Dairy Soil & Water Regeneration (DSWR) leaders and researchers delved into the challenges and opportunities of the broad data-driven project during a panel discussion May 14 in Madison.
Dennis Busch, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville’s Pioneer Farm, was featured in the main-stage discussion at the Dairy Symposium, an academic-focused event held by the Dairy Innovation Hub, which is a state-funded effort to support Wisconsin’s dairy community in part by advancing science at the state’s three universities with agriculture programs: UW-Platteville, UW-Madison and UW-River Falls.
Busch’s fellow panelists were Reza Afshar of Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) who is the principal investigator and overall lead for the project; Cristine Morgan, chief scientific officer at the Soil Health Institute (SHI); Gregg Sanford, an assistant professor in UW-Madison’s Department of Soil & Environmental Sciences; and Joshua Faulkner, a research associate professor at the University of Vermont who coordinates the Farming and Climate Change Program in the Extension Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The Dairy Innovation Hub’s faculty director, Matt Ruark, a professor and soil scientist at UW-Madison, moderated the panel.
DSWR is an eight-year, multi-state project studying soil health and manure management and their effects on greenhouse gas reduction, water quality improvement and agronomic factors such as forage yield and quality in dairy feed production.
The project is a key collaboration between DMI, SHI, the USDA Agricultural Research Service and seven research universities to advance progress toward the dairy industry’s collective 2050 environmental stewardship goals, which were established through the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. The project is largely supported by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, which awarded $10 million toward this work, and matching funds from companies like Dairy Management Inc., Newtrient, Nestlé and Starbucks.
Highlights from the discussion:
Filling knowledge gap with data
Collecting, analyzing and making data available is at the heart of the project, Afshar said.
The work began in 2021 with a baseline survey of soil health and carbon storage on nearly 100 dairies representing different climates, soils and management practices across the country. Now, extensive field trials are underway involving differing management practices and manure products.
“One of the main goals of this project was to produce scientifically robust data that farmers can use to make informed and confident decisions,” Afshar said.
DSWR is aggregating thousands of soil, greenhouse gas, water and plant samples using the same protocols to ensure consistent comparisons.
“There’s a lot of data being collected across a wide geographic area; it’s the consistency in that data collection that’s probably the most important part,” said Busch, whose team’s primary focus at Platteville is on surface and ground water quality.
SHI, which collaborated with DMI on the experimental design of the project, is curating massive amounts of high-quality data captured in the project.
“Across the U.S., we have data on gas emissions, soil deep carbon, soil shallow carbon, soil health indicators, and we have agronomic data coupled with all this management data,” Morgan said.
Part of the project involves using the data in models commonly used to inform ecosystem services markets that can enable economic benefits for dairy farmers.
Making the data regionally relevant for farmers is important, Afshar said, and that’s why DSWR is taking place in six dairy-producing states.
“Any change in the management system comes with risks and farmers need to be confident that a specific practice change or technology adoption will work for their specific climate, soil and farming system,” he said.
Examining impact of novel manure products
The effects of using novel manure products are a key aspect of DSWR. Products and technologies that may offer environmental advantages over conventional storage and applications have received very limited if any previous field testing.
Researchers are experimenting with two types of novel manure products — evaporative solids and flocculated solids. Evaporative solids are derived from liquid manure by removing moisture, often through heat, creating a drier and more solidified product. Flocculated solids result from manure that is treated with a flocculating agent to aggregate fine particles into larger solids that separate from the liquid.
UW-Madison’s Sanford and his team are studying how these products affect greenhouse gas emissions and soil carbon, among other things.
At one of his sites, most of the positive changes in soil health or gas emissions seen so far are primarily associated with changes in tillage and cover cropping, while forage yield and quality are being maintained. That points to the potential benefit of a more nutrient-concentrated product that is easier to transport to where it’s needed, which can be a challenge with heavier liquid dairy manure.
“In my mind, that’s a great positive — if we can do what we can do with liquid manure but we’re doing it with a product that’s potentially much more feasible to move,” Sanford said.
Faulkner said it’s too early in Vermont’s studies to say definitively what the effect of the flocculated manure solids he’s testing will have on soil health in that region. But the flocculation process removes the vast majority of the phosphorus from the manure, and that is important in the Lake Champlain watershed where soils contain high amounts of legacy phosphorus, he said.
“I think these technologies are going to be critical to address water quality as we see watersheds start to hit this tipping point.”
Flocculation and evaporation are showing themselves to be enabling technologies, Morgan said, “because we know where we want to go with soil health management to improve water quality and water cycling and nutrient cycling, and this gives us another tool so that maybe we can push further toward the soil health management system and not be required to do other things because of the type of manure we have to apply.”
Researching with farmers front of mind
Dairy farmers have been part of DSWR from the beginning — from the many who volunteered to participate in the baseline survey to those now accommodating on-farm trials and attending field days to learn more.
Overall, their level of interest in sustainability practices is high even though there are challenges, the researchers said.
“People are telling us ... we’re thrilled to work with you and get our hands on real data, which has been pretty exciting,” Sanford said.
Busch said implementing new practices is not as simple as just starting. Farmers who want to add a cover crop, for example, must think about multiple factors like what species and how and when to establish and terminate the crop.
“It’s not just a single decision. Once you start going down those paths there are a lot of things to consider,” he said.
Morgan said that what stands out to her in working with dairy farmers is the dynamic of having livestock.
“When someone talks about changing a practice, there’s this risk associated with the question of, ‘Will I still be able to feed all these animals? If I can’t feed them, I’ve got to buy (feed) and what is it going to cost?’” she said. “So, when a dairy farmer does change their practices there’s a huge commitment associated with it because at the end of the day you know you have to feed the cows.”
Most farmers are genuinely interested and proactive in building soil health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving water quality, Afshar said. They also know that solutions are not one-size-fits-all — something DSWR recognizes.
“This project is designed in a way to provide options and give them tools that they need to make the decisions that work for them.”