PCM has been awarded $5 million dollars by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS) Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). PCM farmers in 20 counties will be eligible for financial assistance when developing conservation plans through their local NRCS offices. PCM will use the award to continue to assist farmers in…
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Partners of PCM continue to show their appreciation. Field to Market acknowledged Clay Bess, Lead PCM Specialist, for his success in the PepsiCo cover crop cost share project, recognizing him as an Adviser of the Year. Clay was also named Partner of the Year with the S.T.A.R. program for his work to enroll PCM farmers…
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Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture provides a platform that allows PCM to analyze farmers on metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions, water quality, and energy use. PCM’s combination of these environmental metrics with enterprise analyses earned our team the Field to Market Collaboration of the Year Award for providing these valued assessments…
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Article Published by Farm Progress. June 15, 2020. Written by Austin Keating. Data from Precision Conservation Management helps farmers like Adam Brown determine return on investment for conservation practices before making the switch. Austin Keating – FarmProgress.com Adam Brown wasn’t sure about cutting back fertilizer on his family’s 1,000-acre farm in Decatur, Ill. Without local…
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By Gary Schnitkey, Dale Lattz & Laura Gentry Overall returns on Illinois grain farms are projected to be much lower in 2019 than recent years, resulting in more consumer about managing input costs. Fertilizer, seed, and pesticide costs represent a large portion of the total cost of producing corn, with fertilizer costs historically larger than…
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By Gary Schnitkey & Laura Gentry Strip-till is a relatively common tillage practice on farmland that will be planted to corn in east-central Illinois, accounting for about 14% of the acres planted to corn in Precision Conservation Management (PCM) from 2015 to 2018. Returns to strip-till have been roughly the same as other one-pass tillage…
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By Gary Schnitkey & Laura Gentry There is great diversity in number and type of tillage operations used to grow corn and soybean in east-central Illinois. As 2019 appears to be a low-income year, reducing tillage passes is one way to reduce costs. This may be more of an option in 2019 since fewer fall…
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By Gary Schnitkey & Laura Gentry Spring field operations will soon begin, and nitrogen applications on corn will commence. More nitrogen will be applied this spring than is typical because wet weather limited fall applications. University-recommended nitrogen application rates in Illinois are between 140 and 180 pounds of actual nitrogen per acre for corn-following-soybeans. For…
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Welcome to the Fall 2019 PCM newsletter! In keeping with the theme of the 2019 planting season, we’re running a little behind preparing it. But we have been BUSY! Today, we’ve enrolled almost 350 farmers from Illinois and Kentucky in the PCM program, representing more than 30,000 acres of commodity crops. PCM Specialists and staff…
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PCM Events & Updates A critical piece of PCM’s success is the one-on-one relationship between PCM cooperators and their Specialists. PCM Specialists have been busy delivering the Resource Analysis & Assessment Plans to our 117 cooperators in Illinois. The PCM team has been working hard all winter to have these reports ready to deliver before…
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