Address
Description
LabTech in your Life: https://www.federallabs.org/successes/labtech-in-your-life
USDA Annual Reports in Technology Transfer: https://www.ars.usda.gov/office-of-technology-transfer/tt-reports
USDA ARS Media: https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news-events
Mission
ARS researchers in the PA conduct research to develop and transfer solutions to agricultural problems of high national priority and provide information access dissemination to:
- Ensure high-quality safe food and other agricultural products
- Assess the nutritional needs of Americans
- Sustain a competitive agricultural economy
- Enhance the natural resource base and the environment
- Provide economic opportunities for rural citizens, communities, and society as a whole.
PA scientists at our 22 research locations in 10 states are addressing all of these goals through the 85 to 100 agricultural and nutritional research programs typically underway in the PA at any one time. The Area Director's Office supports these many vital research efforts by providing administrative, technical and budgetary assistance to our locations. Our goal is to provide superior service to all our customers and employees to further the ARS research mission and the multi-disciplinary research efforts underway in the PA.
Technology Disciplines
This system provides a novel approach to quality management in plant-based products. Plants do not always do what we want. Sometimes stress is needed to get the human-desired outcome. This system consists of a combination of physiological information, plant temperature and water status, and an irrigation controller. The system allows a user to continuously monitor and manage the progress of the plant toward a desired quality outcome.
Benefits
• Allows for the precise imposition and management of plant thermal and water stress.
• Allows for management of quality-related plant outcomes in a highly reliable manner.
• Useful in greenhouse and field settings
• Automated
Applications
• Quality-related factors such as aromatics and taste parameters can be associated with plant status and modified over a season.
• Provides water at minimum amounts to achieve desired outcome (product)
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 99.09 |
Ticks and tick-borne diseases kill humans and animals. Enhanced pathogen detection is needed to improve the diagnosis of these diseases. The TickPath Layerplex is an innovative quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay to detect several tick-borne pathogens simultaneously. This assay aids in the diagnosis and treatment of human and animal tick-borne diseases.
Benefits
• Detects several groups of tick-borne pathogens in a sample simultaneously
• Distinguishes type of tick-borne pathogen in the sample simultaneously
• Guides decision for rapid and appropriate treatment
• Results obtained faster than with other types of assays
Applications
• Use during or after treatment of some tick-borne diseases as serologic titers can be persistent despite proper treatment of infection
• Replace serologic titer assays which are unable to determine if an active infection is occurring
• Can assay whole tick, tick fluid and serum from dogs, cats cattle, etc.
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 68.16 |
A novel process for enhancing rainfall has been invented using only tap water. The water is electrically charged before it is released into warm continental or maritime convective clouds with an agricultural aircraft. This technique has been shown to double the amount of additional rainfall generated compared to conventional cloud seeding methods.
Benefits
• Doubles the additional rainfall generated by cloud seeding compared to conventional methods
• Uses only tap water instead of silver iodide or calcium chloride
• Operating costs are greatly reduced
Applications
• Effective, cost efficient and environmentally friendly method of enhancing rainfall from warm continental or maritime convective clouds
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 36.18 |
An integrated set of sensors, microprocessor, and devices with software that remotely measures surface temperature and simultaneously acquires an image for the purposes of qualifying the sensed temperature. The system can be used to aide in precision irrigation management of center pivot or lateral move irrigation systems by providing surface temperature data for use in irrigation scheduling algorithms and automatic irrigation. The system can also be used in greenhouse environments and in drip irrigated fields to help monitor plant abiotic (drought, chemical) and biotic stresses (disease, insect infestation).
Benefits
Applications
- Can detect whether sensor sees plant or soil thusimproving data quality immensely
- Greatly improved irrigation scheduling
- Much cheaper acquisition of data critical for realtimecrop management
- Improved accuracy in crop yield forecasting
- Water conservation
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 288.12 |
Detailed are novel double stranded RNA constructs that target either Chloride Intracellular Channel (CLIC) or Sucrase gene expression in Aphids. The use of these constructs have shown increased mortality in aphid species, including but not limited to Diuraphisnoxia, Myzuspersicae, and Schizaphisgraminum. Also detailed are novel methods for pest management.
Benefits
Applications
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 177.12 and 41.17 |
A novel, two-line breeding system based on a stable nuclear male sterile mutant ms8 and its gene. The breeding system is efficient because it doesn’t require breeding for A/B pair or R lines.
Benefits
• Sorghum hybrids can be created by pollinating the bridge plants with any elite line or natural collection
• Simplified breeding process and more hybrid vigor
• Avoid devastating diseases that attack sorghum hybrids made with A1 cytoplasm
Applications
• Efficiently create hybrids for any type of sorghum, especially for biomass or special use sorghums, for which the traditional three breeding system is not well-established.
| Internal Lab Reference ID | 68.17 |
ARS research is organized into National Programs. These programs serve to bring coordination, communication, and empowerment to approximately 690 research projects carried out by ARS. The National Programs focus on the relevance, impact, and quality of ARS research. Check out the National Programs' website here:
Wastewater management is about to become a lot less smelly, a lot less toxic, and a lot less expensive thanks to technology developed by the Agricultural Research Service for swine farms that is also being adapted for household septic systems.
