Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

NCERA-3 Minutes DRAFT 6-25-12 June 3 and 4, 2012 Hardin Hall - School of Natural Resources University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska Meeting called to order  Chair  Lee Buras at 1 pm. Mark Kuzila introduced Dr. Dave Lewis, Emeritus Agronomy Professor, University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Dave was a member of the NCR  3 Committee for many years. He was in Lincoln visiting and joined the meeting for a few hours. Because Brian Slater was unable to attend the role of secretary and secretary elect this year were switched. Mark Kuzila will serve as secretary and Brian Slater will serve as secretary elect. The minutes from the 2011 meeting state that the 2012 meeting will be held in Omaha. Due to concerns about funding for travel, the 2012 meeting is being held in Lincoln to avoid the risk of losing money due to contractual arrangements for hotels and meeting rooms. Those attending  Mickey Ransom (KS), Lee Burras (IA), Larry West (USDANRCS representative), Maxine Levin (USDANRCS NCSS liaison), Ken Olson (IL and Administrative Advisor), Phillip Owens (IN), and Doug Malo (SD), Mark Kuzila (NE) Minutes of the 2011 meeting were reviewed. It was moved by Mickey ransom and seconded second by Phillip Owens that the minutes be approved. The motion passed. State reports will be attached to the minutes of this meeting. The committee meeting minutes are due within 60 days of this meeting (August 3, 2012). NCERA3 is an integrated committee with research, extension/outreach/ and teaching activities. NCERA3 can add people to our committee from ARS and USDA. Universities can be added to our committee when proper forms are completed (e.g., Appendix E is completed for the faculty member desiring to be on our committee). Agency Reports Administrative Advisors Report (Ken Olson)  Our officers for 20122113 are: Chair  Lee Buras ViceChair  Doug Malo Secretary  Mark Kuzila Secretaryelect  Brian Slater Review of past federal budgets relating to Hatch and AFRI funds was discussed. There will be no new money for FY 2013. It is anticipated that there will be a cut of 5  10 % in the FY 2014 budget. Ken attended a national water conference where Dr. James Dobrowolski (jdobrowolski@nifa.usda.gov) spoke about the potential of a grant activity pertaining to soil, water, and air. The grant would either be a foundation or challenge grant. It is anticipated that the RFP for grant would be released for FY 2014. It is noteworthy that a consulting firm developed the NIFA plans for 2014. Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy was recently named the new Director of NIFA. National Soils Lab/Research (Larry West)  The National Soil Survey Laboratory will be renamed the Charles E. Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory. A ceremony will be held on June 4, 2012. USDA Deputy Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Ann Mills will attend the dedication ceremony. The Soil Survey Division (SSD) has been restructured. There will be a 15% cut in budget for SSD for 2012. The budget for the 2103 FY is not yet known. The number of MO offices has been reduced from 18 to 12 and the number of soil survey offices has been reduced from 140 to 124. With the restructuring there will be line-of-sight, funding and supervision, from the SSD director to the MLRA Soil Scientists. The State Soil Scientists will no longer be MO leaders. They will be responsible for state programs and activities, deliver soil information and cooperator communication. The SSD has the following global objectives: º Develop models of genesis and landscape distribution of soils, diagnostic horizons, and soil features as related to parent material, climate, and geomorphology º Describe properties of soils including spatial variability of static and dynamic properties º Develop relationships among static properties, dynamic properties, and ecosystem characteristics º Evaluate simulation models and pedotransfer functions for prediction of soil properties and behavior º Establish sites with extensive data for hands-on training A major lab project currently underway is the Rapid Soil Carbon Assessment of the US for Conservation Planning (RACA). Data has been collected for 150,000 samples. Three hundred soil scientists and 22 universities have been involved in the RACA project. The challenges that remain are in data analysis, spatial extrapolation of the point data and the application to the national cooperative soil survey databases and conservation planning. National Liaison to NCSS (Maxine Levin)  The reorganization has raised some issues with cooperators. Mickey ransom mentioned that there will be no MO office within the Great Plains. Maxine hopes that the new positions will be rethought. Many things are in flux because the