By Bryan Swistock
Many PA farmers are voluntarily implementing water quality protection practices such as planting streamside forest buffers.
There is much interest into what extent Pennsylvania farmers are using water quality protection practices. Conservation practice adoption is well-documented for practices that are implemented with federal or state financial assistance.
Yet, while it is known that farmers adopt water quality protection practices without public financial support, there is no systematic accounting for these investments. In consequence, these self-financed practices are not accounted for in tracking the progress towards water quality goals, including cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
On March 29, 2017, the Penn State Water Resources Extension team hosted a webinar on An Analysis of the Pennsylvania Farm Conservation Practices Inventory for Purposes of Reporting Practices to the Chesapeake Bay Program. The presenter was Matt Royer, the Director of the Agriculture and Environment Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State University.
This webinar reported on an initiative recently undertaken to address this data gap, a survey of water quality practice adoption by Pennsylvania farmers located in the Chesapeake Bay watershed conducted in 2016. The webinar provides a background on this issue and then discusses the methodology used in the survey, the statistical methods used to analyze the data, and the results found from the research team.
To view the entire 57-minute recorded webinar along with a PDF of the presentation slides, visit the Penn State Extension Water Resources Webinar series at:
http://extension.psu.edu/natural-resources/water/courses/water-resource-webinars/webinars/an-analysis-of-the-pennsylvania-farm-conservation-practices-inventory-for-purposes-of-reporting-practices-to-the-chesapeake-bay-program