For Ontario farmer Blake Vince, taking a leap with strip-till practices helped him improve corn yields, preserve soil moisture and reduce expenditures on high-dollar fuel and fertilizer.

Cover crops are planted in the fall and stay on fields over the winter, covering the ground with foliage and holding soil in place with their roots.

Waterfowl hunters should keep in mind that some fields are considered baited and off limits to waterfowl hunting. Due to the wet and cold spring, some farmers were unable to plant a normal crop for harvest. Instead they worked with their insurance companies or the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Conservation Service office to plant a cover crop.

Saturated soils proved to be a challenge for Iowa farmers this past spring. Iowa had 726,350 prevented planting acres according to the Nov. 1, 2013 FSA prevented acres report. More than 619,000 intended corn acres and about 107,000 soybean intended acres were reported as not planted here in Iowa.

When Nick Viney partnered with Josh Trautman to form Badgerland Grain Farms LLC in 2006, they started with just 155 acres in south-central Wisconsin. But during the last 7 years, they've grown their Evansville, Wis.-based operation to more than 1,800 acres, an even split of strip-till corn and no-till soybeans, with about 180 acres of no-till wheat.

One of the first steps in Iowa's water-quality program, cost-share for cover crops, is a hit.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey announced today that cost share funds are available to help farmers install nutrient reduction practices. The initial practices that are prioritized for funding this fall are cover crops, no-till or strip till, or using a nitrification inhibitor when applying fertilizer.

Although Iowa does not have a deadline for reducing its nitrate and phosphate levels of surface water, researchers urged farmers Wednesday to do their parts sooner, rather than later.

Is there a fallow period in your crop rotation after wheat harvest? If so, you have an excellent opportunity to seed various legume cover crop species to supply nitrogen (N) to your following crop.

A report has just been released with detailed results from a farmer survey on cover crops. The survey was carried out in partnership between the USDA North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC).