USDA Report- Agricultural Conservation on Working Lands: Trends From 2004 to Present

The USDA’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) recently released a report title, “Agricultural Conservation on Working Lands: Trends From 2004 to Present.”  A fact sheet that accompanied the report explained that, “The first step toward increasing adoption of conservation practices is to establish a baseline of current adoption rates;” and added that the report, “uses survey data to track U.S. adoption of selected agricultural conservation practices that both reduce GHG [green house gas] emissions and provide additional environmental benefits.”  Today’s update includes brief excerpts and highlights from both the report and fact sheet. The authors explained that, “Tracking every conservation practice is beyond the scope of this report; as a result, the scope was narrowed to track a subset of working-lands conservation practices producing a common benefit: reduced GHG emissions or increased carbon sequestration. Specifically, we included practices that were targeted as part of USDA’s Building Blocks for Climate- Smart Agriculture and Forestry initiative and narrowed those to practices for which survey data were available. Such practices include reduced tillage (mulch tillage and no tillage), nitrogen management, use of cover crops, use of precision agriculture technologies, and use of anaerobic digesters for manure, which generate GHG benefits by reducing emissions of nitrous oxide, methane, carbon dioxide, and/or increasing carbon sequestration.”The report stated that, “Application of nitrogen fertilizers to soils is the largest source of GHG emissions in agriculture. In 2015, it accounted for approximately 75 percent of N2O emissions and 3.8 percent of total emissions in the United States.”“Corn had the highest nitrogen per acre application rate and the highest percentage of applied acres of the three crops studied,” the report said.