An Indiana initiative has made the state a national leader in getting continuous living cover established on crop acres. Can it change the way farmers view soil? Michael Werling is, literally, a card-carrying connoisseur of soil health. “I call it, ‘My ticket to a farm tour,’ ” says the northeastern Indiana crop producer, showing off… Read More →
How Indiana is using cover cropping and early adopters as ‘gateways’ into a deeper understanding of sustainable soil management. It’s an overcast August morning in northeastern Indiana, and in a massive machine shed well stocked with the tools of a modern row crop operation, some 60 farmers are being reminded that growing corn and soybeans… Read More →
Nov. 20: An LSP Round-up of News Covering Land, People & Communities Grassland 2.0 Aims to Replace Soy and Corn Farming with Perennial Pasture in the Upper Midwest (11/11/20) With $10 million in funding from the USDA, Grassland 2.0 is a five-year project housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to begin transforming the… Read More →
Jan. 29: An LSP Round-up of News Covering Land, People & Communities After COVID-related Livestock Kills, a Push to Diversify Meat Processing in Minnesota (1/25/21) When several large pork processing plants shuttered last spring because workers got sick with COVID-19, it had a huge impact on farmers across the Midwest. One estimate is more than… Read More →
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Clears Senate, Sending it Back to House (7/1/25) Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 tie in the U.S. Senate today to pass President Donald Trump’s centerpiece legislation on tax cuts and spending, the 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill,” reports Oklahoma Farm Report. In order to pay for spending on… Read More →
When it comes to making the ag landscape healthier, how much is enough? One day in 2007, a farmer walked into Paul Wymar’s office in Montevideo, Minn., not far from where the Chippewa River drains into the Minnesota River. He had a question for Wymar, who at the time was a scientist for the Chippewa… Read More →
Cover crops proved themselves foul weather friends during the Great Drought of 2012. A groundbreaking farmer survey conducted in the Upper Mississippi River watershed showed that during that year’s brutal growing season keeping the soil covered with small grains and other plants helped fields preserve enough precious moisture to provide a yield bump of, in… Read More →
Report: Cancer Rates Rising Among Young People in the Corn Belt (10/29/25) The Minnesota Reformer reports on an analysis conducted by The Washington Post showing that the six states that lead in corn production — Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas — have seen higher rates of cancer among young people than other states… Read More →
From the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction department: In 2007, Monsanto talked the USDA’s Risk Management Agency into giving farmers a discount on crop insurance premiums if they planted the company’s triple-stacked GMO corn. Reportedly, some reviewers of the proposal raised concerns that the premium subsidy would unfairly benefit a single private company. But in the end, the USDA… Read More →
In the early 2000s, I wrote a series of Land Stewardship Letter articles about a generic environmental impact statement study that was done on Minnesota’s livestock industry. The final report had an interesting finding related to phosphorus, a key source of crop fertility: small livestock farms had a medium phosphorus shortage of 17 pounds per… Read More →
