nutrient management

Multi-Faceted Approach to Nitrogen Management

aerial map of field spreading in agriculture
Photo: Rich Meinert

We have a multi-faceted approach to nitrogen management in Connecticut that addresses land use issues, agricultural production, and water quality. 

Extension faculty from the Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) are working on several applied research projects in support of better nitrogen (N) management. They are collaborating with the University of Rhode Island and EPA to create an online tool, “N-Sink,” to track the movement of N in coastal watersheds (Highlights, 2020). In a project funded by the Long Island Sound Study (LISS), they are using cutting-edge high resolution land cover data to explore the relationship of land use to N export for the over 4,300 small watershed basins in Connecticut. Finally, the CLEAR geospatial team is part of another LISS study, led by Dr. Ashley Helton of the 

Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, that is looking at “legacy” N loadings that are derived from past land uses that are no longer apparent but that continue to export N to our waters. 

Rich Meinert is working with three farms on developing accurate as applied maps for farm applications. Current as applied maps provided by GPS systems are inaccurate on smaller New England farms. Our small irregularly shaped fields require spreaders to negotiate tight turns. Current generation software does not calculate the differences in as applied rates between the inside and the outside of a turn. Preliminary measurements using equipment on one of the farms has resulted in a 30% decrease in application rate on the outside of a turn versus the inside of the turn. 

Another challenge in our smaller fields is overlap. Current spreaders have a fixed operating width. They throw lime, fertilizer, or manure with a set amount of force, across a fixed width, or they spray manure, or pesticides from a single point or a set of nozzles with a certain pressure and spray pattern, like a paint sprayer. Having a fixed application width and a varying field shape inevitably results in overlap. Certain sprayers can shut off nozzles to prevent overlap, but fertilizer and manure spreaders cannot vary their discharge. This research is currently collecting data to develop a computer algorithm to show where the nutrients are actually going so that future nutrient applications can target areas of fields that need it, and avoid areas that have had excess nutrients applied previously.

Visit CLEAR.uconn.edu and s.uconn.edu/nutrientmanagement for more information.

Article by Chet Arnold and Rich Meinert

Nutrient Management in Canaan

dairy cows in East Canaan at Freund's Farm
Photo: G. Morty Ortega

Nutrient Management on farms is a balancing act between how much manure needs to be spread and how many nutrients crop fields need. We work with dairy farmers throughout the state to address the challenge of managing nutrient distribution on their fields through research and outreach, innovative technology, and by fostering collaborative partnerships.

The Canaan Valley Agricultural Cooperative Waste Management Program formed in 1995 when Peter Jacquier of Laurelbrook Farm received a Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant. Jacquier worked with four other farmers to organize the cooperative. The farms improved manure management and disposal practices and adapted new technologies on their farming operations. Extension guides manure digester discussions, and assists with manure management through data collection, soil testing, and ongoing research using drones and other types of innovation.

Dairy farmers in the cooperative, and other areas of the state, are developing strategies for anaerobic digestion and to deal with phosphorus accumulation in farm soils as a result of the grant.

Methane digesters reduce odor and make farms more neighbor friendly. Digesters are expensive and need off farm food waste to help make the system profitable.

Some digester companies include food waste tipping fees in the economic analysis, but not the increases in manure hauling costs to dispose of the added digestate. Farms need accurate hauling cost numbers to include in the economic analysis of the digesters to determine overall profitability of these projects. Extension continues to facilitate discussions with Canaan dairy farmers and others to address these challenges.

Article by Richard Meinert

Conservation Planning

aerial view of Connecticut River and agricultural fieldsExcess fertilizer use and inefficient nutrient management strategies often are causes of water quality impairment in the United States. When excess nitrogen enters large water bodies it enhances algae growth and when that algae decomposes, hypoxic conditions—often called a “dead zone” occur.

Nutrients carried to the Long Island Sound have been linked to the seasonal hypoxic conditions in the Sound. There are many different sources of nutrients within the Long Island Sound Watershed, an area encompassing parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. These sources include municipalities, industry, agriculture, forests, residential lawns and septic systems.

The Long Island Sound Watershed Regional Conservation Partnership Program (LISW-RCPP) is a technical and financial assistance program that enables agricultural producers and forest landowners to install and maintain conservation practices. The goal of this program is to enhance natural resources and improve water quality. Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the LISW-RCPP supports efforts that find common ground among agricultural producers and conservation organizations in working towards the sustainable use of soil, water, and other natural resources.

Conservation practices can achieve multiple positive environmental outcomes, including water quality improvement. A widemap imagery for conservation planning for farms variety of practices exist including in-field (cover crops, reduced tillage, diversified rotation and nutrient management), and edge-of-field strategies (grassed water ways, buffer strips, riparian area, bioreactors and wetlands). These changes, in turn improves nitrogen retention during vulnerable leaching periods in the spring and fall. Conservation strategies also function to safeguard other ecosystem roles, such as carbon sequestration, animal refuge habitat, fisheries and recreation.

