For those of you who have followed me a while, if you’ve found value in the agricultural science content I share, or not, I’d appreciate your input via a quick 5-question survey. It'll help me assess whether my time spent posting is making an impact. wsu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

For those of you who have followed me a while, if you’ve found value in the agricultural science content I share, or not, I’d appreciate your input via a quick 5-question survey. It'll help me assess whether my time spent posting is making an impact. wsu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Bluesky VS X. Agriculture is not on Bluesky.

"Fertile soil"’ is mostly a myth. Crops need water, light, and nutrients—these can be managed even on sandy soils with just 0.5% SOM and irrigation. What’s often called ‘fertile’ is just mining old nutrient stores post-conversion. Management matters more.

Whatever your research question, I can assure you it is *NOT* answered by a combination of linear mixed models, random forest, and structural equation models.

The idea that we can precisely fine-tune our soils is wrong. But this has not stopped a swarm of salesmen from swooping upon budding soil micromanagers, hawking their bio-products. csanr.wsu.edu/micromanagin...

How many times do I have to tell you that we are not going to solve any food crises by growing bougie lettuce indoors.

Distressed to see I guess I'm out of a job. AI has figured out everything there is to know about maize domestication. (Found this online when looking for images for a talk)

This is the left doing its best RFK Jr. imitation, ignoring the preponderance of the evidence on a substance that they really really really want to hate. Glyphosate's combination of safety & effectiveness makes it the best broad-spectrum herbicide we've ever had.

Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea

🌱 Here’s one of the tropical pumpkin hybrids I bred last year. It was easy to grow, productive and very early. I harvested this one just 78 days after transplanting. It’s also delicious – incredibly sweet and nice balance of floral and savory notes.

The irony is, the advocates pushing "justice" in food systems are usually pushing low-yield organic/regenerative approaches that are nice for Chez Panisse but make food more expensive for the poor and more damaging to the planet.

If something is bad, don’t make it sound even worse If something is good, don’t make it sound like the One Weird Trick that can fix everything If something sounds like it could be right, but you know it’s wrong, don’t write or reshare it Double check stuff before amplifying We are the algorithm

"There are probably few sciences that are so closely identified with a specific ideology as is the science of ecology." True. Yet Weiner goes on to argue that both the science and the ideology of ecology are needed, a dangerous proposal... jacobweiner.dk/download/2me...

If this works, it's a new day for beekeepers.

Cover crop mixture research, 5 states, 17 site-years, concludes that CC mixture diversity and seeding rate did not consistently improve CC performance, measured soil parameters, or cash crop yields. But they cost more. Open access. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10...

Dramatically? 🤔 Fertilizers yes, fungi not so much. SPUN spin.

Fertilizer DOES NOT burn up soil organic matter. Long-term study finds "NP fertilization substantially augments both the quantity and stability of soil organic carbon stocks." scienmag.com/long-term-n...

AI is right up there with biofertilizer as a deceptive marketing term. AI is just A. Biofertilizer is just bio.

Ecologists, agroecologists, and regenerative agriculture advocate for biodiversity as a solution to many agricultural challenges. However, the research supporting this approach is often not directly applicable to crop production. Read on to learn why... csanr.wsu.edu/why-ecologic...

How dare they focus on yield to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity. Productivity drivel! 🙂

Still shocked that a senior official would endorse biodynamic farming. I don’t know a single serious ag or environmental expert who supports it. Some back organic or regenerative—I disagree with them, but at least there’s debate. But biodynamic? It's based on mysticism, not science. t.co/4ZNJ5gv4rq

New paper published this week! "Herbicides Have Minimal and Variable Effects on the Structure and Function of Bacterial Communities in Agricultural Soils" enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cover crops do important things, including building soil organic matter. But the potential contribution to carbon sequestration is negligible.

Move over mycorrhizal fungi. "These results provide the first lab-based evidence that common non-mycorrhizal networks can occur and suggest that fungal networks among plants may extend beyond mycorrhizal fungi." www.nature.com/articles/s42...

We don't compare arid vs. humid soils and then call the arid soils "degraded" because they have less soil organic matter. They have less SOM because they have less water and so less C inputs. Same with cropped soils, due to harvest. This is unavoidable. csanr.wsu.edu/soil-organic...

Using Conservation Reserve Program soil as a benchmark to evaluate soil health gaps misses a big point: CRP is not harvested, and so will nearly always have better soil health than harvested cropland. 🍎 vs 🍊 www.mdpi.com/2571-8789/9/... More here: csanr.wsu.edu/soil-organic...

