By Blake Jackson
University of Kentucky researcher Bill Ford, Ph.D., spent part of 2026 in Ireland examining how agricultural practices influence water quality and developing new approaches to managing phosphorus pollution.
Ford, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering at UK’s Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Specializes in Hydrology and Water Quality, according to Briana Fortunato, Marketing and Communications Manager at the University of Kentucky.
Through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Ford worked with researchers at Teagasc, Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority, from February through July. He was hosted by Per-Erik Mellander, Ph.D., a Senior Research Officer with Teagasc’s Agricultural Catchments Programme.
Ford’s project, titled “Advancing tools to manage phosphorus pollution in karst watersheds of Ireland,” focused on developing modeling methods that can measure how nutrient-management practices affect water quality in agricultural watersheds.
“Quantifying the impacts of agricultural practices on water quality is important because it has direct implications for food production, environmental health and human safety,” Ford said.
Ireland provided a valuable setting for the research because both Ireland and Kentucky contain karst landscapes, where water can move through underground channels created as limestone and other soluble rocks dissolve. These landscapes include caves, sinkholes, sinking streams, and springs, making it difficult to predict how nutrients and contaminants travel through watersheds.
Ford compared long-term watershed data from Kentucky with high-resolution hydrologic and water-quality information collected in Ireland. Differences in soil conditions, climate, landscape development, and agricultural policies offered researchers an opportunity to examine how these factors influence water movement and pollution.
“A major motivation for this project was to combine shared long-term datasets for watersheds here in Kentucky with those collected in Ireland for model development and testing,” Ford said.
The collaboration resulted in an empirical risk assessment tool that uses data from Kentucky, Ireland and other locations to evaluate watershed risks.
The research was presented in June 2026 at the BIOGEOMON conference in Sweden, while several related papers are being prepared for journal submission.
Ford plans to continue collaborating with Irish and European researchers and expects to return to Ireland for Catchment Science 2027 in Wexford.
The Fulbright experience also gave his family an opportunity to live in Ireland, where his children attended school and experienced the local community.
“The Fulbright was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I would highly recommend to anyone considering,” Ford said. “Personally, the program allowed my family and I to immerse in a culture and lifestyle that we could not have experienced with short-term visits.”
Photo Credit: bill-ford
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