"We're talking about building a world-class clean energy economy, and this mine, this project. demand, enough for several hundred thousand electric cars, but marks a significant milestone in the country’s push for domestic production of the critical mineral needed for electric vehicle batteries and battery storage. Opened this week in Idaho, the mine is expected to only meet about 10% of overall U.S. Mining for the Future: For the first in decades, America has an operating cobalt mine. The National Park Service also announced the purchase of an additional 3,478 acres of land to expand the Sand Creek Massacre historic site in southeastern Colorado - more than doubling the size of the existing preserve. In other public lands news, The Nature Conservancy donated over 9,000 acres to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Officially dubbed The Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument, it will protect 53,804 acres of wildlife habitats and historic buildings from further development. Kelly Kopp, a professor of plant, soils, and climate at Utah State University, who helped design the drought-tolerant turf, said.Ĭolorado Public Lands Expand: Joined by two surviving members of the 10 th Mountain Division, President Biden designated Camp Hale outside of Leadville Colorado, where the famous mountain soldiers trained before WWII, as a national monument – the first of his Presidency. “It is a way to meet the needs we have for recreational and functional grass, while still helping address the drought," Dr. A partnership between Utah State University, the Turfgrass Water Conservation Alliance, and Salt Lake City Public Utilities created a drought-tolerant turf, a blend of grasses that use less water than traditional Kentucky bluegrass, but still looks like traditional turf. Of course, drought-tolerant plants can also help with domestic water conservation. The University of California, Davis even launched the Stuart & Lisa Woolf Fund for Agave Research to focus on outreach and research into the plants and their viability as a low-water crop in the state. The drought has had such an impact on California agriculture that many producers are considering a switch to agave, which uses about a tenth as much water as olive trees and require almost no water at all once the plant is established. In California, vineyards like the Tolosa Winery’s Edna Valley vineyards just south of San Luis Obispo have switched to using drought-tolerant varieties of grape vines that possess deep root structures capable of retaining water longer and ensuring the crop makes it through the increasingly hot and dry summers. Not only does planting pulse crops on “fallowed fields” improve soil health and crop resistance to disease, but it also increasing yields and enhances soil water conservation. In Montana, an increasing number of farmers are already planting drought-tolerant pulse crops – legumes that are harvested for their dry seeds, like chickpeas, lentils, and dry edible peas – to great effect. Department of Agriculture recently announced a $64 million grant to help farmers in the high plains transition to producing sorghum, a similarly drought-tolerant grain. The promise of drought-resistant crops like Kernza is so great that the U.S. While Kernza has been grown on the central plains for decades, the fact that it consumes at least 30% less water than alfalfa makes it a good candidate for the dry western states in the high plains, according to Perry Cabot, a water resources specialist at the Western Colorado Research Center. Researchers at the Western Colorado Research Center and The Land Institute, a nonprofit agricultural research organization based in Kansas, are studying the potential for Kernza – a drought-tolerant wheatgrass that produces high-quality forage grain – to be used as a cover crop or even offset some of alfalfa production on the Western Slope. While climate-smart agriculture incorporates a wide variety of practices, planting drought-tolerant crops has emerged as one of the most effective for conserving water and maintaining the financial stability of the region’s agricultural producers. Climate-smart agriculture has become a hot topic following the Biden Administration’s announcement of a $2.8 billion investment to support its expanded use.
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