Collaborative RCE Program in Atlantic County Promotes Community Composting

On May 13, the Master Composter program, a partnership between Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Atlantic County (RCE) and the Atlantic County Utilities Authority (ACUA), wrapped up its six-week certification course.

The Master Composter program was designed to create a countywide network of educators, advocates, and community composters that support the efforts of both RCE and ACUA. The program trains volunteers to promote the benefits of composting, recycling, and sustainability through education and public outreach. Organizers include Belinda Chester, RCE Program Associate and Master Gardener Program Coordinator, Atlantic County, Amy Menzel, ACUA communications manager, and Alexis Demitroff, ACUA Education and Public Outreach Assistant.

The Master Composter Certification is a beginner-toadvanced education and outreach component of the program.

To become a Certified Master Composter, participants must complete a series of requirements that include eight classroom-based workshops, two field trips, and 20 hours of volunteer service in composting education activities. The program provides an in-depth look at soil, decomposition science, vermiculture, composting tools and equipment, manure composting, safety, legislation, large-scale operations, as well as school and university composting operations. Through the field trips, participants are introduced to operations throughout Atlantic County and engage in discussions on the successes, failures, and learning opportunities of those enterprises. The field trip stops include working farms, community gardens, the ACUA community garden composting demonstration site, a school composting site, and an extensive educational tour of the ACUA landfill and compost production site.

The Master Composter

Certification course provides participants with direct access to Rutgers experts in soil science, allowing for deeper understanding of the role compost plays in soil improvement and how it differs from soil. Additionally, participants gain an understanding of the benefits of composting that are far beyond just reducing waste. Composting is an effective way to turn kitchen scraps and yard waste into a nutrient-rich, soil-building boost for gardens. It’s also a way to combat soil erosion, reduce water use, sequester carbon in the soil, attract beneficial organisms to the soil, reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers, and build resiliency to the impacts of climate change.

The program organizers in Atlantic County often collaborate with other county-based programs, like the Ocean County Master Composters, and incorporate research information from successful programs in other states to expand and improve the program. During COVID-19, the team seamlessly converted the two-day, in-person program to a six-week hybrid format that continues today. The change in the program has allowed it to include a wider range of field experts across the state and other useful resources. It has also allowed the program to welcome participants who were previously unable to attend the in-person training program.

Participants in the course are given updates on the legislative efforts of the New Jersey Composting Council, a state chapter of the U.S. Composting Council. They are encouraged to support efforts in each of their communities to create composting opportunities. They are also encouraged to support native habitats through their composting efforts. Many of the program participants are individuals closely associated with Community Green teams, Sustainable New Jersey teams and individuals who are school leaders, avid gardeners, and environmental stewards. Each is an advocate for community change.

During the initial certification process, participants are asked to support local events (e.g. farmers markets, Earth Day events, community programs, and the 4-H Fair), create presentations, and partner with RCE and ACUA to accommodate educational program requests. Graduates of the Master Composter program remain actively engaged. They have created children’s workshops, presented hands-on, do-it-yourself workshops for compost bin building, recorded presentations, and have played a significant role in municipal efforts to create community composting sites. Armed with their Master Composter certification, these program graduates are invited back each year to the final day of the course. They share with new participants and program alumni the efforts they have spearheaded and the successes within their communities as well as solicit feedback and support to increase their efforts. This network of volunteers continues to assist county programs in conducting science-based, educational programs for all ages.

“Past program participants have created some amazing composting displays and educational programs through their volunteer work that are continually requested by groups throughout our county,” says Belinda Chester.

Each year, the program is limited to 35 participants. While priority is given to Atlantic County residents, the program has welcomed participants who reside in Cumberland, Cape May, Burlington, and Camden counties. Since 2018, the Master Composter program has trained more than 150 community volunteers and has led to efforts in other counties to develop their own programs. Efforts are being made by the team to create a statewide network of county programs supported by Rutgers experts that share resources and expand the scope and impact of the program.

Prof. Pamela McElwee Co-authors Study Offering New Solutions for Combating Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss

Pamela McElwee, professor in the Department of Human Ecology, is co-author of a new study, “Overcoming the coupled climate and biodiversity crises and their societal impacts,” published in the journal, Science. She is among 18 international experts who contributed to the study.

“This paper emphasizes that biodiversity loss and climate change are essentially two sides of the same coin. But our policies are often designed for either one or the other, but not both. At the minimum, this leads to unnecessary overlap and duplication, but at the worst, it means policies working at cross purposes or even making the situation worse,” said McElwee.

In announcing the study, led by Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, head of the Integrative Ecophysiology Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and co-chair of the IPCC Working Group 2, the experts describe the rapidly worsening loss of species with the aid of sobering figures: they estimate that human activities have altered roughly 75 percent of the land surface and 66 percent of the marine waters on our planet. This has occurred to such an extent that approximately 80 percent of the biomass from mammals and 50 percent of plant biomass has been lost, while more species are in danger of extinction than at any time in human history.

The destruction of natural habitats not only leads to biodiversity loss, but also reduces the capacity of organisms, soils and sediments to store carbon, which in turn exacerbates the climate crisis. In a vicious catch-22, these degraded ecosystems are then even more vulnerable to rising temperatures. Yet despite these interactions, the study points out that not enough is being done to tackle both problems together.

“It is important to recognize that essentially no country in the world is doing the maximum it could to integrate biodiversity and climate policy, and many countries don’t even acknowledge the impacts of each sector on the other,” explained McElwee.

