Catching Up with CALS — Oct. 4, 2023

Dean's Message — Organic Research Facility Bearing Fruit

Workers at the University of Idaho Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center (SOAC) begin harvesting the orchard’s earliest maturing apple variety — Duchess of Oldenburg – in mid-August. The Russian heirloom variety, identifiable by its yellow skin and red stripes, is cold hardy and is a popular choice for apple sauce production. The orchard’s visitors marvel at the incredible size of Alexander apples — just one is said to be sufficient for making an entire pie. The last apples to mature at the organic orchard, crisp and tart Hauer Pippins, originated in California in the 1890s and are known for lasting extraordinarily long in storage. On Aug. 1, SOAC celebrated its five-year anniversary as a university asset. In addition to being Idaho’s sole USDA Certified Organic agricultural research station, the unique center serves as a repository for long-forgotten heirloom and antique apple varieties and offers a scenic venue for food system forums and community events.

Dennis Pence, cofounder of the women’s apparel retailer Coldwater Creek, once used the orchard, capacious lodge, dormitories and meeting facilities as a headquarters for his local nonprofits, as well as for hosting yoga and meditation retreats. U of I was able to acquire the property thanks to a generous donation from Pence and his family. While most commercial orchards grow no more than a half dozen apple varieties, 68 varieties are raised in Sandpoint from 650 trees. Most of the varieties are heirlooms — including 27 that were grown in the northeastern region of the U.S. during colonial times. Kyle Nagy, SOAC’s operations manager and superintendent, and his staff sell their fruit directly from the orchard and at markets in the Sandpoint area. Late each fall, they also press their own cider.

SOAC supports a wide variety of research studies and demonstration projects catering to small farms. A multi-species rotational grazing demonstration involving 30 sheep from the U of I Sheep Center in Moscow, as well as 60 chickens, is being conducted within pasture at the center. From mid-May through the end of August, the sheep grazed half-acre, fenced paddocks for two to three days before being moved to fresh grass. Chickens follow the sheep in rotation, helping to spread the sheep manure and controlling parasitic worms. Soil testing must still be conducted for comparison with baseline data, but the researchers anticipate their project will demonstrate the introduction of animals helps control weeds while their manure improves soil health and fertility. The chickens will soon be sold to local residents as egg layers.

Researchers with the Department of Soil and Water Systems recently completed year three of another study evaluating soil health in organic production systems in certified organic research plots at the center. Summer interns manage a separate educational market garden that uses organic production methods but isn’t certified organic. The interns consume some of the produce they raise throughout the summer, and this season they also delivered more than 2,500 pounds of produce to the Bonner Community Food Bank. Researchers have expressed interest in conducting post-harvest studies using the heirloom apples.

Community events and forums hosted at SOAC always draw large crowds. The Heritage Orchard Conference begins on Oct. 18 and will include Zoom sessions featuring expert speakers on a host of heritage tree fruit-related topics on the third Wednesday of each month through April. Registration is free, and the event has grown to include more than 1,700 participants from 27 countries. Sessions will cover topics such as making homemade fermented cider with heirloom apples, historical apple research, development of new commercial apple varieties and backyard apple breeding. The public is invited to taste up to 30 apple varieties at the orchard during a free apple tasting scheduled for noon to 4 p.m. on Oct. 21. Apples will also be available to purchase at the event, which drew more than 400 people last fall.

Registration is now open for the Second Annual Selkirk-Pend Oreille Food Summit, which is devoted to establishing connections between consumers who wish to buy local food and local food producers. This year’s event will be hosted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Nov. 3, and the theme is “Season by Season.” It will begin with presentations from local food producers, restaurants and markets utilizing local food and organizations dedicated to food access within the local food system. This fall’s summit will also include workshops on planning your garden, preserving your harvest and raising your own meat. Admission is $35 and $15 for students and includes a catered meal featuring local foods. Contact Area Extension Educator Colette DePhelps for more information.

For astronomy lovers, SOAC will soon be home to a powerful telescope that will be housed inside of a shipping container, which the public will be allowed to access during important astronomical events. The telescope is owned by the Sandpoint-based organization Spacepoint and is tentatively scheduled to be unveiled later this fall.

