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OSU educators garner sustainable ag info at Michigan center
Late in August, 30 Ohio State University representatives endured a bus excursion to the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) located in Hickory Corners, Mich. County Extension representatives from across the state, research station employees, state level faculty members and students made up the group. Joining us were similar people from six other Midwest states.

We were seeking more knowledge about sustainable agriculture. Alan Sundermeier and Mike Hogan, co-coordinators of OSU’s Sustainable Agriculture Team organized the trip to one of the leading such research centers in the country.

Why did we go? We Buckeyes ventured into Spartan country to learn from the experiences of researchers working on long- and short-term field experiments. Research ranged from cover crops to continuous corn verses crop rotation and from comparing tillage to long-term no-tillage. Biomass research is looking at switchgrass, traditional crop residues, 10- to 20-year production from hybrid poplar trees and more. KBS is also home to a 120-cow pasture based dairy with a robotic milking center.

About 50 percent of the lower 48 states is under agricultural management, with about half of this in row crops. KBS researchers are asking fundamental questions about how these ecosystems function: how do microbes and other soil organisms make nutrients available to plants; how are pest populations kept in check, how does plant biodiversity contribute to ecosystem productivity; what regulates the loss of nitrogen and other pollutants from these ecosystems; and how can the ecosystem services provided by agriculture be valued.

Their leaders state that KBS research is designed to answer the broader question of how agronomic management, based on ecological concepts, can more effectively substitute for agriculture’s reliance on chemical subsidies.

Some of what we learned from the basic research conducted at KBS will provide us with new perspectives on soil health. Several times during discussions, our conventional agriculture additions of commercial fertilizer, crop protection products and livestock manures were questioned by KBS staff. However, when asked about poor looking crop plots being sustainable, economically, our host researchers could not always adequately address stated concerns. More than one fellow visitor pointed out that feeding the world requires technological advances unacceptable to many leaders of the sustainable agriculture movement.

We all recognize that for crop and livestock farmers to be truly sustainable, use of research like that generated at the Kellogg Biological Station needs to be practical. We were fortunate to have Natalie Rector, Michigan State University Extension’s statewide nutrient management coordinator, with us much of the time. With various organic plots exhibiting nutrient deficiencies, Rector suggested nutrient supplementation via manure as a possible solution. Historically, pre-commercial fertilizer crop production always included a livestock component for crop nutrients. With at least some of the basic research folks, there seemed to be a strong aversion to the use of animal produced, organic fertilizer.
9/9/2009