In case you were wondering, yes you should wear clothes when farming. Is it ever a good idea to not? Well, if you ask a billboard in southern Minnesota, the answer is no.

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When you drive through Austin or Rochester Minnesota, there is a billboard that shows a pair of bare legs with the phrase “Don’t Farm Naked”, and no it doesn’t mean there is a naked farmer problem in Minnesota…

It is actually an off-season cover crop promotion.

Over the last year, the Land Stewardship Project has been promoting the power of healthy soil through billboard campaigns. This campaign debuted in February 2022.

The campaign spans Austin, Spring Valley, Fountain, Preston, Dexter, Grand Meadow, and Minnesota City to share the benefits of soil health techniques like cover cropping, rotational grazing, no-till, and diverse rotations.

The billboards feature photos and quotes, but the one with the “bawdy” humor comes from a partnership with Practical Farmers of Iowa.

Cover crops are a way farmers can reduce erosion, filter runoff, and create an animal habitat. However, despite the good they can do for the environment, cover crops are only planted on 4 percent of Iowa farmland each year.

This is because of the costs associated with buying the seeds, actually planting them, and then applying a herbicide in the spring to kill them off. According to The Gazette, Practical Farmers partnered with corporations such as PepsiCo, Unilever, and ADM. Those partnerships and government funding helped the organization pay farmers $3.4 million in 2022 to offset the costs of cover crops.

So, in a very clever, and eye-catching way, the two groups pulled off a successful billboard campaign that you can still see today.

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