2015 CT Farmer Innovator Award Recipient Charlie Rominger Recognition Ceremony

December 2, 2015

Video available at YouTube

The story about Charlie Rominger is posted in a blog article below.  A video of the recognition ceremony honoring Charlie Rominger as the 2015 Conservation Tillage Farmer Innovator Award recipient is available at the following YouTube site.

 https://youtu.be/1u4irdOdlgo 

 

 

 

 

 

Sandoval-Solis Hydrology Lab graduate students using drone to capture aerial video data of + and – cover crop study field at Sano Farms in Firebaugh, CA, February 5, 2016

Dr. Samuel Sandoval-Solis and Hydrology PhD student, Alyssa DeVincentis, and two other graduate students from the Sandoval-Solis lab at UC Davis conducted a whirlwind visit of four farm cover crop fields and the longstanding NRI project field in Five Points as part of their reconnaissance survey tour of the San Joaquin Valley on Friday, February 5^th.

The group visited cover crop evaluation sites at the Five Points farm of Scott Schmidt, the Firebaugh farm of Alan Sano and Jesse Sanchez, the Madera farm of Kirk Texeira and Lucero Farms, and the pistachio orchard of Jacob Sheely near Lemoore. Alyssa and Samuel are part of a team that also includes UCD Hydrologist, Daniele Zaccaria, UC Merced Climate Change scientist, Tapan Pathak, UCCE Advisors Dan Munk, Gene Miyao, and Roger Duncan, and Jeff Mitchell, of UCD's Department of Plant Sciences. This team is conducting work to evaluate tradeoffs of winter cover crops with respect to soil water depletions, costs, carbon capture and soil improvement in a range of orchard and tomato production systems. A variety of data collection efforts are now underway including the use of soil water content sensors and dataloggers, neutron probe soil water content determinations, and commercial field ET measurement instrumentation that is also being installed at the study sites. The project began in the fall of 2015 and hopes to expand to additional sites that will be intensively monitored during the coming two years. Additional information on the preliminary findings for the 2015 – 2016 winter period will be available soon.

 

About thirty CASI members were treated to a fascinating discussion of some of the very innovative work that Greg Butler, Research and Development Director of the South Australian No-till Farmers Association, and the more than 500 Australian farmers who make up SANTFA are doing to be proactive and to create “real innovation in real time.”  SANTFA is a non-profit farmer-driven organization that develops and shares information on high quality no-till systems and creates a wide variety of quite impressive technological advances in the “broad-acre,” or field crop farming systems that are common throughout the state of South Australia.  A key aspect of SANTFA is the close relations the organization has with private sector partners and their true emphasis on improved, practical and profitable production systems.  Accompanying Greg at the seminar that took place on the UC Davis campus on Friday, January 22, were Dylan Howes of FLOW, an ultra-high pressure water jet technology company, and Neil Wahlgren, of CoolPlanet, a biocarbon production company.

Butler presented recent work that he and SANTFA partners are conducting using ultra-high pressure water jet technology to cut residues as part of overall residue management systems, and also on precision application of engineered biochar.  Because over 85 or so percent of farmers in this region of Australia already use no-tillage seeding techniques, the emphasis of SANTFA is now looking to address specific problems that their conservation agriculture practices have with truly integrated residue, fertilizer, weed, and water management systems. 

A video of Greg's presentation is available at the CASI website at https://videocenter.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/videos/video/185/.

Several CASI members recently took part in a planning workshop that was held at the University of Arizona's Maricopa Agricultural Center to consider and develop opportunities for working together on joint research aimed at coupling advanced technologies and practices for high efficiency and resource-conserving vegetable production systems for California, Arizona, and New Mexico.  28 people took part in the meeting that included farmers, university and NRCS participants from these three states along with a colleague from Iowa State University.  The meeting occurred as a follow-up to a similar sort of regional planning session that was held in Salt Lake City, UT in 2014 that brought together farmer, NRCS and land-grant university representatives from 18 of the western states in the US to share information related to high residue, conservation agriculture production systems.  The goals of the meeting in AZ were to develop ideas and a joint research proposal aimed at maintaining the competitiveness of vegetable farms in these three states while simultaneously developing practices that address uncertainties of climate change, energy costs, and labor and water shortages.  The practices that were discussed are designed to increase production system efficiency while also providing opportunities for testing alternatives that have not yet been applied to the production challenges of high-value vegetable production systems such as the use of a variety of conservation agriculture practices and principles that have been successfully been used in several regions of the world for various agronomic crops.

 

To view a short clip of some of the people attending this important planning meeting click the link below.