SSD Director position is open. NSSC and NSSL remains to be very supportive. State Soil Scientists remain liaisons with cooperators Town Hall meeting about soil survey is necessary to redefine a mission because people think the soil survey is at a low point. The focus has been getting areas mapped and into the web soil survey. There was no plan to continue. Our goal has not been reached. The map is the first step. Our maps do not match the intensity of current agricultural practices. The scale of our maps is not detailed enough 21st century agriculture. Maxine asked the question. Where will the students get jobs in the NRCS soil science area? The national soil survey conference will be held in the third week of June 2013 in Annapolis MD. NCERA-3 Committee Reports 1. Soil Taxonomy (Miles, Malo, and Crum) Ed Nater will replace Doug Malo on the Soil taxonomy committee. Phillip Owens reported on the effort on establishing a Universal Soil Classification System for the world. The consensus of the group is to try and develop a system based on a hierarchical system. A sixteen member group is working on joining the various soil taxonomic systems into one. A meeting of the International Union of Soil Science will be held in Lincoln, NE next week. The subject of the meeting is a universal soil classification system. 2. High intensity Soil Surveys  (Owens and Olson)  Local projects but no regional activity. The committee will continue to incorporate more digital soil map information. 3. Education, Extension, and Recruitment Committee  (Slater, Crum, Kuzila, Crouch, and Malo) Undergraduate enrollments in departments of Agronomy and Soils at KSU, ISU, and SDSU are increasing. The key will be to get graduates to consider soil scientist positions in the NRCS. Salaries for graduates are competitive. Many NCR universities are moving to reduce the number of credit hours needed to graduate from 128 to 120. The NCERA-3 group has requested that the NRCS provide information on how our students are doing as NRCS employees and comments on the coursework that the students have taken. The NCERA-3 group has also suggested that the NRCS increase the number of hours of soil science courses necessary to qualify as a soil conservationist. A national soils field camp, a six week course, is being planned by the SSSA. The camp will likely be held at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. 4. Advisory Panel to Director of Soil Survey  (Ransom)  This committee was not highly involved in the reorganization of the Soil Survey Division. Mickey stated that when given the opportunity to provide input the Advisory Panel to Director of Soil Survey failed in the response. At the recent meeting of the south region soil survey conference the soil survey cooperators group proposed that a national level soil survey cooperators committee be established. The NCERA-3 agrees with that proposal and will discuss it further under new business. provided by the committee. 5. National Data Base  (Olson)  The project continues and more states are providing their lab data to the data base. From the NCR, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas have entered their data to the data base. Old Business  Doug Malo led a discussion about the proposed Benchmark soils bulletins. Doug showed the group a draft copy of the bulletin for the Houdek Soil from South Dakota. Doug has done some extensive work on the project and he will provide his work as a template for others in the region. New Business  The group discussed the national level soil survey cooperators committee proposed by the south region cooperators group. Since the soil survey is at a crucial time in its history, the NCERA3 group thinks it is important for such a committee to be formed. Phillip Owens moved and Doug Malo seconded a motion to support the proposal for a national level soil survey cooperators committee with the addition that the NCERA3 will be the group that determines the representatives from the north central region. The motion passed. The group also agreed that if the committee is formed, Mickey Ransom and Phillip Owens will serve as the first representatives of the north central region. The NCERA3 group supports the NRCS plan to send a letter communicating the importance of university cooperation in soil survey to our college-leaders. Any approach that makes it easier for university leaders to support pedology research is highly valuable as universities continue to downsize and re-prioritize research. We ask NRCS to recognize that the appropriate college leader is sometimes the Dean, sometimes the Director of the Experiment Station and sometimes has a different title. We will make sure the National Soil Survey Center has the appropriate contacts. The NCERA3 group would like to emphasize the importance of discretionary funding from NSSC  even