California Ag Network

Tag: Soil

  • Castanon’s 5th-Place Finish Leads Fresno State Soil Judging Team At Nationals

    Fresno, Calif., (April 17, 2018) – Fresno State senior Mark Castanon qualified for the International Soil Judging Contest in Rio de Janiero after finishing fifth overall among 88 individuals at the national competition. The Fresno State soil judging team placed 15th for its highest-ever team finish in the national competition.

    The National Collegiate Soils Contest was hosted by the University of Tennessee at Martin on March 22 and 23. Representatives from 22 of the nation’s most respected collegiate agriculture programs were tested in their ability to identify, evaluate, classify and describe soil profiles in individual and team competitions.

    Castanon will advance to the international contest from Aug. 7 to 11. The international competition is held every four years in conjunction with the World Congress of Soil Science meetings.

    The Fresno native was the top finisher from a university in the western United States with his combined score of 680 points, only 24 points behind winner Kelli Roush of Iowa State who scored 704 points.

    “Our team’s performance was a representation of all the hard work and dedication that we have put into making the soil judging team a reality at Fresno State,” Castanon said. “The team is thankful for all the support that we’ve received from our coaches, advisers and department staff to prepare us for these competitions with knowledge that will also be advantageous in our career paths.”

    Fresno State’s seven-person team also included plant science seniors Aldo Garcia (Shafter), Nancy Valdez (Wasco) and Ricardo Rodriguez-Baeza (Mendota); junior Georgina Reyes Solorio (Livingston); and freshmen Sandra Gaylord (Ivanhoe) and Vanessa Ramos (Porterville).

    To prepare for the event, the team members voluntarily met on Friday evenings and weekends to learn soil judging techniques and methodologies. The competition also exposed the plant science major students to southeastern soil conditions derived from wind-blown silt, coastal-plain sediment and fragipan layers.

    The University of Tennessee at Knoxville won the team contest with 2,566 points to edge Virginia Tech with 2,554 points.

    The event was sponsored by the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Soil Science Society of America.

    Complete results are available at http://bit.ly/FS18-natl-soil-judging-results, and more event information is available at http://bit.ly/FS18-JC-natl-soil-contest-info.

    The third-year team is coached by Michael Sowers and Dr. Phil Smith. Plant science faculty Dr. Dave Goorahoo and professor emeritus Dr. Bruce Roberts serve as team advisers.

    “Mark and the team’s finish was a true testament to all their hard work since they were competing against the nation’s top students, many of whom are taking advanced soil science classes or are majoring in the field,” Sowers said. “The team’s future is bright with each year’s improvement and the addition of two freshmen who quickly understood the concepts without any formal classes.”

    Sowers works as a Cascade Earth Sciences senior soil scientist and was a former soil judging team instructor for Delaware Valley College that won a national group soil judging title in 2011 and was the northeast regional champion in 2008 and 2010.

    Smith is an area USDA-NRCS soil scientist and previously served as a consulting soil scientist in the private sector.

    Under their guidance, the team finished 20th nationally in 2017 and 18th in 2016.

    Castanon, Garcia, Valdez and Reyes Solorio competed at the national event both previous years, while Rodriguez-Baeza competed in 2017.

    Fresno State’s highest individual honor in 2017 was Jagdeep Basi (Sanger) who placed 40th overall.

    Plant science faculty, staff and students also support soil judging and evaluation by hosting high school FFA state contests each spring on its campus farm – an event that Reyes Solorio placed first in 2015 when she was a high school senior

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  • Digging Deep: Exploring the Diversity of Soils in the Sacramento Valley

    Sacramento, Calif., (November 7, 2017) – Not more than three months on the job and Konrad Mathesius is hard at work bringing farmers together to discuss the unique challenges that Sacramento Valley farmers face. As the new UCCE agronomy advisor for Sacramento, Solano and Yolo counties, his role is designed specifically to help growers with their crop issues – pests, disease and fertility – but with a strong background in soil science, Mathesius hopes to shed light on the diversity of soils in the region and the unique management considerations that each necessitates.

    Participants gather around the first soil pit of the field tour, as Toby O’Geen provides a brief natural history of the land.

