- Author: Ben Faber
Please register for Nitrogen Management Plan Self-Certification Webinar on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 17/18, 2020 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST at:
https://attendee.gototraining.com/r/2352520986463929090
This workshop is intended for growers, and their representatives, who are looking to learn more about nitrogen management planning and/or intend to self-certify their plans. It is also a good education on how nitrogen works in our environment and how it can be managed. The program is sponsored by CA Department of Food and Agriculture, University of CA Cooperative Extension and the Ventura County Irrigated Lands Group.
Attendees must participate in both sessions to receive education credit and qualify to take the online certification test after the final webinar session.
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the training.
This workshop will open a half hour early at 8:30am, to allow attendees to test their connection and access the GoTo Training webinar link.
Email organizer: training@lwa.com
Image of nitrogen deficient avocado leaf on left
- Author: Ben Faber
Nitrogen is the nutrient plants require in the largest quantity for better yield and quality. Nitrogen is also an integral constituent of proteins, nucleic acids, chlorophyll, co-enzymes, phytohormones,and secondary metabolites, and its deficiency can negatively affect yield. Nitrogen-deficient plants are stunted, with narrow, small, pale leaves. Excessive N application increases vegetative growth and susceptibility to diseases that infect fruit, kill spurs, and reduce yields in subsequent years. Managing nitrogen is critical to tree health and productivity, and active understanding of how it plays in the general horticulture of the tree is critical.
In response to evidence of nitrate pollution of groundwater in California, the various Regional Water Quality Control Boards have adopted regulatory programs to protect groundwater resources that requires growers to use best nitrogen (N) management practices to reduce nitrate loading. As a help to growers, this publication has been created to optimize N use efficiency in citrus and avocado crops with the outcome of reducing N leaching.
- Author: Ben Faber
Every little bit helps, and the Ventura County Resource Conservation District might help some Ventura growers.
The Ventura County Resource Conservation District (VCRCD) would like to remind agricultural producers about an existing incentives program, the Calleguas Creek Watershed Agricultural Management Measures Program (CCWAMMP). The purpose of CCWAMMP is to improve water quality in the Frontal Pacific and Revolon Slough subwatersheds of Calleguas Creek. To achieve this, VCRCD, with funding from the State Water Resources Control Board, will reimburse growers a portion of the costs needed to implement certain agricultural management measures (MMs) and irrigation efficiency upgrades. If you are a grower in the coastal region of the Calleguas Creek Watershed, please submit an on-line CCWAMMP Interest Survey to VCRCD today! The CCWAMMP interest form is available here.
VCRCD is also pleased to announce that a new incentives program, Interactive Irrigation Management to Reduce the Leaching of Nitrogen (MRLN), is expected to start April 2020. The goal of the MRLN program is to help agricultural producers build irrigation and fertilizer schedules that reduce the potential for nitrogen leaching. To achieve this goal, VCRCD will provide participants incentives for lysimeters and soil moisture sensing equipment as well as free irrigation and nutrient management technical assistance. Specifically, VCRCD will work with the landowner and agronomy professionals (such as Cooperative Extension staff) to evaluate the lysimeter and soil moisture data and provide the participating landowner guidance concerning potential irrigation and fertilization improvements. If you are near a nitrogen-impacted waterway in Ventura County, please submit a MRLN interest form here.
For more information about either of these programs, please contact Jamie Whiteford at jamiewhiteford.vcrcd@gmail.com.
“Wood chip mulches will decrease soil nitrogen and spread pathogens” A Misunderstanding that is addressed below by:
Chalker-Scott, L. , Extension Specialist And Associate Professor, Washington State University
Downer, A.J., Farm Advisor, University of California
With chronic drought and/or record-breaking summer temperatures making it increasingly important to conserve water, many gardeners and groundkeepers are using landscape mulches. The ideal landscape mulch not only moderates soil temperature and conserves water, but also:
- reduces compaction;
- provides nutrients;
- enhances plant growth;
- provides habitat for beneficial insects;
- helps control weeds, pests and disease; and
- reduces the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
In addition, landscape mulches should be readily available, affordable, and easy to apply and replace. A review of the literature on landscape mulches (Chalker-Scott, 2007) determined that organic mulches are overall the best choice, with deep layers of coarse woody material providing most or all of the above-listed benefits. Arborist wood chips (created from leaves and branches chipped up by tree service companies) are a particularly good option as they are generally inexpensive and easy to obtain anywhere trees are managed.
Fortunately, none of these concerns are validated by research. Here are some brief explanations (Chalker-Scott, 2007) targeted to our audience:
- Wood chips will not draw nitrogen from the soil unless they are incorporated into it. When used as mulch, arborist chips have no effect on underlying soil nitrogen levels, except to increase them over time.
- Wood chip mulches, even those made from diseased trees, will not transmit pathogens to healthy plant roots. If diseased chips are incorporated into the soil they could infect plant roots, but field evidence of this is rare. Arborist chips that are stockpiled even for a few days undergo severe pathogen reduction through microbial attack within the pile (Downer et al., 2008).
