UMass Amherst transformed a 1/4 grass lawn on campus into a thriving, abundant, permaculture garden during the 2010-2011 academic year. Learn how this student-led project can be easily replicated and spread to other campuses, institutions, or any piece of land for that matter. UMass Amherst is doing this project directly on campus, and supplying the food to its dining commons.

North and South Carolina have seen a steady increase in swine production over the last 15 years. In North Carolina alone, swine production generates approximately a quarter of the state’s gross farm receipts. The presence of so many large-scale pig farms leads to the problem of proper animal waste disposal.

The most common practice in the Carolinas is storing animal waste in anaerobic lagoons. They are primarily used to concentrate and passively treat urine and feces but because of the widespread use of this practice, the environmental impact could be quite severe. Conflicting reports implicate lagoon sites to be responsible for high emission rates of nitrogen gas and volatized ammonia.

A team of ARS-USDA scientistsexamined a series of commercial, anaerobic, swine wastewater lagoons in North and South Carolina for genes involved in the nitrogen cycling process. Nitrification and denitrification are the parts of the process responsible for turning ammonia into nitrogen gas. After analyzing eight lagoons and measuring the abundance of four nitrogen cycling genes, researchers concluded that the denitrifying and nitrifying organisms were not active despite there being a thriving amount. Acidification and eutrophication of the surrounding ecosystem could be the result of prolonged exposure to volatilized ammonia.

The number of solar panels, wind turbines, and methane digesters on America’s farms and ranches has increased significantly over the past decade, according to survey results released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on February 23. There are now 8,569 operations producing their own renewable energy, according to the 2009 On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey. Conducted by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service as a follow-up to the most recent Census of Agriculture, this was the first nationwide survey to look at renewable energy practices on America’s farms and ranches.

According to the survey findings, solar panels were the most prominent way to produce on-farm energy. In 2009, farmers on 7,968 operations nationwide reported using photovoltaic and thermal solar panels. The use of wind turbines was reported by farmers on 1,420 operations across 48 states. The use of methane digesters was reported by 121 operations in 29 states. California leads the nation with 1,956 operations producing renewable energy, accounting for nearly a quarter of all participants in the United States. Colorado, Hawaii, and Texas were the other major states where farmers on at least 500 or more operations were producing their own renewable energy. See the USDA press release, a USDA fact sheet, and the survey results.

Much of the Mississippi River’s sediment load doesn’t come from field runoff, according to work by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Instead, the scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have confirmed that stream bank collapse and failure can be chief contributors to high sediment levels in the silty streams and rivers that flow into the Mississippi. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency.

Studies by a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist and cooperators have confirmed what many pollen-sensitive people already suspected: In some parts of North America, ragweed season now lasts longer and ends later.

Soon there will be U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) “apps” for smart phones, now that the Object Modeling System (OMS) is operational. The OMS is a framework for making software applications that use the power of cloud computing to run science computer models.

Bioethanol from new lines of native perennial prairie grass could become less costly because of plant engineering by The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and fermentation research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe their transgenic version of switchgrass as one that produces about one-third more ethanol by fermentation than conventional switchgrass. This improved plant feedstock will be able to generate more biofuel per acre, benefiting not only the transportation sector but also the growers and farming community.

Recalculating the global use of phosphorous, a fertilizer linchpin of modern agriculture, a team of researchers warns that the world’s stocks may soon be in short supply and that overuse in the industrialized world has become a leading cause of the pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.

Writing in the Feb. 14 edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters, Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Elena Bennett of McGill University report that the human use of phosphorous, primarily in the industrialized world, is causing the widespread eutrophication of fresh surface water. What’s more, the minable global stocks of phosphorous are concentrated in just a few countries and are in decline, posing the risk of global shortages within the next 20 years.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have figured out a cost-benefit balance between identifying the best sites for building bioenery facilities in the Pacific Northwest and supplying those facilities with the biofeedstock needed to produce fuel.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) agronomist George Mueller-Warrant, plant physiologist Gary Banowetz, and hydrologist Jerry Whittaker calculated that the 6.2 million tons of straw left over from the production of Pacific Northwest cash crops could be used to produce more than 430 million gallons of biofuel. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of developing new sources of bioenergy.

Taiwan has been experimenting with a simple solution to the perennial problems of pollution, smell and excessive water use on pig farms: train the pigs to use a toilet.