if it is a small amount  being available to university cooperators. In many cases that funding is critical to insure we can be active participants in cooperative soil survey activities  both in state and meetings such as these. It also shows our administrators that there is value in our being a cooperator The NCERA3 group will submit a renewal for NCERA-3 in 2014. One of our priorities will be productivity indices tied to soil survey since this is a topic of growing importance throughout north central states Next meeting of the committee will be held the third week in June 2013 during the national conference in Annapolis MD Lee Buras will send out a reminder to those who have not filed a state report. Respectfully submitted, Mark Kuzila Secretary

Accomplishments: 1. Coordinate activities and set priorities among the universities for the NCSS, with increasing emphasis on interpretations and data base availability. Cooperative work with the National Soil Survey Laboratory on a soil carbon field evaluation over time (1 or 2 growing seasons) on an every other month basis is being initiated. Different cropping sequences from Sanborn Field will be compared with sites on Tucker Prairie. Illinois accomplishments include paired cultivated and uncultivated landscapes in southern Illinois with similar soils transected. Soil samples were collected with depth for soil organic C analysis. 2. Identify and prioritize common needs for soil and landscape research by Major Land Resource Areas to foster cooperative research projects and minimize duplication, with emphasis on important processes. North Dakota representatives continued participation in the terrestrial C sequestration group of the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership (PCO2R) Phase II and preparing to establish 1200 to 1500 C sequestration monitoring benchmark sites in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Mon In Missouri two field sites which have usually been in a corn-soybean rotation for examining the distribution of soil C have been identified: The native area is Tucker Prairie, a native tall grass prairie. Nearby, paired crop production fields are usually in a corn-soybean rotation or a 3-year rotation of corn-wheat-soybeans (soybeans double cropped in wheat stubble, 3 crops in 2 years). Soils in this area are claypans (Mexico, Putnam, Leonard). Soil C in long-term Sanborn Field plots (primarily Mexico silt loam) will be used as long-term control for similar cropping management systems. The scale of this project will be dependant of internal and external funding. Wisconsin participants have used a cone penetrometer to develop a three-dimensional (3-D) map to display soil variability for part of a small private farm. Data were collected on a 20-m grid. The sampling points were georeferenced using a global positioning system (GPS). Total dry matter yield (DMY) of clover was obtained at different points in a field where we have matching soil organic carbon (SOC) content data. While the SOC levels were significantly different (p < 0.01) among sampled points, there were no significant differences in the DMY of clover ( = 0.05) when all data are considered (p = 0.0759). In this test, data analysis cut across two soil series, namely, Radford and Miami silt loam, 2-6% slopes (MyB). In consideration of the possible effect of soil variability on crop yield, the effect of SOC on clover DMY was evaluated within each soil type. Because of data limitations, we could only evaluate this effect in the MyB series at this time. Within this series, analysis of variance indicated no significant differences in clover DMY ( = 0.05) (p = 0.1096) even though treatment means correlated positively with SOC (R2 = 0.88). North Dakota representatives continued participation in the terrestrial C sequestration group of the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership (PCO2R) Phase II and preparing to establish 1200 to 1500 C sequestration monitoring benchmark sites in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Montana over the next three years. Currently over 200 benchmark sites have been established in Sheridan County, North Dakota. The study focuses on C distribution by soil series and landscape position on CRP, native grassland and cropland. 