Prioritizing areas for nutrient management strategies requires an understanding of the spatial relationships between land use and impaired surface waterbodies. Our project utilizes a geographic information systems (GIS) based approach to under- stand and act upon these important spatial relationships. In part, we are identifying contemporary and historical hotspots of agricultural land use by using satellite- derived land use land cover (LULC) classifications initially developed by
the University of Connecticut’s Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR). Spatial analyses depicting the proximity of agriculture to highly valued water resources (both surface and ground- water) serves as the foundational work that informs where efforts to protect and restore water quality will be most impactful to the greater Long Island Sound Watershed.

Our future work will pair spatial maps with modeled contemporary and historical nutrient loading patterns to expand regions of interest. Our goal is to provide education and tools that help farmers realize the benefits of sustainable agriculture with individual conservation plans tailored to their specific needs and objectives. Connecticut’s environment of diverse crops and farms offers unique opportunities and challenges. UConn Extension is offering soil tests and interpretations to assess each farm’s nutrient needs. We look forward to co-creating knowledge with farmers and developing soil health solutions for long-term production goals and resilient farms.

Article by Katherine Van Der Woude and Kevin Jackson

Nutrient Management Planning

Article by Richard Meinert

Photo: Rich Meinert

In the simplest form a Nutrient Management Plan is an inventory of the nutrients produced on the farm or needed by crops that are, or will be, produced, and a list of planned applications needed to distribute those nutrients to individual crop fields to support the growth of the desired crop, for all fields on the farm. Historically these plans were pretty simple. A farm would apply manure by spreading it on the fields until they ran out, then they would apply fertilizer where they thought they would need it with little regard for how an individual application would affect the field, the crop or the environment. Today fertilizer is too expensive to waste and excess nutrients in a field are more likely to run off to contaminate ground or surface water. The goal of the Extension Nutrient Management Planning Program is to help famers target their nutrients to the portions of the fields that need them.

The key to accomplish this is knowing what is there already. Remote sensing technology is the tool that can provide that information to farmers for each individual field at a cost they can afford. UConn Extension’s Nutrient Management Planning team is using this technology (aircraft mounted camera-like sensors) to help farmers use manure and fertilizer more effectively. Eleven farms across Connecticut are cooperating in this project to show farmers how remotely sensed imagery could be used to guide future manure and fertilizer applications. Farms agreed to allow UConn faculty access to 35 fields to take soil and crop samples and to allow their fields to be photographed during the growing season. Farms receive copies of all of the sample results during the growing season to make management decisions. During the winter farms come together as a group to see the imagery, discuss the results for their fields and to plan the next year’s manure and/or fertilizer applications using the analysis results and imagery to guide their decisions.

The photo above is an example of the aerial imagery used in this process, in this case an NDVI image. NDVI stands for Normalized Difference Vegetative Index. NDVI was originally developed to determine land cover differences in vegetation from space. However by bringing the sensors closer to earth and targeting individual crop fields the technology can pinpoint areas in the field that are stressed and likely to yield less crop. NDVI basically calculates a ratio of the amount of light reflected in various wavelengths. This ratio number is the mathematical value of the “greenness” of the plant. Darker green color is indicative of healthier plants. This ratio is calculated for each pixel present in the images, as shown by the enlarged section of the photo. Each pixel or square visible in the enlarged section represents a 50 X 50 cm (19.6 X 19.6 inch) potion of the field surface. The resulting values are then color coded into ranges so the well fertilized healthy vegetation in the field appears as dark green, the less well fertilized or less healthy regions vary from light green through yellow and the worst vegetation in the field shows as orange. Areas with little or no vegetation appear red. This color-coding makes it easy for the farmer to understand where the best areas of the field are located.

Capturing the imagery and calculating the NDVI is the easy part. Commercial companies provide imagery for millions of acres of farmland across North America each year. The challenging part of this project is answering the question, “So now what?” This is where Extension is focusing its attention. There are 4 labelled locations in the field image. These are the points in the field chosen by Extension faculty to represent the poor, better and best regions in the field. Using hand held GPS devices faculty and students visit each location and mark out a 5 X 10 foot region for detailed sampling and data collection. Plant population is counted, soil samples are taken, and plants are harvested, weighed, ground and analyzed for dry matter and nutrient content.

When all of the laboratory work, and other data is collected and collated we calculate the overall yield information for the various colored regions in each field. Since we have data on the yield and the soil we can make recommendations that give farmers a more accurate estimate of the nutrients that should be applied to the various regions of the field. Having identified areas of the field that don’t need fertilizer as well as those areas that may need more nutrients the farmer can better target the areas that need additional fertilizer and save on areas that need less. Some farms use the information to maximize production per acre so they can farm fewer acres. The point is that having accurate information allows each farm to manage the field in a way that best fits their need without guessing and without over applying nutrients and having them be lost and possibly cause pollution.

