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Farm*A*Syst Plus
Brian J.
Holmes, Wisconsin Extension Engineer
Gary Jackson, Professor, Soil Science, University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Farm*A*Syst,
a farmstead assessment system, was born in Wisconsin in the
early 1990s. Its early objective was to help a producer
determine practices on the farm that threatened the quality
of the farm’s water supply. The supporting materials
for this assessment provided education about how wells could
become contaminated and how the risks could be reduced. This
program was expanded to Home*A*Syst for rural
homeowners.
One or both of the Farm*A*Syst/Home*A*Syst programs have
been adapted and adopted for use in all fifty states. As
these states adapted the worksheets, assessment for surface
water quality pollution risk was added.
The Farm*A*Syst/Home*A*Syst program has supported the
development of other assessment systems around the world.
Some examples are:
- Dairy Quality Assurance Program, Milk and
Dairy Beef Quality Assurance Center, Inc., Stratford,
Iowa, operates a FIVE-STAR program, which provides
third-party assessment.
- Environmental Farm Plan–Ontario, Canada
is a producer led initiative with government incentive
payments for completing the assessment and planning
process.
- Cotton Best Management, Australia is a
producer led program that supports efforts to develop
environmental management certification.
- Lodi Winegrower’s Assessment of Integrated
Farming Practices is an industry lead effort to
reduce environmental risks and improve wine grape
quality.
Other initiatives aid producers to identify environmental
risks in their operations and take actions to reduce risks
when technically and economically feasible. Some examples
are:
- America’s Clean Water Foundation and the
National Pork Producers Council have teamed up to do
assessments using third-party assessors.
- Wisconsin Agricultural Stewardship Initiative uses
research on University research farms and transfers the
results to trials on the University of
Wisconsin-Platteville Pioneer Prairie Farm and to
Discovery Farms (commercial farms).
- Environmental Management Systems for Pork Producers.
North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service will work
with pilot swine farms to implement environmental
management systems.
- Project XL sponsored by the United Egg Producers
offers a voluntary program of multimedia environmental
management with third-party auditing.
- Sustainable Industry Program–Meat and Poultry
Processing Sector Project will identify what drives and
what are barriers to environmental performance.
- Raising Quality Replacement Heifers–A Guide to
Best Management Practices Milk and Dairy Beef Quality
Assurance Center, Inc., Stratford, IA.
Some of these programs reference Farm*A*Syst as a source
of information considered during the design process.
A new initiative has been funded through an Initiative
for Future Agriculture and Food Systems (IFAFS) grant. This
grant is supporting development and pilot testing of an
advanced environmental assessment tool. This program is
entitled “Partnership for Livestock Environmental
Management Systems.” The program will develop a
generalized assessment tool for use on dairy, beef, and
poultry farms. The generalized tool will be modified by each
pilot state (9 states) to incorporate information about
state regulations, policies and resources available to
support voluntary pollution prevention actions. After
adapting the model materials to their state conditions, each
state will pilot test the tool on at least thirty farms. The
pilot states for this project include:
Dairy: New York, Wisconsin, Idaho
Beef: Texas, Iowa, and Montana
Poultry: Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia
In addition to assessing environmental risk, this program
will help producers understand whether or not their farming
operations are in compliance with state and federal laws and
regulations and will also help them to start making changes
to reduce the risk of causing environmental problems and/or
a visit from regulators. Computerization of the system will
facilitate the completion of the assessment.
This system is in the early phases of development, but
on-farm pilot testing of the system is expected to begin in
about a year.
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