    In hopes of highlighting this diversity of soils and encouraging growers to dig a little deeper to better inform their management practices, Konrad enlisted the help of UCCE soil resource specialist Toby O’Geen to lead a field tour of three major soils in the southern Sacramento Valley. The event included three pit stops on two Yolo County farms and brought out a diversity of participants from USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service agents, to resource conservationists, to farmers and crop advisors.

    Kicking things off at Rominger Brother’s Ranch — a diversified family farm in Winters that grows everything from wine grapes to processing tomatoes to rice, wheat, corn, onions, alfalfa and hay — O’Geen took the audience on a journey back in time, describing the rich natural history of the former floodplain that has given rise to the rich, productive soils that support California agriculture today. After introducing himself as a pedologist, or a scientist who studies the nature and properties of soil, he went on to introduce the five soil forming factors and their role in molding initial (1) parent material (i.e. rocks), under the influence of (2) climate, (3) topography and (4) organisms and over a given period of (5) time into soils.

    Yolo County farmers and UC Cooperative Extension specialist Toby O’Geen, right,peer deep into the processes that formed the land just beneath their feet.

    Proving that soil scientists take the term “pit stop” literally, Mathesius shifted the conversation to a 1.5-meter deep hole in the ground, dug out the day before with a back hoe. Step by step, he walked participants through the process of analyzing a soil pit – cleaning the face, identifying horizons or individual layers and using the senses to assess soil properties and determine function. As he struck the face of the pit with a rock hammer, an audible difference was detected between the surface layers and the subsurface.

    Working backwards from the sound, he explained that the subsurface was significantly harder, which he attributed to a finer texture and ultimately identified as a clay pan, a restrictive layer that prevents roots from penetrating deeply and has the capacity to waterlog soils, due to poor drainage. O’Geen offered some tangible advice as to how to manage these soils, quipping that a deep rip would be no better than cutting butter with a knife (eventually it all just settles back into place) while likening a slip plow to a giant shank that just inverts the soil, mixing things to about a depth of 6 feet and permanently eliminating the problem.

    UCCE agronomy advisor Konrad Mathesius, left, talks soil texture and water-holding capacity.

    From there, Mathesius segued into a hands-on exercise to determine the soil texture, or percent distribution of various size particles, allowing participants to work on their pottery skills making balls and ribbons with the clay-rich soils.  Discussing the many functions that soil texture controls, led the conversation down a rabbit-hole around water holding capacity and how to calculate the range of plant available water for your soil.

    With the demos out of the way, they voyaged to the next pre-dug pit, bringing participants face to face with the harsh reality of soil heterogeneity. Just 300 feet away and it was as if we had ventured into another environment altogether, yet these soils formed in the same place, under the same climate and similar vegetation, but in a completely different time with slightly different starting material.

    By changing just a couple of the ingredients in the special sauce of soil formation the results are completely different featuring a clay dominant surface soil and entirely different water management challenges. And these aren’t just any clays, but a special class that swell and shrink as they wet and dry, oftentimes shearing roots under the pressure and creating a hospitable environment for disease to thrive.  O’Geen suggested trying to keep them in the sweet spot where they are consistently moist, but not wet, and never allowed to dry out. Unfortunately, there is no precise measurement to that formula, “you just have to be almost like an artist. It’s a lot of feel to it and the numbers sometimes just don’t work out. It just comes with years of experience. Its one of those native intelligence things that you just have to feel your way through,” he noted.

    Up close and personal with a soil pit, showing participants how to use basic tools of observation to assess soils!

    Caravanning 20 miles back towards Davis, the tour arrived at the third and final pit, located at Triad Farms, a tomato operation in Dixon. Well-drained, young and fertile, Yolo loam soils are the poster children of agriculture, owing in large part to regular deposits of silts from past flood events. With not many management challenges to speak of, conversation immediately shifted towards an undocumented challenge that farmers on the eastern side of the Sacramento Valley are all too familiar with – the unavailability of potassium, even under intensive fertilization regimes. While the jury is still out on the cause and while it contradicts what soil scientists expect to find in those regions, possible explanations were tossed around and O’Geen used the opportunity to stress the importance of speaking up about things growers or advisors see going on in their area. Turns out the USDA-NRCS is working on updating its inventory of soil surveys, documenting soils across the nation and is currently seeking input on what’s working for growers and where things are differing on the ground.

