The Illinois Corn Growers Precision Conservation Management team, PCM, has been working with participating farmers in the 5-Year Soil Health Transition, 5YT, program to complete new enrollments and prepare current participants for adapting to soil health management systems. Conservation Specialists work with individual farmers to review new management practices, compare them with conventional practices, and evaluate the financial and logistical considerations of implementing them.
Eight PCM specialists are assisted by project lead Jim Isermann. 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 to facilitate peer-to-peer learning opportunities and demonstrations to help farmers visualize what is occurring by focusing on soil health. This program currently has about 61 producers enrolled. 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.
