Recent content by luz.ballesteros

Like a good gen zier 😁 I spend too much time on social media, which means I get flooded with ads from "green" companies but this one caught my attention: Mill.com- So from my understanding you pay a membership, which gets you a cool bin and then you ship your processed scraps back and they make...

I been thinking a lot about this and remembering how my high school and college cafeteria had an array of items like frozen pizza, cookies, and tex-mex style burritos. I never ate there, as a first-generation immigrant it was drilled in my head eating that food would not only make me fat but...

Day 2 was great! Here is one takeaway question: What is one change you can make to improve your biological soil fertility, whether on your farm or in your daily activities? I don't have a farm or a garden for that matter :( so..... This might be controversial but.... lately I have been...

The first session was great & I loved this question. "What is one change you can make to improve your carbon footprint, whether on your farm or in your daily activities?" I unfortunately don't have a farm :( but one thing I try to do is always purchasing local animal products from regenerative...

Hi all, My name is Luz Ballesteros, and I am a Sustainable Ag Specialist with NCAT in our Southwest Region office in San Antonio. For the past 4 years I been working with soil laboratory analysis of carbon🧪🌻 as part of my graduate degree. I have a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science with...

As I was browsing the internet💻 I came across Dry Farming Resources. The basic idea being utilizing water stored throughout the soil profile in partnership with other practices to utilize low to no water additions. Thoughts?

Fiction category: It's so dry and hot here the corn 🌽 is turning into pop-corn 🍿!!!

Oh wow! here in South Texas we also have pigweed growing everywhere as weeds. Soil is mostly sandy clay loam and the pH is also between 8 to 9. My dog loves to eat the pigweed and I recently tried it as a warm salad with some beat tops, it's pretty good! @Darron Gaus how do you pop amaranth...

Hi Justin! Thank you for sharing that video. I think Dr. Haney does a great job at explaining how complex and variable soil testing can be and the difference between Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) and Soil Organic Matter (SOM). Which brings me to what I call " The SOM crash". In recent work I...

Story Time! Last week a random chicken🐔 (well... we think it's a chicken) started living in my in-laws front tree and she is very happy and living her best life up there. I shared this with my colleagues from the University of Texas Rio Grandy Valley and they mentioned tree range chickens. I...

Hi Linda! Thanks for sharing. I can totally relate with this article since I was vegetarian for almost six years mostly for environmental reasons. Now I'm a happy flexitarian, for a variety of reasons including health and culture. I think a good podcast episode that highlights some of the...

I am not a rancher or have been but I came across this article: Days of intense heat have killed thousands of cattle in Kansas , and couldn't help but think about ranching with temperature increasing exponentially. What are some proactive methods ranchers can implement to become more resilient...