About Us

This website was originally started as part of a Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NE SARE) grant looking at low-residue winterkilled cover crops for no-till vegetable production (final report), coordinated by Ray Weil and Natalie Lounsbury at the University of Maryland. Since that project’s completion, Natalie has attempted to keep the website current with new information about cover crops and reduced tillage in vegetable production systems. We always welcome feedback, ideas, and questions.

Natalie Lounsbury received her M.S. in soil science from the University of Maryland in 2013, where she worked on low-residue, winterkilled cover crops. She is currently a PhD student in the Agroecology Lab at the University of New Hampshire, much closer to home in Maine. Prior to graduate school, she managed an organic vegetable farm and worked as an organic inspector.

Ray Weil has taught soil science to over 6,000 students at the University of Maryland and abroad and has addressed over 4,000 farmers at meetings and field days. He has also brought an ecological approach to soil science with his textbook The Nature and Properties of Soils. He is a pioneer of sustainable agriculture and cover cropping systems. For the last decade, he and many of his graduate students have investigated various properties of forage radish as a cover crop.

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