Environment

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), along with six state pork producer associations and other national agricultural groups, have filed a legal motion to intervene as parties in challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) water quality standards....More

Presentations and proceedings are now available online from the recent conference entitled, “Got Manure? Enhancing Environmental and Economic Sustainability.” The conference was hosted by Cornell University. A variety of speaker manuscripts can be downloaded at http://www.manuremanagement.cornell.edu/Pages/General_Docs/Events/Got_Ma.......More

Have you ever wondered how a manure digester actually works? The Kansas State University Livestock and Environmental Learning eXtension Web site offers an online, virtual tour showing highlights about how the Cayuga County, NY, Soil and Water Conservation regional digester operates. This facility receives manure from multiple dairy farms. The regional digester model allows both large and small farms to benefit from the digestion process without having to take on the complex management of their own on-site digester. Learn more at http://www.extension.org/pages/63540/cayuga-county-manure-digester-virtu.......More

The U.S. Pork Center of Excellence offers a variety of fact sheets explaining the science behind odor and manure management techniques via the Pork Information Gateway Web site’s Environmental Stewardship domain. Erin Cortus, assistant professor, South Dakota State University Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, maintains this section of the Web site. She says an increasing world population means waste handling practices will need to continue to improve, while at the same time a higher population will also demand more protein production, which will result in more livestock manure to handle. “What happens to the manure after it is deposited, through storage, treatment or land application, can have significant implications on air quality, water quality, public perception and cost of production,” she says....More

Purdue University research findings indicate that today's hybrid corn varieties more efficiently use nitrogen to create more grain. The researchers recently reviewed 72 years of public sector research data. Tony Vyn, a professor of agronomy, and doctoral student Ignacio Ciampitti looked at nitrogen use studies for corn from two periods – 1940-1990 and 1991-2011. They wanted to see whether increased yields were due to better nitrogen efficiency or whether new plants were simply given additional nitrogen to produce more grain. “Corn production often faces the criticism from society that yields are only going up because of an increased dependency on nitrogen," Vyn explains. “Although modern hybrids take up more total nitrogen per acre during the growing season than they did before, the amount of grain produced per pound of nitrogen accumulated in corn plants is substantially greater than it was for corn hybrids of earlier decades. So, in that sense, the efficiency of nitrogen utilization has gradually improved.”...More