Project Search
Since its inception in 2004, CIG has funded hundreds of projects, boosting natural resource conservation while helping producers improve the health of their operations for the future. Use this tool to search for CIG projects based on any of the criteria listed below.
CIG projects from 2004-2009 may be missing information in the following categories: Resource Concern (specific), Conservation Practice, Production/Use.
Showing 1381 - 1390 of 1760 projects
IPM Institute of North America
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WI
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2007
The IPM Institute will develop an innovative on-line tool that will rank pesticide products for impacts on soil, water, and air quality, avian and aquatic life, beneficial organisms, and worker and consumer health and safety. This tool will apply best available science to permit producers, advisors and regulatory professionals to compare different pest management scenarios for any commodity and select options with the fewest potential environmental and health hazards, and to identify mitigation options for products/uses selected.
Iowa Soybean Association
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IA
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2007
This project focuses on enhanced nutrient management that involves farmer self-evaluation of nitrogen (N) fertilizer needs for corn with incentives to increase efficiency. Between Iowa and Delaware, 1,590 fields will be evaluated. To date, hundreds of Iowa producers have used remote sensing with replicated strip trials and/or guided stalk nitrate sampling to evaluate their N needs and new N management approaches, and the majority has found they can maximize profit and reduce N losses to the environment by applying far less fertilizer and/or by adopting different application strategies. The high corn prices and huge demand for ethanol made from grain has resulted in an increase in acres planted to corn. This increase in corn acres results in more acres with corn following corn. As a result, there is an immediate need to collect more information from fields that have corn following corn. The surge in ethanol production has raised questions about the Energy balance of corn production. Nitrogen fertilizer is considered to be about 30-40% of the Energy needs for corn. Improved efficiencies in N management will have significant impacts on the Energy balance of producing ethanol from corn. Differences in N requirements from different rotations will be compared and the Energy differences can be accounted for.
United Egg Producers
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GA
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2007
The purpose of this award is for the grantee to demonstrate to egg producers nationwide that the feeding of the ethanol by-product, dried distillers grains or DDGS, as part of a properly balanced diet, can result in dramatic reductions in ammonia emissions while maintaining production performance for egg laying hens.UEP will administer this project under the direction of Mr. Chad Gregory, with management support from collaborative scientists at three land-grant universities, particularly Professor Gates at UK. Scientists from ISU and PSU will work with egg producers in Iowa and Pennsylvania. These producers will adopt specific diet modification strategies involving DDGS, certain FDA-approved feed supplements, enzymes, and probiotics. At these same farm locations, and under essentially identical production conditions, hens in the paired houses will be fed a standard “control” diet. Ammonia emissions, manure nutrient contents, hen production performance, and production costs for both the treated and control facilities will be measured, analyzed and compared. The economics of these diet manipulation strategies will be thoroughly evaluated and an economic analytical tool will be developed to help transfer this economic performance information to other producers. These findings will be featured prominently in an upcoming National Poultry Waste Management Symposium. Most importantly, UEP will disseminate these findings through its regular newsletters, reaching 90% or more of the egg laying industry and through 16 regional meetings held over the course of two years (two per region) where these results will be presented.
Farmers Conservation Alliance
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OR
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2007
Farmers Conservation Alliance (FCA) is requesting funding for the Farmers Screen Project in order to stimulate the development and adoption of the Farmers Screen as well as demonstrate the benefits for agricultural production, environmental enhancement, and environmental protection. The Farmers Screen is a diversion screen that is designed to allow water to flow from the river into an irrigation system while keeping fish and debris from being trapped. The Farmers Screen prevents clogging, protects fish at all life stages, ensures consistent water flow, and saves farmers and irrigation districts thousands of dollars annually in avoided operation and maintenance costs. FCA will use project funds to host an extensive outreach campaign, develop a market-based distribution system for the Farmers Screen, create streamline, permitting processes, install at least 56 screens throughout Oregon, become a NRCS technical service provider, become an EQIP-approved technology and for evaluation the agricultural and environmental benefits of the Farmers Screen.
Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Governments
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OR
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2007
The focus of the proposed project is to provide cropland and forestland managers with the tools and resources they need to make conservation incentives part of their land management strategies. In particular, the project will make ecosystem service markets more available and accessible to farmers and foresters. The project has three ways in which this objective will be achieved. First, ready access to ecosystem service markets depends on having a structured market where buyers and sellers of goods can easily connect and transactions can occur in a common, uniform currency. The Willamette Partnership is committed to creating this framework and is developing many components of the marketplace through existing EPA grants. The proposed project will focus on obtaining acceptance from regulatory agencies on the common currency. This aspect of the project will build upon a significant amount of currency development work accomplished by the Oregon Department of Transportation over the past three years. Second, for a wide range of farmers and foresters to be able to access the market, the tools used in that market must be user-friendly. Accordingly, the second component of the project is development of a user friendly database interface for the accounting method (the currency). The development of this interface will help standardize the currency, make it less subject to error and make it more usable by private individuals. Third, in addition to an easy to use interface, farmers and foresters will benefit from additional user friendly tools that allow them to make decisions about using market incentives as part of their land management approach. The need for these tools will be identified through coordination with the farmers and foresters that comprise the ultimate user group. Examples of some anticipated tools that will be developed include a rapid assessment approach that allows land owners to easily assess the financial desirability of pursuing market incentive strategies and a tool to help them understand the available market incentives and the advantages/disadvantages of those various incentive programs.
Belle Fourche River Watershed Partnership
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SD
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2007
The purpose of this award is for the grantee to provide producers with a reliable, simple means to monitor and schedule irrigations that will conserve water and reduce the amount of sediment-laden irrigation return flows that enter the Belle Fourche River.This project will develop and implement a Web-based, interactive irrigation scheduling calculator that is customized to each producer’s crop, planting date, soil type, rainfall, and irrigation amounts, and method of irrigation. The calculator will allow any producer with internet access to create a personalized Web page with irrigation information for a particular field. To accomplish this, an extensive real-time weather network will be implemented. This weather network will monitor rainfall and provide the inputs to calculate daily evapotranspiration (ET) using the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Penman method. Irrigation delivery amounts will be retrieved from an existing database and added to the rainfall estimates for that location to determine the daily increase in the soil water balance. Producers will be able to track the estimated soil water balance for their individual fields and obtain a recommended irrigation schedule. Readings from installed soil moisture instruments will be transmitted via an existing radio network and provided online as a means to track relative soil water changes throughout the irrigation season. Weekly ET values and rainfall will also be published in local print media.
North Carolina State University
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NC
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2007
In response to growing consumer demand and increased production of outdoor-raised (marketed as “pasture-raised”) pork in North Carolina, this project will demonstrate and evaluate a comprehensive set of innovative conservation practices on outdoor hog production systems throughout three distinct regions of the State—the Mountains, Piedmont and Coastal Plain—that represent major production characteristics and soil types throughout the Southeast. Through the oversight of a technical steering committee, model farms, and demonstration sites will be established to demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness, environmental impacts and economic implications of implementing different conservation practices on outdoor hog production systems. Farmer participants will be supported to maintain comprehensive records, engage in project planning, and host outreach and educational events, including field days, training workshops, and informal gatherings. Regional support teams will be developed that include farmer mentors, District Conservationists, and extension agents as a means of increasing the likelihood of adoption of conservation practices, and specifically utilization of EQIP, particularly on small and limited resource farms. A variety of deliverables will be developed, including a technical guidance document for use by NRCS staff and District Conservationists to foster expansion of EQIP to outdoor hog production systems.