During public events at SOAC, guests also have the opportunity to view displays offered upstairs in the main building by the U of I Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences, featuring clothing from the Leila Old Historic Costume Collection, which is curated by Professor and Collections Manager Sonya Meyer. The current display highlights vintage farm attire. Members of the Pend Oreille Arts Council adopt the theme of the current clothing display when they showcase quilts at SOAC. The setting at SOAC is idyllic, and the events showcase what makes the fall harvest season special. We hope you can make it to one of these popular events and see for yourself.

Michael P. Parrella

Dean
College of Agricultural and Life Sciences

By the Numbers

The University of Idaho Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center celebrated its 5th anniversary of being part of CALS on Aug. 1. During the past 5 years, 24,052 pounds of apples and 2,147 pounds of cherries have been harvested from the center’s orchard and grounds. Furthermore, 1,460 pounds of raspberries have been harvested through you-pick and 1,042 half-gallon bottles have been filled with freshly pressed cider. The center’s Heritage Orchard Conference has drawn 1,735 attendees and has included 22 webinars. It has hosted more than 330 days of U of I programs and events, plus 60 events that were not associated with the university. The center has also welcomed 8 amazing interns and 1 resident bull moose.

Our Stories

An Italian Adventure

A desire to gain more experience working with large animals led Mikayla McCormick on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. McCormick spent two weeks during summer 2023 shadowing veterinarians in Florence, Italy, immersing herself in Italian culture while working at animal rescues and rehabilitation centers.

A routine email from the University of Idaho’s Pre-Veterinary Club alerted McCormick to the  Doctors in Italy Fellowship program and she decided to take a chance. McCormick, a senior from Windsor, California studying animal and veterinary science: pre-veterinary option, selected the Florence option because of its focus on livestock animals.

Read the full story

Incentivizing Ag Innovation

Devin Fielding held up a photograph of his children when he explained why he farms, as well as the golden opportunity he sees in the University of Idaho-led Innovative Agricultural and Marketing Partnership (IAMP) program, formerly known as Climate-Smart Commodities for Idaho.

The Shelley farmer and rancher acknowledged he has a dirty job requiring long hours, slim profit margins, uncertainty and risk. But Fielding recognizes farming instills a strong work ethic and a deep appreciation of natural resources, and he’s vested in making certain his kids also have the chance to work the land and learn farming values.

As president of the Idaho Association of Soil Conservation Districts (IASCD), Fielding has been recruiting other Idaho food producers to participate in IAMP, which seeks to evaluate and promote regenerative agronomic practices intended to make Idaho farms and ranches economically and environmentally sustainable into the future.

U of I and its partners received the $55 million IAMP grant through USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, and most of the funding will be passed on to the state’s producers, incentivizing their adoption of one or more climate-smart practices that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cover cropping, cover cropping with livestock grazing, reduced or no-till, interseeding, precision fertilizer application, nutrient management including partial nitrogen fertilizer replacement and soil carbon amendments including biochar and compost are the covered practices. Precise details about the size of incentives are not yet available, but the program will offer payments above Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) rates through USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

Priority will be given to applicants willing to enroll for three years. Depending on specific rotations, practices may differ among years. Producers will be prohibited from having an IAMP contract for the same practice in the same field in which they’re receiving an incentive through another federal program.

The goal throughout the grant’s five-year period is to prevent an average of 60,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere annually while replenishing organic matter in Idaho cropland soils.

IASCD is a partner in the grant, which advances the organization’s mission of promoting voluntary, locally led, nonregulatory conservation. IASCD will help share the bulk of $22 million with participating food producers, anticipating the practices they adopt, once successfully implemented, will become part of their standard operations.

Fielding offered his thoughts on the grant during a sustainability-themed field day McCain Foods hosted in Aberdeen, encouraging the food producers in attendance to contact their local Soil and Water Conservation District about participating. IAMP organizers hope to start accepting applications this fall.

