• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Notebook

Posted on: Friday, 28 October 2005, 03:01 CDT

By Anonymous

CONSERVATION NEWS YOU CAN USE

Applying decision support tools to agriculture

The Soil and Water Conservation Society has a new book, The Farmer's Decision: Balancing Economic Successful Agriculture Production with Environmental Quality, for sale. Decision support tools have been used in many fields for decades. These tools help individuals make decisions.

Applying decision support tools to agriculture production has recently become more widely used. The Farmer's Decision, tackles the decision making process when a producer or landowner wants to balance making money and environmental quality. It looks at the decision support tools the farmer and rancher can now use from several perspectives-the researcher's point of view; the farmer's point of view; the equipment manufacturer point of view; and finally from a strictly nutrient management point of view.

Questions are answered, such as, 'Do we need new or modify existing decision support tools?' 'Are some decision support tools not practical at the field scale?' 'Are decision support tools designed to take the watershed into account?'

This book is comprehensive, practical, an easy read, and necessary for scientists, policymakers, planners, producers, and landowners. The Soil and Water Conservation Society's goal is to sustain and improve environmental quality, but to do it congruently with successful, money-making operations. This book is one step toward that end.

Ordering t is easy. You have three points: 1) email: linda.larson@swcs.org; 2) call (515) 289-2331, extension 10, or 3) order online at www.swcs.org. The cost is: $53.00 (includes shipping and handling).

Nominate a "Most Endangered River"

Each year, the America's Most Endangered River list shines a national spotlight on local rivers. Nominate the river of your choice at www.americanrivers.org by October 1, 2005 and next April, the list will be published.

FACTOIDS

New environmental policy Institute at Duke University

In late September, Duke University is launching its new institute, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, made possible through a $70 million gift. The institute is designed to have a global reach and will marshal the broad resources of Duke University, including the law school, business school and the Nicolas School. By having the Nicholas School, it will be the first environmental policy institute of its kind to have a resident faculty.

The institute will provide independent analysis on key environmental issues to corporate and environmental leaders, policymakers, and the news media. "For too long, we have seen environmental problems increase while our political ability to address those challenges faded," says Timothy Profeta, director of the institute. "The Nicholas Institute is being created to seek to end that trend by injecting creative and workable solutions into the debate."

The Nicholas School has faculty concerned with forest health, water quality, biodiversity, endangered species conservation, coastal and marine management, global warming, and environmental health.

For more information, access the Internet website at www.nicholas.duke.edu/institute.

Call for papers, posters, special sessions, and workshops

You are invited to submit proposals for oral and poster presentations or to organize special concurrent sessions or workshops at the Soil and Water Conservation Society's (SWCS) annual meeting held July 22 - 26, 2006 in Keystone Resort in Keystone, Colorado. SWCS welcomes papers, posters, and symposia reporting the results of research, testing, monitoring, and evaluation projects, and/or lessons learned from professional experience working with conservation and environmental management systems, technologies, programs, and polices.

We welcome proposals for presentations that address one or more of the ongoing areas of emphasis outlined on the Society's website and the Call for Papers brochure. These ongoing areas of emphasis comprise the core of SWCS s work to foster the science and art of conservation. In addition, each year SWCS identifies specific topics- within our ongoing areas of emphasis-for special attention at that year's annual conference.

There are three areas of special emphasis at the 2006 SWCS international conference, which are: 1) Water Use and Management- Learning to Live with Limits; 2) The Science of Targeting; and 3) Conservation and the 2007 Farm Bill.

Submissions will be taken via the SWCS website at www.swcs.org. The deadline for submitting all abstracts is December 5, 2005.

Horseradish lessens manure smell

Where there are hogs, there is an odor. Horseradish to the rescue! HUH? Penn State University chemist Jerzy Dec and colleagues added ground horseradish and hydrogen peroxide to hog manure. A panel of trained odor evaluators concluded that the smell was half as intense as untreated manure.

Why horseradish? Oxidation can reduce the odor of manure and horseradish has a powerful oxidizing capability. Purified forms of the abundant enzymes found in horseradish are used for soil and water treatment. Dec wondered if the cost and trouble of isolating the enzymes was worth the trouble. He performed experiments in which he ground up horseradish and added it to polluted water. "It worked as well as the purified enzyme," he says.

