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Posts Tagged: farm
A Honey of a Bee
Is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor in the courtyard? Is there a doctor in the honey bee costume? Yes! That was the scene at...
Hear that buzz? The Honey Bee (Dr. George Stock) enters the courtyard. With him are Vacaville Museum Guild members Georganne Gebers (right) of Vacaville, and Sharon Walters of Dixon. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Children expressed excitement as they circled The Honey Bee. In the back is a cutout banner of a California dogface butterfly, the state insect, from the Bohart Museum of Entomology. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Little Eloise Vieira loved The Honey Bee. In back is Vacaville Museum Guild member is bee assistant Sharon Walters. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The Solano County Sheriff's Department, Vacaville Police Department and California Highway Patrol all participated in the Museum Guild's Children's Party. The Honey Bee took time out to pose with several of the officers. From left are CHP Officer Mike Barday, Sheriff Sgt. Rex Hawkins, and CHP Officer Erica Tatum. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The Honey Bee poses with "Queen Bee" Ettamarie Peterson of Petaluma, who displayed her bee observation hive at the event. At right is a costumed McGruff the Crime Dog from the Vacaville Police Department. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The Honey Bee gets acquainted with Stanley, a 20-year-old donkey brought to the party by Tina Currie of the Vaca Valley Grange. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
UC awards Brodt $2M to advance soil health, climate-smart farming practices
Regional farms will demonstrate practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, compost and mulch use, hedgerow planting, optimized irrigation systems
To accelerate adoption of climate-smart farming practices, the University of California Office of the President has awarded nearly $2 million to a team of UC Cooperative Extension scientists and community partners working on a network of farm demonstration sites. The project will be led by Sonja Brodt, coordinator for agriculture and environment at the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program. This UC Agriculture and Natural Resources project is one of 38 funded with $83.1 million allocated to UC by the State of California for climate action research and innovation.
Scaling up soil health and other climate-smart agricultural practices to sequester carbon, increase water and nutrient use efficiency, and improve the resilience of farms to climate-related threats like drought and floods is a core pillar identified in California's Natural and Working Lands Climate Smart Strategy.
“Our project will strengthen the nascent California Farm Demonstration Network for on-the-ground, regionally specific demonstration of a range of climate-smart practices,” said Brodt. “Regional farms will demonstrate practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, compost and mulch use, hedgerow planting, irrigation system optimization and more.”
The $1,999,524 project will pilot a participatory partnership extension model that allows farmers to learn from their peers to reduce adoption risks and adapt knowledge to an ever-changing environment, increasing the likelihood of farmer success and accelerating long-term uptake of complex, place-specific practices.
Building on the capacity of local trusted organizations, project collaborators will be organized in a hub-and-spoke network with three regional Farm Demonstration Hubs (Sacramento Valley, North Coast and Central Coast), a pilot Hmong/Mien Demonstration Hub, and a statewide Organic Demonstration Hub.
Collaborators at each hub will be responsible for identifying and nurturing farm demonstration sites, and conducting demonstration trials and farmer-to-farmer outreach activities. Centralized organization and capacity building will be provided by UC SAREP, UC Organic Agriculture Institute, the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, and the California Farm Demonstration Network Advisory Panel.
In addition to several UC Cooperative Extension advisors and specialists across the state, partners include the UC Hansen Research and Extension Center and the Rodale Institute California Organic Center, both in Ventura County, and the UC Climate Smart Agriculture Program. Eight Resource Conservation Districts will also be involved in leading Farm Demonstration Hubs.
The project will also conduct soil health assessment activities to inform soil health and resilience monitoring protocols in future research and extension efforts. Since many existing soil health metrics were designed for agroecosystems in the Midwest and Eastern U.S., this project aims to lay the groundwork for research to adapt soil health metrics to the arid and Mediterranean climates of California.
“By utilizing relationships built between demonstration hub managers and demonstration farms across different cropping systems, we will gather quantitative and qualitative soil health data, information about growers' management practices as well as their own perspectives of what they really need to know about their soils in order to better manage for climate resilience and mitigation,” said Brodt.
Ultimately, the project partners aim to establish an enduring on-farm extension and research system that will help thousands of farmers adopt climate-smart practices tailored to their farms.
Other grant-supported projects focus on water access, conservation
The largest of the Climate Action Matching Grants, an $8.2 million investment, supports the development of planning tools to advance sustainable, inclusive and equitable water distribution for California's 39 million people. The project is led by Ted Grantham, a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. Kristin Dobbin, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, and Erik Porse, director of the California Institute for Water Resources are collaborating on the project.
Three other projects involving UC ANR researchers received California Climate Action Seed Grants and Matching Grants subawards:
- Development of a hydrogel that can work as a soil amendment to help small-scale vegetable farms conserve water led by UC San Diego associate professor Shengqiang Cai with Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, UC Cooperative Extension small farms advisor and interim director of UC SAREP; Mallika Nocco, UC Cooperative Extension specialist; and Matthew Gilbert, UC Davis professor of whole plant physiology. $297,979
- Development of a tool for predicting climate-water variation led by UC Irvine professor Isabella Velicogna with Tapan Pathak, UC Cooperative Extension specialist. $199,531
- A study of urban stream corridors led by UC Davis professor Gregory Pasternack with Igor Lacan, UC Cooperative Extension environmental horticulture and urban forestry advisor. $33,824
- A study of how California's housing crisis affects the growth of the wildland urban interface (WUI), where the fringes of development reach into natural areas led by UC Santa Cruz professor Miriam Greenberg, with Barb Satink Wolfson, UCCE fire advisor, Devii Rao, UCCE livestock and natural resources advisor, and the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association.
