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Last Updated on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 16:42

Written by Saige Albert

Powell – The Powell Research and Extension Center (PREC) Field Day on July 14 provided more than 120 participants an opportunity to explore numerous projects being conducted on the facility’s 220 acres.
Research at PREC spans from fertilizer application rates and incorporation methods to drought tolerance and performance studies. Notably, research by UW Assistant Professor in Plant Sciences and Irrigation Specialist at PREC Axel Garcia y Garcia regarding water stress on corn has captured the attention of the USDA.
“This study was initially started here in Powell,” said Garcia y Garcia. “It has become so important that it is being conducted at the USDA’s Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center (ALARC) in Maricopa, Ariz.”
This project, funded by AgroFresh, Inc. and Dow Chemical Co., has two primarily objectives including monitoring corn responses to water stress as well as an assessment of methods used to determine stress onset.
Garcia y Garcia’s research utilizes an automated weather station and infrared thermometers deployed in the field to monitor the temperature of the canopy of the corn. The canopy temperature is used to determine crop stress, based on the crop water stress index.
“The index is used all around the world as the best way to determine when a crop is stressed,” said Garcia y Garcia. “Right now, we are seeing temperatures as high as 30 to 32 degrees Celsius (86 to 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and obviously, the corn is not really very stressed yet.”
Garcia y Garcia simultaneously measures soil moisture using a series of probes.
“The water markers are very simple, cheap sensors to measure soil moisture conditions,” explained Garcia y Garcia. “We measure soil moisture at six, 12, 24 and 36 inches.”
Every hour the information is sent to a data collection site in the field and is gathered on computers to supplement PREC research.
Garcia y Garcia’s project, titled “Corn Response to Water Stress” is a three-year project in its first year.
The PREC facility also features several new facilities to accompany their ongoing research projects, one of which is the foundation seed cleaning facility.
Mike Moore, manager of the State Seed Certification Service, and Mike Killen, farm manager at PREC, have worked for over three years to facilitate the move of the Foundation Seed Cleaning Facility from its former location in Sheridan to PREC.
“Foundation seed is the purest of the pure and most true to type for variety, for crop, and for weed seed content,” explained Moore. “This project was located over in Sheridan for many years, and there was a big emphasis to get the building over here.”
Previously, all crops for seed were grown and harvested in the Powell area, shipped to Sheridan for cleaning, then shipped back to Powell.
“The building is the only thing that is new,” said Moore. “All the equipment came from Sheridan.”
The facility serves an additional purpose as a sample cleaning area for researchers at PREC, where a separate room is being populated with necessary equipment.
Additional cooperative efforts with the Bridger Plant and Materials Center increases the availability of clean seed for native grasses and shrubs.
“The objective is to have better seed for folks in our area and in the Mountain West,” said Moore. “The Foundation Seed Cleaning Facility will provide a service for the area not only for growers, but the users of the end product.”
Director of the Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station Bret Hess emphasized, “I think it is an excellent addition to the center, and I’m looking forward to everything that can be done in the Foundation Seed Cleaning Facility.”
A second notable addition to the PREC site is one of four Automated Weather Stations (AWSs) that are part of the Wyoming Agricultural Weather Network (WAWN).
Environmental factors, such as temperature, wind speed and rainfall are a constant concern to agriculturalists and one of the largest challenges that producers face.
WAWN was initiated in 2010 and involves data collection from AWSs located in Heart Mountain, Powell, Sheridan and Worland, with the goal to provide weather information for both agricultural and environmental application.
“We have four weather stations that are connected to computers which send information to our office,” said Garcia y Garcia. “The idea of a weather station came up because we needed environmental information, not only for research, but to provide some developmental tools for farmers.”
Garcia y Garcia explained that weather information is necessary and helpful for the daily activities of farmers, such as irrigation and chemical application.
“We decided we needed to go online with the information to be most useful,” said Garcia y Garcia, referring to a website where all data collected is provided for public use.
