Sustainable Practices and Technology

We recently released StockSmart, a free, online decision support tool that we developed in partnership with the University of Arizona and the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, that accesses remotely sensed forage production data and allows the user to easily define what is accessible to their livestock based on their fences, watering locations, the type of terrain their livestock will traverse and other parameters.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is filtering your spam, gatekeeping your newsfeed, chatting with you online, and underpinning many of your regular activities. Many vaunt the potential of AI in agriculture to help land-managers adapt to uncertain and extreme weather, increase production through automation, mitigate greenhouse gas production through optimized precision farming and more. Realizing any of this potential depends on addressing potentially negative unseen effects and barriers to adoption, like a lack of transparency in AI systems and science and issues of data integrity.

There are many soil health benefits of applying high rates of organic amendments. For example, a recent meta-analysis found adding organic amendments increased soil organic matter across multiple studies by an average of 29% in croplands and 34% in grasslands (Figure 1 below, Beillouin et al., 2023). This is the power of winning a pyramid scheme. What the studies don’t consider, however, is what happens to the losers of a pyramid scheme. What do I mean by all this? With organic amendments, all of it had to grow somewhere.

Compost is used as a nutrient source as well as soil conditioner with a number of noted benefits in agricultural production systems. Compost application improves soil structure, soil moisture retention and builds up soil organic matter (Doran, 1996). Compost application has also been shown to activate soil microbial communities that help in nutrient cycling. Past studies have reported that compost helps improve soil water infiltration and binds the soil particles, helping reduce erodibility (Nigusse et al., 2015).

Waste is not glamorous. Just look at the moldy pumpkin leftovers from Halloween and Thanksgiving (yes, there are still quite a few around my neighborhood!) and you know why so many of us prefer to not spend our time thinking about wastes. From an energy standpoint, however, waste contains a largely untapped reserve of resources that can be recycled into the products we utilize daily as consumers. When we recover these materials, we have fewer materials to deal with as waste – and also reduce our consumption of raw materials. So why is waste recovery not a typical component of our infrastructure?

Does synthetic nitrogen fertilizer burn up soil organic matter? Whether you are focused on soil health, soil sequestration, or soil carbon credits, this is an important question. The persistent claim is that synthetic N fertilizer can “burn” soil carbon by supercharging the soil microbes. This claim mainly arises from a 2007 research article from researchers at the University of Illinois (Khan et al., 2007; open access here) and has recently resurfaced in another article (Jesmin et al., 2021) and the resulting (flawed) media coverage. However, a single study is far from conclusive – so what does the broader scientific literature say? And what have we learned in the last few decades on the relationship between synthetic N and soil organic matter?

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.

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.