By Carrie Muehling
BLOOMINGTON – About 250 farmers gathered in Bloomington Thursday learned more about biological agriculture at a program hosted by AgriEnergy Resources.
“To us, biological farming is farming with nature. It’s using the natural cycles that should that should function well in our soil from our bacteria and our fungi. Cycling the carbons, the phosphorous, the sulfur and the nitrogen particularly, when we use these types of products and we’ve got the soil alive we can use a lot less nitrogen and phosphorous, which is a significant input to the grower,” said Dean Craine, general manager with AgriEnergy Resources. “So it helps our pocketbooks as farmers, and it also helps the environment because we don’t need as much of that laying out on the field, potentially getting into our rivers and streams.”
The program featured a number of farmer presenters who are using techniques like growing cover crops, banding and split applying nutrients, raising non-GMO or alternative crops, using organic practices or diversifying with livestock. Caine said while many of these ideas were traditional on the farms of years ago, farmers using the practices today are looking ahead.
“Definitely not looking at going back. Some of the folks talk about it that way and I think that’s wrong. With today’s tools – the GPS, the soil sampling we’re doing, the technology – we can use a lot of the techniques that our grandfathers did, but with today’s knowledge and technology, it is light years more efficient,” said Craine. “There is so much more we can do with it today versus looking back 40 or 50 years. It’s new. It is old concepts, renewed.”
Craine said typically the company’s clients are about half conventional farmers and half organic farmers. AgriEnergy Resources is based in Princeton, Ill.
Carrie Muehling can be reached at carrie@wjbc.com.