3. Priority research in pedology needs to include work at both smaller and larger scales of resolution than obtainable in soil surveys. Focus and pool regional resources in areas, such as wetland delineations. In many parts of the Midwest open surface tile inlets are being replaced with gravel filters to reduce potential pollutants from entering the underground tile system. In Minnesota samples were taken from gravel filters installed three years prior to replace open surface tile inlets in a three dimensional grid to characterize the deposition of sediment and associated organic carbon. At one location the landscape was lacustrine with gently sloping clay loam soils and large depressions (>20 ha). At another location the landscape was glacial till with small depressions (<6 ha). At the lacustrine location, one site within the field had gravel filters chisel plowed in the fall and not at another site within the same field. At the glacial till location a single gravel filter was not tilled. Corn and soybeans in rotation were grown at both sites. Fines (<2mm) were separated from gravel samples by sieving. The percentage of gravel porosity filled with fines at the tilled site was 100% at the surface and decreased to 40% at 25cm deep (about the depth of tillage). From this depth it was a relatively constant 40% to the sampling depth of 70cm. Without tillage the gravel porosity filled with fines decreased from 30% at the surface to 15% at 70cm. At the glacial till site 15% of the gravel porosity was filled with sediment and constant to 70cm deep. Organic matter concentrations of the fines decreased from 7% at the surface to 3.4% and 5% at 70cm for the untilled and tilled sites respectively at the lacustrine location. At the glacial till location organic matter concentration decreased from 5.5% at the surface to 1% at 70cm. Three field sites for examining the spatial distribution of soil carbon have been Identified in South Dakota. These include landscapes developed in till, loess, and outwash. Digital elevation models were developed for the cultivated sites using a survey grade GPS. The digital elevation models were used to generate three dimensional erosion maps for the combined effects of tillage and water erosion. Generated terrain and erosion maps were used to evaluate soil sampling sites. Slope grades over the hillslope at the till site ranged from 0 to 18 percent. Tillage erosion was estimated to be severe on the crest and shoulder positions while water erosion was estimated to be severe in the mid to lower backslope positions. Soil cores at the till cultivated site were collected from the root zone (1m) for soil characterization and classification. Soil C samples are currently being analyzed. Soil sampling at the loess and outwash sites will be initiated in the near future. The on-going experiment on soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration in eroded/scalped soil has been conducted for about 10 years at Columbus and South Charleston in Central Ohio. The soil of the study site is Miamian Silt Loam in Columbus and Crosby Silt Loam at South Charleston. Soil management treatments consist of the following: I. Main Treatment (Topsoil Depth): (i) Normal topsoil depth, (ii) Double topsoil depth, (iii) No topsoil 11. Sub-plot Treatment (Management) (i) Chemical fertilizers, (ii) Compost, (iii) Control Soil samples from 0-10 cm, 10-20 cm and 20-30 cm depths were obtained in July 2006. Samples were analyzed for bulk density, C and N concentrations. Top soil removal by simulated erosion significantly decreased SOC concentration in 10-20 cm and 20-30 cm depths in treatment with topsoil removed. As expected, application of compost increased SOC concentration in 0-10 cm layer by 39.5% in Columbus and 69.2% in South Charleston soils. Using compost had no effect on SOC concentration in 10 -20 and 20-30 cm depths. Similar trends were observed in N concentration. Soil N concentration was significantly more in 10-20 and 20-30 cm depths in treatments with normal and double topsoil depth than no topsoil. Similarly, application of compost increased soil N concentration by 4 1.5% in Columbus compared with 67.8% in South Charleston soil. These data show that use of biosolids and organic amendments can enhance SOC pool and improve quality of eroded soils. 4. Develop the scientific foundation for databases needed for soil and landscape assessment and interpretation. In Missouri a no-tillage continuous corn plot (initiated in 1971) from Sanborn Field will be used to compare to conventional tillage monoculture and crop rotation plots with full fertility, lesser fertility, and with manures. Yield and C levels will be assessed. tillage experiment with three treatments (no-till (NT), chisel plow (CP) and moldboard plow (MP)) was initiated in the spring of 1989 in southern Illinois. The plot area was previously in a tall fescue hayland for 15 years, was moderately eroded and had a 6% slope. After 12 years the surface layer (0-15 cm) subsoil (15-75 cm), and rooting zone (0- 75 cm) of all treatments had reductions in soil organic carbon (SOC) when compared to the pre-treatment values for sod. At the end of the 12-year study, the MP system had significantly less SOC in the surface layer, subsurface layer and rooting zone than the NT system at comparable depths. The difference in SOC between treatments in the tillage zone was attributed to the effects of management on erosion, disturbance, aeration and residue incorporation. For any land returning to row crop production from the Conservation Reserve Program, NT and CP system, compared to MP system, should retain more SOC and reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. 