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ECO Farming or ecological farming is a new way of improving our soils, improving nutrient and fertilizer efficiency and ultimately increased crop yields while protecting the environment. Ecological farming is an integrated system of practices that closely mimics and works with natural processes. For years, farmers have increased crop yields by plowing up the soils (using fuel and equipment) and then utilizing fertilizer and crop inputs like herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides to control pests. The upside of this has been higher crops yields but the inputs like fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides are becoming more expensive. Modern agriculture now has to deal with environmental problems including soil erosion, soil compaction, nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, flooding, resistant weeds, insect infestations, and crop diseases. In a nutshell, the goal of ecological farming is to produce profitable high yielding crops that utilizing inputs efficiently while protecting the environment. Skep...

Soil quality or soil health is a concept that farmers and gardeners are starting to learn more about. Soil quality/soil health is define by Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS, soils.usda.gov) as “The capacity of a soil…to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and support human health.” What does a healthy soil smell and look like compared to an unhealthy soil? Farmers often call their soil “dirt” but soil is more than dirt! Dirt is the sand, silt and clay you wash off your clothes. Soil contains those elements plus soil organic matter but it is also alive with various microbes and small animals. You can actually smell the difference. Take a scoop of soil from a fence row and compare it to a shovel of soil from a typical field. Fence row soil typically has an earthy smell and will be teaming with microbes and small critters while a bare field generally will have fewer microbes and smell stale. The fence row soil should crumble and be ...

1. What factors contribute most to soil compaction? Soil compaction is caused by excess weight and poor soil structure. A lot of soil compaction is actually poor soil structure due to excessive tillage. Tillage disrupts the macro-aggregates which give us good soil structure, releasing carbon and nutrients. The glues that form the macro-aggregates comes from plant roots and microbial waste or byproducts. Bacteria wastes are important for cementing soil particles into microaggregates while fungus are important for producing glomalin that cement macro-aggregates together. Both are important however, their needs to be a balance of bacteria and fungus in the soil. tillage promote bacteria populations over fungal populations, reducing glomalin production. These glues in the soil have two major functions, they promote good soil aggregation and they serve as a source of food for the microbes. When you till the soil, farmers increase the oxygen content of the soil, increasing the microbial popu...

  A presentation by Ohio State University's Jim Hoorman at the National Conference on Cover Crops and Soil Health. Speakers in this session discussed both local and off-site impacts of using cover crops, including some of the latest information on cover crop impacts on water quality, nitrogen loss from fields in tile lines, phosphorous loss and wildlife considerations. Learn more at http://www.sare.org/covercropconference .

There are several “keystone” or critical soil organisms that are important to human’s survival. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are a type of fungi that infect plant roots root to recycle soil nutrients that increase crop growth, vigor, and yield. About 250 AM fungi species infect 80-90% of all agricultural annual crops. This beneficial (symbiotic) association started over 450 million years ago, when newly evolving plants had few roots and relied on AM fungi to gather soil nutrients like phosphorus (P), sulfur, nitrogen, and many micronutrients. AM fungi form a mycorrhizal network with plant roots, extending out 6-18 inches from a root hair, increasing surface area for soil nutrient extraction by 20X. AM fungi hyphae are 1/10 the size of a root hair, so tiny AM hyphae extract soil nutrients unavailable to plant roots. "There are 1 to 20 meters of AM hyphae in each gram (finger nail size) of soil or maybe 5 miles of AM fungi hyphae in a pound of soil" (Sylvia et al 2005). Th...

Farmers often struggle to get corn residue to breakdown. Many environmental and soil conditions can affect residue breakdown including air and soil temperature, moisture, oxygen, biological activity, and farming practices. Tillage and the addition of fall nitrogen after harvest are common practices that farmers use to speed up residue breakdown. Many farmers feel that the GMO (genetically modified) corn residue is also much slower to break down. Integrated Crop Management at Iowa State University (Dr. Madhi Al-Kaisi) conducted a 3-year trial to test these ideas. GMO versus Non-GMO corn with tillage: Researchers used both Bt (Bacteria Thuringiensis) and Non Bt or Non-GMO corn varieties and evaluated three tillage systems: deep tillage, strip till, and no-till systems for three years, in the field and under controlled laboratory conditions. After 12 months in the field, they found no significant differences between Bt and non Bt corn and no differences between tillage system in corn resi...

In 2019, Lake Erie had the 5th largest Harmful Algae Bloom (HAB) due to record water runoff and 2-3 feet higher water levels than normal. Lake Erie also had the highest total sediment, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus loads ever recorded, but the extra water diluted the sediment and nutrient concentrations, possibly reducing the impact. Examining the facts and problems may offer some possible solutions. About 60% of phosphorus (P) nutrient loads come from the Maumee River watershed (Johnson, 2018). Roughly 30% of P comes from surface runoff and 70% from subsurface (tile) runoff through preferential flow (soil cracks, crevices) with about 90% of the losses occurring during the most intense rainfall events (Watters & Hoorman, 2018, Fussell et al. 2017). Depending on the soil and landscape, 60 -90% of P come from 10-40% of land, generally on soils located close to or with access for transportation to ditches and streams. Average Ohio P loss is 1-1.2# P/acre with a goal of losing l...