GROVER HILL, Ohio — After much consideration, Terry McClure agreed to have two test sites placed on his farms for the On-Field Ohio project. McClure’s farmland is in the Maumee River watershed, which drains into the Western Basin of Lake Erie and is one of Ohio’s more problematic watersheds.
The three-year project seeks to revise the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Ohio Phosphorous Risk Index. Libby Dayton, a soil scientist with the Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources, is conducting the study.
"Early on I was attending agricultural meetings with presenters talking about blue-green algae," said McClure, who is on the Soybean Council board and is a past president of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation.
"Many times they would say, ‘we don’t know what is causing it, X,Y, or Z.’"
Also, testing equipment is usually placed at the mouth of the river, the edge of the lake, or farther back up the tributaries. Results of water coming off the fields was estimated by modeling. For Dayton’s project, testing would be at the field’s edge.
McClure wasn’t questioning the modeling, but wondered what the reality might be under different scenarios. That persuaded him to take part.
"We thought about it a long time on our farm, whether we wanted to be involved," McClure said. "There is possibly a little bit of risk—you’re letting your information out that no one has ever had."
Farmers use so many different practices, McClure said. They concentrate on yield with the different practices, which they must do, but they also need to concentrate on how different practices affect runoff, how the nutrients are leaving the field.
"When I was a young man there was one way to farm: you plowed it up and you worked it down and you planted it," McClure said. "Now there are so many different systems and no one system is right or wrong on any given year but we should understand so that we can do better management."
"Should we apply our nutrients differently with different systems?" McClure said.
"If you’re in a pure never till system and you are spreading your fertilizer on top and it is (lying) on top of last year’s crop, is it at more risk for loss during a rain event? We don’t know."
Farmers understand they are part of the problem and are trying to learn more and be proactive, McClure said. Yet they’re not even certain about using less nutrient. "We keep records of the phosphate that is used," he said. "We know that farmers are applying less phosphate and have been for decades. At the same time, the dissolved reactive phosphate (DRP) is going up."
In water there are two kinds of phosphates - particulates which are eroded soil, as in a muddy stream and DRP. "For our corn to take up phosphate it has to become DRP," McClure said. "In the lakes it is like steroids for algae. We know we’re using less phosphate, and if you look at a chart for that same time that phosphate use has gone down, DRP in the lakes has gone up. Those are some of the things we just don’t know - there’s a lot to learn."
He agreed with Dayton that the program needs to go on longer than three years. "Shame on us if we get all of this set up and we don’t get a decade of information because the longer the data stream, the more valuable it is," he said.