ASAE changes its name

The American Society of Agricultural Engineers changed its name in late July to American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE). ASABE President Melissa Moore, says the name change more clearly represents the breadth and depth of the profession. The action also follows the lead of university departments in the United States, which oneby-one have adopted names that reflect the unique and broad educational experience they provide. These departments now include biological in their names or such variations. Accordingly, the graduates of these programs possess the engineering skills that deal with all agricultural and biological systems, including the entire food and fiber chain. ASABE was founded in 1907 and headquartered in St. Joseph, Michigan.

GAO report on the Great Lakes Initiative

In July 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on the Great Lakes Initiative to Congressional requesters. The GAO found that the initiative has limited potential to improve the overall water quality in the Great Lakes Basin because it primarily focuses on regulated point sources of pollution, while nonpoint sources, such as air deposition and agricultural runoff, are greater sources of pollution. The report also says the Great Lakes Initiative's potential impact is further limited because it allows the use of flexible implementation procedures, such as variances, whereby facilities can discharge pollutants at levels exceeding stringent initiative water quality standards.

For a more complete look at the GAO report, reference GAO-05-829 on the GAO website.

Birds have something to sing about in riparian areas

In southern California, an endangered songbird, the least Bell's vireos, is back and thriving after two decades of effort. Habitat protection in small riparian areas has provided the needed nesting grounds for this small bird.

For more information, contact Gloria Macndcr at (520) 610-5596 or Gloria_Maendcr@usgs.gov at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Private landowners welcome major agriculture policy change

The American Farmland Trust (AFT) held eight forums, and the diverse group of ranchers and farmers say the U.S. agriculture policy is in need of a change. The environment of change is caused, say the 280 participants, by globalization, federal deficits, World Trade Organization negotiations, and changing consumer demands. The AFT forum's were intended to gather insight into how farmer view current programs and what changes they would make.

The producers may have anxiety about change, but they recognize the need for the next farm bill to have six key goals:

1. Furnish a better safety net to help all farmers manage risk;

2. Reward farmers for providing environmental benefits;

3. Nurture entrepreneurship and the development of new markets;

4. Help farmers transition and adjust to global market changes;

5. Expand support for regional food systems; and

6. Shift payments to support such national priorities as energy, nutrition, food security, and rural development.

Producers involved in the four research groups have agreed to meet twice a year over the next 24 months to consider options and help develop policies that serve the needs of producers within their unique geographic regions.

Contact Jimmy Daukas for more information at (202) 33 Ι- 7300 extension 3042.

Importance of soil potassium

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Soil Scientists Douglas Karlen and John Kovar think potassium deficiencies can limit corn yields, and they cite a shift by growers away from preplant tillage as a possible cause.

"No-till" farming has become an important agricultural practice because it offers such benefits as lower energy costs and reduced soil erosion. But the practice may have a side effect in causing potassium-which is naturally recycled as plants decompose-to accumulate in the surface soil where new plant roots cannot capture it, according to Karlen and Kovar. They're based in the ARS Soil and Water Quality Unit, part of the National Soil Tilth Laboratory at Ames, Iowa.

The scientists also question whether increased emphasis on nitrogen andphosphorus management brought on by those nutrients' off- site effects may have led growers and researchers to overlook potassium's importance as an essential plant nutrient.

ARS scientist; started investigating the potassium problem in 2000 at a tillage research site initiated in 1971 at Iowa State University's Agronomy and Agricultural Engineering Research Center in Boone County. They noticed that corn and soybean plants grown in no-till plots were susceptible to slow early-season growth and lower yields. The region's growers were experiencing similar problems, according to Karlen. The scientists' goal was to find a way to overcome the slow early-season growth and lower yields while maintaining no-till usage because of no-till's other benefits.

According to Kovar, they found the cause through field tests in which dry fertilizer was placed three inches below the surface, enhancing early-season growth. Follow-up studies pinpointed potassium deficiency as the cause of the growth and yield problems.

Now Karlen, Kovar, and the Kansas-based Fluid Fertilizer Foundation are in the middle of a three-year exploration study in which they're directly applying 30 gallons per acre of a liquid potassium solution during planting. The solution penetrates the soil to the root level.

In the first year, the treatment helped boost corn yield by eight bushels per acre, and soybean yield by more than two bushels per acre.

