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Page 2 SARE Grant Partnership BCC Meeting – June 14, 2016 – CONSENT May 26, 2016 quality and productivity of the soil; conserve soil, water, energy, natural resources, and fish and wildlife habitat; protect endangered species; and maintain and improve the quality of surface and groundwater; • Protect the health and safety of persons involved in the food/farm system; • Enhance the quality of life for farmers/ranchers and society as a whole, in part by increasing income and employment - especially profitable self-employment opportunities in agriculture and rural communities. Specifically, a major goal is to strengthen the family farm system of agriculture, a system characterized by small - and moderate-sized farms that are principally owner operated; • Promote crop, livestock, and enterprise diversification and the well-being of animals, Strengthen rural communities by creating economic conditions, including value- added products that foster locally owned business and employment opportunities, and; Address the needs and promote the success of limited resource, minority, and women farmers while advancing agricultural sustainability. SARE Grant Per -Proposal Application Abstract Central to sustainable agriculture is meaningful recycling of nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. When nutrients used as fertilizer are lost to the environment, they can become pollutants, often eliciting destructive algae blooms. This results in eutrophication, which can impair aquatic, estuarine and marine ecosystems. The environmental, social, and economic impacts of eutrophication are dramatic—as examples, in the Great Lakes, in subtropical lakes of Florida, and in coastal estuaries. We consider these escaped nutrients as rogue nutrients and as a lost resource that can be recovered and recycled. One means of recovering and recycling rogue nutrients is through a new agricultural paradigm involving cultivation of aquatic plants, a technology known as Managed Aquatic Plant Systems or MAPS (HydroMentia, 2005). MAPS involves the production of select aquatic plant(s) through controlled delivery of nutrient polluted water, which serves as the sole nutrient source for the plant(s). These may be vascular plants, algae or a mix of both, and are cultivated within an engineered unit. Through frequent harvesting, the rogue nutrients are captured and recycled in the recovered plant biomass. The direct benefits of MAPS are two -fold — 1) water quality improvement through nutrient reduction and 2) recycling of nutrients to support other types of agriculture. Therefore, MAPS is both water treatment and agriculture, and may be seen as an agricultural solution to an agricultural problem. F -\Public Worhs\KeithM\Stormwater Projects\Egret Marsh Operation\Agenda ItemsWgenda - Consent - SARE Grant 2g Partnership.doc