The odors associated with wastewater treatment are well known. A jury recently awarded more than $50 million to 10 neighbors of a swine farm in Bladen County, North Carolina, partly because of the foul smells coming from the farm’s open-air wastewater tanks, called lagoons. But swine lagoons aren’t just annoying; they’re also a public health hazard. In North Carolina, the Research Triangle Institute estimated that reducing gaseous emissions of ammonia from the state’s swine farms by 50% could save $189 million per year because of improvements in human health.
Both the high ammonia concentration typical in livestock wastewater and cold winter temperatures inhibit nitrification (conversion of ammonia to nitrite, which is soluble in water). Conventional methods of promoting nitrification, such as constructing additional treatment tanks or covering the lagoons with plastic, can be very expensive.
ARS scientists isolated a high-performance nitrifying sludge (HPNS) from manure that is effective at high ammonia levels and low temperatures. In addition to oxidizing the ammonia, the process substantially reduces the presence of odor-causing compounds in the wastewater.
The HPNS is introduced via floating media scaffolds, or capping units, which make it possible to treat just the top layer of wastewater rather than all of it. This process is significantly less expensive than the use of plastic lagoon covers or other conventional methods. Covering the lagoons in North Carolina alone would cost more than $320 million; the ARS lagoon capping units would cut that cost by more than half.
ARS signed technology transfer agreements with Pancopia Inc. of Hampton, Virginia, to design and develop next-generation commercial units of the technology, and with Terra Blue Inc. of Clinton, North Carolina, to devise cost-effective ways of retrofitting it for livestock production farms.
In addition to swine lagoons, the technology can be adapted to wastewater lagoons for other types of livestock such as dairy, beef and poultry. The technology transfer process also identified new market segments that could benefit from this technology, such as household septic systems.
Pancopia is planning to incorporate HPNS in household septic tanks in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, at a fraction of the cost of current systems. Maryland will pay up to $13,000 of the cost to replace a septic tank with one that will remove nitrogen; replacing the state’s 52,000 critical septic systems could require a $676 million investment. HPNS could cut that cost by two-thirds, saving up to $446 million.
This nomination details the successful partnership between a federal laboratory, university, collaborative sorghum stakeholder group, and a bioenergy industry partner to address an issue in bioethanol production and address barriers to adoption and utilization of sorghum—a crop in the United States that is more acclimated to growth in hotter/dryer climates.
The partnership identified a barrier to a grain processor, the biofuel plant, responding to the variability in local production of starchbased grains. Specifically, ethanol plants located on the Great Plains have influx between the availability of corn and sorghum based on the growing season. This necessitates the need to utilize diverse feedstock. A barrier to diversifying feedstock is the requirement to account for the grain in an infrastructure that mixes commodities in lieu of single commodity storage. Feedstock accounting supports both the management of fermentation efficiency and requirements of fuel markets. Addressing this barrier required high throughput technology that is scalable with easy adoption in a commercial processing plant.
Specifically, researchers at USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Kansas State University, The Center for Sorghum Improvement and Western Plains Energy, LLC, collaborated to develop and validate a rapid near infrared (NIR) spectroscopic test to determine the composition of corn-sorghum flour mixtures used in the production of bioethanol. In addition to this rapid NIR test method, the partners developed a real-time PCR method to support the rapid NIR methodology with a reference and validation method.
Adoption of the NIR technology was rapid due to the integral partnership approach. Western Plains Energy, LLC, has received the NIR calibration curve and reference samples, and is integrating the methodology into operations. In addition, an NIR instrument company and a bioethanol enzyme company have received the NIR method and are working with Western Plains Energy to further implement and develop the methodology. This expansion of the partnership to service providers enables broader dissemination of the technology. Further distribution of the process will occur by publication and stakeholder presentation in the fall.
Western Plains Energy is currently in the process of adopting this technology for use and has installed in-line NIR instrumentation to facilitate it. This technology could be used industry-wide where needed to help identify the composition of feedstock used to produce a given batch of ethanol.
This project leveraged existing strong partnerships between the USDA-ARS lab in Manhattan, Kansas, Kansas State University researchers, and the Center for Sorghum Improvement at Kansas State University (state government). The interface between the researchers and industry provided by leadership at the Center for Sorghum Improvement was critical to the success of this project and highlights the potential for future partnerships between ARS, academia and the sorghum industry. Sorghum is an important crop for the central and southern region of the Great Plains, with an estimated gross production value for the U.S. of approximately $1.3 billion (www fao.org/faostat/en/#home). Continued partnerships like the one detailed in this nomination will serve to strengthen and increase the value of U.S. sorghum and benefit the U.S. ethanol industry.
