Oats

Cattle and sheep graze on permanent pasture, cover crops and crop residue on Pasture Grazed Regenerative Farm in northern Illinois.

The goal of the Illinois Grazing Lands Coalition is to help support livestock producers in building profitable, sustainable grazing operations.

Examples of typical and not-so-common cover crops used in corn and soybean rotations were featured in a recent plot tour on the Farm Progress Show grounds.

An Illinois State University organics class toured a farm and milling facility to see up close the field-to-bag process.

After years of research and planning, Janie’s Mill began milling certified organic grain grown on Harold Wilken’s farm in 2017.

Kyle Schminke deep tills all his farm ground. However, it is not done with a tractor and tillage equipment.

Beef production spans generations in the Hanson and Kuipers family in Iroquois County where they operate a forage-based program utilizing a paddock grazing system along with growing corn, soybeans and wheat.

Berkeley Boehne and his brother, Vaughn, raise corn, soybeans and wheat on their DeKalb County farm, where they also feed pigs and operate a custom manure application business.

The winner of the Star in Agricultural Placement award will be announced during the Wednesday afternoon session of the Illinois FFA State Convention starting at 2 p.m.

Nutrition as well as a clean, comfortable environment impact the average daily gain of dairy calves.

The race to keep up with grass growth is about to start here. The sheep and cattle are now content with the rye and volunteer wheat, saving on the hay supply.

Extensive multiyear, in-field trials found a key to unlocking the challenge of meeting the final goal of the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy.

Snowfall and rain showers during the past month have improved the soil moisture conditions for Rahn family farm in northern Illinois.

Three farmers with decades of experience utilizing soil conservation practices on their farms detailed their efforts in a “Toolshed Talk.”

Agricultural producers who have not yet enrolled in the Agriculture Risk Coverage or Price Loss Coverage programs for the 2024 crop year have until March 15 to revise elections and sign contracts.

Winter wheat and oat production increased year over year with several counties surpassing triple-digit average yields.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that agricultural producers can now enroll in the Farm Service Agency’s Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs for the 2024 crop year.

‘Tis the season to give, so I gave the rams to the ewes. Now everybody’s happy. I should start lambing about mid-May. Hopefully we will have a lot of green vegetation to graze.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service is gathering information about crop production practices from producers across Illinois, as part of the 2023 Agricultural Resource Management Survey.

Summer is flying by, as usual. With so many things going on this time of year it seems to pass too quickly and now school starts.

Explore a century of farming at the 42nd annual Mill Road Thresherman Show, a working tractor show scheduled Aug. 10-13 at the Effingham County Fairgrounds in Altamont.

The rain in the past few days has really helped all plants and crops here in northern Illinois. June was very dry. Hopefully, the July rains will be enough to get the crops growing again.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. The beautiful weather the second week in April saw a lot of field activity, not only planting and working ground for planting, but harvesting all the debris from the three storms preceding.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. It was a lot warmer March 1 getting the clover frost seeded this year, but that weather has disappeared lately.

Classifying Holstein cows gives dairymen an unbiased evaluation of the phenotype of their cows. “That information is used in two ways,” said Maureen DeBruin, classifier for Holstein Association USA.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. We will be sending the last of our pastured hogs to the locker, so one less winter chore. We take orders in the spring from our regular customers and add a few more for new customers and buy our Berkshires from Ralph by East Peoria.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. I keep looking at the 10-day weather forecast for a return of fall, but so far it looks more like winter to me. Harvest is now over for us and thanks to my neighbor’s drill we have 75 acres of wheat that’s looking good.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow! Our harvesting crew, Ken and Richard, are yet to arrive. Since I planted one 12-acre pasture to beans two weeks after the main crop was planted, I did not want them to have to make the long detour around the as-yet-blocked I-80 overpass twice.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. As I write this, we’ve had about 3 inches of rain and the high temp today and tomorrow is 60 degrees. It’s a kind of a preview for upcoming attractions. With 80-degree temps yet ahead, there’s still some summer left, but harvest is soon here.

My flock is eating the 36-day-old wheat stubble weeds, as in forbs, and red clover right now and should have them eaten to the ground in eight days. I ordered a 10-species forage cover crop mix that I’ll plant into the eaten-down wheat stubble after they get it all eaten.

After hearing about some of the extreme rain events in Illinois and elsewhere the past few weeks, I am very grateful to have been spared those deluges. Here at home the pastures and row crops are faring well so far. And with the cooler temps the animals and I are thankful.

Lincoln Slagel enjoys doing research and when his college roommate introduced him to craft beer, he looked deeper into it.

Multiple events have been scheduled for the University of Illinois’ Agronomy Days. The Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and U of I Extension will host a series of events all season long.

A team of Illinois State University researchers are evaluating the impact of cover crops on carbon sequestration and organic matter.

With the last five or so days of July-type weather most all the crops got planted in a hurry and much has emerged looking great. Here, though, our organic corn and soybean seed is still in the bag.

Building soil organic matter is important to farmers for several reasons, including sequestering carbon and increasing crop yields.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. Well, still no oats in and not a lot of growth in the pastures. Not even the rye is tall enough to start grazing yet. I’m predicting a late spring.

The Iffts planted their first cover crop 10 years ago on 50 acres, continued to increase acres year-over-year and have seen the benefits of this practice.

March has been teasing us with 70-degree temps followed by snow and single digits. Winter has a hard time letting go, but the forecast looks favorable for spring’s arrival. The recent snow cover did allow for finishing my frost seeding.

No single grazing system will work for all cow-calf operations. “I work with a lot of producers and we do a lot of different things,” said Mary Drewnoski, beef systems specialist and animal science associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is in the process of issuing $1.8 billion in payments to agricultural producers who enrolled in the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs for the 2020 crop year.

The way Paul Taylor looks at it, using cover crops is a lot like walking.

Steve Leesman’s move into organic crop production began several years ago as an answer to consumer demand and he has continued this diverse farming operation in Logan County, Illinois.

Murphy’s Law is defined as, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” When it comes to markets — and, in particular, the commodity markets — prices that rise to unusually high levels or decline to humbly low levels happen because at some point “something went wrong” with supply or demand, or both. As a result, prices and values moved higher or lower accordingly.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. For all those in the non-farm public, many casual conversations start with sports, but many of us in the farming community will usually start with a rain update, at least during the growing season, and then it turns to snow and cold topics.

A new constructed wetland was showcased during the recent Vermilion Headwaters Watershed field tour in Livingston County. The constructed wetland was installed in August 2018 on Fulton Farms farmland and is designed to capture and remove nutrients from tile drainage.

A recent, number-laden bulletin posted on the University of Illinois website farmdoc daily caught my attention for two reasons. First, its data, drawn mostly from several U.S. Census of Agriculture, paints a troubling picture of U.S. agriculture today.

A former official at a large grain warehouse Iowa was sentenced Feb. 2 to three months in prison for his role in a scheme to blend lower value oats into soybeans and then sell the mixture as soybeans to unsuspecting buyers.

Conservation practices span generations in the Swartz family, and they continue to look toward sustainably improving their farm.