Posts Tagged: nitrogen

UC hosts community forums on nitrogen management

Doug Parker, director of UC ANR's California Institute for Water Resources, highlighted the importance of ensuring safe drinking water for residents of California's rural communities at a nitrogen management forum June 12 in Sacramento, reported Capital Public Radio.

"Currently there's a real problem of safe drinking water -- and we need to fix that system, and we need to do that quickly," Parker said. "But separately from that is how do we make sure we don't continue to have this problem in the future."

The Sacramento forum was one of two being hosted by the California Institute for Water Resources and the CDFA Fertilizer Research and Education Program to explore solutions to nitrate in groundwater and the role of policy in addressing the issue.

The second forum is from 1 to 5 p.m. June 18 at the Tulare County UC Cooperative Extension office, 4437 South Laspina St., Tulare. The forum is free and open to the public. Advance registration is required. For more information, see the Managing Agricultural Nitrogen website.

UC nitrate *quick test* protects water quality

Lettuce farmers can use less fertilizer - saving money, cutting back water use and reducing nitrate groundwater contamination risk  - without sacrificing crop yield by employing a "quick test" developed by UC Cooperative Extension, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

With the quick test, growers can determine how much nitrogen is in the soil and use only as much fertilizer as their lettuce needs to grow.

UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor Michael Cahn told reporter Julia Scott that he helped one company use 70 pounds less fertilizer per acre and get the same yield.

The Chronicle story was focused on imposing regulations to ease water nitrate contamination in California. Cal State East Bay earth and environmental science professor Jean Moran pointed to agriculture as the primary source of the problem.

"It covers a much larger area, it's a constant input of nitrates in groundwater and you have constant irrigation and over-irrigation, which drives the nitrates deeper into the groundwater," Moran was quoted. "But if you look for new evidence of regulations on nitrate issues in groundwater, you just don't find them."

Lettuce irrigation.

Going beyond the green bag

When the earth is passed on to the next generation, will those who last inhabited the space do so with any regrets? This grand question was asked by the director of UC's Agricultural Sustainability Institute, Tom Tomich, in an op-ed piece published in yesterday's Huffington Post.

Leaving with "no regrets," he wrote, goes beyond cloth grocery bags and compact fluorescent light bulbs. And for the ag community, "no regrets" strategies are particularly important.

"Agriculture is the largest industry in California and is among the most vulnerable to climate fluctuations," Tomich wrote. "Climate's impacts on our farms and ranches directly affect our economy, jobs and our food supply."

Tomich's essay touched on three key areas where agriculture impacts environment:

• Water - Farmers need the technology to produce more food with less water, homeowners and business should continue to increase water efficiency and water should be left over to ensure healthy rivers.
  
  
• Energy and nitrogen fertilizer - Nitrogen fertilizer helped drive spectacular increases in food production, but manufacturing the fertilizer gobbles energy. The nitrogen also holds risks as a greenhouse gas and source of water pollution.
  
  
• Farmland preservation and healthy children - Preservation of farmland could reduce sprawl and perhaps, along with "smart growth," foster walkable communities in the West.

Tomich said the "no regrets" strategies require Americans to raise their awareness about the links between food, agriculture and climate and he praised California's leadership on the issue, which was demonstrated by passage of the state's Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006.

"California's actions can't substitute for a comprehensive global approach," Tomich concluded, "but they are a start we won't regret."

Tom Tomich

More on global warming

Escaped nitrogen from agricultural production has "huge potential to contribute to climate change," according to the director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, Tom Tomich. He was quoted in "The Smog Blog," written by Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee, in a post about $2.8 million in grant funding ASI received to research agricultural nitrogen. The story appeared in his blog last week and on the front page of the newspaper's Local News section yesterday.

According to an ASI news release announcing the new funding, many people, including politicians. are unaware that escaped nitrogen from agricultural production affects climate change and air, water and soil quality.

Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen by volume, according to the Wikipedia entry on the chemical element. And in fact, "Mike D." commented on Grossi's blog posting, "I'm a bit confused as to how nitrogen could be a greenhouse gas when it already exists in abundance in the atmosphere."

This confusion perhaps underscores the need for more research and extension efforts on the topic. According to the ASI news release, data on agricultural nitrogen pollution are limited, and some nitrogen pollution forms are difficult to monitor. Measurements can be labor-intensive and expensive and are influenced by variables such as weather conditions, irrigation timing and method, and crop-specific fertilization practices.

I trust that, as the ASI's research is conducted and results are publicized, much more information about the role of agricultural nitrogen in global warming will become widely available.

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