Vertical farms sound perfect—no pests, no pesticides, no land needed. But here’s the truth: they don’t scale. They use too much energy and can’t grow the crops we actually rely on. Lettuce isn’t the problem. Our food system is. \#VerticalFarming #FoodMyths #RealTalkOnFarming

Paper now out in Science Advances — “Soil carbon formation is promoted by saturation deficit and existing mineral-associated carbon, not by microbial carbon-use efficiency” with Noah Sokol science.org/doi/epdf/10....

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” ― Thomas Sowell He didn't know it, but he was writing about agriculture.

Agroecology (some versions), organic, and regenerative agriculture have taken the old Enlightenment idea that humans can be perfected and applied it to agriculture. History has taught us that this is wishful thinking for humans. So too for crop production.

Mike's book is coming out in July - this is an excerpt. It's a great, solutions-oriented book, and this piece sets the stage for it. The food problem is a LAND problem. Things like food miles and packaging are a blip. It's the land.

Cash crops, along with their well-managed residues, can match or even surpass the benefits of traditional cover crops. They effectively control erosion, scavenge nutrients, disrupt pest cycles, and enhance soil health. How? Biomass production. My latest: csanr.wsu.edu/cash-crops-a...

Cash crops, along with their well-managed residues, can match or even surpass the benefits of traditional cover crops. They effectively control erosion, scavenge nutrients, disrupt pest cycles, and enhance soil health. How do they do this? Biomass production. My latest: csanr.wsu.edu/cash-crops-...

Common Ground uses anecdotes, emotion, and slick editing to promote an organic "NO CHEMICALS" version of regenerative ag. In doing so, it ignores conventional no-till, vilifies science, and blames pesticides for everything from Crohn’s to ALS. My review… csanr.wsu.edu/common-groun...

Organic ideology takes away rational evaluation of synthetic inputs; they are all bad. And so you get the "herbicides devastate soil life" or similar simplistic mantras. And again, organic is only regenerative with it's high rates of organic amendments. civileats.com/2025/05/08/w...

Solar panels reduce grassland production. From 17 solar parks across the Netherlands. Open access. Gap=between panels, Below=under panels nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A LOT of people do not want to hear it but in the United States at least, food has never been safer to eat, not to mention tastier

This @foeus.bsky.social report on regenerative greenwashing is right: A lot of no-till farms use a lot of pesticides. But so what? The goal shouldn't be "more natural," "less tillage" or "fewer chemicals." It should be more food with less land and less impact. Whatever works. foe.org/resources/re...

Will compost tea or a microbial ferment, EM-1, speed decomposition of cover crop residues? Not according to this field research from California. "Application of microbial inoculants onto surface residues had no effect on decomposition rate." www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

🙄 when gardening gurus recommend applying a 4" layer of compost to vegetable garden beds. From my calculations, that's 260-320 tons/acre, way more than any farmer would apply. It's also over 2000 lb of nitrogen per acre. And then apply 1" annually after this, so another 500 lb of N...😬

Want rhizosheath formation in your cover crop? Plant cereal rye. This field trial found cereal rye had by far the most rhizosheath mass "regardless of time, diversity, or species combination" compared to fava bean and mustard. link.springer.com/article/10....

Spring, summer, or fall; 5- or 6-species and 14-species; "mixtures were never more weed suppressive than the most weed-suppressive cover crop grown as a monoculture, and the more diverse mixture never outperformed the less diverse mixture." www.cambridge.org/core/journa...

The average American diet requires about 2 acres of land per person per year (and that’s food grown and raised by people who are experts at growing and raising food)

CSANR is ready to help you #DigIntoCompost! Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting work with compost as a solution to common problems, & how we can improve compost through continued research. Ready to dig in? csanr.wsu.edu/dig-into-com... @wsucahnrs.bsky.social @wsuextension.bsky.social

Ugh. I really wish journalists and writers would stop rehashing the exact same ideas, supported by little data, from the exact same two or three people on this topic. There is already so much to love and admire about plants! Write about their wacky pollen tubes or cool stem cells! 🧪 #plantscience

Cover crop research from Montana. Pea monoculture and full functional mix gave similar results, adding to the evidence we found in our systematic review: ✔️Best monoculture and best mixtures often give similar benefits. Review: doi.org/10.1002/agj... acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10...

"sampling biological soil health indicators in the spring resulted in more positive, significant treatment effects compared to sampling in the autumn, where we found no effect. 🤔 Note to self: always sample cover cropped fields in the spring. acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10...

1/ Exploring rhizophagy & quorum sensing—hyped in regenerative ag as natural fixes for crops. Rhizophagy: plants "eat" microbes for nutrients. Quorum sensing: bacteria coordinate via chemicals. Fascinating, but do they work in farming? csanr.wsu.edu/rhizophagy-a...

"Until this study, honey bees were the only livestock that could not be maintained on a man-made feed" Watch for a new niche "Flower-fed only" honey marketing. news.cahnrs.wsu.edu/article/new...