What happens underground on a farm can be just as consequential as what grows above it, and a new federal research program is using West Alabama’s working landscapes as a proving ground for much-needed agricultural solutions.
The CONSERVE Research Group, part of the Alabama Water Institute at The University of Alabama, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service, or ARS, Southeast are partnering to establish the Innovative Water Systems program. The program brings together three distinct research projects: modeling the ecological impacts of aquifer recharge, demonstrating native rivercane as an agricultural buffer crop and mapping the underground root architecture of rivercane using technology borrowed from archaeology.
“Having these national resources and assets interested in the type of work we do here at UA and CONSERVE, but also partnerships with landowners here in the area, is going to lift the whole region up,” said Dr. Michael Fedoroff, director of the CONSERVE Research Group.
USDA ARS Southeast is headquartered in Stoneville, Mississippi, with research capabilities across the region. CONSERVE’s partnership centers on collaboration with Dr. Christopher Delhom and the National Center for Alluvial Aquifer Research, which focuses on aquifer recharge, agricultural water use and contamination in the Lower Mississippi Valley and beyond.
The partnership draws on CONSERVE’s interdisciplinary makeup, bringing together mathematicians, ecologists and biologists, to apply state-of-the-art modeling and on-farm science to problems that have long resisted single-discipline solutions.
West Alabama and the Black Belt region anchor much of the work. Agriculture remains a defining part of the economy and landscape there, and the Innovative Water Systems program is designed to produce science that reaches working farms directly.
Source : ua.edu