CFAES’s Warren Dick is two years into a three-year study of gypsum’s benefits on farms, including to soil quality, crop yields and reducing phosphorus runoff.
So far, he says, fields in his study treated with gypsum are seeing an average 55-percent reduction in soluble phosphorus runoff, based on tests of water samples collected from the fields’ drainage tiles.
He says:
“There’s no one technology that’s going to solve the issue of phosphorus runoff. But I think gypsum is going to become one of the tools in the toolbox, something farmers will use with other approaches as part of their total management package.”