The Penn State Environment and Natural Resources Institute will host another Water Insights Seminar on March 19 on research being done by the Stroud Water Research Center on soil health, cover crops and no-till farming.

Matt Ehrhart, Director of Watershed Restoration at Stroud, will review the work Stroud is doing with the PA No-Till Alliance and Steve Groff of Cover Crop Coaching to  provide outreach, training, mentoring and technical advising to producers who are transitioning to soil health focused farming systems.

Staff from Stroud are working with 2 individual producers to implement hundreds of acres of new cover crops and multi-species cover crops in the White Clay Creek Watershed where extensive long term monitoring is in place and positioned to evaluate watershed scale outcomes of the implementation.

Stroud is also in the fourth year of a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant project to evaluate the water quality impacts as well as changes in soil parameters and soil microbial communities resulting from a transition to a 24/7 cover system implementing no-till planting and a multispecies cover crop on two paired control/experimental fields.

Stroud has also recently initiated a related research project with the Rodale Institute.  This project includes four field scale trial plots including: 1. Conventional Practice; 2. Conservation Ag (no-till with cover crop); 3. Organic; 4. Organic No-Till (cultivation for weed control).

These fields are on a six year rotation plan with comprehensive collection of soil, water quality, production, and economic data.

The Seminar will held from Noon to 1:00 in Room 312 of the Ag and Bio Engineering Building on Penn State’s main campus in State College and is available online via Zoom.

For more information on past Seminars, visit the Water Insights Seminars webpage.

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[Posted: March 14, 2019]

3/18/2019