Join us as we discuss why environmental compliance matters and learn how it works at NRCS including introduction to laws and legal basics, Environmental Evaluation (EE) and CPA-52, programmatic NEPA documents, categorical exclusions (CEs), where to find them all, and who to ask for help. Participants will receive an introduction to NEPA and its relationship to the NRCS Environmental Evaluation (EE). You will learn how the NRCS environmental compliance system operates with the following objectives in mind:

Join to explore linkages between soil, environmental, and human health. How does soil influence human health? This presentation will explore linkages between soil and human health through the framework of sustainable food systems. Evidence from the scientific literature will be provided of the influence of farm management on food composition and health outcomes. Highlighting efforts of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, the presentation will conclude with challenges and opportunities for evaluating linkages between soil and human health

Join this webinar to learn about innovative technologies that can be used in organic production systems. This webinar will explore new and developing technologies that can be used in organic systems to improve efficiency, yields, and conservation of natural resources. Robotics and imaging methods to detect disease, breeding well-adapted crop varieties, and laser weeding machinery will be highlighted.

Audrey Lomax, MNL, presents on ecological restoration projects. Audrey highlights specific case studies and goes in depth on the use of goats in native restorations.

This is a collection of trainings, video replays, and information pertaining to the engineering skills hydrology and hydraulics. Hydrology in this training series primarily includes topics pertaining to watershed delineation and resulting water flows needed to design various engineering practices. Hydraulics in this training series includes topics like conveyance and flood routing of water through pipes and channels, also relevant to various engineering practices.

Scoop up some soil in your hands and consider there are more organisms in that handful of soil than humans who have ever lived. Soil is a living entity in its own right, a community of micro- and macro-organisms that interact with the earth’s mineral resources to create this complex entity that undergirds all life on the planet. The 54th Nobel Conference, Living Soil: A Universe Underfoot, invited participants to consider the vast diversity and complexity of soil, and to ponder the challenges we face in protecting this most fundamental resource.

The Soil Health Institute and Cargill conducted this project to provide farmers with the economics information they need when deciding whether to adopt soil health practices and systems. The 10 farmers interviewed in Minnesota grew crops on an average of 1930 acres, using no-till on 54% and cover crops on 48% of those acres. Fifty percent of the farmers interviewed reported increased yield from using a soil health management system, and none reported a yield decline.

The goal of this training is to become familiar with terms and procedures, recognize features of different equipment, and make you more comfortable with surveying concepts. When you can get hands on experience, this training should allow you to understand procedures for completing a survey more quickly. This session covers general surveying concepts, what styles of surveying are used for various practices, the equipment commonly used in Minnesota’s field offices, and the principles of recording notes to document a survey.

This webinar will discuss the fundamentals of composting and how preprocessing of carcasses combined with forced aeration of the piles optimizes the entire mortality composting process and how this process has evolved over two decades with NRCS oversight and support into a simple state-of-the-art method of mortality management.

The webinar will provide viewers with an understanding of the principles of successful composting of animal mortality in routine and emergency situations.  Mortality composting is a known strategy of the agricultural waste management system.  The principles of proper mortality composting will be discussed.  Discussions will also include the composting process, trouble shooting techniques, what is considered compost, how properly composting animal mortality impacts bio-security.