Food ag news outlet kicks off year-long reporting series on rural America - Entrepreneur Generations

Soybeans coming up in a rye cover crop. (USDA photo)

Civil Eats is kicking off a yearlong project called the Rural Environment and Agriculture Project about how our nation's food is farmed and the often-overlooked rural Americans who do the farming. Rural America, Civil Eats writes, is undergoing big changes: small farmer are struggling to stay on their land, more people are moving to the city, many local newspapers have gone out of print, jobs are hard to come by, and businesses and hospitals frequently close. And the cultural divide is growing too. "Our hope is that by reporting on these tensions in modern rural America and showcasing solutions where agriculture can help to revitalize communities, we will expand our readers’ awareness of the interdependence of American agriculture and food systems. Of course, we realize that many of these stories will raise challenges that don’t have immediate solutions. And we welcome you to join us on this journey and share your thoughts and ideas along the way."

The first story in the series is about the increasingly popular no-till farming movement, in which farmers plant crops directly into the soil without breaking up the soil first. "According to the USDA’s latest data, by 2010-11, no-till farming had grown to the point where roughly 40 percent of the corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton grown per year in the U.S. used either no-till or a half-step technique called strip-tilling. That works out to around 89 million acres per year," Twilight Greenaway reports. The technique has been around for more than 50 years, since herbicides and precision planting tools made it possible. Farmers traditionally embraced it as a way of improving yields or cutting costs, but now farmers are touting it as a way to improve the soil, retain water and organic matter, and sequester carbon. Some see it as a way to cut down on synthetic herbicides and fertilizers.

At the recent No Till On the Plains conference, a fourth-generation farmer from Arkansas who has been using the no-till method for several years said, "I don’t need seed treatments for my cotton anymore. I’ve taken the insecticide off my soybeans. I’m working toward getting rid of fungicide … I’m hoping that eventually my soil will be healthy enough that I can get rid of all of it all together."

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2CAHS6Y Food ag news outlet kicks off year-long reporting series on rural America - Entrepreneur Generations

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