Great Plains Grazing is hosting a webinar July 23 on the new Nutrient Tracking Tool | Download this photo.
July 23 Great Plains Grazing webinar highlights online Nutrient Tracking Tool
NTT estimates nutrient and sediment losses from agricultural land
July 18, 2019
MANHATTAN, Kan. — How well do conservation practices, such as reduced tillage, reduce nutrient and sediment losses from agricultural fields? Researchers with Great Plains Grazing have helped develop a web-based tool to try to help answer this question. It’s the topic of a webinar on Tuesday, July 23.
The Nutrient Tracking Tool (NTT) allows producers to evaluate how different conservation practices can improve water quality on their fields and farms. The tool’s results are based on site-specific conditions (such as soils, slope, and weather) and on-farm management practices. Users can compare environmental impacts such as nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment losses, as well as estimated yields of various management scenarios. Results are presented in both tabular and graphical formats to allow producers to make informed decisions on the types of conservation practices that can most benefit their operations.
Researchers from the Texas Institute for Applied Research (TIAER) at Tarleton State University will present a free webinar “Nutrient Tracking Tool (NTT): Decision Support for Conservation Management” on Tuesday, July 23 at 2 p.m. (CDT).
Ali Saleh is an associate director at TIAER, where he develops and evaluates hydrologic models and the impacts of different management practices for local producers and land managers. His research and writings address wind and water erosion, water quality modeling and related issues, physical and chemical analysis of soil, and design and evaluation of irrigation and drainage systems.
Edward Osei joined TIAER in 1996. His primary responsibilities include computer modeling of economic issues involved in environmental policy assessment. His areas of interest include computer modeling of economic processes, nonpoint source pollution, natural resource and environmental economics, and farm management and production economics.
Narayanan Kannan is a research scientist with TIAER and a faculty member in the Center for Environmental Studies at Tarleton. His research focuses on development and application of computer models for solving challenging water resources problems. He developed a computer model to estimate water use, energy requirement and greenhouse gas emissions associated with livestock production.
This webinar will describe the NTT and new components added as a result of the Great Plains Grazing project, including an Animal Production Life Cycle Analysis Tool (APLCAT) and a Farm Economic model (FEM). The APLCAT estimates water use, energy use, nutrient balance, and greenhouse gas emissions (methane, N2O, and CO2) associated with beef cattle production. In addition to the model validation, multiple scenarios were tested to estimate various environmental improvement opportunities in beef cattle production. Routines within FEM are used to estimate costs and returns, based primarily on livestock and crop operations, ownership and characteristics of structures, facilities and equipment, financing terms, land areas and uses, livestock nutrition, and manure production and handling.
Underpinning the NTT Tool is the Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender (APEX) model, the same model used for USDA’s Conservation Effects Assessment Program (CEAP) to assess environmental impacts at the national and regional scales. Currently, the USDA Office of Environmental Market is planning to use NTT as part of a water quality trading program.
This webinar is part of a recurring series hosted by Great Plains Grazing, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agriculture and Food Research Initiative-Coordinated Agricultural Project (USDA-AFRI-CAP) grant. The webinar series aims to provide research-based information, and is targeted for producers and extension agents. Previous webinars are archived and available for viewing on the Great Plains Grazing website: http://www.greatplainsgrazing.org
Interested individuals can register for the free webinar at: http://bit.ly/NTTWebinar.
