NRCS chief tours Valley businesses

MAT-SU — The head of one the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agencies was in the Mat-Su Valley last week, seeing how the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Alaska meets its goal of “helping people help the land.”

Arlen Lancaster, chief of NRCS, toured A&M Farm, Windy Valley Muskox farm and the Alaska Plant Materials Center while in the Valley. He also visited Homer, Nome, St. Lawrence Island and Tyonek on his five-day Alaska trip.

Lancaster, whose office is in Washington, D.C., got a taste of small-scale agriculture at the vegetable operation of Arthur and Michelle Keyes off Inner Springer Road. John and Dianne Nash’s musk ox farm on Wolverine Road showed how Alaska farmers diversify, in this case agrotourism and an agricultural product — quivet. Both operations have conservation practices cost-shared through NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). NRCS projects are voluntary.

The Alaska PMC in the Butte, which has been expanded through federal earmarks through NRCS, is similar to NRCS-operated facilities in other states that provide seed stock and other first- and second-generation plant material for farmers.

Lancaster said the Alaska PMC was the finest he’d visited. He expressed interest in the center’s landmark work in ethnobotany — developing sustainability guidelines for traditionally harvested plants now experiencing commercial harvest.

With earmark funding unlikely to continue, Lancaster said he will look at how NRCS’s federal pie is sliced and where the PMC’s work falls in NRCS’s priorities.

“It’s a balancing of resources,” Lancaster said of the budgeting process.

Lancaster said the visit to Alaska has reinforced information from NRCS Alaska State Conservationist Robert Jones that meeting NRCS’s goals in Alaska sometimes takes a creative strategy.

“The key is where is flexibility and where is rigidity of policy,” Lancaster said. “That’s the balance.”

Unlike other areas of the nation where farmland has been under cultivation for as long as 200 years, Alaska is still bulldozing trees to create new fields. That means NRCS conservation programs protecting soil and water are not always well tailored to Alaska’s needs.

In Alaska, Lancaster said NRCS programs are benefiting production and agricultural viability despite the logistical challenges of delivery that an Iowa farmer may have difficulty fathoming.

“One of the biggest challenges here is the sheer distance and diversity,” Lancaster said, adding he will be reviewing the agency’s structure to see if it is meeting those challenges.