Economic Incentives and Water Quality in Ohio

Brent Sohngen, a professor in Ohio State University’s Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, presented “Economic Incentives and Water Quality in Ohio”, an interesting talk about paying farmers for the reductions in runoff pollution they deliver. This economics-inspired approach differs from that typical of Soil and Water Conservation grants that pays for specific installations like riparian buffer strips, containment ponds for sewage, and conservation research program fallow fields.

Dr. Sohngen experimentally signed a contract that would pay farmers for pollution reductions in a small watershed in West Ohio. Unfortunately pollution increased when one of the farmers in the watershed decided to double his hog production. Still, Dr. Sohngen thinks the technique has promise, given that the farmers were responsible for more pollution than a nearby town's wastewater treatment plant. Given what we are willing to pay to upgrade the plant, shouldn't we be willing to pay a similar amount to the farmers?

I like the idea, but the economic logic seems to falter because it is based only on what society is willing to pay, not the cost to the farmer. I would have liked to ask about how much money, given the farmer's decision to invest in additional hogs, it would actually take for the farmer to pollute less. What is the opportunity cost of reduced pollution?

Managing Great Lakes Forests for Climate Change Mitigation

Dr. Peter Curtis presents information from the FASET project at UMBS in this video presentation produced as part of The Ohio State University's Changing Climate webinar series.

Adaptive Nitrogen Management

Harold M. van Es, Cornell University Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Soil Health

Dr. van Es introduced his team's effort at a comprehensive, quick, and cheap soil test that goes beyond the standard chemical measurements to include physical and biological properties as well. I would like to see a paper showing how much variation in yield (b/c that is the output variable of interest to farmers) this test can account for, compared to other more comprehensive tests or even expert in-field evaluation.

Dr. van Es than discussed his work creating an adaptive nitrogen management tool that would completely bypass soil tests. His on-line tool uses rainfall patterns to estimate loss of nitrogen from corn fields and than recommends how much "booster" N to add. The benefits include less overall use of N. Interestingly, the loss of N in wet weather is exacerbated in soils with high organic carbon because of increased decomposition rates, according to Dr. van Es. Unfortunately, he did not discuss the dynamics of N under alternative farming (no synthetic fertilizer, no-till with cover crops, etc) practices that could obviate the need to even add N. I realized that one thing that's nice about monoculture corn across most of the mid-West is that the standardization makes it easier for science research to be relevant to a lot of people. It would be harder for Dr. van Es to research all the different alternative management techniques and apply recommendations for adaptive management to each.

The reason for internet-based adaptive management is a lack of real-time on-the-ground data on, say, soil moisture levels, N content, etc. But this is changing and Dr. van Es did show a few slides about what may be the future, with combines and irrigation equipment festooned with hi-tech spectrometers to gauge how much N plants have. The technique has been shown to be successful with wheat, but is still being developed on other crops.

Some links:

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education

Alternative Farming Systems Information Center

Sustaining Lives through Organic Farming

Association for India's Development, Columbus, along with the EARTH Center and Students for Food Sovereignty welcomes AID Fellow and organic farming expert, Ms. Revathi.

Revathi has worked with more than 32,000 farmers in the organic movement in Tamil Nadu and her work has been recognized by the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. She has hands-on knowledge in the importance of rejuvenating the soil using a holistic approach towards soil restoration, seed selection techniques, methods to create organic pest repellent and herbicides. She described the use of Sesbania ("dhaincha") to reclaim soils made saline by the tsunami as well as conventional agriculture.

More info.

Soybeans as a Nitrogen Sink?

"Field Investigations of Manure and Synthetic Fertilizers on Agronomic Crops in Ohio" a talk by Keith Diedrick, OSU School of Environment and Natural Resources Soil Science Graduate Program.

This talk described the problem of too much fertilizer: large factory farms produce huge amounts of manure, which then must be disposed of. Whereas city and municipal biosolids (human waste) must be handled with extreme caution including up to a year of filtration, settling, fermentation, and more filtering, animal waste is treated differently. It is spread directly on conventional farm fields. Current agricultural practice includes spreading manure on top of snow (which then melts directly into local streams).

This research aimed to determine how much of this goop could be applied before the fields became over fertilized. This research should help farmers know when and how much animal waste they can apply to their fields. Ironically, the research was conducted on crops that actually require no fertilizer: soybeans. Because soybeans are legumes, they fix their own nitrogen and increased fertilizer has not shown increased productivity. While there may have been some productivity increase with increased use of manure, the limiting factor appears to be the production of dissolved forms of nitrogen in the soil. If farmers hypothetically wanted to limit the amount of fertilizer running off their fields, how much manure can they apply? Unfortunately, given that no groundwater or runoff samples were taken, it is not clear that this research can answer this question.

Maybe when will we stop researching factory farms and Roundup Ready soybeans and start researching solutions to the ecological and agricultural problems of today there will be better news to report here. This talk completely omitted the issue of antibiotics, surfactants, and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in manure and what effect these compounds might have on downstream ecology. I'm not just questioning the blatant narrow mindedness of this research, but the entire mindset that could lead someone to claim that this toxic manure is "just NPK" [nitrogen, phosphate, potassium] and that those three chemicals are the only thing important to plant nutrition and ecosystem functioning.