For more information, contact Luis Pons at (301) 504-1628 or lpons@ars.usda.gov in the ARS communications office.

South Africa restoring land and water for human benefit

Since 1995, the South African government has been funding a program called "Working for Water," in which unemployed people are hired to clear thirsty invasive species from watersheds surrounding Cape Town. One eucalyptus tree consumes up to 100 gallons of water per day, so removing the trees is like putting water back in the system. In a July 26 New York Times article, the founder of the program, Guy Preston, says, "Rivers that hadn't run in 30, 40, years began to run again."

This program now operates in every South African province, has an annual budget of $60 million, and is inspiring new programs to change the face of conservation on the continent. A new ecological approach-conservation farming-has taken off to address the environmental problems. Especially a single problem, invasive plants, is displacing native vegetation and sucking up water needed by humans. The intent is not to just restore ecosystems, but to put them to use for human benefit.

This intent of humans benefiting from environmental efforts has spread since that first program, Working for Water, in 1995. There now are the programs Working for Wetlands, Working on Fire, and Working for Woodlands. Programs that build the capacities of marshlands to purify water, prevent and control forest fires, and reforest subtropical thickets to capture carbon from the atmosphere and support biodiversity, respectively.

The other side of the human benefit in these programs, is the poorest of the poor are the people that must be recruited to carry out the programs. It is an effort to give people job skills to use later in the private sector, and an effort to raise the participation of single parents, six out of every 10, must be women.

SWCS, NRCS, CPESC, and TSPs working together

No you aren't in acronym hell. At the recent Soil and Water Conservation Society (SWCS) conference, the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) Chief Gruce Knight signed a memorandum of agreement with the Certified Professionals in Erosion and Sediment Control (CPESC) organization so CPESC can recommend certain members to NRCS in the intent to become technical service providers (TSPs).TSPs are administered by NRCS.

NRCS certifies TSPs and lists them on a national, web-based registry called TechReg. Farmers, ranchers, and other landowners seeking conservation technical assistance can locate a TSP through this registry. More than 2,400 certified TSPs are registered.

$19 million funds conservation technologies and approaches

In late August, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) released the latest information on their Conservation Innovation Grants. NRCS is awarding $19 million to 54 projects in 40 states and Guam to fund the development and adoption of innovative technologies and approaches through pilot projects and conservation field trials.

NRCS administers the Conservation Innovation Grants as part of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Grant recipients include In universities, 13 nongovernmental organizations, four agribusinesses, six state governments, four resource conservation and development councils, six conservation districts, and two individuals. Projects were selected out of 150 proposals. The proposals receive grants for up to 50 percent of the total project cost and must provide nonfedcral matching funds for at least 50 percent of the project cost. The total value of the projects is more than $44 million.

Additional information on the Conservation Innovation Grants and summaries of the 54 selected projects can be found at www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/cig.

Untapped conservation zones

An American Museum of Natural History Biologist, Kim Russell, is advocating using the alleyways across the Nation that hold power lines, as havens for bees, dragonflies, and small mammals. Russell says that conservation biologists often focus on pristine areas and try to protect these areas. Her position is that there are five million acres of land nationwide used for high-voltage power lines and these are possible conservation sites.

Russell et al. recently compared the diversity of bees that inhabit power-line strips with bee populations in fields that are mowed annually. The findings showed that the number of bees of the two habitats remained roughly the same, but the scrubby power strips turned up many more species of bees. Bees serve as an important role as crop pollinators, are good indicators of the presence of other insects, and their numbers have dropped over the past decades.

Helen Howes, with the Chicago-based power company Exelon, says about 500 acres in Illinois are now managed using conservation volunteers, which takes a large portion of the maintenance costs away from the power companies. The conservation groups perform controlled burns-previously forbidden-on the power-line strips to restore these sites to a natural state.

On the Web

The Geospatial One-Stop Portal-online tool that provides access to 72,000 federal, state, and local government geospatial resources related to natural hazards and biology, and human health: http:// www.geodata.gov

"Nature never hurries: Atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

New EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water

In late August, Brent Fewell was named the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water. Fewell is responsible for advising in the development and implementation of critical agency decisions related to national water policy. Immediately prior to coming to EPA in 2004, Fewell worked for an international law firm.

Copyright Soil and Water Conservation Society Sep/Oct 2005

Source: Journal of Soil and Water Conservation

More News in this Category