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Partnership to Improve Nutrient Efficiency: Technical Expert Panel Meeting
Citation:
Compton, J., A. Henning, AND Jacqueline Brooks. Partnership to Improve Nutrient Efficiency: Technical Expert Panel Meeting. PINE Technical Expert Meeting, Corvallis, OR, May 08, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Jana Compton and Renée Brooks from WED, along with Alan Henning from EPA Region 10, will host the PINE technical expert meeting in Corvallis. At this meeting team members will present nitrate leaching and soils data collected for four years (2014-2017) from farm fields in the southern Willamette Valley Groundwater Management Area (GWMA). The Groundwater Management Area was established in 2004 because of high nitrate levels in groundwater. Staff from federal, state and local agencies with an interest in nitrate leaching in the GWMA will attend this meeting, including USDA-NRCS, Oregon Department of Ecology, Oregon Department of Agriculture, Oregon State University and EPA-NRMRL’s Groundwater, Watersheds, and Ecosystems Restoration Division. The goal of the meeting is to share data with our stakeholder team and to develop approaches to communicate the results and implications for the local farm community.
Description:
The purpose of this presentation is to give stakeholders and other local researchers an update on the progress of the Partnership to Improve Nutrient Efficiency project. This presentation shares data and results from the four-year study which was initially funded by two EPA-RARE grants with the project team and others who work on the specialty crops studied. The study is conducted within the southern Willamette Valley Groundwater Management Area, established by Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in 2004 because of concerns about nitrate contamination of private wells in the area. The overall goal of the PINE project is to provide information that will help farmers, managers and conservation groups quantify the water quality benefits of practices that they are conducting or funding and use that information to set priorities and inform decisions. At this meeting, EPA will present to the team the annual N leaching results for 14 PINE study sites from 2014-2017, including information about the monthly leaching and crop-specific leaching rates and fertilizer application rates. The presentation also includes methods about how the farm field water balances were calculated. We also provide a comparison with historic 1990s leaching data at some of the same sites.