The Illinois Corn Growers Precision Conservation Management team has been working with participating farmers in the 5 Year Transition program to complete new enrollments and prepare current participants for adapting to soil health systems. Conservation Specialists work with individual farmers to walk through the new management practices with them and help them compare against their conventional practices. The eight current specialists are assisted by project lead Jim Isermann and receive support from the agronomy team at the Illinois Soybean Association, directed by Abigail Peterson. PCM Director Greg Goodwin and Illinois Corn Growers Association Director of Water Quality Laura Gentry oversee the PCM program and integration of the 5YT program with PCM.
Overall, the program helps farmers understand what is occurring in terms of gains in soil health over a five-year period. The specialists facilitate this learning through conducing soil health assessments, and field checks including soil sampling which provides a dataset that is communicated back to the farmers to understand how practices are affecting their soils and cash crop. The program also conducts grower meetings as well to facilitate peer-to-peer learning opportunities and demonstrations to help farmers see visually what is occurring from focusing on soil health. This program currently has about 69 producers enrolled, and is seeking an additional 11 to reach full enrollment. Over the next one to two years, data from this program will be used to demonstrate changes as a result of adopting soil health practices in anonymous aggregated data summaries.
For more information, see precisionconservation.org.
