Harvesting rainwater with University of Maryland researchers

With climate change we're having alternating periods of both extreme precipitation and extreme dryness or drought. So rainwater harvesting can provide an additional water source that we can capture when there's extreme precipitation and then save it to use when there's drought. But we know that we have to understand the safety of harvested rainwater before farmers can use it to irrigate produce. So our project is called Developing a Framework for Integrating Rainwater Harvesting into Urban Agriculture. And the whole point of the project is to take research to action. So leveraging research that we've already done or research that's ongoing about looking at the safety of harvested rainwater and determining how do we help farmers actually safely harvest rainwater. So we have one irrigation system and treatment system at the Central Maryland Research and Extension Center in Upper Marlborough and then we have a second system at Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm in Baltimore City. So at both of these sites we've already built these systems and we've built them so that we can test different types of sustainable treatment. In this project we're leveraging those existing systems and we're taking it one step further. So we're answering questions that farmers have raised to us mostly about long-term storage. What happens when we actually save this water to use later when we need it during drought. So this is looking at the safety of the water from a microbial standpoint and also the nutritional quality of the produce that's grown with that water. And then even one step further is that we're trying to help farmers make decisions about if rainwater harvesting makes sense for them and what sort of variables they need to consider when they make those decisions. So urban farmers you would think have access to water that's easy because they live in cities so there is municipally supplied water but even when an urban farmer lives within a city that has accessible water it might not be accessible at the site that they're farming. So for instance we have a farmer partner where there's water that's accessible to the site but it's down a slope on a sidewalk and so what that farmer has to do is run a hose from the sidewalk up to where they're actually using the water. So this creates some safety concerns, this creates some logistical concerns and even though our municipally supplied water is less expensive than the true cost might be it still might be cost prohibitive for some small urban farmers. With our research we're finding that it's important to treat harvested rainwater before it's used for produce irrigation. From the work that we've done with the Hughes Center funding we already had a training where we trained four contractors about how to actually build these rainwater harvesting treatment and irrigation systems and those farmers all said that they increased their knowledge about rainwater harvesting, they increased their knowledge about irrigation and that they're more willing to actually help farmers build these rainwater harvesting systems. So we see the goal of this project as taking the knowledge that we have from the research that we've done that we're continuing to do and bringing it to farmers and to those that serve the farmers so that they actually know how to harvest rainwater safely. So this project is really important because this type of work requires a holistic approach so yes it's important to do the work in a microbiology lab to understand the safety of water but we also need to understand the economic considerations and then the real life considerations that our extension partners can help us with.