Farmer-Led Research

Successful weed management is usually the result of strategic thinking: “If hoeing doesn’t work this year, I’ll…” “If the spring turns dry, we’ll…” Paul and Karen Mugge, Sutherland, must have set aside some time to think about strategy, …

Livestock husbandry has always been an art. Today many producers are moving into sustainable-type production systems designed to reduce animal stress and benefit the environment. At the same time, their markets and/or their philosophy may exclude antibiotics and …

One of the strengths of PFI on-farm research is that the program has enabled cooperators to pursue their own questions. Of course this means that trials are often one-ofa-kind, and PFI trial designs allow each experiment to stand …

Sometimes it’s not what you fertilize with but how you fertilize that’s important. With funding from the USDA SARE program, PFI has been comparing two competing philosophies, or paradigms, of fertility. One approach is to look at a …

Varieties and hybrids were mentioned earlier as part of trials by Angela Tedesco and Gary Guthrie, but the so-called field crops were also part of variety comparisons in 2001. Ron and LaDonna Brunk and Steve and Tara Beck-Brunk, …

Just for the record, lets remember the weather of spring, 2001. If you didn’t get the crops planted before May, chances are you didn’t get them planted until after May. The wet weather meant it was not a …

Gary and Nancy Guthrie, Nevada, have a CSA garden where new questions are always cropping up. In 2001, they addressed questions of fertility, specifically foliar fertilization. Gary had read that potatoes responded to a fish emulsion-kelp mix and …

Jeff Klinge, Farmersburg. Early in January 2000, when I was starting to make my plans for the coming crop year, the company that I decided to work with offered contracts on two varieties for organic soybeans: Vinton 81 …

PFI cooperators have completed trials in a Leopold Center-supported project to examine composting of swine hoophouse manure. This “manure” is almost as much bedding as it is manure. Feeder pigs eat about three pounds of feed for every …

Let’s dive right into a topic that has kept PFI cooperators and ISU scientists occupied the last two years – manure, or, more generally, “biosolids.” The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture funded a study of swine hoophouse manure …

The soybeans started out very well; but foxtail came in later. I thought they looked very poor at our field day in late summer. But the experts thought they would make 30 bushels per acre and they were …

In the last several years, you may have heard something about PFI’s work with fertility paradigms. If so, you probably heard the explanation that a paradigm is a way of looking at the world, a way of making …