The National Soil Tilth Laboratory at Iowa State is in its fifth year of conducting research to detect what kinds of chemicals are in the Midwest’s air, water and soil.

“The United States Department of Agriculture developed a series of research demonstration sites to determine the impact of current and future research on farm quality,” said Jerry Hatfield, professor and collaborator at the laboratory.

One of the main goals of the research is to observe the impacts on how farmers manage farming practices, he said.

Although research on this subject has been in progress for more than a decade, the current research is called Agricultural Systems for Environmental Quality, Hatfield said. This is the most recent research done about farming practices and their impacts on the environment.

Throughout the Midwest, there have been a series of inter-related studies, Hatfield said.

“Different sites mean different climate, different soils and different cropping patterns,” Hatfield said.

Mike Burkart, hydrologist and research leader at the USDA, has been looking at regional impacts of pesticides and nutrients that mostly move through systems into streams.

“Crop areas of the country have greater water problems,” he said.

Two of the research sites are watersheds, one in Missouri and another in Illinois, Hatfield said. The main problem with the water quality at these two particular sites is atrazine, which is a corn pesticide that can contaminate groundwater, he said.

Beginning in 1997, the USDA wanted to demonstrate the difference in farming practices and its impact on farm quality. Hatfield said the focus of this research has moved from researching the impact of herbicides to how farmers manage systems.

Another question researchers have been asking is how nitrate-nitrogen moves from the surface to the air. One task that they have been working on is trying to measure ammonia levels in the air, Hatfield said.

“Water is easy to measure compared to the air,” he said. “Sampling the atmosphere becomes very difficult.”

Researchers are observing farming practices that decrease soil run-off, Hatfield said. Since there are several research sites throughout the Midwest, there are different types of soils researchers have to deal with and what works for one type of soil may not work for another, he said. Researchers look at the long-term effects on environmental quality.

“We look at everything and help people make better decisions about land,” Hatfield said.

Before this research began, researchers made sure the technology was going to be effective, he said. There are calibrated instruments that can determine accurate information about what is in a sample and do as much work in one day as researchers can do in four days, Hatfield said.

The lab is looking for ecologists and sociologists to look into this problem, Burkart said.

“Scientifically, we understand how contamination occurs and changes,” he said. “What we don’t know is the social, economic and political information to solve the problems.”