Online access to the information gathered by WAWN allows this resource to be easily available for producers’ needs. The information is extensive and includes readings for barometric pressure, evapotranspiration, rainfall, relative humidity, solar radiation, temperature and wind speed, as well as soil moisture and temperature at a variety of depths.
Data is also available in table form for seven-day data and graphed in 30-day increments to provide information for longer-term decision-making.
UW provided funding for the AWSs in Powell and at the Sheridan Research and Extension Center, while Worland’s AWC is funded by Washakie County Conservation District. The Wyoming Sugar Company, LLC, as well as the Heart Mountain Irrigation District, support the AWSs as well.
“Our long range plan was to develop a system to better utilize water, not only on the crops that you are growing but on your lawns and shrubs around your houses, so that was kind of the concept we built our station on,” said former President and CEO of Wyoming Sugar Company Cal Jones.
The AWS, as well as the Foundation Seed Cleaning Facility, are expected to be very helpful in the research at PREC.
To supplement the 2011 field days at research centers in the state, a bulletin was produced featuring short synopses of each research project covered in the tour. The bulletin will be available online this winter.    
For more information about research at PREC, call 307-754-2223. To access the WAWN, visit wawn.net. Saige Albert is assistant editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 16:36

Written by Saige Albert

Lingle – On July 21 the James C. Hageman Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension Center (SAREC) hosted over 90 farmers, ranchers and interested community members at its 2011 Field Day for tours of the research projects being conducted on the site.
SAREC project manager Jenna Meeks heads the Economic and Environmental Sustainability of Conventional, Reduced-Input and Organic Approaches on Western Crop-Range-Livestock Farms project, which started in 2009 under the direction of UW Extension Soil Fertility Specialist Jay Norton.
Of the project, Norton said, “We got started here on a 36-acre half-pivot in 2009 with a grant from the USDA National Research Initiative in a program area called Cultural Prosperity for Small and Medium Size Farms.”
Norton said the research is supplemented by grants from the Organic Research Initiative and Extension Initiative.
Meeks described the project, known as the SAREC Ag Systems project, as an integration between crops, livestock and range that utilizes three approaches in two systems.
“The goal is to provide a long-term basis for economic, soil quality and other attributes that will help producers make choices about their operations,” explained Norton.
Meeks added, “Producers have a wide range of things to look at – we’re trying to quantify those things.”
The team described three approaches that are overlaid by two different systems, for a total of six treatments in the project. The approaches are conventional, reduced-input and organic production, while the systems are cash crop and beef-calf.
The 36 acres are organized in four wedges subdivided into six sections. In the outside three rings of each wedge, cash crops grow in one-acre plots, while the inner three rings constitute two-acre grazing plots for the beef-calf system.
In the cash crop systems, crops are planted on a rotational basis and are determined by what producers in the area might plant.
The conventional plots follow a dry beans/corn/sugar beets/corn rotation, while the reduced-input approach incorporates triticale as a ground cover after dry beans. The reduced-input approach also follows conservation tillage practices.
The organic plots follow National Organic Program (NOP) guidelines for organic production and use an alfalfa-oats/alfalfa/corn/beans rotation.
“We bounced the idea of using soybeans around for a while,” said Meeks, “but the organic plots will probably be in dry beans next year.”
Within the one-acre plots, other research projects are being conducted in micro-plots, including the research of PhD students in the UW Department of Renewable Resources.
Renée King, a second-year PhD student under Norton, focuses on organic production and sustainable farming, more specifically carbon and nitrogen cycline and phosphorus in the soil.
“Phosphorus is next to nitrogen in its importance for crops and, in Wyoming soils, phosphorus gets tied up in calcium complexes,” explained King. “It is really important to look at how we can release or increase the ability of phosphorus to solubilize in organic soils.”
King is comparing the abilities of a variety of amendments to make phosphorus in the soils more accessible to plants.
“We have two liquid amendments and two granular amendments, including bone meal, raw phosphates, humate acids and compost tea, that are applied over the first four plots,” said King. “We are looking for synergistic actions of these amendments, as well, so the other four plots are a combination of the four amendments.”
