Cover Crop

Cover Crop Reporting

Another interesting project I was able to work on was cover crop reporting. Each year we drive all over the state to see how farmers are doing at keeping the soil covered to prevent wind and water erosion as well as keeping live roots constantly in the pedosphere.

Cover cropping is very dependent on what crop you are harvesting and whether you can get the cover crop established before the growing season comes to an end. For example if you are growing vegetables you may use the whole season to grow your crop. If you grow pumpkins until late in the season you have very little time to establish a cover crop. This type of growing and the lack of a cover crop throughout the winter can lead to soil nutrient and organic matter loss.

NRCS has a big push this year for aerial seeding of cover crops on corn and soy beans. The idea is to have a helicopter seed an active corn or soy field prior to harvest. This gives the cover crop time to get established while the corn is still growing. Then when the corn or soy is harvested it opens up the canopy giving the cover crop ample time to grow before the season ends.

Here are a couple of clips that help to explain the importance of cover crops and how they are aerially applied.

Soil Health and Cover Crop

Aerial Seeding

National Resource Inventory

NRI

National Resource Inventory is a statistical survey of land use and natural resource conditions and trends on U.S. non-Federal lands.  As an intern I was asked by the Massachusetts State Soil Scientist to assist in compiling and reporting NRI data for the western part of the state. This will help to generate a report which you can view an example of at:

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/technical/nra/nri/

This inventory is an import tool to see how land use is changing. It shows how we are losing prime farmland to other uses. Looking at the 2010 report MA lost nearly 57.2 thousand acres of prime farmland from 1982 to 2010.

The U.S. and MA state governments have programs to help to preserve prime farmland. One such program is the Agricultural Preservation Restriction Program (APR):

http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/agr/land-use/agricultural-preservation-restriction-program-apr.html

These programs help to keep prime farmland in agricultural use by paying for a permanent deed restriction that keeps that property in agricultural use in perpetuity. I was glad that he asked me to help with the project because I feel strongly about saving farms and farmland.

Field Day

UMass Agricultural Field Day

At the end of July I had another opportunity to be in the field and learn about the different aspects of agriculture. Each year UMass plans and executes the UMass Agricultural Field Day. It is a day long event to highlight the research they do in agriculture. It is held at the UMass Animal and Crop Research Center. Attendance is free and there is a lunch served between sessions.
If you follow the link you will see the too numerous to mention topics that are covered throughout the day. A few that I would like to highlight are:

• Organic Fertility
• GAP Certification
• Amending Soil with Biochar and Rock Dust
• Pig And Vegetable Intercropping

These subjects were well presented very interesting and you walk away with information you can use. There is something about being in a field and seeing things growing that can never be duplicated in the classroom.

IPM With UMass In North Amherst

Education is a huge part of my Pathways Internship. My mentor and supervisor are constantly sending me invites to attend classes and educational opportunities. So when UMass offered an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) field walk I couldn’t pass it up. The class took place on a local vegetable farm in North Amherst just off campus.

As we arrived at the farm there was a staff from the UMass Extension and some folks from the farm to greet us. We signed in and did some networking. There were UMass students, local farmers and out of state farmers attending. Everyone who is in attendance had a real interest in IPM because they know it is an integral part of resource conservation on cropland.

After introductions we first had to learn to identify what we are looking at. The concentration was on the Colorado Potato Beatle and the Flea Beatle. Both are present in North Amherst. Next we discussed what you do to control the pests and when to control them. The Economic Threshold and Economic Injury Level are one of the cornerstones of IPM. They give you real data to work with in terms of when to treat a crop to mitigate damage to that crop.

Enough talk so we headed into the potato field. As we arrived a lightning storm that had been looming sent us scrambling back to the barn where we finished the talk with a classroom version of a field walk using visual props and discussion.

All in all it was a very informative class. It was well run and when you walked away, you had some very useful information. I highly recommend it to anyone.

EQIP Ranking

An internship with NRCS is not always adventures in the field. You have to pay your dues and attend important meetings like the one in June. On the agenda was ranking the different Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) applications. Under EQIP NRCS will cost share with the farmer or land owner to put conservation practices on the land. As the applications come in from the general public they are categorized under different subaccounts. These subaccounts have specified budgets.

The 2014 Farm Bill allotted over $9.5 m in EQIP funds for the state of Massachusetts. These funds will be spent on things like:

• Farm Energy Efficiency
• Organic Certification Assistance
• Water Quality
• Conservation Activity Plans
• Cropland
• Farmstead
• NE/NY Forestry Initiative
• Pasture and Hayland

I happily note that there is a separate subaccount that has its own line item in the budget for Historically Underserved (HU) individuals. This category is made up of:

• Beginning Farmer
• Limited Resource Farmer
• Socially Disadvantaged Farmer
• Tribal Indians

Because they have been historically underserved; this line allots specific funding for those who qualify for this fund code yet might not make the cut under a general ranking subaccount.

All the players attend this meeting, Planners, District Conservationists and Program Managers from the state office all come together to rank each application in a fair and equitable way. It was an eye opener for me to see the inner workings of the ranking process.

The Peoples Garden

As an intern you must take on collateral duties to alleviate the collateral workload for the office. I have taken on multiple collateral duties to include The Peoples Garden, Feds Feed Families and Combined Federal Campaign. Each of these duties provides its own set of challenges as well as rewards. I will post about the others later. Right now I would like to write about The Peoples Garden.

This will be my 4th year as The Peoples Garden coordinator. The Peoples Garden has been a very rewarding program. It seems to morph each year, reinventing itself yet fulfilling the same mission of feeding people at the Amherst Survival Center fresh vegetables from our raised bed garden.

You can tell the real gardeners in the office. Every year donating vegetable plants, weeding, watering and harvesting. Without these true gardeners our garden would not be so productive. We also have great technical assistance from our soil scientist as well as our agronomist. It really takes a team to make our Peoples Garden the success that it is.

What I did Last Summer

My summer internship and the summer itself are flying by. With so much doing there hasn’t been enough time for blogging. So keep an eye out as I catch up on this blog with stories about my agricultural adventures this summer.

I would like to start at the beginning. In May of 2014 I applied for and was offered a Pathways Internship by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). I am currently a student at the University of Massachusetts Stockbridge School studying for my BS in Sustainable Food and Farming. It is my hope that when I graduate I will land a job with NRCS as a Soil Conservationist.

This blog is part of my Summer Session 2 Agricultural Practicum at UMass. The blog will serve two purposes. One, it will record all of my hard work and learning experiences for credit towards my degree. Two, I hope that it will be used as a tool for up and coming students who might be interested in what an internship at NRCS might look like.

I plan to break up my experiences into three categories, Conservation Planning, Engineering and Soils. All of these categories are directly tied to farming and farming operations. Some of the conservation planning under the Wetland Restoration Easements (WRE), however, is only tied to agriculture through the return of ag land to its natural state of wetland.

The experiences I have with each one of these categories are varied. I delved deeply into some aspects of all three categories and on other fieldwork, barely scratched the surface of what it really takes to put conservation practices on the land.

The farther I travel towards this field of work called Soil Conservation, the more I understand how truly multifaceted it is. I am slowly realizing it will take years to master.