NRCS and PMC partnership supports Feds Feed Families campaign
Pictured: Sam Richardson (left) and Richard Gallagher of the Mat-Su Youth facility unload potatoes.
With smiles on their faces and delightful thoughts of homemade French fries, staff at the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer unloaded nearly 1,500 pounds of potatoes that will feed local youth. The spuds were donated by the Alaska Plant Materials Center in partnership with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), June 23, 2020.
The potatoes were planted as part of an NRCS soil health field trial at the PMC that shows the effects of cover crops on soil properties and validates the benefits of soil health between rotations in a commodity crop harvest. The potatoes were harvested in the fall of 2019 and saved as seed crops to use for future trials. However the trial didn’t require as many potatoes this year since more of the plots are being planted into cover crops, so the remaining supply went to practical use as a food donation.
NRCS entered into an agreement with the PMC to conduct the five-year soil health field trial from 2015 through 2019, and it was recently expanded to include another three years through the 2020 to 2022 growing seasons. Cory Cole, state soil scientist, is leading NRCS’s involvement in the trial and was instrumental in finalizing the agreement with the PMC. Learn more about the trial in our recent success story “Alaska Farmers on a Quest for Healthy Soils.”
Pictured: An action shot from the cover crop field trial at the Plant Material Center - seeding cover crops over a potato plot with a no-till drill.
The trial is providing valuable data to help NRCS and its partners further refine cover crop recommendations, and the resulting spuds provide a valuable source of food to local organizations such as the Mat-Su Youth Facility.
The donation counts toward the agency’s contributions to the national Feds Feed Families campaign. Dee Covalt, administrative assistant at the state office, is the NRCS Alaska coordinator for the campaign. She shares information with employees from the national campaign and records all donations for Alaska. Last year, a similar amount of potatoes (14,260 pounds, to be exact) were harvested from the PMC in October and donated to Palmer Pioneer Home, Anchorage Food Bank, and the Mat-Su Youth Facility.
The Mat-Su Youth Facility is a co-ed, 15-bed secure detention program that helps institutionalized youth be released back into the community through its Transitional Services Unit. Serving youth in their community provides greater offender accountability, contact with families, the court, local law enforcement officials, and schools. Remaining near or in their own community provides many advantages as juveniles transition. Services provided to residents of the facility focus primarily on advancing educational goals, physical and mental health, life skills education, victim empathy, substance abuse education and other groups and activities designed to increase self-awareness, promote healthy lifestyle choices and to foster good decision-making abilities.
See more photos from the potato haul on the NRCS Alaska Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrcsalaska/albums/72157714837111412
By Tracy Robillard, Public Affairs Specialist
Pictured front row left to right: Sam Richardson, juvenile justice officer; and Shannon Schneller, juvenile justice officer. Pictured back row left to right: Richard Gallagher, maintenance; Theron Powell, superintendent; Phil Czapla, Alaska PMC; and Casey Dinkel, Alaska PMC. NRCS Photo by Tracy Robillard.
