Dr. Brian Gardener

Managing residue cover is critical to maintaining soil biology over winter and preparing the soil for timely planting next spring. Farmers' decisions in the fall significantly impact how quickly residues degrade, how much carbon is retained in the soil, and how quickly soils can warm in the spring.

Soil health is most meaningfully assessed based on its ability to produce marketable yield per unit of farmer input under varied growing conditions. Because all inputs and management practices have some trade-offs, growers need to do more than just determine if a product or practice will work in isolation. They need to be sure that all their choices work together as an efficient system to achieve the desired result of producing healthy, abundant, and sustainable harvests year after year.

The wildfire smoke impact on agronomic crops should be of much less concern for Maximum Farming System farmers than their more conventional neighbors.