Mackane Vogel here with this week’s Cover Crop Connection. Well the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast is officially back for the start of 2025 and we are going to have lots of great interview guests on the show in the coming weeks. But to start off the year strong, here’s a clip from the first episode of the new year with Olivia Caillouet. She’s the soil health program manager at the University of Missouri’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture and she’s currently working on several cover crop related projects, including what’s known as the Women Landowners Leading Regeneration program.

“This project, Women Landowners Leading Regeneration, has really two components. The first being we are going to train women conservation professionals to implement these practices. Women caring for the land to help women landowners engage in conservation practices. About 25% of the US farmland is owned by women. A lot of it is rented, so we're focusing specifically on non operator women landowners who are renting out their land. And then that second component is going to be directly supporting our women landowners hosting trainings in Missouri, Kansas and Iowa to bring together women landowners to idea share, build networks and continue to empower them to implement conservation practices on their land …Cover crops — definitely a strong component of it and the exciting part about this project is we are getting to pull in those other synergistic practices no-till and reduced till riparian buffers and we are going to be offering resources to the conservation professionals as well as women landowners to find funding for those diverse conservation practices.”   

Olivia says the project is still waiting for final approval, but you can find any and all updates on the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture website, as well as an interest survey which is live right now. And be sure to head to Cover Crop Strategies to check out the full podcast episode and to hear lots more about what Olivia is working on.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.