Arkansas Row crops and commercial horticulture are in full swing during the fall.

Besides being the largest producer of rice in the United States, Arkansas as a major producer of a variety of agronomic crops.

And while big farming is big business, Arkansas farmers know that good stewardship of the land is key for the future generations of farmers.

We learn about an Arkansas program promoting agricultural sustainability and environmental awareness.

In this episode of Good Roots.

I'm at Stevens Farm just outside of Dumass, where the cotton harvest is in full swing.

Did you know that Arkansas produces over 1,000,000 pounds of cotton bales and nearly 400,000 tons of cotton seed that's fourth in the nation.

It takes months of planning and preparation to produce canes like this and it all starts in the soil.

The Arkansas Discovery Farms programs goals is to determine the effectiveness of water and soil conservation practices utilized on working farms like this.

My name is West Kirkpatrick.

We're here at CB Stevens Farms incorporated.

We farm a little over 4000 total acres anywhere from 500 to 1000 will be cotton every year.

We typically start planting cotton sometime in April.

Temperature soil temperature is really the dictator of when we start planting about the middle of September 1st of October.

It's about when we start our harvest process in order to make yield, we have to irrigate with the University of Arkansas where part of what's called the Discovery Farm.

We've got 110 liter bottle inside of here and they have.

On site monitoring stations, anytime there's a runoff event off of the field, be it rain event or an irrigation event, the automated system samples that water that's leaving the field, so the university is able to measure how much nutrient is leaving the field, and we also know obviously how much we're putting on the field.

The Discovery Farm has been pretty beneficial to us to help monitor those nutrient amounts.

Cotton farming has been in your family well all your life.

Yes all my life.

You literally grew up.

Right, right across the field.

Yes, that's incredible.

Yeah, now you are part of this program.

You're in Arkansas Discovery farm.

Tell me about your involvement.

Oil.

When I was first approached, they basically said they wanted to monitor our nutrient runoff, nitrogen and phosphorus.

Because of the epoxy on the Gulf of Mexico and EPA and industry just felt like that farmers were contributing to the epoxy.

And I wanted to look at a cotton farm that had water running into the Mississippi River to see if we were contributing.

I first said no to the program because I was fearful that maybe we were contributing and I didn't want EPA breathing down my neck all of a sudden, hey, they're going to have numbers from my field, but I was convinced if we had a problem they would help me solve it.

The first thing that we found was pleasant surprise.

Our in and pee runoff numbers were very very low when we irrigate.

We don't run a lot of water off the field to the point where we're 90% efficient today in our watering program and this helped us to do that based on having the equipment to measure the water, we pumped the water that runs off the field.

And just to make sure that we can be as efficient as possible solely, what are you actually looking for when you get a sample from this?

So we're specifically looking for agronomic nutrients so farmers are putting nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium on their fields to produce their crops, and we want to know are the crops using it?

Is it staying in the field or is it leaving the field in the water runoff?

And so we take a subsample from the composite sample of every runoff event and we send it to the Arkansas Water Resource Center in Fayetteville?

And it's analyzed for nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved phosphorus and potassium, and total suspended solids.

Every location we monitor just for the infrastructure is probably 15 to 20,000 depending on what equipment we need at this site.

And then we're talking about the analysis of each water sample over $100 apiece, so it's expensive program.

That's why we don't monitor everywhere.

That's a pretty decent year up there, Terry dabs, he said, you know, I think I might be a candidate for Discovery Farms because I have absolutely no groundwater.

On my farm, everything he uses is surface water and we thought it would be a good location because he recycles all the water that he uses.

Their results.

We've been saying I've been very promising we were actually losing very little nutrients, so when we got our test back.

We farm about 8 miles South of Stutgart in a family partnership farming operation, which consists of myself, my son and my wife.

Yeah, Discovery Farm program was something that when my dad first approached me about it I was like are you crazy?

I mean you, you want environmentalists and other groups out here.

You know trying to watch what we're doing?

I'm not too not too sure about that, but the more we talked about it and the more I learned about the program.

I was excited.

We grow about 800 acres of corn so monitoring the the nitrogen, phosphorus mainly or the two that were really looking at.

And that's important.

'cause we don't.

We don't want any running off into our irrigation system or getting further down in the river.

And eventually to the Gulf of Mexico.

That monitoring let us know.

Hey, are you doing this right or we're doing something wrong?

It's very important that we have that data from a third party that we can go to our legislators, our EPA, or whoever.

When they're getting ready to pass laws and regulations that affect us, we can say look, you know we've got data here that proves we're not doing this.

So the overarching goal of the Arkansas Discovery Farms Program is to gather and gauge the water and soil quality of these Arkansas lands.

But the data that is harvested empowers these farmers to make the changes they need for a bigger yield and a better environment for all.

This is good roots and I'm Lauren McCullough.