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Tucked away amid 4,000 acres of land at Huntington Farms in Soledad, a 2.5-acre plot could hold important lessons for the future of agriculture in the Salinas Valley.
In late November, it doesn’t look like much is happening. Gazing across the field, one would be forgiven for noticing little more than dirt. But this expanse of soil contains 24 individual plots that, over the next four years, will reveal the potential of farming practices meant to make certain corners of the industry more resilient to climate change.
“We measure from each of those locations every day we come out, and we try to measure for multiple days in a row after any kind of major management activity that would influence emissions,” said Stefanie Kortman, a researcher in the Laboratory of Agricultural Biogeochemistry at CSUMB.
Kortman is overseeing greenhouse gas measurements at this monitoring site as part of a 5-year, $5 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. A primary goal is to evaluate nitrous oxide emissions when specialty crops in the Salinas Valley — like lettuce, strawberries and cauliflower — are grown using climate-smart practices.
The term “climate-smart” refers to strategies farmers use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from crop production and to make their operations more resilient to climate change.
“We’re evaluating three different climate-smart agriculture practices,” said Cole Smith, a soil science researcher at UC Davis collaborating with Kortman. “Those include cover cropping, compost application, and nutrient and irrigation management.”
Cover crops, like barley and rye, are usually planted after the fall harvest and grow until the next crop is planted. They help improve soil health and reduce erosion by keeping living roots in the ground during the off season.
Nutrient management limits how much chemical fertilizer is applied to a crop. Nitrogen fertilizer can improve yield, but, if too much is used, it can harm water quality and produce nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
“We’re evaluating it as a comparative trial, comparing those practices against grower standard,” Smith said.
Kortman’s hypothesis is that, at the end of the 5-year trial, the crops grown using climate-smart practices will emit less nitrous oxide than those grown in traditional ways — without compromising crop yields.
To measure emissions, Kortman and her team use a device called a Smart Chamber, which resembles a cross between a small grill and R2-D2. Elise Vasquez, a CSUMB graduate student working on the project, stuck what looks like a large metal straw into the dirt. Within seconds, measurements began to appear on the Smart Chamber screen.
“You can choose what you would like it to look at,” Vasquez said. “So you can have it look at the soil moisture content, you can have it look at the temperature. But, for us, we usually like to look at the carbon dioxide and the nitrous oxide.”
There’s another dimension to this project too, and it involves a group of 25 local farmers.
“With the other aspect of the project, we've enrolled our first cohort of growers to implement the same practices on a much smaller scale than are being implemented here,” said Arlene Haffa, who leads Kortman’s lab.
A key component of the trial is replicating these climate-smart practices on other small farms in the Monterey Bay region. To do so, Haffa, Kortman, and Smith enlisted the help of Aysha Peterson, an agroecologist with the Monterey County Resource Conservation District.
“[They] essentially were like, ‘how would you get $1 million to farmers to do conservation work?’” Peterson said.
So Peterson and their colleagues at the RCD made a plan. They came up with an idea to bring in 25 farmers and work with them for four years.
“Every grower is eligible for the same amount of money, regardless of how big they are,” Peterson said, “and [we] basically just require all growers to do these three practices with us, which are composting, using cover crops, and then doing nutrient management.”
All of the participating small-scale farmers are considered “underserved” by the USDA. Peterson said many of them have experience with these practices, but that without financial incentives, it can be difficult to maintain them.
One of Peterson’s goals is to embed the farmers into the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“I think the success of this program would be getting farmers enrolled in NRCS programs and able to access conservation funding longer term than just four years,” they said.
But there’s one potential hurdle — immigration status.
“What I am a little bit concerned about is, currently, in order to receive funding through NRCS, one does not have to be a citizen,” Peterson said.
After President-elect Donald Trump takes office, that could change.
But, at least for now, the farmers enrolled in the program are getting paid to expand the use of climate-smart practices. And, combined with the measurement site at Huntington Farms, this project could be an important step toward making Salinas Valley agriculture more resilient to climate change.
Cal State Monterey Bay holds the FCC license for 90.3 KAZU. The station is located on the university’s campus.
