By Scott Weybright
A new study at Washington State University will look at a variety of soil health changes in lands enrolled in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
WSU scientists will use a USDA Farm Service Agency grant to track soil health, wheat yields, and soil microbiology for lands used in CRP, a voluntary program that encourages farmers and landowners to convert highly erodible and other environmentally sensitive acreage to vegetative cover. The program pays landowners to take land out of production for the duration of a contract, normally 10 to 15 years, with the option for contract renewal.
The research will look at the best ways to convert CRP lands back into use for crop production while keeping soils healthy, examining the benefits of conservation enrollment for soil. The WSU scientists will then share their findings with farmers to help them make decisions about their own land.
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