2023 Fellow in the International Union of Physiological Sciences Academy

Dipak Sarkar, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences, was recently elected as a 2023 Fellow in the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) Academy.

The IUPS Academy represents the diversity and excellence of worldwide physiology. It celebrates and publicizes the important contributions made by physiologists globally to science and health. As an international non-political organization, IUPS is a body that represents the entire community of physiological researchers, teachers, and students.

Its mission is to advance physiological research and teaching and its translation into benefits for health and society. The vision for the Academy is that it will be a resource for physiologists. In addition, it will be a source of information and contacts for journalists, funders, charities, politicians, allied health professionals, or members of the public.

Three SEBS Professors Ranked Among “Best Plant Science and Agronomy Scientists”

Three faculty members in the Department of Plant Biology have been ranked “Best Plant Science and Agronomy Scientists” by Research.com. The latest scientific rankings were based on number of publications and their citation values within the discipline.

Distinguished Professor Bingru Huang focuses her research on understanding mechanisms of plant tolerance to abiotic stress tolerance, including heat, drought, and salinity for grass species, with emphasis on cool-season turfgrass species.

Distinguished Professor James Simon leads the research portfolio of the New Use Agriculture and Natural Plant Products, which focuses on the development of new crops, the identification of new bioactive compounds, new uses of plants and plant products and the botanical standardization of phytomedicines.

Professor James White studies plant microbiomes and how plants use microbiomes as sources of nutrients and defense. His lab’s ultimate goal is to develop new and effective ways to protect plants from biotic and abiotic stresses, and enhance the nutritional status of crop plants.

Homeowner Rain Garden Rebate Program - Spring 2023

The Water Resources Program has had a fantastic spring residential rain garden rebate season.

We partnered with groups from all over New Jersey over the past few months to provide a Rain Garden Rebate Program for residents. Our partners for these sessions were Pinelands Preservation Alliance, Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions, South Jersey Land and Water Trust, American Littoral Society, Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, the Wallkill River Watershed Management Group, New Jersey Highlands Coalition, and Lopatcong Creek Initiative with funding provided from National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.

The Rain Garden Rebate Program is a program designed to provide incentives for homeowners to install rain gardens on their property to help reduce flooding and improve water quality. The program is run virtually, so we are able to reach more people and be able to see the person’s property without actually conducting a site visit. We have held eight (8) one-hour rain garden educational zoom talks with 232 attendees. After the educational talk, we provided an opportunity for the homeowners to have a consultation with an engineer and a landscape architect from our staff. We held four full days of technical sessions, where we held 45 individual zoom calls with homeowners to discuss their property and determine the best location for a rain garden.

The Water Resources Program staff designed 44 rain gardens, one meadow planting, and one vegetative buffer to capture stormwater runoff from a total drainage area of 22,038 square feet. If all the newly designed rain gardens from this program are installed, they could potentially capture 574,000 gallons of stormwater per year.

We are excited to see what the homeowners are able to create over the next few months!

Keeping Corn from Frequenting the Phosphorus Buffet Line

When it comes to food, plants can “eat” more than they need—just like the diner who can’t resist another stop at the buffet line despite already feeling full. Indeed, with respect to phosphorus, corn plants will keep taking up the nutrient 25 to 80 percent beyond what’s needed to reach their full grain yield, scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in West Lafayette, Indiana, have found.

The corn plant’s gluttonous appetite for phosphorus is known as “luxury consumption,” and in extreme cases, it can decrease grain yields. Up until recently, though, corn’s luxury consumption had only been demonstrated in studies with nitrogen and potassium. However, no direct links to phosphorous had yet been established, according to Chad Penn, a soil scientist with the ARS National Soil Erosion Laboratory in West Lafayette.

To investigate the matter, Penn and Purdue University graduate student Matt Wiethorn and Purdue agronomy professor James Camberato used a state-of-the-art “grow room” and hydroponics system. This enabled the researchers to precisely control the root environment of corn plants and the timing of phosphorous applications to them in pots filled with sand. More significantly, it allowed the researchers to monitor the bioavailability of phosphorous to corn plants more easily than growing them in field plots.

“This system demonstrated that it could produce corn that is the same as field-grown corn, both physically and chemically,” noted Penn. “Developing it was a huge hurdle in being able to do this research on corn’s luxury consumption of phosphorus,” he added.

The researchers began the study in 2019, using several corn hybrids, and published the results in the January 2023 issue of the journal Agronomy.

Among the study’s findings, the corn hybrids needed an average of 580 milligrams of phosphorous per plant to reach their maximum grain yield. Beyond that, “excess phosphorus uptake caused a decrease in grain yield, which was attributed to reduced movement (translocation) of copper and zinc from the corn plant roots to grain,” said Penn, whose team published a companion paper in Agronomy.

Penn noted that the research is a first step towards determining whether current phosphorus application recommendations can be refined based on what the corn plant actually needs for optimal yield and how much of the nutrient is already present in the soil (the type and condition of which can vary from one location to another).”Knowing the target phosphorous uptake value of 580 milligrams per plant can be used in developing more robust and precise soil phosphorus fertility recommendations in the future,” he added. More broadly, such adjustments can contribute to natural resource sustainability since phosphorus fertilizers come from materials mined from finite geologic supplies in different parts of the world.

Penn’s other research on nutrient management practices includes co-developing the P-trap, a software application that farmers and others can use to design, build and install in-field phosphorus removal systems to help reduce some of the “leftover” phosphorous that can escape the field as runoff and potentially compromise water quality.

Editor’s Note: The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in U.S. agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.