    Ultimately, in closing, Mathesius called for more engagement between the university, extension and growers. O’Geen reminded everyone that “You can really learn a lot by digging a hole, looking at stuff, and developing theories.  Sometimes you’re wrong, but they’re kind of fun to talk about.”

  • Powers of Microbes: UC Davis Graduate Students Get Creative to Teach Farmers About Soil

    Davis, Calif., (August 30, 2017) – If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s (or were a child at heart during that era), the famous Powers of Ten film likely left an indelible mark in your mind.

    The film starts with a couple lounging on a picnic blanket and zooms out to the outer reaches of the universe, then back in to peer into the microscopic world of the human body: from white blood cells to DNA, and finally down to the proton of a carbon atom.

    In its short 9-minute run time, Powers of Ten manages to inflame an existential angst about the size of a single human life while at the same time connecting the viewer to the beauty of the universe and the human body.

    As a high school student watching the video, it filled me with the same sense of awe that I felt the first time I heard Carl Sagan’s famous quote that “we are all made of star stuff.”

    Powers of Ten reminds us that looking at the world from different perspectives, from the very tiny to the immensely large, helps create a better understanding of the natural world, our place within it, and how we can impact it for good.

    Had Powers of Ten returned from outer space by zooming into a piece of soil rather than a the human body, it would have explored the billions of living creatures in one handful of soil, slowly scaling down from millipedes to earthworms to ants to nematodes to protozoa, and finally down to the soil’s bacteria and fungi that make up the base of the soil food web.

    The video might then have looked a lot like the recent workshop at the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility, which served as a science fair for farmers and researchers to learn about the minuscule but powerful soil microbe.

    Through hands-on demonstrations using everything from soccer balls to building blocks, sponges, and food coloring as props, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in UC Davis’ Soil Microbial Ecology Lab lead by soil microbiologist and professor Kate Scow explained the role and importance of these invisible players in soil to the people who depend on direct observation for much of their work: farmers.

    While farmers often have a baseline knowledge about soil microbiology and its importance on the farm, “the science is evolving so quickly at this point, that it can be hard to keep up,” said attendee Margaret Lloyd, UC Cooperative Extension advisor  who works with small-scale farmers in Yolo and Sacramento counties.

    The workshop coupled foundational principles of soil microbiology with practical on-farm management situations, making the case for farmers to actively consider soil bacteria, fungi, and other micro organisms in their decision-making process.

    Jessica Chiartas, a fourth-year graduate student in soil microbiology and one of the workshop organizers, is somewhat of a soil science evangelist.

    Her hope was to help workshop attendees better understand that “soils are not just physical, chemical systems. A majority of the processes that take place underfoot are biologically driven. Soils are living and breathing bodies and much like us, they need to be fed, covered, and protected from disturbance” in order to function in the long term.

    The scale of microbial activity in soil makes it challenging to help farmers dig into just what scientists are talking about when they talk about microbes.

    “It’s important to talk about the scale of microbes,” Chiartas said. “So much of what goes on in soils is mediated by microbes and the scale that they operate on is far different than the scale we measure them at. Our typical method of soil sampling and analysis is analogous to harvesting whole fields of crops, chopping them up, throwing them in a heap and then trying to glean information about the individual plants.”

    The presenters at the soil health workshop used vivid analogies to translate the abstract results of scientific research and hard-to-imagine scales into concrete, relatable concepts.

    A single gram of soil may contain a billion bacteria, and several miles of fungal hyphae, the web-like growth of fungus. Translated into human scale, the numbers are mind boggling.

    If a single microbe were a 6-foot-tall person, then a single millimeter of soil would be as tall as the empire state building. A typical soil bacterium contains as many DNA letters in its chromosome as two copies of “War and Peace.” A stack of copies of “War and Peace” equivalent to bacterial DNA from a single teaspoon of soil would be larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

    The metaphors of scale are a fun thought experiment, and they could provide a jumping-off point for a discussion between farmers and scientists essential for improving our current understanding of soil as a living system. Climate change is expected to amplify the  effects of soil erosion, compaction, nutrient leaching and other issues common in our current agricultural systems.

    “We need improved management that works with the soil ecosystem to increase crop production while enhancing soil health,” said Radomir Schmidt, a postdoctoral researcher and workshop organizer. ”That’s going to take a concerted effort and open dialog between farmers, scientists, and citizen scientists to discover, test, and implement these methods in the real world.”

