Alaska Life

Alaska's only public soil sampling lab to close

MATANUSKA EXPERIMENT FARM -- The state's only comprehensive soil sampling lab open to the public is closing due to system-wide budget cuts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The university's Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory processes thousands of samples a year for home gardeners and farmers trying to home in on that delicate balance of soil nutrients and pH necessary to grow the best food.

The lab also tests the nutrient content of forage materials.

Once thriving, the lab is now down to one full-time scientist: Melissa Dick. Her last day is expected to be in February or March. The lab is still running tests but stopped taking new samples as of last week.

"I hate having to direct people out of state," Dick said Monday as she processed some samples for a local high school student's research project. "In Alaska, we don't want to send money out."

Stocked with hundreds of bottles of chemicals and elaborate equipment including a plasma-powered spectrometer valued at more than $90,000, the lab is in a big brown government building on the Matanuska Experiment Farm. The university-run agricultural research campus predates Palmer, the tidy Mat-Su town founded on the premise of a New Deal farm colony.

Closing the lab is expected to save about $90,000 this year, according to Milan Shipka, director of UAF's Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, which includes the Matanuska farm.

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The cut is part of a "budget reduction expectation" placed on UAF as part of the broad reductions the university had to take this year, Shipka said. More cuts are expected next year. Along with the general public, the lab gave university researchers a place to get samples analyzed for free, he said.

The lab actually costs more than those in the Lower 48, already used by some home gardeners and at least several of the Matanuska Valley's commercial growers. And those labs can provide a more thorough analysis than this one, which provides information about the three major nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, as well as pH.

But there's a certain value in having a homegrown place to bring Alaska dirt.

"We all like to see Alaskans providing service to Alaskans but we can't do everything," Shipka said. "We're a little state. And we're a very, very little experiment station."

The loss of the lab will ripple through the gardening community, given the fervor Alaskans bring to the midnight sun-fueled pursuit of bountiful cabbages, fist-sized potatoes and pendulous raspberries.

At least 200 gardeners from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough alone got samples tested last year, officials say. Landscape contractors also use the lab, as do growers making use of federal grants to install high-tunnel greenhouses.

Knowing what's in the soil -- and what should be -- can be the difference between a good garden and a great one.

"I'm often asked, 'What can I do to improve my bed?'" said Ellen Vande Visse, who operates the Good Earth Garden School near Palmer. "I always answer, 'I have no idea. Get a soil test.'"

But there's more.

If your child plays soccer, the lab may have helped grow the grass on the pitch. Soil scientists at the experiment farm are responsible for the fine green outfield at Hermon Brothers Field, the scenic home of the Mat-Su Miners with its Pioneer Peak backdrop.

Research at the lab even developed a way to grow grass on Alaska's plentiful gravel runways -- not so fast that it turned into a meadow but thick enough to trap rocks and prevent aircraft damage.

The lab probably saved the state's aviation industry millions of dollars, said Steve Brown, the Mat-Su Agricultural Extension agent who wrote the runway grass publication that even caught the attention of a Pentagon general for use in Afghanistan.

"That lab has been responsible for saving the aviation industry probably millions of dollars in aircraft damage," Brown said. "The closing of the lab has so many ripple effects that are just hard to calculate."

Zaz Hollander

Zaz Hollander is a veteran journalist based in the Mat-Su and is currently an ADN local news editor and reporter. She covers breaking news, the Mat-Su region, aviation and general assignments. Contact her at zhollander@adn.com.

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