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Showing posts from January, 2016

2016 CSA Shares Available Now!

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No-till is the ONLY Way to Go!

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I read an incredible peer reviewed white paper the other  day.  It was on the impacts of no-till farming under arid conditions and the benefits to watershed hydrology.  The title of the article is " Conservation Tillage in Dryland Agriculture Impacts Watershed Hydrology " by Van Wie et. al. 2013 (Full reference below).   What was particularly interesting to me about the article was the emphasis not just on no-till, but on the importance of this in arid conditions and locations.  Although the study was primarily in the Palouse region of Washington, the study related to myself as a farmer in the high-desert of Colorado; Colorado being one of the driest states in the country with abnormally high rates of evapotranspiration (evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants).  The article discusses that the utilization of no-till methods is a BMP (Best Management Practice) for soil management (Van Wie, et. al. 2013).  The benefits to the watershed, as found by the authors