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USDA-ARS technician John Frame conducting field work.
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USDA/ARS Technician Elizabeth Pruessner performing maintenance on the Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer in the Stable Isotope Laboratory.
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Technician Tim Creed working with Qicube DNA robot to extract soil bacterial DNA.
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Technician Kedge Stokke working in the laboratory.
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Cover crops can be used to reduce soil erosion, conserve water quality and improve potato yields and crop quality. (Photo credit: Stephen Ausmus, ARS Agricultural Research magazine.)
Mission
The mission of the Soils research of the Soil Management and Sugarbeet Research Unit (SMSRU) is to develop and evaluate new knowledge required to efficiently manage soil, fertilizer, and plant nutrients (emphasis on nitrogen) to achieve optimum crop yields, maximize farm profitability, maintain environmental quality, and sustain long-term productivity. For Sugarbeet, the mission is to utilize distinctive site environmental and disease-free characteristics and specifically developed team expertise to: (1) develop new knowledge and adapt biotechnologies to modify host-pathogen relations that affect disease resistance, pathogenesis, and epidemiology in sugarbeet and other plant species pertinent to sugarbeet cultivation; 2) discover new information and techniques to identify and produce genotypes exhibiting superior disease and stress tolerance and agronomic qualities; 3) provide new knowledge that improves production efficiency and biochemical processing characteristics.