5. Engage in research, education and outreach activities regarding key soil processes and functions. Benchmark C monitoring sites have been established on an existing cropping systems study in southeastern North Dakota. Treatments include permanent vegetation (alfalfa), a low-diversity cropping system (corn-soybean), and a high diversity cropping system (corn-corn-soybean-winter wheat-spring wheat-canola/flax) under no-till management. In 2002 soil carbon index for cropland in Iowa was developed for the top 1 meter of major soil map units. Soil C concentration of different soil horizons and bulk density were used to determine soil carbon content. The soil carbon content for different soil associations was weighed against one reference major soil association (Okoboji) to develop soil carbon index. This soil carbon index will potentially be used as a management tool to evaluate future management impact on soil carbon change of different soil association in the state. Iowa participants are continuing evaluation of different tillage systems on soil carbon content through long-term tillage studies established in 2002 across Iowa on different soil associations using five different tillage systems and two crop rotations of Corn-Soybean and Corn-Corn-Soybean rotations. In addition, in 2002-2004 several studies of tillage and N management effects on soil CO2 emission and soil C change were finalized. This (2006) was the fifth year for this Indiana study. This study is on a Sebawa loam. It is poorly drained. The cropping system is continuous corn as well as corn/soybean and soybean/corn rotations. Tillage treatments are designed to leave a range of residue cover and to reflect practices currently used by many farmers as well as those which may be adopted. Treatments include: fall chisel with two secondary tillage passes; fall chisel with one secondary tillage pass; fall disk and spring field cultivator; fall strip till; and no-till. The following measurements were made: residue cover after planting, stand and height at four weeks, height at eight weeks, harvest moisture and yield. There were differences in yield between treatments for corn in rotation with soybeans. This marked the fifth time we have had a yield reduction with continuous corn with no-till, although not always statistically significant. This is in contrast to no difference between the other four tillage methods regardless of rotation. Residue cover maintained with strip till are intermediate between to no-till and the full width tillage. There were no yield differences for the soybean plots. 6. Initiate and strengthen partnerships with ancillary disciplines and sciences to inform users and the general public about the importance of the soil resource and its synergisms with water and living organisms. Topsoil was added to eroded landscape positions from the toeslope on the till site in Morris, MN (Sharon Papiernik USDA/ARS). Soil carbon distribution, crop productivity, and measurements related to soil quality will be examined on the soil movement treatments over time in relationship to paired control strips where soil was not redistributed. We also plan to establish a similar topsoil addition study on the outwash site located near Brookings, SD. These sites are being coordinated in collaboration with David Lobb (Univ of Manitoba) who has established additional sites in Manitoba. Long-term rotation (>15 year) studies are being characterized for soil carbon distribution (total, inorganic, and organic carbon; bulk density) within the root zone (1.5 m). Samples were taken at Wall, SD ( a ustic environment in western SD) this spring and are currently being analyzed. We plan to take samples this fall at Beresford, SD (a udic environment in eastern SD). Rotations at Wall are given in Table 1. All Wall rotations are no-till. The Beresford rotations are corn soybean based with various rotations including alfalfa, field pea, and spring wheat. Beresford includes no-till and conventional-till (chisel plow , disk) comparisons. Past work has examined carbon distribution in matched no-till, till, and grassed sites in central SD. Although the studies were primarily conducted to examine the impact of surface soil carbon distribution on soil physical properties I have included graphs of carbon distribution to 0.8 m corrected for bulk density. Bulk densities above 0.4 m were measured. Below 0.4 m bulk density was estimated and considered the same for all treatments for the purpose of discussion.

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