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Farmer Focus: Rain and series of breakdowns add to challenges

Farmers Weekly

We got the cover crops drilled, beans, spring oats and barley cut, potatoes topped and cultivation done in the Indian summer. It took more than a fortnight to bale the oat straw, […] The post Farmer Focus: Rain and series of breakdowns add to challenges appeared first on Farmers Weekly September was a tester at Brickyard Farm.

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Mushrooms for Wildfire Resilience

Caff

Cheetah covered the basics of mycology (the study of fungi), mushroom cultivation techniques , and the pollutants that can be released when structures burn. Finally, everyone gathered around a long table covered in sterilized straw and learned how to inoculate different substrates with fungi spawn.

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Regenerative Gardening, No-Till Winter Cover Crop Strategies

UnderstandingAg

This is generally accomplished by mechanically removing plants by flail mowing, tillage, cultivation equipment, or by manual labor. Root crops and tuber beds are generally clean and free of residue after harvest, which make them an easy location to direct seed with any seeder, or broadcast seed, followed by applying a straw mulch.

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Are Next-Gen Synthetic Fibers the Future of Sustainable Textiles?

Modern Farmer

As the companies see it, the process is more efficient than growing fibers naturally; traditional silk, for example, is biodegradable and long-lasting, but cultivation can use large amounts of water and pesticides. Those fibers can be plant-derived, mycelium, cultivated animal cells, microbe-derived, recycled materials and blends.

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More things in Heaven and Earth: Mycorrhizal fungi, ploughing, no-till and glyphosate

Sustainable Food Trust

This reached its most extreme level in the 1970s, when tens of thousands of acres of straw were burned in the fields every summer in the UK, sometimes setting fire to hedgerows as well. How significant those increases are compared with, for example, the higher levels of root colonisation on organic farms (see below), is not clear.

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Some Farmers Are Skipping Tomatoes and Eggplants. Their Reasons May Surprise You.

Civil Eats

The Burgers are among a modest cohort of small-time growers who almost exclusively cultivate cool-weather and storage crops that they sell in the wintertime. The final straw for Hachmyer was losing half of her crops in 2021 to drought. I couldn’t keep martyring myself,” she says.

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Can Mushrooms Help Extinguish Toxic Waste?

Modern Farmer

Her Belgian start-up cultivates mycelium—the thread-like root structure of fungus—using the plastic- and toxin-laden stubs as fodder. A designer by training, Speyer stumbled on fungi while searching for a sustainable and easy-to-cultivate material. Fungi are nature’s recyclers,” says PuriFungi’s Audrey Speyer.