Growing Returns

3 ingredients for success in soil health

By / Published: April 9, 2021

This blog was originally posted on Soil Health Partnership’s blog.

Profitable conservation systems don’t look the same on every farm. Growers must implement different strategies to address their specific needs, thanks to a wide range of variables including soil type, moisture availability, equipment and labor. However, just because every farmer takes a slightly different approach to soil health doesn’t mean there aren’t some consistent success factors.

In our recent report, Conservation’s Impact on the Farm Bottom Line (developed in partnership with Environmental Defense Fund and the agricultural accounting firm K·Coe Isom), we discovered that farmers who felt their soil health practices were making a difference — both in the data and anecdotally — took some similar approaches. These three “ingredients for success” increased their chances for achieving profitable conservation systems. Read More »

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Report provides guidance on repurposing California farmland to benefit water, landowners, communities and wildlife

By / Bio / Published: March 25, 2021

Over the coming decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley will transition to sustainable groundwater management under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), ensuring reliable groundwater supplies for generations to come. Sustainable groundwater management and a changing climate will inevitably affect how land is used on a sweeping scale.

By some estimates, the amount of farmland that will have to be taken out of production to balance groundwater demand and supply is equivalent to the size of Yosemite National Park — a transition that could serve a huge blow to the agricultural economy, rural communities and the environment.  At the same time, farmers are also facing steep declines in surface water supplies from rivers and melted snowpack, largely driven by climate change, as they learned just this week.

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4 lessons learned from nitrogen balance pilot projects

By / Bio / Published: March 17, 2021

Environmental Defense Fund led several pilot projects in the 2019-2020 growing season to better understand how different farm management practices impact nitrogen balance, or N balance, a robust and practical proxy to measure agriculture’s climate and water quality impacts.

EDF scientists assessed real-world, in-field data for 16 management practices and N balance scores from more than 500,000 acres of corn across nine Midwestern states. Here are four actionable insights. Read More »

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Understanding the impact of conservation tillage on operating expenses

By / Published: March 12, 2021

This blog was originally published by Dr. Maria Bowman on Soil Health Partnership’s blog.

When farmers consider implementing a soil health or conservation practice on their farm, one question they inevitably ask is: what will the financial impacts be?

In an effort to answer this question, we recently released Conservation’s Impact on the Farm Bottom Line — a report developed in partnership with Environmental Defense Fund and the agricultural accounting firm K·Coe Isom — to better understand the benefits, opportunities and limiting factors associated with common conservation practices. Read More »

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Report shows how nuts and managed vegetation are a winning combination for California growers

By / Bio / Published: February 22, 2021

California is an agricultural powerhouse, producing billions of pounds of nuts in 2020 and tree nut acreage continuing to increase year after year.

The bountiful Central Valley provides fruit and nuts to the majority of the U.S., but these orchards offer additional potential that growers have yet to reap.

A new report, Managing Vegetation for Agronomic and Ecological Benefits in California Nut Orchards [PDF], details opportunities for growers to build a more resilient agricultural system in California — with both sustainability and profitability in mind. Read More »

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A breakthrough to measure agriculture’s environmental impact

By / Bio / Published: February 18, 2021

Nitrogen (N) is essential for high crop yields to feed a growing population, but excess nitrogen contributes to climate change as nitrous oxide and to water pollution as nitrate.

Historically, measuring nitrogen losses has been expensive and time consuming. Environmental Defense Fund’s N-Visible framework remedies that.

N-Visible provides an easy-to-use, scientifically robust way for farmers and their advisers to assess nitrogen losses from individual fields. It also allows food companies and policymakers who promote on-farm sustainability to measure progress toward improved environmental outcomes at regional scales.

An open-source implementation guide is now available for download. Here’s what it contains and how to use it. Read More »

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“Success first.” How one ag retailer is helping farmers adopt conservation practices, profitably.

By / Published: January 27, 2021

Missouri-based ag retailer MFA Incorporated is a regional farm supply and marketing cooperative representing 45,000 farmers and ranchers. It has 130 locations throughout Missouri and in parts of Kansas, Iowa and Arkansas. The co-op’s priority is neither “sales first” nor “conservation first,” but “member success first.”

With this priority in mind, MFA Inc. and three state conservation agencies — Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC), Missouri Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and Missouri Department of Natural Resources — teamed up to help farmers manage for both profitability and environmental sustainability.

The innovative public-private partnership is featured in a new report prepared for Environmental Defense Fund by Datu Research, Helping Farmers Find Profit and Sustainability: A Case Study of MFA Inc. Shows How Conservation Can Support the Bottom Line. Read More »

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Farmer interest in conservation is growing, but barriers remain high. Here’s how we can overcome them.

By / Bio / Published: January 6, 2021

“Are you interested in planting hedgerows of native plants on your farm, but aren’t quite sure how to get started?”

That was the question Rex Defour, the California regional director for the National Center for Appropriate Technology, posed to farmers in a blog earlier this year.

The response? A flood of calls and emails from interested farmers. In a matter of weeks, 90 growers from across the country signed up to plant over 23 miles of hedgerows. Read More »

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Small grains have big outcomes for climate resilience

By / Bio / Published: December 16, 2020

Small grain crops, like oats and wheat, are making a comeback in the Midwest, disrupting the traditional corn-soy rotation and delivering big benefits for farmers and the environment. And they’re about to get another big boost.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently awarded a $1.1 million Conservation Innovation Grant to Practical Farmers of Iowa to advance the use of small grains crops and test market-based solutions for lowering emissions linked to nitrogen from manure and fertilizer. Read More »

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How can we measure the profitability of healthy soils? There’s a new guide for that

By / Bio / Published: December 14, 2020

Any investment, from Wall Street to a local park, requires investors to establish expectations for the costs, benefits and timing. They dedicate significant resources to researching and identifying these expectations to optimize their investment decision.

Investing in soil health should be no different.

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