Currently this program is effective, but not affordable without grant funds from off-farm sources. There is insufficient demand from farmers in New England, so the cost for imagery is too high for an individual farm to justify. The grant project is paying to obtain the imagery, and introduce the technology to the farms. UConn Extension’s work allows us to understand the various costs and obstacles involved in adapting this process to New England farms, which tend to be much smaller and more widely scattered than Midwest farms. The team has purchased a drone and is working on programming hardware and training a pilot to fly the drone and turn photos into usable images. There is a significant amount of computer processing of imagery needed to create a field map usable for nutrient applications. This will be a large portion of the effort of the team for the 2017 crop season.

Greenhouse Nutrient Management

Michael's Greenhouse

Have your registered yet for the Practical Applications in Greenhouse Nutrient Management Program that will be held on  Tuesday, Sept 27 at the CT Ag Experiment Station in New Haven ? 

                Don’t miss this opportunity to: 

  • Update your ever needed skills on nutrient management
  • Obtain 4.75 pesticide recertification credits 
  • Learn from leading experts in the field and meet with your industry colleagues

                Early registration deadline is Sept 20th. Register one of three ways: 

Email: Leanne Pundt, at leanne.pundt@uconn.edu or Mail in registration form below or call 860-626-6855. I just need to know how many lunches to order!

See program below: and attached.  

Practical Applications in Greenhouse Nutrient Management

September 27, 2016

Jones Auditorium, the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station,

123 Huntington Street,

New Haven CT 

 9:30 – 10:00 Registration, Coffee Available

 10:00 – 10:30 USDA Crop Insurance options to manage farm risk, Joseph Bonelli, Associate Extension Educator, UConn Extension 

 10:30 – 10:45 Break

 10:45 – 11:45 How to Maintain, Calibrate and Clean your Fertilizer and Chemigation Injector, Lela Kelly, Dosatron International Lela will take you through why maintenance and calibration are so important, and show you how easy it can be.

 11:45-12:30 Lunch provided

 12:30- 1:45 Water and media testing, Rosa Raudales, Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut and Ryan Dickson, University of New Hampshire Rosa and Ryan will discuss the principles of in-house testing and demonstrate how to do it correctly.

 1:45- 2:00 Break

 2:00- 3:00 Selecting fertilizers: Step by Step, Rosa Raudales, Assistant Professor, University of ConnecticutPractical case studies on how to choose the right fertilizer and the right dose for your crops.

 3:00 – 4:00 pm Managing nutrient levels for container crops.  Ryan Dickson, University of New HampshireTrouble shooting up’s and down’s of pH and nutrient levels.

  * 4.75 Pesticide Recertification Credits have been approved in categories PA, 3A for attendees from CT, RI, MA, ME, NH and VT 

 

Directions:   123 Huntington Street, New Haven, CT  06504-2016 

From I-95:   North or South: Exit onto I-91 north in New Haven. Take Exit 6 (left exit) to Willow Street. From I-91:North or South: Take Exit 6 in New Haven to Willow Street.  Turn right onto Willow Street and proceed to the end. Turn right onto Whitney Avenue. Take the third left off Whitney Avenue (Huntington Street) and proceed up the hill. The Experiment Station is on the right just past the first cross street.

View program and form online at:  http://ipm.uconn.edu/documents/view.php?id=980 

Registration deadline: postmarked on or before Sept 20, 2016

 

All names ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­__________________________________________________________________________

Firm _______________________________________________________________________________

Address ______________________________________________________________________________

Town ________________________________________________________________________________

Phone _________________ Email: ___________________________________________________

Required                                           (Required for confirmation of registration)

 

Total Number Attending _____ x $25.00 per person ____ (by check only)  

Registration includes:  handouts, refreshments, lunch.  Make check payable to University of Connecticut.   Return this form and check to:  Leanne Pundt, University of Connecticut, Litchfield County Extension Center, 843 University Drive, Torrington, CT 06790-2635.

 For more information, contact: 

Leanne Pundt, UConn Extension, 860-626-6855, leanne.pundt@uconn.edu

Rosa Raudales, UConn, 860-486-6043, rosa.raudales@uconn.edu

This Program is a cooperative effort of UConn Extension, the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, CAES and the Risk Management Agency/USDA

An Equal Opportunity Employer and Program Provider. If requested by a program participant at least two weeks in advance, every effort will be made to provide special accommodations.

Sugaring Manure

water boiling interns sugaring manure sugaring manure2 sugaring manure

Connecticut has more manure nutrients than we need for our crops. UConn Extension Educator Rich Meinert and two summer interns spent Friday “sugaring” manure. Just like maple growers sugar sap by boiling away the water we will be sugaring liquid dairy manure from a screw press separator to remove the water so that we can quantify the mass and more importantly the volume of the material that remains. In order to plan a meaningful strategy to move nutrients off of Connecticut farms and onto crops somewhere else, either in Connecticut or beyond, we need to know how much quantity we are talking about.