A group of four authors, Robert Willmott, Jennifer Valdez-Herrera, Jeff Mitchell, and Anil Shrestha, have published the article, Potential of Cover Crop Use and Termination with a Roller-Crimper in a
Strip-Till Silage Maize (Zea mays L.) Production System in the Central Valley of California, in the open-access journal, Agronomy, (Agronomy 2025, Volume 15, Issue 1, 132.  A pdf copy is available here.  This work was conducted by Robert Willmott as his MS thesis on the Fresno State campus and describes a multi-year study of using strip-tillage corn planting into rolled cover crops.  

July 5, 2024

CASI's Jeff Mitchell was a "three-peater" July 5th on Tom Willey's "Down on the farm" radio program on KFCF's 88.1 FM station on July 5, 2024. He shared information from the recently published article, No-tillage, surface residue retention, and cover crops improved San Joaquin Valley soil health in the long term, that was published in the May 2024 issue of California Agriculture.  Willey was a co-author on the work and he talked with Mitchell about how the work came about, what its study goals were, how it was conducted, and what its findings were.  Willey's program airs every first Friday of the month and has a loyal following that includes a great diversity of folks who greatly enjoy his 'on the front porch' conversations with his guests.  A video of the radio interview is available at the You Tube link 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXoyBLlImUo

CASI's Mitchell on MyAgLife podcast June 28, 2024

 July 1, 2024

Jeff Mitchell, CASI member and Professor and Cropping Systems Cooperative Extension Specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, appeared in a 39-minute podcast with host Taylor Chalstrom on June 28, 2024 to talk about conservation agriculture in general and the recently-published article in California Agriculture on the 20-year study  in Five Points, CA.  The podcast is available at

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/JuQ7qakGSKb

You may need the podcast platform, Spotify, to listen to it. 

In an effort to extend information on CASI's twenty-year conservation agriculture study that has been conducted at the University field station in Five Points, CA and that has been recently published in the journal, California Agriculture, Jeff Mitchell provided three radio interviews on the morning Ag Report that Don York produces for KMJ580 AM each morning out of Fresno.  The segments aired on May 23rd and on June 4^th and 6th, 2024 and are available below.  Mitchell shared findings of the long-term “NRI Project” that since 1998 has examined four production systems – standard tillage without cover crop, standard tillage with cover crop, no-till without cover crop, and no-till with cover crop. 

The NRI Project started as an effort to determine the potential of reduced disturbance tillage in terms of generating or producing less dust and in the early 2000s found that dust can be significantly reduced by as much as 80% with a variety of reduced tillage practices relative to standard tillage techniques that have been widely used in annual crop fields throughout the San Joaquin Valley since the early 1930s.   The recent findings from the unique long-term study have shown that several soil health indicators including aggregation, water infiltration, biodiversity, and surface carbon were improved through the long-term use of cover crops with reduced disturbance tillage. 

In the interviews, Mitchell points out that the systems that were evaluated and developed in the NRI Project were not at all easy to implement and required considerable trial-and-error effort to achieve.  Yields, for instance, of cotton in the early years under the high residue, no-till cover crop system lagged behind the standard tillage, however once effective planting techniques were learned to establish the cotton crop. There were no yield differences between the two tillage systems for the next several years. 

The results of this study that included 18 coauthors can be seen at  https://doi.org/10.3733/001c.94714