Ryan Reker
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NE
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2007
The purpose of this award is for the grantee to acquire detailed elevation information for South-Central Nebraska to incorporate into conservation planning models, project design, and conservation program delivery to producers.The project will provide the Rainwater Basin Joint Venture and conservation partners with accurate elevation data derived from LIDAR. The elevation data will then be integrated with detailed spatial data to create models and decision support tools to improve natural resource planning, design, and implementation of conservation practices in the Rainwater Basin Wetland Complex, Central Platte River Corridor, Republican River, and NRCS-Major Land Resource Area – 75. Integrated LIDAR will enable all conservation partners to plan and prioritize conservation efforts for specific programs such as WRP, EQIP, WHIP, and CRP. It will also allow for better planning and prioritization for specific natural resource issues such as: improving water quality through better site selection of riparian buffer strips or waterways or improving wildlife Habitat by targeting grassland improvements. The elevation data will also be used by partners to improve their effectiveness and increase the number of conservation projects. Shrinking NRCS and partner engineering staffs are creating a significant backlog of projects in Nebraska. Much of the survey and design data could be obtained through LIDAR elevation data. Many design features could be accessed from the office on the computer. Increasing design efficiency would allow increased numbers of conservation projects throughout all conservation programs requiring engineering input.
Albert Wayne Jones
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MS
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2007
The overall goal of this project is to implement a unique and innovative, market-based solution, for effectively managing Energy generation on a small broiler poultry farm with four houses, while addressing the highly critical issue of broiler litter disposal. Mississippi, which is the fourth largest poultry producing State in the U.S., generates about 2.2 billion pounds of litter annually. New environmental regulations and health concerns related to mad cow disease and watershed are putting increasing pressure on poultry growers to curb the practice of conventional litter spreading on pasturelands or for cattle feeding. Additionally, the significantly higher Energy costs of a poultry operation today are placing a tremendous financial burden on the farmers. An on-farm anaerobic digester is an innovative approach to conserve water, soil and atmospheric resources while generating bio-based renewable Energy and eliminate the problems of litter disposal as well as dead birds. Additionally the market for carbon credits is emerging in the U.S. and since methane qualifies for 21 times the credits for each unit of carbon dioxide, the returns on investment in digester projects may become a respectable revenue source for the farmers. Even though the science behind anaerobic digestion is well understood, using an anaerobic digester to manage broiler litter is a truly innovative approach and has only become feasible due to a recent change in poultry raising practices as described in the narrative. A very important element of the proposed system is that this project will be a scaled-down, user-friendly, production-oriented version of an experimental poultry litter digester that is currently operational on a ten-house farm in Mississippi and was funded in large part by the State of Mississippi. A smaller scale digester on a farm with four broiler houses will also lend itself to the study of a modular approach to constructing digesters for larger farms in the poultry belt States.
North Carolina State University
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NC
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2007
The purpose of this award is for the grantee to increase participation, revitalize and improve Drainage Water Management in North Carolina to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment losses to surface waters, conserve water and increase yields.Drainage Water Management or Controlled Drainage has been installed on over 400,000 acres of cropland in North Carolina. It is conservatively estimated that under proper operation, these systems will reduce N loads to streams and estuaries by about 4,000,000 lbs annually. However the original contracts for management have expired and the systems are, in many cases, no longer functioning as designed. Further, most of the control structures have been installed on open ditches with little application of the more recently developed structures for controlling drainage in subsurface or “tile” mains. This project will support the installation of these new structures in subsurface mains on 15 to 20 sites. If successful, this demonstration could lead to application on thousands of additional acres in the middle Coastal Plain. The project will also develop and implement a web-based system for encouraging and assisting users in the proper application of drainage water management on both old and new systems. The goal is to revitalize and improve the management of controlled drainage systems in North Carolina. A web-based system will be developed and implemented on a pilot scale with 15 farmers in at least 6 Coastal Plain counties. The system will provide crop, soil, and location sensitive advice and reminders on management of the control structures. DRAINMOD simulations to evaluate soil water conditions and provide guidance on managing the structures based on current and forecasted weather conditions and the status of receiving waters will be conducted and updated at least monthly through the year. Brochures will be developed to promote Drainage Water Management and field days will be held to demonstrate the practice and present results of its effect on crop yields, drainage outflows and nutrient losses to the environment.