Moving the Sustainability Needle in Southeast Georgia

Moving the Sustainability Needle in Southeast Georgia

Since 2016, Seth McAllister, a Terrell County Extension Agent with the University of Georgia (UGA), has been working diligently to help producers implement sustainability practices into their operation. In collaboration with UGA specialists and local producers, he conducts research to help those producers make better, more informed agronomic decisions.

To date, McAllister has worked on over 50 different research projects, helping farmers make decisions on cultivar selections, irrigation scheduling, fungicide applications, and more.

In his region, a three-year rotation of cotton, corn, and peanuts is common and brings with it a unique set of challenges for sustainability. Given the area's soil profile, which is not sandy like other areas of southern Georgia, sustainability practice implementation has notoriously been difficult given the growth of peanuts and the need to invert the soil for harvest.

"Farmers historically have used deep tillage to break hardpans and then to bed up the peanuts so that when we plow them, there is less surface area for the peanut plow to have to run through," McAllister explains. "That has been a major impediment for conservation tillage and cover crops, until recently."

Recently, he's seen younger farmers starting to use strip-tillage and cover crops to attempt to mellow out the soil profile enough so that they can still grow peanuts. Through various research projects, McAllister has explored with farmers how to best implement cover crops, including research on how heavy residue cover crops can help reduce evapotranspiration by shading out the soil earlier in the season.

Additionally, with over 65-70% of the area's producers utilizing center pivot irrigation, many are working to try to maximize efficiency and only use what water is needed based on the growth stage of the crop. Over the past 6-7 years, McAllister has worked with many producers to implement water saving techniques using moisture sensors.

"Seth has advanced the adoption of cover crop usage in Terrell County, along with other soil health practices, and has also been involved in supporting numerous agricultural water conservation efforts," remarks Mark Masters, Executive Director of the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center at Albany State University, a supporting partner of some of McAllister's projects. Seth McAllister
Terrell County Extension Agent
University of Georgia Some of his projects, including the University of Georgia, American Peanut Council, and Cotton Incorporated Georgia Cotton & Peanut Project, include use of the Fieldprint Platform to help producers see the impact of their sustainability practices and compare themselves to state and national benchmarks.

"The Platform helps people conceptualize that there's a benchmark for many of our standard practices to produce a crop," McAllister says. "All that has been eye opening to, and for farmers. When we're able to compare field-to-field, farm-to-farm, and region-to-region, it brings some clarity [to what we're doing]."

McAllister is driven by a mission to help farmers on their journey of stewardship, helping them continue to be good stewards of the land and navigating new ideas and challenges as they address all three legs of the 'sustainability stool.'

"For [sustainability] to be a true long-term goal, it has to check all the boxes," McAllister says. "That means economically, environmentally, and socially. If we don't check all those boxes, we fail as an industry."

A big element of that, he says, is controlling the narrative and sharing with the public what our nation's farmers are doing.

"Farmers are some of the most conservation-minded people in the world-they make their livelihood from the land that they work on," he explains. "Farmers are consistently utilizing those environmentally impactful best management practices. It's really important to me that we tell people why we do what we do and what we're doing that's already good for the environment itself… and [trusted advisers] can help do that."

"For [sustainability] to be a true long-term goal, it has to check all the boxes."

Seth McAllister