“It all starts with the soil,” Neil Diboll tells me. I met Diboll in 1990 at a prairie restorationists’ conference in Iowa. A year or two later, I visited Prairie Nursery, a nursery he opened in ...

Industrial agriculture is profitable, but recent trends show that profit may only last in the short run if soil health isn’t prioritized. Farmers in the central US in the 1930s learned the hard way.

Lee Tesdell stands in a prairie strip on his farm near Slater, Iowa. He grows alfalfa and Kernza, a perennial grain, raises sheep and cash rents to a neighbor who grows corn and soybeans. Over the ...

Illinois, nicknamed the Prairie State by early settlers, was once dominated by a tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Prairies are characterized by deep, fertile soils that are the result of thousands of ...