“Farming is challenging — it’s hard — but I wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else, and me continuing to farm and ensuring that this generation has the same opportunity I did relies on two things in my view,” Fielding said. “Locally, it’s my ability to pursue new ideas, evaluate the results and incorporate those ideas into my operation. More broadly it’s dependent on me communicating with the people who want to buy my products in an effective and constructive way.”

The grant was written to target seven major commodities raised in Idaho and will seek to drive climate-smart practices on 10% of the state’s active cropland. Fielding believes Idaho producers will appreciate the opportunity to work with neighbors from within IASCD rather than regulators. Most of the research to quantify carbon dioxide sequestration will be conducted at U of I facilities and extrapolated across the participating farms.

“This grant is an opportunity for growers to try new things, and if this is the nudge you need to take the financial risk out of a new idea — something you’ve had your eye on; something that looks interesting and appealing — please take advantage of it,” Fielding said.

Other funded partners include the Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene Tribes, the Nature Conservancy Agriculture Program in Idaho, Desert Mountain Grassfed Beef and Arrowleaf Consulting.

There’s been an increasing emphasis on programs that entice producers to try new ways to produce more food with less impact on the environment as food manufacturers seek to assure consumers that they take sustainability seriously.

McCain, for example, has set a goal of sourcing 100% of its potatoes from regeneratively grown acres by 2030. In 2021, McCain launched its Farm of the Future on cropland it purchased in New Brunswick, Canada, to study regenerative agriculture. This season, McCain partnered with three farmers — in Manitoba, Canada, Washington and Idaho — to establish Innovation Hubs, expanding its regenerative agriculture projects into new regions. Those farmers receive technical support to try new regenerative practices they might otherwise avoid due to risk, as well as the company’s pledge to offset any potential yield losses resulting from their experimentation.

The company hosted its recent field day at its Idaho Innovation Hub, farmed by Austin Poulson of Aberdeen. Poulson showed other farmers in his area how planting cover crops has improved the soil-moisture retention of fields. Poulson has also had success with introducing sheep to graze his cover crops. Both practices are also included in IAMP.

“There is a benefit of this regenerative agriculture to empowering the soil to do what the soil needs to do,” Poulson said.

Additional Innovation Hubs are set to launch next season in Alberta, Canada, Wisconsin and Maine.

Courtney Cosdon, UI Extension instructor specializing in soil health, and Linda Schott, an assistant professor and UI Extension specialist specializing in nutrient and waste management, were among the guest speakers at the McCain event in Aberdeen.

Cosdon offered a demonstration using USDA-NRCS equipment, showing how simulated heavy rainfall is readily absorbed by squares of topsoil from relatively undisturbed soils, while it forms a crust and runs off conventionally tilled soil samples.

For her demonstration, Schott showed off several pairs of cotton men’s underwear in various stages of decay, which had been buried in farm fields. While underwear buried in conventionally tilled fields were largely intact, little more than a waistband remained of briefs buried in soils with abundant microbial communities to feed on the cotton. Schott explained the soil microbes got a boost from certain soil-health practices, such as manure applications and cover crops.

U of I is in the process of hiring a full-time project manager to oversee IAMP. In addition to the payments, participating farmers will receive technical support, data analysis and information about emerging markets for produced commodities that could be associated with farmgate premiums.

“Where we have informed people about this grant, the interest is strong,” said Sanford Eigenbrode, a university distinguished professor in the Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology and co-principal investigator of IAMP. “It’s an opportunity.”

Annual Alfalfa Shows Benefits

University of Idaho Extension forage and small grains researchers are testing a seemingly counterintuitive theory that local farmers could reap rewards by planting alfalfa varieties that weren’t bred to withstand Idaho’s cold winters.

The team is in the first year of a planned three-year trial at the University of Idaho’s Aberdeen Research and Extension Center evaluating the planting of non-dormant alfalfa varieties — those that don’t enter winter dormancy — in Idaho as a means of improving soil health and fixing extra nitrogen to benefit future crops.

