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What is Regenerative Agriculture? Regenerative agriculture is a farming and ranching approach focused on improving soil health, restoring ecosystem function, increasing biodiversity, and strengthening the natural cycles that support life. Rather than simply sustaining current conditions, regenerative agriculture seeks to improve the land over time, making farms and ranches more resilient, productive, and profitable for […]
Bringing it Together In the first three parts of this series, we explored what nutrients plants need, where they come from, and how living organisms use them. In Part 4, we’ll examine how those nutrients move through the ecosystem. Nutrient cycling is the continuous exchange of elements between soil, plants, microbes, animals, and the environment. […]
Are You Mining Your Soil or Managing Sustainably? By Brian Dougherty, Understanding Ag Consultant In my Fertilizer Fallacy article, I made the case that conventional fertility recommendations often drain farmer bank accounts without a reliable yield response to show for it. However, a common concern with reducing nutrient applications is a fear of “mining” your […]
Profit is not a four letter word! In fact, if your farm or ranch is not profitable, what can you do for your family, your employees, your community, or for soil health and the environment in general? There are a few wealthy land owners who want to focus on healthy soil, clean water, clean air, […]
How Life Uses Atoms As we learned from Part 2 of this series, the ingredients for life are all around us. Some atoms, like nitrogen and oxygen, are abundant, so it comes as no surprise that living organisms have them in abundance in their bodies. Others, like boron and zinc, are less abundant so they […]
As I travel across the United States working with ranchers, I’m often asked where to focus time and energy to make the greatest impact on profitability. In many of my presentations, I close with a couple of summary slides that highlight the highest-leverage decisions-those that can drive meaningful improvement in the shortest amount of time. […]
During a beautiful, abnormally warm February day this past winter, my two-year-old grandson was looking out the window and pointing at the heifers along my driveway and rambling about “da cows”. I decided to let him see them up close. Like most young, curious, and gentle cattle, they lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and slowly moved closer […]
Where the Wild Atoms Are Learning the story of nutrient cycling is a necessary first step to memorizing the nutrients and how to manage them appropriately. Most of us were “taught” the latter without the former, which is an extremely difficult way for our brains to remember something. The story provides the substance for the […]
In my last article I made the case that conventional fertility programs are costing farmers real money – and that the soil tests driving most of those programs don’t actually measure what we think they do. Understanding what’s wrong with the current approach is step one. Knowing what to do instead is step two. That’s […]
What is a Silvopasture? Silvopastures are grazing systems where trees, forage crops, and livestock are integrated on the same land. This blended microecosystem creates many beneficial symbiotic relationships between the soil, the plants, and the livestock. Silvopastures consist of a diverse mix of trees-such as hardwoods, conifers, fruit and nut producers, and nitrogen-fixing species-and support […]