Agriculture Commons^™

Optimizing Fertilizer And Compost Rates In Organic Reduced Till Agriculture, Nicholas W. Rowley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Interest in reduced tillage systems has been increasing and advanced by a need to practice agriculture in a sustainable way to limit environmental degradation. The focus on preserving soil integrity has become commonplace in all scales of agriculture. Recently trends in agricultural production have given rise to numerous small farms centered on local and sustainable farming. In turn, this has led to a growing desire to implement conservation tillage into these systems.

In 2015 and 2016 a collaborative effort between the University of Maine at the Maine Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station: Highmoor Farm and Cornell University at the Homer …

A Comparison Of Seed- And Seedling-Focused Ecologically Based Weed Management Strategies, Bryan Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many farmers target weeds at the seedling stage, aiming to control weeds with the minimum amount of labor necessary to avoid crop yield loss. Other farmers with a more long-term, seed-focused approach aim to prevent weeds from setting seed so that emergence will be decreased in subsequent crops. These strategies likely vary in short- and long-term effects on farm ecological and economic health. In 2014–2016, I compared these strategies in a test crop of onion. Unexpectedly, due to high yields, the more labor intensive, seed-focused strategy was the most profitable. Case-study interviews of farmers who have adopted each approach indicated …