AM Minnesota Talking Conservation

It was a very enjoyable AM Minnesota Friday as we were talking about Strip Tilling and conservation. One of my guests was Dave Legvold from just North of Faribault. Dave is a retired educator and still is a farmer. Dave has been using the Soil Warrior which was developed and manufactured right here in Faribault. Recently Dave received a National Strip Tilling award at the National Strip Till Conferance in Peoria Illinois.

For Friday's AM Minnesota Program Dave brought along Joey Castaneda who is a Geology major at Carlton College and is doing research on Dave's farm. Joey is measuring nitrate nitrogen in the tile lines before and then after it goes into a saturated buffer. In "plain" English the main tile line water is discharged into a low area with a lot of vegetation. Then the tile water is filtered before it enters the creek. So far Joey has found that the nitrate nitrogen levels have been very low because of strip and no tilling practices on Dave's farm. Then the saturated buffer removed about two thirds of the nitrate nitrogen that was in the tile water!