Conservation

Vermont’s agricultural history will soon be enriched as a new Farm to Ballet project aims to celebrate the state’s farming culture and expose a new audience to the beauty of classical ballet. The endeavor is the brainchild of former professional dancer and Vermont native Chatch Pregger. His farm...

What do you get when you combine an abandoned rural high school, two Colorado farm families and potatoes? White Rock Specialties. The innovative potato packing facility in Mosca, Colorado, is an economic driver for valley potato growers and employment in this small, unincorporated community in the...

Demand for fresh lamb from ­five star restaurants drives Bob Corio’s use of cover crops and better forages that provide feed but also build organic matter in the ­fields he farms in Union County, South Dakota. “We needed something else for our sheep to eat other than hay,” says Corio, who has a...

As part of our ongoing #womeninag series, we are highlighting a different leading woman in agriculture each month. This month, we profile Gayle Goschie, a third-generation hop grower on a farm her family has owned in Silverton, Oregon, for 130 years. Goschie Farms grows 550 acres of hops and sells...

In the “Old West”, barbed wire fences were often cut to allow trailing droves of cattle through. In the “New West,” livestock fencing is being marked to help reduce collisions for sage grouse and other wildlife. Sage grouse are especially at risk of hitting fences that are close to established leks...

A rich background in agriculture helped Wade Kloepping make the decision to come home to Dawson County after college and take over the family farm near Eustis, Nebraska. Two years before graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Kloepping’s dad passed away; he was the manager of the family...

Stewardship and cutting-edge technology are nothing new to the North Williston Cattle Company, a Vermont dairy farm that uses solar energy and robotic milking machines. The latest advancement on the 800-acre, 224-head operation are edge-of-field water quality monitoring stations, which measure water...

Statistics associated with the Sage Grouse Initiative (SGI) are quite impressive. Since 2010, more than 1,100 ranchers have teamed up with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in the partnership led by the agency to conserve habitat on 4.4 million acres, an area of working lands...

Of the several practices USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service recommends to improve soil health and sustainability one of the most important is to keep the soil covered. In corn and soybean fields, the starting point is maintaining the post-harvest crop residue on the soil surface. Crop...

Recently, ninety Alaska Native, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian high school students came together at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia for a week of intensive education and peer-to-peer training about the impact of climate change on tribal communities...