King explained there are a number of potential amendments that can be used in organic production, but gaining access to things like large quantities of manure is sometimes difficult. As a result, her research encompasses the economic feasibility of the amendments as well.
“In the future we’ll do some bench-top trials in the lab and look at ramping up application rates to see if there is an economic advantage to using two or three times the manufacturer’s rate,” said King.
Rajan Ghimire, also a PhD student, is looking at three things in his research: soil quality, microbial activity and trace gas emissions.
Ghimire takes soil samples four times a year and analyzes them for different fractions of organic matter, including available nutrients and long-term implications of the amount of organic matter present. The goal of this project is to look at how different crops, amendments and cropping systems affect the soil organic matter, which directly influences the amount of nitrogen available in the soil.
A related study by Ghimire looks at the microbial diversity of the soil.
“Because nitrogen is the most important nutrient for crop production, we are looking at the amount of nitrogen cycling microorganisms present and what kind of cropping approaches help to grow those microorganisms,” said Ghimire.
Ghimire’s final project involves the environmental implications of the three cropping practices.
“We want to see how different agricultural systems have an affect on gas emissions,” explained Ghimire.
Using a PVC ring buried in the ground with a chamber on top, Ghimire is able to use a syringe to take 60-milliliter gas samples, which are injected into evacuated glass vials and analyzed in the lab. These reading can help to determine the microbial activity of the soils because a higher number of microorganisms will respire more, leading to higher emissions, explained Ghimire.
“We also have 10 gas chambers installed in the dryland operations, five of which are no-till and five are organic transition, and in the irrigated land,” added Meeks. “We have taken samples immediately after tilling to see the immediate effect of tillage.”
The beef-calf system of the SAREC Ag Systems project involves 24 cows and 13 calves.
“They will be on dryland pasture all summer, and we will bring them into the feedlots in late fall to wean the calves,” said Meeks.
Last year the cattle were put on SAREC’s GrowSafe system, so Meeks will be able to compare weight data from last year. While the animals aren’t currently grazing the inner three rings of the half-pivot plot, they are consuming baled forage from the pivot.
“Getting water to each of those grazing plots is a logistical nightmare,” said Meeks.
Regardless, Norton is hopeful that in the final year of the trial they may be able to come up with a strategy to graze the test plots as was originally intended.
The SAREC field day featured three tours for attendees to choose from including dry-land crops, irrigated crops and livestock research and featured projects ranging management of herbicide-resistant kochia, establishment of specialty crops such as fenugreek and the impact of calf weaning date on quality grade.
A summary of projects being conducted at SAREC and extension research centers across the state was consolidated in the “2011 Field Days Bulletin,” which will be available online later this year.
For more information on SAREC research projects, call 307-837-2000. Saige Albert is assistant editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 16 December 2009 05:48

Written by Christy Hemken

Cody – According to Jim Krall of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension Center (SAREC) at Lingle, there are a lot of reasons to plant cover crops, one of which is to biologically fix nitrogen in the soil.
    Krall presented ongoing Wyoming research on cover crops as a part of the Soil and Water Conservation Society’s (SWCS) breakout sessions in Cody at the early November joint annual meeting of the SWCS Wyoming Chapter, The Wildlife Society Wyoming Chapter and the Society for Range Management Wyoming Section.
    Krall shared research on peas, vetches, lentils and annual medics, some of which he’s brought to Wyoming from his time spent with crops specialists in Australia, whom he says are way ahead of where the U.S. is in their use of biological nitrogen.  
    “They’ve come up with some values that say a ton of dry matter forage above ground will put down 18 to 22 pounds of nitrogen,” said Krall. “When you consider 40 percent total nitrogen below ground, that comes to 26 to 32 pounds.”
    A pea released a few years ago that Krall researched – the Forager variety – was refined mainly for forage production. “Across 15 trials it out-yielded more popular forage pea varieties by 780 pounds per acre,” he said.
