Dusty and I traveled to the Northe East of Missouri today with Ranjith Udawatta.
We visited the Ross Jones Site, an 18yr old Agroforestry site with Maple trees and alley crops of oats. The trees are now very large on the 40f x 40ft (18mx18m) site and alley crop prodiuction is now sufferingh.hoever the site was established to study soil effects and water competetion between the trees and the alley crop.
Visited the Greenley experimental station and looked at a very long term watershead management experiment comparing coontour buffers with either (a) no buffer (b) grass strip bufferes every 30m (c) gras buffers and agroforestry every 30m. All set up on a very large scale with automatic flumes catching all water etc. Not suprisingly water catchment, sediment deposition, Nutrient and pesticide capture were much better in the trees/grass strip treatment. I was very impressed with the scale and scope of the science being undertaken which puts real data on hoe benefitial AF can be.
Spent some time talking with the farm manager and agronomist - seems we face the same issues the world over.
Had lots of productive discussions on the travel to and frrom the sites. Back at Columbia I visited 'Sanbourn Field' - the site of the longest running soil science experiments from the 1800's and the site whare the 'Universal Soil Loss Equation' was developed - rather a seminal moment for a soil science person like me!
Early evening visited a farmers market with Dusty and then spent a very pleasant evening with his family, with bugers on the BBQ and cold beer to wash them down....the latter neded since most of the day it was 34 deg 94F with 80% humidity...you step outside the office/house/car and its like someone turned on a massive fan heater!
Spotted an interesting mailbox on a farm who had an aerial spraying plane and found a street named after me also
No comments:
Post a Comment