How Legacy Nutrients Affect Farm Conservation Measures
Channel: Livestock & Poultry Environ. Learning Community
Date: 2015-08-13

Full proceedings available at: http://www.extension.org/72868

There has been a tremendous amount of activity and funding of conservation programs with regional and watershed-specific cost-share initiatives. While there have been some successes, water quality response in many areas has not been as great as expected. This has led many to question the efficacy of these measures and to call for stricter land and nutrient management strategies. In many cases, this limited response has been due to the legacies of past management activities, where sinks and stores of phosphorus along the land-freshwater continuum mask the effects of reductions in edge-of-field losses of phosphorus.