To the untrained eye, Jeremy Gustafson’s 1,600-acre farm looks like all the others spread out across Iowa. Gazing at his conventional corn and soybean fields during a visit in June, I was hard-pressed to say where his neighbor’s tightly planted row crops ended and Gustafson’s began.

But what distinguished this vast farm in Boone, Iowa, was a thin, 16-acre strip of oats Gustafson had planted in a loop around the barn. At the time, the chest-high oats were at the “milk stage.” When Gustafson squeezed the grains embedded in the feathery grass between his thumb and forefinger, they released a tiny dollop of white liquid, a sign that they would be ready to harvest in about a month. Read more on Yale Environment 360