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BLACKSBURG — Agri-Tech ’90 participants will have a choice of farm tours Thursday morning July 12: Hickory Hill Farm, owned by T. Marshall and Peggy Hahn, or the low-input sustainable agriculture (LISA) research project at Whitethome-Kentland farm.
Agri-Tech is the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Science annual public education event, beginning Wednesday, July 11, with meetings of agricultural organizations and the alumni awards banquet.
On Thursday, July 12 activities begin at 8:15 a.m. with registration and refreshments at Litton Reaves Hall on campus. From there, at 8:30 a.m., participants may elect to go to either Hickory Hill Farm in Ellett Valley or to the college’s new research farm on the New River.
The LISA project at Whitethome-Kentland is unique on several counts — because of the number of disciplines involved — experts in weeds, seeds, feeds, soil, insects, crops, computers, engineers and economists; because of the scale of the project — 80 acres and at least 10 years; and because it involves livestock on the project — 48 head of angus steers from start to finish.
The project, already underway, will compare two agricultural systems: 1) a state-of-the-art system, conventional livestock production system, and 2) the LISA approach. Each system will have four replications.
The conventional system will even include some low-input recommendations, explains forages expert Vivien Allen, one of the project’s principal investigators. “It’s everything we know today. If we are going to develop an improvement it has got to beat the best we’ve got right now.”
The aim of the LISA system is to produce what the conventional system produces in terms of economic return, to minimize and hopefully eliminate any practice that has any detrimental effect on the environment or uses a non-renewable resource, explains Ms. Allen. “We will try to produce at the same level or better. If it’s not economically defensible, it’s not usable.”
The LISA system may also mean producing less but with more profit, she said. “But in the larger sense, you have to produce enough food and fiber for the population. It has to be an acceptable level with acceptable economics to be sustainable. We’ve got to learn to be productive with no negative impact, and so there’s an improvement in the environment.”
This is a long-term project. A full rotation of crops and livestock through both schemes will take 10 years. “This could be a classic experiment people will learn from for decades,” Ms. Allen says. “Somethings we will learn in a year — some things will take 20-30-40 years to begin to understand.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has funded the first two years of the project and the development of computer programs during the third year.
Crop establishment began in Fall ’88. Livestock will be moved on in Fall ’90. Tour participants will be able to see the cropping sequences and the layout of the two systems.
The Angus steers, bought at
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