- Wood chips, or any other organic mulch, will not change the pH of the soil. The soil volume is vast, and any acidification would occur only at the mulch-soil interface where it would quickly be neutralized.
- Wood chips, even those made from black walnut or cedar, will not kill landscape plants. There is no reliable evidence that chemical inhibition from decaying wood actually occurs in a landscape situation.
- Wood chip mulches do not lend themselves to tunnel building like landscape fabric and other sheet mulches do: they collapse. Termites do not eat wood chips unless they have no choice; they are negatively affected by some of the chemicals wood contains. In fact, arborist chip mulches house a number of beneficial insects and other species that naturally control pests.
For arborist wood chip mulches to be the most effective (Chalker-Scott, 2007), they should be:
- coarse – no less than ½” diameter – so water and air can move freely through them;
- applied as soon as possible after chipping both to maximize the materials available to microbes and to capture the nutrients released by their activity in the soil; and
- maintained at a depth of at least 4” to prevent weed growth.
Read on:
- Author: Ben Faber
For centuries, the prevailing science has indicated that all of the nitrogen on Earth available to plants comes from the atmosphere. But a study from the University of California, Davis, indicates that more than a quarter comes from Earth's bedrock.
The study, to be published April 6 in the journal Science, found that up to 26 percent of the nitrogen in natural ecosystems is sourced from rocks, with the remaining fraction from the atmosphere.
Before this study, the input of this nitrogen to the global land system was unknown. The discovery could greatly improve climate change projections, which rely on understanding the carbon cycle. This newly identified source of nitrogen could also feed the carbon cycle on land, allowing ecosystems to pull more emissions out of the atmosphere, the authors said.
"Our study shows that nitrogen weathering is a globally significant source of nutrition to soils and ecosystems worldwide," said co-lead author Ben Houlton, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and director of the UC Davis Muir Institute. "This runs counter the centuries-long paradigm that has laid the foundation for the environmental sciences. We think that this nitrogen may allow forests and grasslands to sequester more fossil fuel CO2 emissions than previously thought."
WEATHERING IS KEY
Ecosystems need nitrogen and other nutrients to absorb carbon dioxide pollution, and there is a limited amount of it available from plants and soils. If a large amount of nitrogen comes from rocks, it helps explain how natural ecosystems like boreal forests are capable of taking up high levels of carbon dioxide.
But not just any rock can leach nitrogen. Rock nitrogen availability is determined by weathering, which can be physical, such as through tectonic movement, or chemical, such as when minerals react with rainwater.
That's primarily why rock nitrogen weathering varies across regions and landscapes. The study said that large areas of Africa are devoid of nitrogen-rich bedrock while northern latitudes have some of the highest levels of rock nitrogen weathering. Mountainous regions like the Himalayas and Andes are estimated to be significant sources of rock nitrogen weathering, similar to those regions' importance to global weathering rates and climate. Grasslands, tundra, deserts and woodlands also experience sizable rates of rock nitrogen weathering.
GEOLOGY AND CARBON SEQUESTRATION
Mapping nutrient profiles in rocks to their potential for carbon uptake could help drive conservation considerations. Areas with higher levels of rock nitrogen weathering may be able to sequester more carbon.
"Geology might have a huge control over which systems can take up carbon dioxide and which ones don't," Houlton said. "When thinking about carbon sequestration, the geology of the planet can help guide our decisions about what we're conserving."
MYSTERIOUS GAP
The work also elucidates the "case of the missing nitrogen." For decades, scientists have recognized that more nitrogen accumulates in soils and plants than can be explained by the atmosphere alone, but they could not pinpoint what was missing.
"We show that the paradox of nitrogen is written in stone," said co-leading author Scott Morford, a UC Davis graduate student at the time of the study. "There's enough nitrogen in the rocks, and it breaks down fast enough to explain the cases where there has been this mysterious gap."
In previous work, the research team analyzed samples of ancient rock collected from the Klamath Mountains of Northern California to find that the rocks and surrounding trees there held large amounts of nitrogen. With the current study, the authors built on that work, analyzing the planet's nitrogen balance, geochemical proxies and building a spatial nitrogen weathering model to assess rock nitrogen availability on a global scale.
The researchers say the work does not hold immediate implications for farmers and gardeners, who greatly rely on nitrogen in natural and synthetic forms to grow food. Past work has indicated that some background nitrate in groundwater can be traced back to rock sources, but further research is needed to better understand how much.
REWRITING TEXTBOOKS
"These results are going to require rewriting the textbooks," said Kendra McLauchlan, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which co-funded the research. "While there were hints that plants could use rock-derived nitrogen, this discovery shatters the paradigm that the ultimate source of available nitrogen is the atmosphere. Nitrogen is both the most important limiting nutrient on Earth and a dangerous pollutant, so it is important to understand the natural controls on its supply and demand. Humanity currently depends on atmospheric nitrogen to produce enough fertilizer to maintain world food supply. A discovery of this magnitude will open up a new era of research on this essential nutrient."
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UC Davis Professor Randy Dahlgren in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources co-authored the study.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences and its Division of Environmental Biology, as well as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Photo: The stuff that makes leaves green