<p><strong>Plantain Offers Nitrogen Reduction Potential</strong></p>
<p>Research work conducted by Jimena Rodriguez Gelos may help provide evidence to support the belief that plantain could help farmers reduce the nitrogen load on their farms &ndash; an important part of the fight against climate change.</p>
<p>Jimena, from Durazno, Uruguay, is a PhD student in the School of Agriculture and Environment at Massey University studying changes in the natural control of nitrate (NO<sub>3</sub>) leaching, nitrous oxide (N<sub>2</sub>O)&nbsp;and ammonia losses with plantain pastures.</p>
<p>She is in the second year of her studies involving grazed field drainage trials at Massey&rsquo;s No.4 Dairy Farm, where her main supervisor is Professor Peter Kemp and co-supervisors are Associate Professor Dave Horne, Dr James Hanly, Dr Soledad Navarrete and Dr Peter Bishop.</p>
<p>The team&rsquo;s and Jimena&rsquo;s aim is to answer the question - will plantain-based pastures significantly reduce nitrate leaching, nitrous oxide and ammonia losses from grazed dairy pastures?</p>
<p>&ldquo;Plantain has been shown to reduce NO<sub>3 </sub>leaching from dairy farms and this research will have positive impacts at a number of different levels. I think that if implemented correctly, farmers will be able to decrease their N load on-farm, reducing the negative impacts on the environment.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Jimena says she is interested in any mitigation tools to reduce nitrogen losses from dairy systems to the environment. In this project she is not only able to study the N cycle into the soil but also the gaseous N losses.</p>
<p>Jimena comes from a rural background in Uruguay, where her family had a beef and sheep farm and cultivated their own food. The family had to move to Durazno for her secondary school education &ndash; &ldquo;Durazno is a small town, only 30,000 inhabitants, however, for me it was a huge town.&rdquo;</p>
<p>When she finished high school, she moved to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, to study biological sciences majoring in ecology at university. A project comparing nitrous oxide emissions from two different production systems -- dairy and beef &ndash; prompted further interest in this field and when Jimena decided to do a master&rsquo;s degree, she contacted Professor Surinder Saggar in New Zealand, who had published papers on the subject.</p>
<p>She did her master&rsquo;s degree at Massey University in 2012, writing her thesis on the ammonia losses that came from applying urease inhibitor Agrotain<sup>&reg;</sup> on pasture soil before, on the same day and after the deposition of animal urine.</p>
<p>Jimena says the NZAGRC&rsquo;s scholarship has been important &ndash; &ldquo;I can use that money to cover the cost of analysing N<sub>2</sub>O gases, which are very expensive. Otherwise, I would have to do it by myself and it is a time-consuming task. Each sample has to be injected every five minutes manually and in each sample day I collected 100 samples.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Looking to the future, Jimena hopes to continue doing research using plantain as a mitigation tool.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I believe that lot of work has to be done to understand the effect of plantain in soil N transformations and how the environmental factors are affecting N<sub>2</sub>O losses from soil cultivated under plantain.&rdquo;</p>
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