Landon and Anne Plagge show how soil-first farming, community leadership and a willingness to innovate can expand conservation efforts far beyond their own acres.

A soil health discovery that the Cotter family made decades ago set them on the path to becoming Minnesota’s 2025 Leopold Conservation Award recipient.

Michael Thompson walks the same Kansas fields his great-great-grandfather broke in 1888, but his vision reaches far beyond tradition.

Let’s enter a very strange world. Dark, silent, microscopic, underground. The soil – on which our crops and forages depend – is a veritable Amazon jungle teeming with thousands of species of animals and plants and something that’s not quite either: fungi.

Over time with many common farming practices, we start to lose some of those minerals to insolubility, erosion or crop exportation. As with sentences, a soil's integrity can deteriorate as these minerals are depleted, leading to reduced plant health, more pest pressure and overall harvest productivity decline.

Soil aggregate stability is critical to the soil’s ability to infiltrate and hold water.

Some 400 attendees from across North America gathered in Loveland, Colorado, to hear the latest in beef cattle research from some of the industry’s leading experts from government, academia and industry.

Fall soil assessments and sampling can provide insights into soil health so growers can work with an expert to devise a plan that revitalizes the soil microbiome.