Perspectives on Sustainability

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?

I spent this summer working as an intern at the AgAid Institute, a renowned research facility dedicated to advancing the field of sustainable agriculture through innovative technologies and methodologies. I have been making significant developments toward a fully autonomous orchard robot by expanding on the same safety technology used in self-driving cars. For the agricultural robot to operate effectively in an orchard, it must be able to “see” its surroundings precisely.

Over the last three months, we have discussed the groundbreaking scope of the Soil to Society grant and ongoing work by our Soils and Cropping Systems and Plant Breeding Teams. But what is the point of breeding better grain and legume varieties if farmers have nowhere to sell their harvest? Crops must be marketable in order for farmers to integrate these varieties into their current rotations. For this reason, our Food Science Team is working to develop a diverse and innovative suite of flavorful, affordable, and nutritious food products accessible to consumers from all income levels.

In the spirit of “what gets measured gets managed”, there has been recent attention directed to how we can quantify potential benefits of compost as an agricultural soil amendment, and its potential to sequester carbon. Accounting for benefits in a defensible way is one key to creating channels for the most impactful action. The beauty of CSANR often lies in its ability to meet challenges like this where they are, to bring science to bear, and provide pathways forward to sustainable solutions.

In a realistic scenario, where not everyone gives up eating meat, where some in the developing world eat more like us, and where food waste is not zero, feeding 9+ billion people will require a lot more food. Ideally, this additional production would be from existing cropland, with better input efficiency, and fewer off-farm effects. How are we going to do this, both in currently high-yield agriculture and where significant yield-gaps exist? This is the topic of an important book chapter from Hunt, Kirkegaard, Celestina, and Porker (2019): Transformational agronomy: Restoring the role of agronomy in modern agricultural research.

Soil health education for youth is vital to change the outlook and attitude of future generations toward soil stewardship. Soil health is linked to some of the most important issues facing our planet and future generations, from a warming climate and increasing extreme weather events to toxic buildup of waste and contaminants, to fresh air and water, to the very food quantity and quality on our tables each and every day. Yet, unfortunately, most students enter college with little to no understanding of the importance of soil in our everyday lives.

I have been called a reductionist quite a few times. I never know how to respond. Am I a reductionist? If so, is that a bad thing? Why is there resistance to the approach? So I did some investigation.