Organic certification is a third-party verification system, allowing the certifier and its inspectors to verify what is happening on an organic farm. “What does the inspector want to see? They want to see records that demonstrate that you’re meeting the organic standard,” said Nicole Dehne, the cert...

The 2025 Irrigation Show & Education Week brought together growers, consultants and tech tinkerers hungry for tools that can stretch every drop. In the middle of the bustle, Dr. Stacia L. Davis Conger, state irrigation specialist and associate professor of irrigation engineering at LSU’s AgCenter, d...

In a presentation hosted by BalChem, Andrew Rose of the nonprofit organization Bioeconomy Information Sharing & Analysis Center (BIO-ISAC), discussed a critical and timely question: Could your operation survive a cyberattack? Rose refers to himself as an “accidental expert” in cybersecurity. He was ...

Hello, farm family! Have you ever walked by a weedy bench and thought, “I’ll just pull a few weeds,” only to realize you then worked for over an hour? Me too. The positive side of that is that I got lots of weeds pulled rather than just a few. The drawback is I now have less time to do the other thi...

In time for National Ag Day on March 24, the nonprofit Rural Minds announces the launch of the new Farmer Mental Health Resilience Program in support of mental wellness for farmers and farm families. This critical new initiative aims to support the ag community by providing farmers and the individua...

When Rusty Mangrum recently built a new house, he wanted to plant shade trees in the yard – magnolia, serviceberry, 'Autumn Blaze' red maple. To find the trees, he didn’t have to go far. He picked them right out of his own nursery. Mangrum has been growing bare root fruit and shade trees in McMinnvi...

Water is waning and landscapes are feeling the squeeze. Lawns and landscapes are increasingly left to languish under water use limits. In response to this pressing problem, Levi Dreiling and Jacob C. Domenghini of Kansas State University’s Department of Horticulture & Natural Resources set out to se...

A recent shift toward more restrictive weed control measures along with new, mandatory pesticide application rules has been mandated by the EPA. Wesley Everman, Ph.D., Iowa State Extension weed specialist, began an explanation of the rule changes with a brief history of what brought the EPA to devel...

At the Cultivate Conference in Columbus, one presentation invited landscape professionals to loosen their grip and embrace a little chaos – with purpose. In a session titled “Natural Disaster: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly of Managing Naturalistic Landscapes,” David McKinney, curator at the Iowa Arbo...