Central Plains Experimental Range
Ranchers have traditionally moved their cattle from the rangeland to feedlots in October in order to maximize their profits; a decision made based on rangeland conditions at that time of year. However, forecasting that move has become increasingly difficult in recent years due to changes in climate and highly variable precipitation timing and amounts.
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Jornada Experimental Range
Historically, farms produced both crops and livestock and recycled animal manure as fertilizers to boost their crop yields. Farms gradually became more specialized, resulting in excessive manure in animal production regions and nutrient loss to the environment. Hoping to reclaim traditional crop-livestock integration among and within farms, ARS researchers with the Range Management Research Unit in Las Cruces, NM, are promoting “manuresheds” to combat nutrient pollution while taking advantage of manure’s productive uses.
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Great Basin
In 2018-19, more than 13.5 million acres burned in more than 108,500 wildfires in the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Scientists at the ARS Northwest Watershed Research Center in Boise, ID, are investigating the effects of land use management practices on wildfires as part of USDA’s Long-Term Agroecosystem Research program. Researchers are looking into how targeted grazing on cheatgrass rangeland can create fuel breaks that may moderate wildfire behavior without impacting ecosystem health.
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Platte River/High Plains Aquifer
Renewable fuels are providing an economic boost to many rural economies. The need for bioenergy crops also has increased the demand for new “biofuel” crops that can succeed on marginal lands, where it is difficult or impossible to grow food crops.
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Texas Gulf
As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate and trap heat in our atmosphere, effective mitigation tactics are now more essential than ever. To help develop sustainable agriculture practices that align with this goal, ARS scientists at the Grassland Soil and Water Research Laboratory in Temple, TX, found that intercropping perennial herbaceous crops with trees successfully increased organic soil carbon levels. During their trials, the team intercropped switchgrass—a hardy perennial plant commonly found in prairies—with poplar trees and discovered that the combination was especially effective in sequestering carbon inside the soil. This discovery is particularly important because carbon sequestration, or storing carbon in plants and trees, can prevent carbon from rising to the atmosphere and becoming a greenhouse gas.
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Upper Mississippi River Basin – Ames
Researchers have found that converting a conventionally tilled field to a management system of planting cover crops and not tilling the soil improves the soil’s carbon balance with only minimal impact on the water balance. Conventionally tilled corn-soybean fields have a negative carbon balance, but reducing tillage and adding a cover crop shifts the carbon balance to a positive net ecosystem productivity.
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Upper Mississippi River Basin – Morris
Water contamination caused by the leaching of labile soil nutrients from corn-soybean cropping systems is a major agricultural challenge in the Midwest. This problem usually occurs during the fall and spring seasons, after soil is left bare between summer crops. Without crops to retain them, nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen are carried away from farmland in water from snowmelt, rainfall, or potentially irrigation. The lost nutrients ultimately end up polluting groundwater and surface waters.
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Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed
Weather prediction and modeling are fundamental to helping agriculture maintain its productivity under a changing climate. To this end, ARS researchers in Tucson, AZ, helped the United Kingdom improve the accuracy of its widely used weather-forecasting models. The United Kingdom’s Meteorological (Met) Office makes routine regional and global weather forecasts that are often used by the United States and many other countries. But the computer models had substantial errors in surface temperature, particularly over arid regions, which caused errors in the Met’s weather forecasts. To investigate why these errors occurred, ARS and the Met Office conducted a study at the ARS Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed, a 58-square-mile long-term research watershed in semi-arid southeastern Arizona.
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