My Summer Internship
with the USDA National Resource Conservation Service
By Cristina Clark-Cuadrado (EVR Grad Student)
My internship is going great. I work very closely with farmers and landowners and do both field and office work. I am located in the NRCS office in York county, PA. Agriculture here is mostly corn/soybean/wheat rotation with some dairy farms. The landscape is fairly hilly so there are many soil erosion problems. There is a big push for no-till here to prevent soil erosion and cut down on fuel costs. In fact, it seems that most agriculture here is no-till.
I'm learning about government incentives and cost-share programs that help the farmer install or continue BMPs. About half of my job is to do the paperwork for these government programs, including soil, topographic, and conservation plan maps. All of the mapping work is done on ArcGIS (The GIS classes I've taken have been a HUGE help! I don't know how it is not required in the job description to be experienced at GIS.) through a program specially designed for USDA called "Toolkit." I also design conservation plans through this program. Conservation plans can be anything from starting a farmer to contour crop to installing spring evelopments, to designing grassed waterways. It really depends on the farmer's problem. About half of the time I am out in the field talking to these farmers and landowners about their problems and the government programs that can help them pay for their practices. I also go out to collect data on fields to design conservation plans, check whether the practices are working out as planned, making the necessary changes, etc.
It has been very nice to attend workshops in which no-till equipment and new agricultural machinery have been presented. I need to be familiar with these products to be able to inform farmers. Farmers also attend these workshops so it is also great to talk to them and see which practices work for them and which don't. One recurring opinion is about the success of no-till. Every farmer I have talked to agrees that no-till is very hard to adopt the first few years, but by the 4th or 5th year, you can really tell the difference in the soil quality. They say that the people that don't do no-till nowadays are crazy. We have been having record-high precipitation the past couple of weeks up here, and I've gone back to several fields to see whether they have gullies and other forms of soil erosion, and the difference between no-till fields and conventional agriculture are amazing! Walking in the no-till fields is like walking over a sponge, whereas walking on normal fields... well, I've had to get my rubber boots out several times to be able to walk through that mess!
Hearing the farmer's perspective has opened my eyes to many things that I had not even thought not only about no-till, but about the economics and business that agriculture is. I am so glad I'm able to do this internship this summer!
Posted July 11, 2006
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Cristina works with Dr Jayachandran and Dr. Bhat. For more information contact Christina at Cristina.Cuadrado@pa.usda.gov.