Contributed papers of a seminar.

Pp. 28.

Cover crops slow erosion, improve soil, smother weeds, enhance nutrient and moisture availability, help control many pests and bring a host of other benefits to your farm. At the same time, they can reduce costs, increase profits and even create new sources of income. You¿ll reap dividends on your cover crop investments for years, since their benefits accumulate over the long term. This book will help you find which ones are right for you. Captures farmer and other research results from the past ten years. The authors verified the info. from the 2nd ed., added new results and updated farmer profiles and research data, and added 2 chap. Includes maps and charts, detailed narratives about individual cover crop species, and chap. about aspects of cover cropping.

The Pacific Northwest is an important wheat production region. In 2015, the National Agricultural Statistics Service indicated that Washington, Idaho, and Oregon harvested more than 240 million bushels of wheat, worth an estimated $1.3 billion. The major areas of production in the inland Pacific Northwest include three major land resource areas with distinctive geologic features and soils as defined by the US Department of Agriculture: the Columbia Basin, the Columbia Plateau, and the Palouse and Nez Perce Prairies, all of which are within the Northwestern Wheat and Range Region. It also includes a small portion of dryland cropping in the North Rocky Mountains major land resource area, adjacent to the eastern edge of the Palouse and Nez Perce Prairies. In the dryland areas, which are the focus of this book, wheat is grown in rotation with crop fallow and much smaller acreages of other small grains, legumes, and alternative crops. In light of ongoing and new challenges being faced by farmers in the region it is an opportune time to synthesize research-based advances in knowledge to support farmer decision-making and improve the long-term productive capacity of farmland in the region. This book should be viewed as a resource that launches further inquiry rather than an end point.

While a good grasp of the many separate aspects of agriculture is important, it is equally essential for all those involved in agriculture to understand the functioning of the farming system as a whole and how it can be best managed. It is necessary to re-assess and understand rain-fed farming systems around the world and to find ways to improve the selection, design and operation of such systems for long term productivity, profitability and sustainability. The components of the system must operate together efficiently; yet many of the relationships and interactions are not clearly understood. Appreciation of these matters and how they are affected by external influences or inputs are important for decision making and for achieving desirable outcomes for the farm as a whole. This book analyses common rain-fed farming systems and defines the principles and practices important to their effective functioning and management.

Dismissed in early years as a wasteland, the rolling open country that covers the interior parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho is today one of the richest farmlands in the nation. This work is the story of its transformation. Meinig traces all of the aspects of its development by combining geographic description with historical narrative.