Winning 4-H project at State Science and Technology Fair of Iowa seeks to improve water quality | Home & Garden

AMES, Iowa – When youth have the opportunity to learn something new in Iowa 4-H, sometimes it’s hard to predict where the opportunity will take them. In the case of Ananya Balaji and Shreya Srinath of Story County, a project in one 4-H program led to a win at the State Science and Technology Fair of Iowa.

4-H youth team wins state science fair. The Ames-based team first came together in 2020 to complete in the Iowa 4-H AgOvation competition. Their adult mentor is Kapil Arora, a field agricultural engineer with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. Arora encouraged them to compete in SSTFI.

AgOvation is a research-based competition that challenges youth to explore and develop innovative, science-based solutions to agricultural problems that they identify in their own communities. Youth in grades 7-12 work in teams to develop a project and create a presentation to share their results.

The team demonstrated how to improve water quality by removing excess nutrients. They used chemistry and engineering to devise two methods, one for removing phosphate and one for removing nitrates. These strategies could be implemented in buffer strips and bioreactors at the edge of fields to reduce nutrient contamination in water ways.

Balaji said the pair wanted to come up with a project for AgOvation that would be “interesting to do with a problem we thought we could solve and make a big impact.”