    We are now in the era of “soil information revolution,” Schmidt said. As our knowledge of the soil microbiome expands, implementing this knowledge in agricultural practice is more and more possible.

    California Ag Network
    Postdoctoral researcher Radomir Schmidt discusses the scale and diversity of microbes in different agricultural management systems

    This graduate student cohort is well-positioned to make the necessary connections, learning from farmers while helping them zoom in to see the essential lifeforms that impact their farm, then zoom out to help make decisions that are good for the farmer, good for the crop, and good for the microbe.

    Farmers in the Davis area will have another opportunity to learn soil health fundamentals at a workshop this fall hosted by the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program and Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility. Details about the workshop will be posted here.

     

  • Better Soil Boosts Farm Profit And Benefits The Planet

    Davis, Calif., (June 19, 2017) – Healthy soil does much more than hold plants upright on the surface of the earth. It is a mix of mineral bits and old plant particles teeming with microbes to form a mysterious and complex web of life scientists are just beginning to understand.

    While scientists use high technology to study heathy soil – painstakingly counting soil worms and bugs, sequencing the DNA of soil bacteria, for example – some farmers know intuitively whether the soil is healthy just by walking on it.

    Scott Park is a first-generation Meridian, Calif., farmer. “When I step on a field and it feels like a road, something is wrong,” he said. “If it feels like a marshmallow or sponge, that’s good.”

    Park shared his farming experiences with 200 farmers, industry representatives, University of California Cooperative Extension scientists, Fresno State students, news media and others during a half-day UC workshop at the UC West Side Research and Extension Center in Five Points.

    “The last 31 years I’ve been on a mission of building soil,” Park said. “I discovered it by accident and I’ve made lots of mistakes. But yields trend upwards every year on every crop. Being sensitive to building soil, I’m making a lot of money. And if I’m doing something for the earth, all the better.”

    Park said he adds 10 to 15 tons per acre of biomass to his farm every year. He’s using less fertilizer, up to 20 percent less water, and even experimenting on the farm by growing a commercial crop with just four inputs: cover crops, water, seed and sun.

    “We got high-yielding, good-quality crops,” Park said. “Nobody was more shocked than I am that I got a good crop.”

     

    Researchers are now using the scientific method to figure out the root causes of these empirical observations.

    “There’s a lot going on in soil,” said Radomir Schmidt, a UC Davis soil microbiologist who spoke at the soil health field day.

    A teaspoon of soil has a billion bacteria and six miles of fungal hyphae, the filaments that branch out through the soil from fungi, Schmidt said. The microbes’ interaction with living plant roots, the larger pores left by decomposing vegetation and tunneling worms and insects create a system that confers resilience to unforeseen challenges – such as pest pressure, torrential rainfall and plant diseases.

    The field day was held under a tent pitched adjacent to an 18-year research trial at the 320-acre facility. The trial compares four farming systems side by side:

    • Conventional system, with annual soil tillage and no cover crops.
    • Conservation agriculture, with no tilling whatsoever and annual winter cover crops.
    • No-till without the cover crop.
    • Conventional tilling with a cover crop.

    “Take a look over my shoulder to see the difference,” said Jeff Mitchell, UC Cooperative Extension specialist and the study leader. “We’ve found the cover crops and no-till reduce water needs, cut dust, and lower costs. And there may be more benefits than we realized.”

    For example, a graduate student counted the worms, bugs, beetles and other microfauna in soil samples from each of the treatments. There were double the amount in the no-till, cover crop plots compared to the conventional farming system.

    UC Cooperative Extension specialist Sloan Rice found that cover crops promote water retention in the soil after rainfall. There is very little water evaporation from the soil surface and water transportation from the cover crop plants in the winter, so little water is lost. Cover crops also promote more water infiltration below three feet.

    “Cover crops for sustainable water management is particularly important considering the water supply availability and its cost,” Rice said.

    Healthy soil management also shows promise in confronting global climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil, rather than depleting it.

    Manager of Sano Farms in Firebaugh, Jesse Sanchez, was a speaker at the field day. He wasn’t surprised by the overflow crowd.

    “Farmers are more and more curious. They see some of us using cover crops, and they want to learn more,” Sanchez said. “There has been a swell of interest. I have a tremendous number of visitors every year.”

    For more information about soil building, see the UC Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation website at http://casi.ucanr.edu.