Teaching and preaching the importance of advancing soil health practices have become Anthony Bly’s career and livelihood.

“There’s a right and wrong way to take care of our natural resources and our well-being,” said Bly, a soil field specialist at South Dakota State University Extension. “I’m not a tree-hugger, but I just see the importance. It should be easy to see. For me it is, and we just have to keep doing things like that.”

Like many farmers, Bly was raised to plow the soil, use a rotary hoe and cultivate a cornfield. “And those were all the wrong things, but it’s what our ancestry had to do,” he said.

Bly’s family farm near Garretson, S.D., has been implementing no-till practices since 1992, so he sees firsthand the results of what he researches and teaches in his SDSU role.

Bly’s passion for promoting soil health earned him the Friend of Soil Health Award, presented by the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition. Bly said he was surprised and humbled to receive the award, given to him during the organization’s recent Soil Health Conference in Aberdeen.

Previous honorees were Lon Tonneson, 2021; Jay Fuhrer, 2020; Ruth and Dwayne Beck, 2019; and Jeff Hemenway, 2018.

“That’s quite a class of people,” he said. “Dwayne [Beck] is a huge mentor. I was never his graduate student, but I was in the same department. He’s a very respected scientist and still is. … He has a concern for humanity and other people, and he makes it known. He’s really the pinnacle, and if I could even get close to being in that group, that’s great.”

Bly is a self-proclaimed “Beck-ite,” a mentee of the longtime manager of the Dakota Lakes Research Farm east of Pierre. Though he’s not sure he has attained a following of “Bly-ites,” he does want to be remembered for “truth, honesty, integrity and helping people,” much as he saw in his other mentors such as Thomas Schumacher, Howard Woodard, Gary Lemme, Ron Gelderman, Jim Doolittle, Jim Gerwing, Bob Kohl and Douglas Malo.

“They held an integrity,” Bly said. “Science is science, and we can’t keep that from people. You’ve got producers doing these things. And it’s right in front of us that really supports the science, and we’ve got to share those things because it’s the right thing to do.”

Bly said he does what he does in the name of soil health. “It’s great to know I’m doing the job everybody wants me to do,” he said.

Legacy Award

Jorgensen Land & Cattle of Ideal, S.D., received the Legacy Award at the Soil Health Conference.

Board member Van Mansheim from Colome announced JLC’s honor. “Bryan, one of their operators and owners, was a very big mentor to me,” he said. “He got me to be a part of this coalition back when it first started in 2016. He really helped me a lot, and he’s done that for many people, in promoting soil health, and now his son [Nick] is doing that, too.”

JLC has been 100% no-till since the early 1990s, while implementing other conservation practices, such as crop rotation, cover crops and grazing by cattle on over 12,000 acres of nonirrigated land.

The Legacy Award was created to honor the late Al Miron, who was a founding board member of the coalition. Miron was dedicated to agriculture and an advocate for improving soil health. Al’s wife, Joan, and their children, James and Jennifer, received an honorary Legacy Award in his memory at the 2020 Soil Health Conference.