Alfalfa is traditionally raised as a perennial crop that remains in production for four or five seasons, until declining hay quality and yields prompt farmers to remove it. As with most legumes, alfalfa can produce nodules on its roots where soil bacteria convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a plant-usable form.

UI Extension researchers Jared Spackman, Reed Findlay, David Callister, Jared Gibbons, Joseph Sagers and Tom Jacobsen anticipate Idaho farmers stand to significantly increase nitrogen fixation by planting alfalfa varieties developed for warmer states, such as Arizona, that don’t have to expend energy late in the season to become winter hardy. The researchers explain rather than thickening taproots and bulking up their crowns to avoid winter kill, the non-dormant varieties popular in warmer climates are free to focus energy on fixing more nitrogen.

“The reason we’re doing this now is because alfalfa prices rose significantly over the last five years and fertilizer costs also rose significantly,” Findlay said. “We’re going to beat this thing at both ends of the stick.”

Non-dormant alfalfa raised in Aberdeen should yield a single season of three cuttings and die in the winter, providing growers with a cash crop while reducing future fertilizer costs. Findlay conducted a similar trial in Utah several years ago and found a non-dormant alfalfa variety bred to optimize nitrogen fixation, called Nitro, produced enough nitrogen to support either a barley or corn crop during the following season, as well as a full barley crop during the third season.

In the current trial, Findlay and his colleagues are testing a variety related to the one Findlay previously experimented with, called High Nitro. They’re comparing it against Stratica, which is a Roundup Ready conventional alfalfa variety commonly raised in Idaho.

“One of the things we’re interested in is if there is a nitrogen benefit of High Nitro versus Stratica,” Spackman said.

To evaluate the ability of the two alfalfa varieties to supply nitrogen for fall or spring seeded barley production, the UI Extension educators will establish plots receiving multiple nitrogen fertilizer application rates including a non-fertilized check. Comparing both fall and spring alfalfa should help the researchers determine how quickly nitrogen is released and made available to subsequent small grain crops.

The researchers will also evaluate protein levels, yield, energy content and digestibility of the hay varieties. Yields from the first two cuttings of both varieties were comparable.

A secondary benefit of raising alfalfa for a single season is that it would allow small grain farmers to diversify their rotations, control weeds using different herbicides and break the cycle of disease. Furthermore, alfalfa killed by the winter cold would lend organic matter to soil. Idaho farmers often plant cover crops — crops grown primarily for soil-health benefits — to accomplish such results. Non-dormant hay would give farmers the benefits both of a cover crop and a cash crop.

Findlay believes the timing is right for the research, given that the market outlook is for fuel prices, which are tied to fertilizer prices, to continue rising.

“The higher fertilizer prices go, the more apt people are to look at different ways of farming,” Findlay said. “This study is really important to find out because I think it’s on us as researchers to figure it out before growers put the annual alfalfa in.”

The project’s initial year has been funded with a $5,000 Innovative Projects Grant through UI Extension.

Faces and Places

Sigma Alpha, a professional agricultural sorority that promotes scholarship, leadership, service and fellowship among members, is hosting a benefit auction and banquet beginning at 6 p.m. Oct. 28 at the Moscow American Legion, 317 S. Howard St. Tickets are $20 and cover a catered dinner and music by country artist Landon Vance. Several auction items will be available including fly fishing gear, a vacation stay in Hayden, Idaho, a horseshoe wine rack and a Dremel tool set.

CALS has earned a ranking as the #22 Best College for Agricultural Sciences in America by Niche, up one spot from last year.

Abigail Thomas, a sophomore from Melbourne, Australia, studying animal and veterinary science: pre-vet option, was named a September Student-Athlete of the Month by Vandal Athletics. Thomas competes on the cross country team.

Hadley Beechinor, a sophomore from Walla Walla, Washington double majoring in agriculture economics: agribusiness emphasis and animal and veterinary science: business option, and Claire Shelton, a junior from Boise studying animal and veterinary science: pre-vet option, attended the Agriculture Future of America Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., Sept. 10-12. They were able to visit with representatives and agriculture policy leaders, discuss innovations and recent challenges in the industry and learn about career paths and opportunities.