Southern Piedmont AREC, Blackstone, VA

The Southern Piedmont Research Facility located in Blackstone, VA preforms research that benefits the local extension agents which in turn benefits the farmers for each county. They research tobacco, forages, and livestock (cattle). This research station is 1 of 12 facilities in the state. They operate on 1,100 acres.

We first visited the labs of the research facility and saw how they tested the forages for quality and digestibility.

Next we went to the tobacco greenhouses and saw the difference in the encapsulated seeds and the non encapsulated seeds. The seeds are encapsulated in clay to make them easier to work with. The encapsulated seeds are pink in color where the non-encapsulated are brown in color. They use a float system to fertilize and water the plants when they are in the trays. They have had a hassle with the types of trays to use to be the most efficient. The most common is the EPS styrofoam trays but they have to be replaced every 4 years and they are hard to decompose and sanitize. It costs $0.25 to wash each tray at the end of each season. They have tried to paint the styrofoam with acrylic paint, recycled paper trays, 2 piece plastic trays, and this year they tried 1 piece plastic trays that hold 288 plants per tray. They place the plants in the floating trays because if they fertilize from the top down it creates a salt build up and if they water from the top down it moves the fertilizer away from the plant. The plants are clipped around 20 times with a rotary mower. Clipping maximizes the amount of usable plants in a stand and they normally get a 90% usable stand. They do not harden the plants off but mowing them does help with hardening off. They are strip tilling tobacco with wheat and soybeans. There is about 1000 acres of strip tilled tobacco in the state of Virginia. Organic tobacco is another option but there is less production per acre but the grower is paid a higher amount per pound and between 5-8% of tobacco grown is organic.

The research center had ponds located in the hay fields to see if they caught any of the pesticide runoff but there was not much found. When they rolled hay bales they injected the bales with urea to increase the ammonia and decrease the ergot alkaloid in the haylage. Feeding haylage with ergot alkaloids can cause animals to go off of their feed in the summer if they were fed the haylage all winter.

 The bales become haylage within 2-4 weeks. They are 45-60% moisture and there is a benefit from being able to cut the hay one day and then bale and wrap the following day instead of having to wait for the hay to dry. There is also no storage loss because of the weather.

The research facility works with many different forage crops, one being Sericea Lespedeza. This is a cold weather crop that has an anti-parasitic agent for small ruminants. Adding lime and fertilizer to this crop increases production. They have seven different varieties of clover plots also.

The cattle barn has multiple pens to separate the calves as they bring them in to work them. The chute has a scale built in and they weight the calves every two weeks. They winter stock pile, which is feeding more hay through the fall and then the cows have field forages to graze through the winter. Strip grazing is another concept that they practice and they leave the cows in one area until the area is clean and then the cows are moved to another area. They use temporary fencing for the strip grazing. The cows are moved twice a week.  There is one self watering trough per 5 acre paddock therefore, livestock are within 800 feet of water at all times which in my opinion is a little bit of an overkill. They also have mineral feeders. In the large pond that the cows drink out of they are restricted to a small area of the pond with large rocks on the bottom to keep the cows from getting comfortable (reduces urination and deification in the pond) and helps to better water quality.

This gave me a good understanding of what grad students do in field research and also gave me an idea if I did chose to go to grad school. The relevance to my studies included almost the entire tour because he covered both the plant and animal side of agriculture and talked about how they thrive to be sustainable with their research. This tour was very interesting and I learned a lot from the tour.