Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
fertilizer on the crops at fi xed intervals throughout the growing season.
The environmental downside to this practice is that any nitrogen or other
nutrients that are not absorbed by the plants' roots may eventually leach
into the water tables below the fi elds.
The solution to this problem seems deceptively simple: just get growers
to use less fertilizer on their crops, and then less nitrate will leach into the
valley's water supply. This, in fact, was the approach taken by a team of
researchers working to address the nitrate problem in the late 1990s. The
research team consisted of a Salinas Valley farm advisor, a UC extension
specialist, and a few other researchers working with county-level adminis-
trative agencies. They were supported in part by grants from a statewide
fertilizer industry association. The team developed and pushed for growers
to begin using a “quick test” soil sampling system for monitoring their soil
and making better judgments about the need for fertilizer at a given time.
The quick test system is a relatively cheap and simple way to check the
level of nitrate already present in the soil, thereby allowing growers to
fertilize only when the plants require it, not on a fi xed schedule regardless
of need. In this way, the quick test was designed as new form of manage-
ment that would serve as an alternative to the application schedules stand-
ardly offered by the fertilizer industry.
Based on fi eld trials of the quick test system on several farms throughout
the valley and other lettuce-growing regions of California, the researchers
found that the system could be used to effectively reduce fertilizer use
while maintaining the same yields. Despite the promise of the fi eld tests,
however, and the potential for growers to save a bit on fertilizer costs, the
research team had a diffi cult time convincing growers to implement
the quick test system in their own fi elds, and few growers ultimately
adopted it. The quick test had run up against the standard practice of
lettuce growers, which is to overfertilize as a kind of crop insurance; the
research team could not guarantee that risk had been completely elimi-
nated. As the following excerpt illustrates, people in the industry remained
skeptical of the new approach, even after fi eld trials using the quick test
method had shown initial success:
CRH:
It seems like, on [certain] problems, Extension can be pretty helpful,
but are there other kinds of things where it's not always as clear whether
[Cooperative Extension] is gonna be helpful or not?
