UNH Cooperative Extension and partners win $480,000 water quality grant
Five-state collaboration seeks to change home lawn care behavior

UNH Cooperative Extension, in collaboration with Plymouth State University, the University of Connecticut, and Cooperative Extension professionals in Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, recently won a $480,000 grant from the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service’s 2006 National Integrated Water Quality Program.

The three-year project will study why homeowners adopt the lawn care practices they do and develop recommendations designed to minimize the impacts of home lawn fertilizing practices on water quality in rapidly developing parts of the region.

The three-year project, Changing Homeowners’ Lawn Care Behavior to Reduce Nutrient Losses in New England’s Urbanizing Watersheds was one of 10 selected from 60 proposals nationwide.

“The ultimate goal of the grant is protecting surface and groundwater quality,” says UNH Cooperative Extension water resources specialist, Julia Peterson, lead author and principal investigator on the grant.

Changes in land use bring changes in stewardship
“We know that excess nutrients from fertilizers applied to home lawns contribute to water quality problems, and we expect that contribution to grow as more land is converted from farms, fields, and forests to homes and lawns,” says Peterson.

“When land is converted from farmland or forestland to houses, the land stewardship practices usually change as well,” Peterson says. “The acreage that was once under a single land manager with commercial and perhaps conservation interests has now been transferred to many land managers with diverse attitudes, knowledge, practices, and connections to the land.”

Despite water quality experts’ concerns over nitrogen losses from homeowners’ lawn fertilization practices, Peterson says, “there’ve been relatively few changes in lawn fertilization recommendations in the past 30 years. Most homeowners still apply fertilizers on a schedule at a set rate, rather than basing their application timing and rate on soil nutrient availability as measured by an objective testing method. This greatly increases the chance of over-application of nitrogen, thereby posing a threat to water quality and to human health.”

Furthermore, she adds, “We have no reliable soil-based nitrogen tests to guide lawn fertilization. Without objective tests to guide if and how much nitrogen to put on the lawn at any given time, homeowners are only guessing—and they frequently guess incorrectly. We thought it was time to change long-standing lawn fertilization practices so they address current water quality concerns.”

Regional water quality collaboration
“UNH has been part of a New England-wide regional water quality program since 2000,” Peterson continues. “While each state has its areas of expertise, we use the regional connections to share ideas, materials, and resources and collaborate on projects that pertain to the whole region. We organize our regional work under focus areas, one of which is sustainable landscaping.”

Peterson says the Extension staff working in that focus area have often talked about the challenges of changing deeply ingrained home and lawn care practices to better protect water quality. “This grant program provided an opportunity for us to dream up a project that integrates research, extension, and education to learn more about how we might make a difference,” she says.
 
Blending social science research with environmental research
Project partners come from the regional Extension group, with the exception of Brian Eisenhauer, assistant professor of sociology and associate director of the Center for the Environment at Plymouth State University. “Brian brings his expertise in the sociology of environmentally responsible behavior,” says Peterson. “He’ll conduct research in five target communities to identify the primary drivers of homeowners’ fertilizer choices and application behaviors. His research will examine the relative strength of various influences, including environmental values, attitudes and norms, and the level of trust in and influence of information sources such as Master Gardeners, local garden centers, and mass media, as well as the relative influence of different types of informational messages.”

“Our agronomist—Karl Guillard from the University of Connecticut—will conduct environmental research to develop regionally specific recommendations for fertilizer use—or non-use—that minimize water quality impacts. Karl also hopes also to develop a reliable soil-based nitrogen test.”

Education and outreach
The project’s extension component involves incorporating the nutrient application recommendations into messages and delivery methods compelling to neighborhood residents, based on social science research. “Extension staff will then work with the folks considered reliable, credible local sources of yard care information to deliver the messages to residents of targeted neighborhoods,” says Peterson., adding, “The education component of the project will incorporate undergraduate or graduate students as part of both the social science research team and as co-developers with Extension staff of the outreach campaign.”

“This project is innovative in its attempt to merge social science, environmental science, formal education, and extension outreach to influence people’s behavior in their own yards, Peterson says. “Our primary task will be to find messages and messengers that home lawn do-it-yourselfers can’t ignore, in the interests of protecting water quality from lawn fertilizers being misapplied in the region’s rapid-growth areas. The completed project will serve as a pilot that could be adapted and duplicated within or outside the region at the neighborhood, community, or watershed scale.”