At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
BERNE, MINN. — On a hot afternoon in mid-July, Brian Bennerotte, who was raised on a farm in the hill country south of Minneapolis in the 1960s and 1970s, made a pilgrimage of sorts to County Road B in Dodge County in his home state. Running straight as a gun barrel east and west, the gravel and dirt road crosses what was once rolling prairie before being steadily converted into crop and livestock farms in …
In 1990, following intensive field trials, a respected agronomist at Iowa State University named Fred Blackmer formally introduced an inexpensive tool to accurately measure how much nitrogen farmers actually require to produce abundant harvests of corn, the most heavily fertilized crop. Driven by concerns about rising production costs and increasing water pollution, Blackmer’s “late spring nitrate test†was stunningly simple in concept. His test focused on one essential data point: the optimum amount of nitrogen …
