Let’s Collect Soil Health Tips!
The NPRC’s Soil Task Force decided at a recent meeting to collect quick tips for improving soil health. We can collect these great bits of advice here on this site. Our plan then is to spread this information every way we can to inspire farmers, ranchers, gardeners and others to use these easily adopted techniques to improve their soil.
Here’s the process. Go to the submit your quick tip page and fill it out with your first tip. The system will create a user account for you and send you an email to reset your password so that you can be logged in when you submit additional tips. If you are logged in for future submissions, it will save you some data entry and will ensure you don’t end up with extra user accounts.
Once we have some Quick Tips to display, we’ll show them here! Until then, enjoy some photos from our NPRC friend, Jackson Newman. Jack is an amazing photographer. He always told me that photos needed to tell a story and as I looked through his pictures to upload to this site, I understood some of his stories. I’ll bet you can see them too – of course they are soil and plant related stories.
I choose the first two, of course, for Tony.
Snow! How do we keep it?
A county road in rural Dawson county Montana showing a skiff of snow snowing on bare, overgrazed spots and healthy vegetation on a small paddock that had been rested for years.
Generations of water management. A homesteaders’ 28.5 foot hand dug, hand rocked well. Once had a windmill for power, but the windmill head flew off in a big wind. Now water if pumped for livestock by a solar pump which has been much more reliable.
A mare and her young filly enjoying the grass growing where the sagebrush held the winter snow.
Another view of the grass in a usually overgrazed pasture after a winter of good snow and a spring of exceptional rain.
Eastern Montana native pastures really come back, even after overgrazing, when it rains.
Drone view of how grass thrives closer to sage brush. Of course in addition to the sage holding snow, the horses graze less the closer to the sagebrush.
The sharp line between brown and green is not a fence line, it is just a change in soil and a low spot that holds water.
Nothing is prettier than eastern Montana when it rains.