Perspectives on Sustainability

I recently wrote a blog post announcing that Sustainable Farms and Fields (SFF) had launched. This innovative program housed in the Washington State Conservation Commission helps Conservation Districts and other public entities implement practices that are “climate-smart,” or in other words, sequester carbon in soil or vegetation and/or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. This is one of only a handful of state programs in the U.S. helping agricultural producers be part of the climate solution and achieve co-benefits such as improving soil health.

You may know that it is difficult to increase soil organic matter, but how difficult is it, with numbers? First, your crop harvest removes up to 50% of the biomass grown. Then, about 90% of the remaining crop biomass is decomposed by soil organisms leaving only 10% contributing to soil organic matter.  You also have to account for the annual 1-5% losses of existing soil organic matter. Using these and other estimates, let’s do some rough calculations so you know what to expect. The task is difficult, but the math is easy, I promise.

If you run in any of the same circles as me, biochar is a hot topic of conversation as of late. There is potential for biochar to serve as a solution to issues in soil health, climate change, and the reduction of biomass in waste streams, all while contributing to rural economies and reducing fire risk through forest thinning. In all of these instances, however, biochar must be utilized to have the intended effects. Agricultural application of biochar as a waste treatment and as a soil amendment allows for the reduction of one waste stream to become a net benefit for farms, the climate, and society.

Throughout this Soil to Society series, we’ve discussed the grant’s goal of breeding varieties of wheat, barley, quinoa, buckwheat, lentils, and peas that are more nutritious and making new, desirable foods with them. Now what about the “Society” side of Soil to Society? The Population Nutrition and Social Science team is answering society-level questions by exploring consumption behaviors, their implications for human nutrition, and identifying strategies to get Americans to eat more of the adapted target crops.

Eastern Washington averages over five million acres of farmland dedicated to growing wheat and other rotational grain crops that rely solely on rainfall to water their plants, called dryland systems. Within these dryland systems, there is a wide range of potential precipitation levels. Some regions get as little as 7-9” annually, and in recent years, many are experiencing increased uncertainty in the amounts or timing of that precipitation.  Approaches to drought resilience in wheat, one of Washington’s major commodity crops, include adaptive farm practices and application of biochemical principles.

In a 2012 book, Donald Maier asked, “What’s so good about biodiversity?” He describes how difficult it is to critique principles of biodiversity because all the value of the natural world has been bestowed on…

WSU extension and research faculty recently wrapped up a multi-year High-Value Horticulture and Processing internship program. In total, 24 interns were hosted by WSU in the summers of 2018, 2019, and 2022. Support for the project came from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates (NIFA REEU) program. Our WSU team worked at the intersection of sustainable food production, processing technology, and food safety to provide undergraduates nationwide with life-changing research and extension experiences.  

We are halfway through our Soil to Society series, so let’s do a quick recap. Following along the Soil to Society pipeline, this grant is working to identify soil-conscious cultivation practices with the Soil and Cropping Systems team, breed varieties of wheat, barley, buckwheat, quinoa, lentils, and peas with the Plant Breeding team, and engineer products that utilize these nutrient rich crop varieties with the Food Science team. Now, we must determine whether the more nutritious varieties correlate to better health outcomes in human consumers.

The Columbia River Basin has grappled with limited water supplies for decades. This was most noticeable during 2015, when we experienced severe summertime drought across large areas of Washington State, which reduced the amount of water available to meet the region’s demands. The 2015 drought and other recent occurrences of lower water availability are representative of a warmer future with lessening snowpack and earlier snowmelt. In fact, Washington is expected to experience drought again this summer due to rapidly melting snowpack and low precipitation forecasts, underscoring the prevalence of water supply issues for the state.

Although I work in irrigated agriculture, the views on my morning commute are all sagebrush, or the shrub-steppe as this native plant community is called. And cheatgrass, a lot of cheatgrass. Where there have been recent fires, stands of cheatgrass thrive. Sagebrush, the iconic plant of the shrub-steppe ecosystem, is having a hard time. The combined effects of fire frequency, climate change, and cheatgrass invasion have made sagebrush recovery an uphill battle. Will the shrub-steppe recover to its former subtle beauty, or should we get used to the cheatgrass prairie?