Agricultural Drainage Management Coalition and Farm Services Agency Research Demonstrates Effectiveness of Saturated Buffers

The Farm Services Agency (FSA) and the Agricultural Drainage Management Coalition (ADMC) collaborated to quantify the effectiveness of saturated buffers to reduce nutrient loading from tile drainage waters. This demonstration program builds upon this same group of collaborator’s findings from the 2012-2015 and 2016-2017 projects.

FSA has made significant investments through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) at addressing nutrients, specifically nitrogen, reaching America’s surface waters through the riparian buffer programs (CP 21 and CP 22). Riparian buffers have been shown to be effective at removing nitrogen from surface flows, as well as shallow subsurface ground water, but in the tile-drained landscape of the Midwest, a significant portion of the nitrogen lost from agricultural fields does not have the opportunity to interact with the carbon rich buffers.

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