Austrian winter peas
    Krall has also been working with spring sown Austrian winter peas as a legume superior in forage production potential. He’s also researched the crop as a winter annual.
    “We’ve found that fall-sown Austrian winter peas seems to do as well as any of them,” he noted. “There’s quite a bit of difference in seed size from Forager, and it’s smaller than a normal pea so that reduces the cost of seed and it’s readily available in southeast Wyoming.”
    However, he says recently there have been shortages because its popularity is increasing.
    “We plant it in grain residue, in moisture and treat it like wheat,” he said. “Then we allow the snow to come along and insulate it.”
    So it can be produced in Wyoming, but how can it be used? Krall said a Western SARE grant is funding a study to look at grazing sheep on Austrian winter peas at the Archer Research Station near Cheyenne.
    “We’ve had pretty good success, and the sheep seem to eat it well with high consumption,” he said, noting they got 138 pounds of lamb gain per acre.
    “We feel we were able to double the rate of return compared to fallow by fall planting Austrian peas, pasturing early in the spring and getting the pasturing done by first of July before terminating the crop,” he added.
    Currently there’s a proposal in with USDA to graze cattle on a pea/cereal mixture. “There’s limited experience with that, and in our region the primary livestock resources are cattle, so it’s important to see how cattle perform on peas,” said Krall.
Vetch varieties
    In addition to the Austrian winter pea Krall has been researching vetches, including hairy vetch and woolypod vetch.
    “The important thing with cover crops is the quicker the better,” said Krall. “The Laramie medic was ready to go and produced forage over two tons per acre by mid-May, compared to the hairy vetch that was a month later in production.”
    He said the woolypod vetch is earlier flowering and maturing in southeast Wyoming than the hairy vetch.
    “Based on the environment in this area, the Austrian winter pea is good, and the Laramie medic and hairy vetch are excellent in winter survival,” explained Krall. He said lentils in general were poor in survivability.
    Krall said another dimension of cover crops is hard or soft seed, or how likely the crop is to volunteer during the next crop. He said woolypod and hairy vetches have some potential to volunteer and be very aggressive in their growth habit, but the Austrian winter pea is very soft-seeded.
Laramie medic
    Regarding medics, Krall said because they’re vegetatively very prostrate, unlike alfalfa, they’re not competitive during the wheat phase because they get shaded out and when you want pasture you let it go. They also have a self-sustaining nature.
    “I asked a farmer in Australia when he’d seeded the medic in his field, and said he’d seeded it 37 years before,” noted Krall. “Growers also don’t have to put on nitrogen because they get it from the medic, and it provides pasture for sheep and cattle.”
    Krall says his research team will continue to work to find annual legumes to fit southeast Wyoming’s environment. Pea breeding work to develop winter annual peas is looking at a very upright pea with tendrils that would be easier to produce for seed compared to the Austrian winter pea.
    Of cover crop research in other parts of the state, Krall says there aren’t any trials in the Big Horn Basin, and he welcomes anyone who wants to work with him on some of the new varieties and strategies in other areas.
    Christy Hemken is assistant editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Friday, 14 May 2010 13:50

Written by Christy Hemken

Two decisions regarding Roundup Ready technology in crops produced in Wyoming are awaiting a decision by the USDA as to whether or not they will be allowed to continue in the future.
The most restricted Roundup Ready crop is currently alfalfa, which as been under litigation since June 2005 when the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) deregulated two lines of the glyphosate-resistant alfalfa and a lawsuit was subsequently filed. The judge in the lawsuit vacated APHIS’s 2005 decision, determining the agency must prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in support of its decision to deregulate the varieties.
Following that, a Draft EIS was prepared to comply with a February 2007 judgment and order by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
That Draft EIS was released and a notice was published in the Federal Register on Dec. 18, 2009. The draft evaluates the potential environmental effects of deregulating the two lines of alfalfa. APHIS extended the initial 60-day comment period on the draft for 15 days, closing it March 3, 2010. The agency also held public meetings in Nevada, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Maryland.
