It isn't too often that researchers get involved in a project that lets them go both deep and wide on their areas of expertise, and to have a good amount of time to learn from their findings.
But that is just what has happened for a UVM team, as part of a nationwide cohort. Thanks to a 6-year grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and the Net Zero Initiative, Joshua Faulkner (of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture), Eric Roy, Carol Adair and Kirsten Workman are going to get an in-depth look at one of Vermont's largest dairy operation's sustainability efforts - and will work with researchers across the nation to see how they compare.
The overall project is designed to get a look at the effectiveness of different dairy practices in addressing environmental needs related to greenhouse gas emissions, water quality, soil health, and more.
We caught up with the UVM members of the team to ask each of them one question about this wide-ranging work: What is the single thing you personally are most excited about learning through this project?
Here's what they said:
"I am most interested in understanding explicit relationships between water quality and soil health. We already understand how improved soil health can benefit water quality, but we've yet to draw concrete evidence, and we're seeing that there may be some unintended feedbacks with improved soil health. We're trying to gain a full understanding of those relationships with Vermont soils, and for Vermont farms.
"We know that soil health has tremendous benefits in other areas - resilience, for example, but the direct water quality benefit is a bit more murky. If it turns out to be complicated, we can then move forward with more nuanced recommendations for practices on farms."
- Joshua Faulkner, Principal Investigator, Farming & Climate Change Program Coordinator, Research Assistant Professor
"It is exciting to work with this really good group of people, and getting to work with people working on sustainable agriculture all across the country. We're going to see how crop production and yield, and climate change mitigation, and soil health, and water quality all come together in different scenarios. It's a lot to balance out among these different practices across the country. And it's fairly long-term, which will give us really valuable insights into how these practices behave in different conditions.
"We'll have the opportunity to see how greenhouse gas and water quality measurements behave in droughty years and in wet years, in really frozen winters and in rainy, melty winters.
"And it’s even giving us a chance to use more effective tools to document what’s happening: we will be able to focus on carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane emissions in real time, using a portable analyzer out in the field instead of waiting months for results from tiny samples brought back to the lab."
- Carol Adair, Associate Professor, Director of Environmental Sciences Program, Director of Aiken Forestry Sciences Laboratory
There are two main things. One is the opportunity to think about soil carbon in a national context. There's a lot of conversation about carbon sequestration, but we really don't understand how it works, and it's a hard question to answer when universities aren’t working on it together.
And the other is the opportunity to approach our work a little more holistically and maybe understand the relative benefits of the practices we're pursuing. It's tough in small projects to link different practices together, but now we're starting to ask: how do (different practices) work together? Are there synergies? Are there conflicts? How does it all come together on a farm or in a region?
- Eric Roy, Assistant Professor, Interim Director of Environmental Sciences Program
For our team, with our focus on both water quality and farmers’ needs, what is most exciting is that it brings together agronomic research (the science of crop production) with soil health and together these are so complex. But also the question of being able to measure farming as an environmental benefit is really exciting: how can farming be a benefit to our ecology?
And, really, for a long time we've known that a two or three year project can't tell the whole story of improvements to soil health - but this project gives us the time for biological systems to adapt to changes, and gives us time to measure the results over several years. We've seen that, for example, when farmers don't till the fields and they let the soil structure remain intact, their crops can look better the next year. But this project will let us see how the farm yields hold up independent of whether the following years are droughty or wet ones, and reducing that "flashiness" (the extreme highs and lows) of the cropping systems in response to challenging weather events.
- Kirsten Workman, MS, Agronomy Specialist
We are excited to share learnings as the project goes on. In the meantime, here are some other announcements about the project's start-up.