

More stories on research with hairy
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Online Vegetative
Mulch Reduces Pesticide and Soil Losses in RunoffBy Sharon Durham April 2, 2001As a mulch in vegetable production, the
cover crop hairy vetch greatly reduces pesticide runoff and soil erosion,
making it an excellent alternative to plastic mulch often used by vegetable
growers. This finding was presented Sunday by Agricultural Research Service scientist
Pamela Rice during this weeks meeting of the American Chemical Society in
San Diego, Calif. Rice is with the ARS
Soil and
Water Management Research Unit, based at the
University of Minnesota at St.
Paul. Vegetable growers now often use plastic (polyethylene) mulch to maintain
soil moisture and control weeds. When it rains, however, the plastic increases
surface runoff because 50-75 percent of the field is covered with plastic that
will not allow rain to penetrate into the soil. The runoff contains eroded soil
and agricultural chemicals that may have potential harmful effects on organisms
in nearby streams and rivers. In a three-year collaborative study, Rice and co-workers at the
Environmental Quality Lab and
the Sustainable
Agricultural Systems Lab at the Henry
A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, Md., have
developed a more sustainable vegetable production system that uses hairy vetch,
a vegetative mulch. ARS has demonstrated that hairy vetch is economical and can
effectively control weeds. The study compared runoff and soil erosion from field plots using vegetative
and plastic mulch. Fields with plastic mulch lost two to four times more water
and up to 10 times more sediment than the plots using hairy vetch mulch. ARS is the chief scientific research agency in the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. Scientific contact: Pamela Rice, ARS
Soil and
Water Management Research Unit, St. Paul, Minn., phone (612) 625-1909, fax
(651) 649-5175, [email protected]. U.S. Department of Agriculture |