Soil Is Our Greatest Asset

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

There is nothing more valuable to a farmer than their land. Not only in monetary value, but in its ability to sustain their livelihood. Modern technology is opening up new doors for farmers to add value to that land by improving their soil health, and companies like Syngenta want to help them. Here’s Syngenta’s CEO Jeff Rowe.

Rowe…” For most farmers, a lot of farmers in the world, the land is their most important investment. It's the investment that if they're growing row crops or vegetables or anything intense like that, that relies on the land, that's the investment that matters to them the most. And in some ways, historically, it's been what we understood the least. And so as, as we're gathering more information, we're helping farmers make better decisions, we're also helping improve the quality of that investment. And we've been doing multi-year experiments where we've been comparing things like conventional tillage no-till strip, till cover crops, lots of different soil health type of practices and then comparing the differences. and, you know, we're seeing some, I mean, really good short-term results like soil organic matter is going up, water holding capacities going up. Those are important factors for farmers.”

Rowe also said he is trying more soil health practices on his own family farm in Illinois.