Updated 8/31/23 to add the wildland urban interface study.
Study offers insights on reducing nitrate contamination from groundwater recharge
Light irrigation before flooding stimulates microbes to remove nitrates from soil
With California enduring record-breaking rain and snow and Gov. Gavin Newsom recently easing restrictions on groundwater recharge, interest in “managed aquifer recharge” has never been higher. This process – by which floodwater is routed to sites such as farm fields so that it percolates into the aquifer – holds great promise as a tool to replenish depleted groundwater stores across the state.
But one concern, in the agricultural context, is how recharge might push nitrates from fertilizer into the groundwater supply. Consumption of well water contaminated with nitrates has been linked to increased risk of cancers, birth defects and other health impacts.
“Many growers want to provide farmland to help recharge groundwater, but they don't want to contribute to nitrate contamination of the groundwater, and they need to know how on-farm recharge practices might affect their crops,” said Matthew Fidelibus, a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology.
A recently published study by UC scientists sheds new light on how nitrates move through an agricultural recharge site and how growers might reduce potential leaching. Researchers analyzed data from two grapevine vineyards at Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Fresno County – one flooded for two weeks, and other for four.
Understanding initial nitrate levels crucial
A key factor in mitigating contamination is understanding how much nitrate is in the soil at the outset, said study author Helen Dahlke, a UC Davis hydrologist and leader of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources' strategic initiative on water. In areas with little precipitation and cropping systems that require greater amounts of synthetic fertilizer, the accumulation of residual nitrate – resulting from nitrogen in the fertilizer not taken up by the plants – can be quite high.
“The percentage of nitrates in some soils can really increase over the years, particularly if you have many dry years in a row where you don't have access to irrigation water or natural precipitation flushing some of those nitrates out of the soil,” Dahlke said.
While intense rains in recent weeks have helped dilute nitrate concentrations naturally, farmers looking to participate in recharge during the dry years ahead should consider flooding their fields with greater volumes of water.
“If you're doing this for the first time – on-farm recharge in the winter – check your residual soil nitrate levels because if they're very high, you should apply a lot of water in order to make sure that the residual nitrate is diluted down,” said Dahlke, who also added that growers should check their soil properties for suitability of recharge projects.
She recommended using, as a “good first approximation,” the online Soil Agricultural Groundwater Banking Index map, a project led by Toby O'Geen, a UC Cooperative Extension soil resource specialist.
Researchers looking at other ways to reduce nitrates
Even before flooding the fields for recharge, there are several practices that can lower initial nitrate levels and risk of leaching. Cover crops such as alfalfa and triticale, for example, can help take up residual nitrates that accumulate from fertilizing a main crop over time.
Dahlke and Fidelibus – a co-author of the San Joaquin Valley vineyard study – both pointed to pre-flooding irrigation that encourages denitrification, a process in which soil microbes transform nitrates into gaseous forms of nitrogen.
“Those denitrifying microbes need to be stimulated to do the work,” said Dahlke. “What we have found is that if you do a little bit of irrigation before you start the flooding, increasing the soil moisture can get those microbes started and they can take out more nitrate from the soil.”
The timing and quantity of fertilizer applications are also major factors in reducing leaching. Although more growers are following high-frequency, low-concentration practices to maximize uptake by crops, Dahlke said there needs to be more emphasis on incorporating nitrogen transformation processes – such as denitrification – in the nutrient management guidelines that farmers follow.
“Implementing thoughtful nutrient management plans will play a particularly important role in participating farms,” Fidelibus added.
A more holistic view of groundwater recharge
In short, choices made during the growing season can affect those in the winter recharge season – and vice versa. For example, applying compost or other organic amendments to soil can give microbes the “fuel” they need for sustained denitrification.
“What we have found is that our denitrifying bacteria often run out of steam because they don't have enough carbon to do the work,” Dahlke said. “Like us, microbes need energy to do the work, and for microbes this energy comes from soil carbon.”
Then, adding moisture via recharge to that field with high organic content can stimulate mineralization and nitrification, processes in which microbes transform the organic nitrogen into ammonium – and subsequently nitrates – that the plants can then take up. Those naturally occurring nitrates would thus reduce the need for the grower to apply synthetic fertilizer.
“The winter on-farm recharge experiments have shown that altering the moisture regime in the winter has consequences for the nitrogen budget in the summer growing season,” Dahlke explained. “Theoretically, what we need to be doing is better integrating both seasons by keeping an eye on the soil-nitrogen balance across the whole year so that we can ensure, at the end of the growing season, the residual nitrate in the soil is minimized.”
The study, published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, was part of the post-doctoral work of former UC Davis researcher Elad Levintal. In addition to Fidelibus and Dahlke, other authors are Laibin Huang, Cristina Prieto García, Adolfo Coyotl, William Horwath and Jorge Rodrigues, all in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at UC Davis.
Bees Buzzing on Breathtakingly Beautiful Berry Blossoms
The alliteration doesn't get much better--bees buzzing on breathtaking berry blossoms. Berry blossoms are in full bloom in the UC Davis...
Two honey bees foraging on berry blossoms at the UC Davis Ecological Garden at the Student Farm. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A honey bee and a native bee seeking the nectar at the base of the berry blossoms. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A honey bee nectaring on a berry blossom. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A honey bee takes flight--time to head for another berry blossom. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Day 7 of National Pollinator Week: Meet a Sunflower Bee
It's Day 7--the last day--of National Pollinator Week. Meet a longhorned bee, Svastra obliqua expurgata, family Apidae....
A female long-horned bee, Svastra obliqua expurgata, foraging on sneezeweed at the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
