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Paul Mugge and Tim Youngquist come together to share their passion for integrating conservation practices into their family farms through prairie strips. In this farminar, they will share their experience with prairie strips, which includes discovering how strategic use of prairie strips can help protect the land while benefitting native wildlife.

Bringing forward information and data from several years and data from assorted research locations, Dr. Gruver discusses both gains and hurdles in cover crops and soil health. Reducing Cost of Failure and Quickly Learning From Failure. “Fail Fast, Succeed Faster” Dr. Joel Gruver, Professor of Soil Science at Western Illinois University brings new soil health discussion forward regarding reducing cost of failure and quickly learning from failure in cover crops; Precision Cover Cropping; Water Quality; presentation of data from several years and locations of research.

Join to learn how to reduce nitrogen need by incorporating legumes into your rotation. Using leguminous cover crops provides multiple below ground ecosystem services that support crop production, restore/maintain soil health and reduce undesirable environmental consequences. The first part of the presentation will focus on understanding soil ecological processes that enable leguminous cover crops to serve as a nitrogen source for subsequent cash crops. Followed by discussing how leguminous green manures alter nitrogen cycling compared to additions of mineral fertilizers. Then, digging deeper into the underlying soil ecology and look at how leguminous cover crops affect soil organic matter formation and improve soil health. Lastly, we will consider how plants acquire nitrogen from organic sources in soils. In the second half I will concentrate on management practices. To optimize legume-derived nitrogen supply, there are two main aspects of management to consider: 1) How can leguminous cover crops be managed to optimize symbiotic nitrogen fixation rates? and 2) Which management strategies are most effective for transitioning from mineral fertilizers to legume-derived nitrogen? I hope we can have some discussion about management challenges that farmers face when transitioning to legumes as nitrogen sources as well as practices that are working.

Tune into this Digital Cafe to hear from Dr. Inderjot Chahal with the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Guelph. Dr. Chalal will discuss the long-term cover crop experiments established at the University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus. The presentation will focus specifically on the benefits and implications of cover crops on increasing soil health indicators and crop yield in the long-term.