Students at a local junior high school will learn firsthand about environmentally responsible agriculture when they begin a partnership program with the UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture Program. A ground-breaking ceremony for the new Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Facility at Douglass Junior High School in Woodland will be held northwest of the school's football field Monday, July 13, at 9 a.m., formally launching the partnership program and introducing the community to the new project. "The establishment of long-term plots at Douglass Junior High will provide an opportunity to educate both the students and the community as a whole on the importance of striking a balance between good food production practices and environmental protection," said Montague Demment, a professor of agronomy and range science and director of the UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture Program. "Long-term data is needed to evaluate the environmental impact of agricultural practices. We anticipate that, as the years pass, these plots will provide a unique perspective for the Douglass Junior High students." Demment has been working to coordinate the project with Jerry Delsol, an agricultural science teacher at Douglass and a 1982 graduate of the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. The project, funded by a competitive grant from the National FFA Foundation, will be located on one acre of undeveloped land on the junior high campus. Plans call for fencing the property, running irrigation lines, constructing storage buildings and preparing the land. Several agricultural systems will be established at the Douglass plots comparable to larger-scale systems at the Long Term Research on Agricultural Systems (LTRAS) facility at UC Davis. Focusing on the impact of agricultural systems on the environment, the LTRAS site was recently established by the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. During the upcoming school year, 90 to 120 seventh through ninth graders from agricultural mechanics, agricultural science and ornamental horticulture classes will be included in the partnership program. Delsol also plans to eventually incorporate local elementary schools in the project. "We hope that the partnership program will help the students will see a real connection between science and the environment," Delsol said. Mirroring studies being conducted at the UC Davis LTRAS site, the Douglass project will focus on the importance of nitrogen both as a nutrient in human nutrition and as an environmental contaminant. Computer models will be provided by UC Davis to help the Douglass students analyze data from various cropping systems and understand the trade offs that exist between crop production and resource conservation, Demment said. Students will establish a computerized data base using the results from their experiments to understand the performance of their systems and will visit the LTRAS plots to compare their results with those on the university research site, Demment said. "We want the students to have a major involvement with our field research, not only to see how large-scale agricultural experiments are run, but also to feel the excitement of doing high-quality field research," he said. "This program is aimed not only at agricultural eduction or research, but also at the general education of citizens to understand the complexities and challenges in providing a food supply for future generations while conserving the resource base upon which production depends."