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ARS Hosts 30th Anniversary Ceremony for USDA George E. Brown, Jr. Salinity Laboratory

Contact: Amaani Lyle
Email: Amaani.Lyle@usda.gov

RIVERSIDE, Calif., Oct. 31, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) hosted the 30th anniversary ceremony of the U.S. Department of Agriculture George E. Brown, Jr., Salinity Laboratory on the University of California, Riverside campus today.

The event celebrated decades of research at the laboratory, where ARS teams have pioneered irrigation practices to optimize crop production, leverage conservation through recycled water, and minimize land degradation caused by the omnipresence of natural and man-made salinization, the overabundance of salt.

Salinization is the buildup of salts and other trace elements in irrigated soils that reduces the productivity of croplands, constituting a long-standing threat to farming in the semi-arid regions of the American West, parts of the Midwest, and throughout the world.

The Salinity Laboratory’s innovation and leadership in understanding salt-affected soil-plant-water systems for the conservation and protection of our land and water resources and the maintenance of a viable, permanent irrigated agriculture has garnered acclaim from both USDA leadership and UC Riverside collaborators.

“This milestone anniversary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture George E. Brown, Jr., Salinity Laboratory marks a storied history of our mission to overcome water quality and water scarcity constraints on agriculture and human health,” said Dr. Simon Liu, ARS Administrator. “Our researchers’ work has yielded palpable solutions to address climate change, drought, and competition for resources -- factors that reduce the availability of irrigation water and compound risks posed by salinization.”

ARS Research Leader Todd Skaggs echoed the importance of appropriate salinity control.

“To meet increasing demands for food amid limited soil and water resources, the nation and much of the world community will continue to look to the USDA Salinity Laboratory for salinity expertise, water quality research, and applications to solve these problems,” Skaggs said. “Protection of soil resources will become even more vital as water conservation, efficiency and quality assurance continue to increase.”

According to Skaggs, current research focus areas have earned the lab a vanguard position in addressing and eradicating per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals of concern whose presence in recycled water may lead to the introduction of these harmful compounds into the human food chain if such waters are used for agricultural crop irrigation.

“Even low levels of PFAS may accumulate in soils over time and be absorbed by crop roots,” Skaggs explained. “Our team is therefore developing a low-cost, low-energy, environmentally-friendly treatment system for the removal of PFAS from recycled water, and it’s being optimized for application at the greenhouse scale, potentially allowing for production of PFAS-free crops for human consumption.”

Skaggs also recounted research inflection points in the 1960s and 1970s when ARS scientists quantified the salinity response of a wide variety of agricultural crops and demonstrated that soil salinity could be managed with significantly less water than used in conventional irrigation practices, setting the stage for substantial water conservation.

“This research enabled the selection of suitable crops for a given irrigation water quality and the data remain the most comprehensive information available on relative crop salt tolerances,” he said.

By the 1990s, the Salinity Laboratory developed benchmark methods for mapping and monitoring soil salinity across swaths of U.S. farms and agricultural regions, irrigated lands that produce 30% of the nation's food and fiber and practically all of the nation's fruits and vegetables.

The 30th anniversary ceremony highlighted but a fraction of the lab’s deep roots.

In 1937, the United States Regional Salinity Laboratory was established at the base of Mount Rubidoux in the city of Riverside before adopting a new moniker, United States Salinity Laboratory, in 1951. 

In 1986, Congressmen George Brown, Jerry Lewis, and Al McCandless of California introduced legislation to replace the aging U.S. Salinity Laboratory with a modern facility on the UCR campus, which supported the project by leasing to the federal government a 7.5-acre site for 50 years at $1 per year. Groundbreaking occurred in 1992 before the facility officially opened in 1995. 

In 2000, the laboratory name would change once more to George E. Brown, Jr., Salinity Laboratory in memory of Congressman George E. Brown, Jr.

The laboratory has the distinction of being the only facility in the country specifically devoted to agricultural and environmental issue analysis through basic research on saline and alkali soils, including related reclamation, irrigation, drainage and soil management.  

Following the ceremony was an open house highlighting current research including breeding of salt-tolerant alfalfa, precision agriculture, and greenhouse-scale treatment systems for removing PFAS from irrigation water.

ARS and UC Riverside researchers have maintained collaborative relationships, sharing vital resources to achieve common research objectives through cooperative research programs. 

Leaders who spoke at the ceremony included:

The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in U.S. agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.