An on-farm innovative conservation approach for water quality improvement, sustaining farm productivity, and supporting healthy watershed

The overall long-term goal of this project is to develop and implement a market-based innovative and sustainable farmer-friendly conservation practice that would allow dairy farmers to convert their unmanageable excessive manure nutrient load and carbon emissions into organic slow-release marketable soil fertility products for crop production, and second their application by crop producers would enable replacement of imported soil health products. EQUIP qualified Vermont based farms and growers along with farmer stakeholders will contribute to this project for evaluating high nutrient recovery potential, conducting field trials of organic slow-release products for warm and cold season crops, and market-based product quality. the main project deliverables and anticipated project results are as follows: 1) Quantify environmental and economic benefits for facilitating improved implementation of NRCS water quality measures by conducting nutrient recovery trials in the most environmentally sensitive watershed of Franklin County, VT, and projecting nutrient recovery benefits for 20 farms in Franklin as well as Grand Isle counties for replicating the process to other counties in Vermont in the future; 2) Quantify soil-health benefits as well as carbon sequestration from nutrient recovery process through field trials of the new organic soil amendments produced from the innovative conservation practice by using the established methods developed by University Extension programs; 3) Deliver the new conservation practice and information about the marketability of the soil fertility products to farmers and stakeholders through field days, workshops, webinars, publications, and other outreach activities.