Sam Denherder

 The video from last week's Weekly Connection was super helpful in defining and explaining all of the best management practices farmers are currently using and trying to implement in order to minimize environmental impact and maximize sustainability. Over the past decade, environmental impacts and sustainable practices have become a lot more apparent and popular with agriculture. We are now starting to realize we need to care for the Earth in order to keep feeding the world. A new practice that the video showed was planting green, I had heard of this practice a couple times before. The main time was while talking to one of my mentors, Dwayne Joseph, planting green was brought up and he helped briefly explain what it is. This practice which plants the crop directly into a living mix of cover crops is incredibly beneficial for soil sustainability and to protect the environment. The farmers at Harborview farms explain how the process of photosynthesis corrects and grounds Nitrogen into the soil. Having plants growing in your field 100% of the year, sometimes even overlapping, puts much more Nitrogen into the ground. Having crops in the field year-round also keeps soil structure and prevents erosion/runoff. Yet another benefit this practice has is there is no need for tilling, since the living cover crops minimize weed growth. 

In the state of Maryland, I feel soil management and environmentally conscious practices are very common. In the past decade, the use of cover crops and no till methods have blown across the state. Another intern I work with goes to school in North Carolina, and they don't use any of these practices and not at the scale we do. I feel Maryland is definitely one of the best states with these new practices. I see precision Agriculture becoming more and more popular to maximize the yield from fields and to sustain them for years to come. The main form of this I have seen in my internship is in the form of using drones. The new technology these drones have allows them to pinpoint abnormalities in fields in order to correctly apply whatever is needed. The drones also make it way easier to show the results of trials happening here at the WREC.  

Me and one of Dr. Vollmers other interns rating a Palmer Amaranth weed management trial in Sudlersville. The Palmer hasn't been growing as we had planned in our plots, so we have not sprayed the trials yet. 

Dr. Vollmer is getting ready to spray one of the Soybean weed management trials at the Wye REC with the help from us interns.

This is a residual pesticide Lima Bean study testing to see if there are signs of damage from Metribuzin.