundwater and the atmosphere were reduced relative to conventional agriculture. Annual nitrate […]
Read More, References, Comment »
Long-term research has documented the extent to which organic farming improves key indicators of soil quality, including soil organic carbon content (SOC) and particulate organic matter (POC). An important article entitled “Total and Labile Soil Organic Matter in Organic and Conventional Farming Systems” summarizes the findings of nine long-term comparative trials assessing the impacts of […]
Read More, References, Comment »
In an elegant study that is the first of its kind, scientists working at USDA’s Henry A Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center used the tools of biotechnology to trace how plants respond to a common organic farming practice – the planting of crops in a hairy vetch (HV) mulch-based system. The study compared the genetic […]
Read More, References, Comment »
For more than ten years, scientists at U.C. Davis in California have conducted a Long-Term Research on Agricultural Systems project (LTRAS). The impacts of conventional and organic management on tomato production and tomato nutrient concentrations have been a major focus of this effort. On June 23, 2007, the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Food and […]
Read More, References, Comment »
