A team of West Virginia University researchers has received an $181,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to demonstrate precision agriculture’s effectiveness for protecting water quality in the Eastern Panhandle.
Funded by the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Conservation Innovation Grant program, the project will use global mapping and other precision agriculture technology to improve ground and surface water quality in fields that have limestone.
Precision agriculture helps farmers select practices that provide the best financial and environmental results. Many farmers rely on tractors that selectively apply fertilizer or lime via sampling directions mapped earlier by the tractor’s global positioning system.
Precision agriculture has been used extensively in larger fields and farms of the Midwest. The USDA grant will help WVU experts demonstrate precision agriculture’s potential in small-field contexts.
“The Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia is an area with a large percentage of its highly productive and usable agricultural lands underlain with a limestone or Karsts geology,” said Craig Yohn, WVU Extension agent for Jefferson County and the project’s lead investigator. “This geology has sinkholes and fissures that rise to the surface and allow nutrients and sediments to directly flow into the groundwater.”
By combining technology and proven conservation practices, he said, “this vulnerability can be greatly reduced.”
Conservation practices will include the strategic use of cover crops to hold nutrients in place or build nutrients for future crops. Besides protecting the area’s water, the new practices will improve the land’s efficiency for growing forage and row crops, such as hay and corn, respectively.
The techniques also could save producers the expense of buying unnecessary fertilizers and soil supplements.
“This research piggybacks on earlier demonstration research completed in West Virginia funded by Eastern Panhandle Producers and WVU Extension,” Yohn said. “A Conservation Innovation grant was also funded to Extension in the Greenbrier Valley to evaluate precision soil testing and nutrient application on forage land.”
The research team includes Mary Beth Bennett (WVU Extension agent, Berkeley County), Denis Scott (Extension agent, Morgan County), Tom Basden (Extension specialist, nutrient management), Ed Rayburn (Extension specialist, agronomy) and Eugenia Pena-Yewtukhiw (assistant professor, soil sciences, Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences).
“NRCS is excited about the funding this WVU Research Corporation Conservation Innovation Grant to evaluate and promote precision agriculture in the smaller farms and fields we have in West Virginia,” said Kevin Wickey, West Virginia State conservationist.
The Conservation Innovation Grant program is designed to speed the transfer and enhance use of technologies and methods that show promise in solving the nation’s top natural resource problems by targeting innovative, on-the-ground conservation. Approved projects address issues such as water quantity and quality, grazing lands, soil and forest health, and air quality.
“The Conservation Innovation Grant program enables USDA to review, field test, and demonstrate practices and ideas that have yet to be successfully mainstreamed into our portfolio of practice options,” said Dave White, chief of the National Resources Conservation Service, which administers the program and provides technical oversight for each project.