By Dan Miller
Progressive Farmer Senior Editor
Contour-strip cropping is a way to hold soil onto the side of a hill -- much of it, anyway. Blending contoured rows of corn or soybeans with strips of alfalfa, for example, slows storm water as it runs around and out from the row crops into the more solid obstruction the alfalfa provides.
The result: less water movement and less soil moving with it.
Researchers at Iowa State University are working with a version of strip cropping in which they replace the alfalfa strips with perennial mixes of native plants in soybean fields. ...
