A new agricultural research project is looking for ways to prevent phosphorus in manure from running off into the Bosque and Leon Watersheds. The challenge is to do so without sinking the region’s dairy industry.
Funded by $800,000 in grant monies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency, the project pools the efforts of experts from the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Texas Cooperative Extension and Tarleton State University.
At stake is not only preserving water quality in Central Texas, but reinforcing an industry crucial to the central Texas economy, said Dr. Barry Lambert. "The city of Waco, downstream from the dairies on the Bosque River watershed, has placed much of the blame for (Lake) Waco water quality issues on the dairy industry in orth-Central Texas," said Lambert, dairy nutritionist with a joint appointment with the Experiment Station and Tarleton State. The issue centers not on the manure itself, but primarily concerns phosphorus, a component of manure.
In light of these facts, the city of Waco, which gets most of its drinking water from the Bosque River, filed suit against 14 Central Texas dairies in April 2004, Lambert said.
In Central Texas, phosphorus pollution has been a controversial issue, for dairies are not the only source of phosphorus run-off, Lambert said.
Natural decay of any organic material or other agricultural activities can also contribute to phosphorus run-off. It’s an accepted fact that home lawn and garden fertilizers, which are typically over-applied, are also a significant source of phosphorus run-off, he said.
Muddying the waters further, many of the federal and state environmental regulations are based on soils, climate and forage cropping systems that have little in common with those in Central Texas, said Dr. James Pierre Muir, Experiment Station forage research physiologist. "If you add assumption on top of supposition, you wind up with legislation and litigation based on very little data," said Muir, who is also a member of the research project. And Central Texas dairies are caught in between the legislation and suits, he said. Muir, Lambert and the rest of the research project team believe the answer lies in the way small changes in dairy farm management can result in wholesale reduction of phosphorus run-off.
Over the next three years, they will examine:
Many of these systems have been tried in part, Muir said, but what makes this project unique is the "whole-farm" approach. Rather than just looking at how a single change affects phosphorus buildup and runoff, researchers will investigate how the various strategies reinforce one another.
"It’s really a matter of fine-tuning a system that isn’t necessarily broken but could run better," Muir said. "We have also included the dairymen as full partners in the design, implementation and interpretation of research and subsequent outreach. It is, after all, their dairies."
Along the way, the team will collect data that can be used to write regulations that reflect the "real world," Muir said. Another factor that makes the research project different from those that came before is this real-world nature, Lambert said.
"We’re doing this work on real, operating dairies. It’s not something confined to a laboratory," Lambert said. "(We will be) tracking phosphorus from the time it enters the farm until it leaves it."
Robert Burns | EurekAlert!
Ammonium nitrogen input increases the synthesis of anticarcinogenic compounds in broccoli
26.04.2017 | University of the Basque Country
New data unearths pesticide peril in beehives
21.04.2017 | Cornell University
More and more automobile companies are focusing on body parts made of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP). However, manufacturing and repair costs must be further reduced in order to make CFRP more economical in use. Together with the Volkswagen AG and five other partners in the project HolQueSt 3D, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) has developed laser processes for the automatic trimming, drilling and repair of three-dimensional components.
Automated manufacturing processes are the basis for ultimately establishing the series production of CFRP components. In the project HolQueSt 3D, the LZH has...
Reflecting the structure of composites found in nature and the ancient world, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have synthesized thin carbon nanotube (CNT) textiles that exhibit both high electrical conductivity and a level of toughness that is about fifty times higher than copper films, currently used in electronics.
"The structural robustness of thin metal films has significant importance for the reliable operation of smart skin and flexible electronics including...
The nearby, giant radio galaxy M87 hosts a supermassive black hole (BH) and is well-known for its bright jet dominating the spectrum over ten orders of magnitude in frequency. Due to its proximity, jet prominence, and the large black hole mass, M87 is the best laboratory for investigating the formation, acceleration, and collimation of relativistic jets. A research team led by Silke Britzen from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has found strong indication for turbulent processes connecting the accretion disk and the jet of that galaxy providing insights into the longstanding problem of the origin of astrophysical jets.
Supermassive black holes form some of the most enigmatic phenomena in astrophysics. Their enormous energy output is supposed to be generated by the...
The probability to find a certain number of photons inside a laser pulse usually corresponds to a classical distribution of independent events, the so-called...
Microprocessors based on atomically thin materials hold the promise of the evolution of traditional processors as well as new applications in the field of flexible electronics. Now, a TU Wien research team led by Thomas Müller has made a breakthrough in this field as part of an ongoing research project.
Two-dimensional materials, or 2D materials for short, are extremely versatile, although – or often more precisely because – they are made up of just one or a...
20.04.2017 | Event News
18.04.2017 | Event News
03.04.2017 | Event News
26.04.2017 | Materials Sciences
26.04.2017 | Agricultural and Forestry Science
26.04.2017 | Physics and Astronomy