Fred Hopkin, sugar beet and alfalfa seed producer from Lovell, attended the public meeting held in Reno, Nev. in conjunction with the Western Alfalfa Seed Growers annual meeting.
“At the public forum I attended, 100 percent of the comments were favorable toward Roundup Ready alfalfa,” says Hopkin, noting the majority in attendance were alfalfa seed growers and people from the alfalfa industry who traveled from several states away to make their comments known.
“At this point it’s in the hands of the USDA. After they filter through the comments and information, then they’ll make the decision on whether to deregulate,” says Hopkin, adding that only USDA knows the time frame.
Following the moratorium against planting Roundup Ready alfalfa, Hopkin says a working group was formed in the industry, including seed companies and seed certification agencies, including the Wyoming Seed Certification Service.
“They’ve come up with a plan to create zones where the seed can be grown, isolating its production to certain areas,” says Hopkin of how the industry has responded to concerns that the glyphosate-resistant gene would spread to seed intended to be kept conventional.
“The pollen flow is a potential issue, and everyone recognizes that, so the intent is to leave some areas of alfalfa seed production where there will not be any genetically modified seed produced,” notes Hopkin. “There’s a specific distance, which is fairly liberal, that’s a buffer between these areas, and it’s based on the science of how far bees and other pollinators typically fly as well as pollen flows.”
“As of now, it’s not been deregulated, and we don’t know when that will be,” says Hopkin. “We hope it will be sometime in the next few months, in time for fall planting, but there’s no guarantee with any of this.”
Turning to Roundup Ready sugarbeets, they were a new option readily adopted by 95 percent of beet growers, including those in Wyoming.
According to Monsanto, sugarbeets experienced the fastest adoption of any biotech crop to date when Genuity Roundup Ready sugarbeets were introduced to sugarbeet producers during the 2008/2009 crop season.
However, on Jan. 21, 2008 opponents of the varieties initiated legal action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, challenging the deregulation of Roundup Ready sugarbeets by the USDA. The case was brought by the Center for Food Safety (CFS), Organic Seed Alliance, Sierra Club and High Mowing Organic Seeds.
U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White ruled the USDA would have to complete an EIS for Roundup Ready sugarbeets. Monsanto emphasizes the ruling focused on the process used by the USDA in deregulating the sugarbeet variety and in no way questioned the safety or benefits of the Genuity line.
The plaintiffs then filed a motion Jan. 21, 2010, for a preliminary injunction against further planting, cultivation, processing, or other use of Roundup Ready sugarbeets until the EIS was complete. On March 16 Judge White denied the request, allowing farmers to continue to plant Roundup Ready sugarbeets for the 2010 crop season. The next hearing is scheduled for July 9.
Hopkin says after clearing the March 5 hurdle sugarbeet producers in the Big Horn Basin have gone ahead with spring planting.
Regarding the distant possibility of Roundup Ready technology in wheat, Tim Anderson of Prairie Farms near Albin says he thinks it will come in the next seven years. However, he thinks the variety won’t be “Roundup Ready,” because Roundup is what producers currently use to take care of volunteer plants. “We’d take away the one tool we have to clean our stubble,” he says.
“The first thing we’d have to do is gain world acceptance. Corn found that out, and alfalfa and sugarbeets are having that struggle right now,” continues Anderson. “The problem with wheat is that it’s different. While sugar and corn are refined before being consumed by humans, and alfalfa is fed to animals, wheat is fed directly to people, so that makes a difference.”
Although there are certain countries that still refuse to purchase genetically modified crops, Anderson says they’re here to stay. “All crop production will have to double to feed the world by the time today’s younger generation retires. That’s why there’s a need for genetically modified crops,” he says. “It comes down to feeding the people.”
“I think the Roundup Ready technology is a useful tool, not only for producers, but it also helps keep the price of food reasonable,” says Hopkin. “If growers can produce crops more economically, ultimately that makes the price of food more economical for consumers.”
Christy Hemken is managing editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .