Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between USDA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Minnesota to develop a new state conservation program for agriculture. The program is designed to increase the voluntary adoption of conservation practices by farmers and ranchers that protect local rivers, streams and other waters by reducing fertilizer … Read More
January 31 Deadline for USDA Conservation Innovation Grants
January 31, 2012 is the deadline to submit project pre-proposals for fiscal year 2012 Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Pre-proposals support large-scale demonstration projects that test and prove original approaches to conserving America’s private lands. “These conservation grants continue to generate exciting new ideas that help farmers and ranchers run sustainable and profitable … Read More
Farm Program Atlas
The USDA Economic Research Service has a Farm Program Atlas online for your searching pleasure. The Farm Program Atlas is a web-based interactive mapping tool that displays payment and participation data on major farm programs and covered commodities at the county level — to visualize how these Federal farm programs vary across the United States. Users can select maps displaying … Read More
USDA Incorporates 4R Nutrient Stewardship in New Nutrient Management Standard
TFI Fertilizer Institute (TFI) commended the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) for embracing 4R nutrient stewardship (the right nutrient source at the right rate, the right time, and in the right place) at the national level with its December 13 release of the national conservation practice standard for nutrient management. 4R Nutrient Stewardship is an innovative and science-based approach … Read More
Precision.AgWired.com: Making life a little simpler
Each month we look at different technologies that make our lives just a little easier. Sometimes it is great technological advancements is precision technologies… sometimes it’s the latest and greatest app for our smart phone and sometimes it is just making a tedious process a little less cumbersome. That’s the case this month. In this Precision.AgWired.com Podcast, sponsored by Ag … Read More
USDA to Conduct Chesapeake Bay Conservation Survey
USDA is conducting a survey for the 2011 National Resources Inventory (NRI) – Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to collect information from producers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed about farming and conservation practices on cultivated cropland. The information gathered from the survey will help USDA improve and strengthen technical and financial programs that help private landowners plan and adopt on-farm … Read More
Conservation Making Improvements in Great Lakes Region
A new USDA study shows that farmers using combinations of erosion-control and nutrient-management practices on cultivated cropland are reducing losses of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorous from farm fields and decreasing the movement of these materials to the Great Lakes and their associated waterways. “The Great Lakes Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) study confirms that good conservation planning and implementation have … Read More
USDA Could Use Some Precision Adoption
The latest report from USDA’s Economic Research Service on “Recent Adoption of Precision Agriculture” is about five years behind the times. The report heralds that agriculture is “On the Doorstep of the Information Age” – using mostly information from 2005-06. According to the report, “recent data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) show that use of yield monitors, often … Read More
Tracking Land Use with UAVs
The military started using them to safely check on enemy activity without putting troops in harms way, but Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now starting to be used for many civilian applications, especially in agriculture. USDA scientists are studying how UAVs may be used to keep an eye on changing land-use patterns across vast tracts of western rangeland. Ranchers, government … Read More
New Method Transforms Digital Cameras for Aerial Photography
Scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service have patented a way to transform commercial digital cameras to produce color infrared aerial photos that can measure the extent of vegetative cover. USDA has jointly patented the technology that can take an ordinary 12-megapixel camera sold without an internal filter that blocks near-infrared (NIR) light and then add a custom-made lens filter to … Read More