First Steps to Testing Regenerative Practices

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

There is a lot of talk about regenerative agriculture these days, but what does it actually look like in practice? For California Ag Solutions president Silas Rossow, his eyes were opened to new possibilities when he first tried strip tilling some corn silage.

Rossow… “It actually was a fantastic success, becuase we addressed not just the tillage side of everything, but we also were focusing on how does tillage change the nutrient cycling in the soil. And that was impressive to see because we did some on seed treatments, we did some foliars, and we were really adjusting nutrition of what the plant needed instead of just saying, Hey, we're gonna put on 200, 300 units of nitrogen. We actually played a little bit more of the game of what is it that needs to be done, more strategic. The feed quality that we got off of those fields that we did the experiment on. So not just strip till, but we also did nutrition on them, was far better. It was a few hundred dollars per acre more that you were generating when you took it all the way through using like a milk 2006 calculator to find out what that value of milk per acre was being produced. So that was something that encouraged me and made me wonder, like, there's gotta be other ways that we can be doing this: more efficient and create a better product.”

Rossow now applies some of the same regenerative principles to helping producers of specialty crops throughout California.