Stroud is working with the PA No-Till Alliance and Steve Groff of Cover Crop Coaching to provide outreach, training, and mentoring/technical advising to producers who are transitioning to soil health focused farming systems. Additionally, Stroud staff are working with 2 individual producers to implement hundreds of acres of new cover crops and multi-species cover crops in the White Clay Creek Watershed where extensive long term monitoring is in place and positioned to evaluate watershed scale outcomes of the implementation.
The Stroud research team is currently in the fourth year of a USDA CIG project to evaluate the water quality impacts as well as changes in soil parameters and soil microbial communities resulting from a transition to a 24/7 cover system implementing no-till planting and a multispecies cover crop on two paired control/experimental fields. Stroud has also recently initiated research project with the Rodale Institute. This project includes four field scale trial plots including:
Conventional Practice
Conservation Ag (no-till with cover crop)
Organic
Organic No-Till (cultivation for weed control)
These fields are on a six-year rotation plan with comprehensive collection of soil, water quality, production, and economic data.