Chris Gaesser
County:
Adams
Bio:
Chris farms in southwest Iowa between Corning and Creston. He farms mostly corn, soybeans and a little bit of cereal rye.
Q&A
What are you doing to practice and promote soil and water quality?
On our farm, we've been no-till completely for almost 30 years now. We also have a lot of terraces and grass waterways. We do a lot of cover crops and we grow our own cover crops for seed. Now we're trying to adapt some other new things like variable-rate nitrogen.
What needs for soil health and water quality do you see in your region/county?
I think in general, one of the easier things that we could all implement would be a variable-rate nitrogen program. Split your applications. There's less risk of losing it if we're applying some in season. There are some logistical things, mostly more for applicators for that to be plausible, but I think it would be easy to implement and a lot of people could do it.
What could be done with more public funding for soil and water quality?
If we could get some more application companies and people doing some custom work to pick up the slack for the busy seasons and to help get those kind of things done in a more timely manner so more people can do them, that would be great.
