Field Notes – October 2023

Happy October! David Redhage gets this issue rolling with a note on cover crops. What’s the October connection? Well, we once ran a demonstration planting pumpkins into killed cover crop mulch.

In other spooky news, there’s a “green glacier” devouring native grasslands all up and down the Great Plains. This monster probably has a tentacle or three on your own acreage! Its name? Eastern redcedar!

We’ve got a story to share about the benefits – ecological and economic – of cover crops. What’s scary about that is simply that more farmers aren’t planting them!

Another non-scary story – but still colored orange and black! – is that the migratory monarch butterfly may not be as close to extinction as recently thought.