Iowa?s rural landscape has seen an increased adoption of conservation practices.
Tim Recker, of Arlington, Iowa, first incorporated cover crops and no-till seven years ago. Recker discovered, ?As you get comfortable, you need to try new things.? He took to his own advice and decided to no-till acres going into seed corn production.
“One thing we haven’t been able to do is plant seed corn into no-till soybean stubble because there are a lot of things wrong with that inbred seed. This year we tried no-till (in) two fields, and they look great,” Recker said.
Recker also decided to restore an existing wetland structure, which accommodates water from surrounding crop acres.
“The idea is to develop wetlands where they’re needed; out them at the right place in the watershed. Because of increased funding, we’ve been able to target a Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP)-like wetland. We have eight acres of water, so about a one-percent conversion of the amount of farmland we have. The neat thing is all the water converges to this point,” Recker said.
Moving forward, Recker plans to add saturated buffers, to compliment his wetland structure.
