The research team is led by Surendra Singh and includes plant pathologist Tim Paulitz and soil scientist Shikha Singh. The study is funded for three years at nearly $800,000.
“For this study, we’re using some land that’s been in CRP for 40 years,” said Surendra Singh, agronomist and director of WSU’s Lind Dryland Research Station. “Some of that land we will till, some will be no-till, and we’ll leave some untouched. Then we’ll compare the results to find the best ways to transition to cropland if a farmer wants to do that.”
Much of the acreage to be converted is at the WSU research station. The team will also convert some plots that have been used as cropland for many years into CRP to study and sample the soil changes in that direction.
In addition to WSU-owned research land, the team is working with growers at 16 sites in eastern Washington to test their CRP and crop land.
Three years isn’t quite enough time for a full encapsulation of CRP impact, but the team hopes initial findings will allow for future funding to continue the work for at least five or six crop cycles.
“We’ll look at wheat yields, grain quality, soil health, carbon dioxide emissions, and other soil microbial measurements,” Shikha Singh said.
Surendra Singh is unaware of any other studies in the dryland Pacific Northwest that look at soil health in CRP land, which is quite different from typical cropland.
“I know a farmer who took land out of CRP last year,” Surendra said. “When I felt the soil, I could feel that the clods were different from that of croplands. We want to measure what we put back into CRP to learn the rate of change.”
Putting land into CRP may help improve soil health, but it also means that land isn’t producing food, he said. “We want to see if we can make the benefits of conservation last longer when land is taken out of CRP,” Surendra said. “We don’t want to impact food production; we want to complement it.”
Source : wsu.edu