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Water and Agriculture
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Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance:

Agriculture Runoff and Waste - Technological Improvements
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Erik Peterson
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Michael O'Neill

 
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Mon, Mar 30, 2009 nada:
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Erik Peterson:

Let me ask two more questions, one for each of you. And then we'll open things up to general discussion. Michael, if you'll allow me to begin with you. Agricultural waste and run-off are clearly major contributors to, among other things, in terms of waterway pollution, illnesses that we are seeing take such an amazing human health toll across the world. USDA has worked with researchers in Delaware, we know, to remove chemicals from chicken feed, for example, that pollute waterways. How can we engage in kind of a broader effort to get these kind of positive results?


Michael O'Neill:

Well, we focused on, I think, trying to use those demonstration projects and the research and education that would really extend our knowledge base to a variety of other countries. I think, you know we have technologies now to remove arsenic, for example, from chicken litter. We have technologies to use less nitrogen. And so those are out there, and just need to be applied. I think part of this is, we have to focus. Our efforts have always been on the technology, but we haven't looked at the behavior of the people using these things. So we need to work more with farmers, in terms of their behavioral sort of patterns. Why do they want to fertilize more? What's the impetus? And many times, it's because in order to make their yield goals, they have to either irrigate more, or fertilize more. Weather is the big unknown factor. And when that happens, they're forced to kind of make a decision early on in the season, to either put fertilizer on or not, and we can actually do better in terms of managing that. I think the tools we need in the future are going to be ones that help us understand what the weather's going to be, sooner, and be able to manage those micronutrients or nutrients in the soil, earlier on. That technology does exist, but getting the behavioral changes out there on the ground is really a major challenge. And it's not just a challenge in the developing world, it's a challenge right here in the United States. And we're working on that, but I think that's a slow process as farmers... most farmers are now over sixty years old in the United States alone. So if that's the case, you know, we need a new generation of farmers who can actually use these technologies, and understand how to implement them.


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