“Everything starts with an idea,” according to Sotirios Archontoulis, professor of agronomy at Iowa State University, who will co-lead a five-year, $16 million project to explore some big, interconnected questions impacting agriculture in the Corn Belt and Great Plains.
The project will seek to understand how combinations of crops (corn, soybean, wheat and rye), agronomic management (tillage and fertilizer), diverse soils and water (rainfed, irrigated and subsurface drainage) affect productivity and environmental performance of cropping systems. The expansive study will collect new data from experimental field sites in seven states (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska and Ohio) and use simulation modeling to expand the knowledge gained across time and space.
Archontoulis’ partners include Dorivar Ruiz Diaz, professor of soil fertility and nutrient management at Kansas State University, the project lead. Others involved are The Ohio State University, Mississippi State University, The University of Kansas, Landscan: Information Infrastructure for Agriculture and LiCOR Environmental.
“Research on the effects of crop production management factors on soil, environmental sustainability and yield has been largely fragmented, focusing only on a few selected factors and specific locations,” Ruiz Diaz said. “This complex project, through a unique public-private collaboration, aims to bring these factors together to accomplish a number of related goals.”
Those goals include:
Understanding the long-term impacts of combinations of cover crops, nitrogen, crop rotation intensity and tillage on crop productivity and environmental sustainability across climatic regions. Characterizing how soil microbial diversity and activity are affected by crop management, soil moisture regime and soil residue cover and how these factors influence soil carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions.
Using cropping systems modeling to predict and explain productivity and soil carbon contributions to assess scenarios for the long-term profitability for different cropping systems in the U.S. Corn Belt and Great Plains.
Archontoulis, head of the Integrated Cropping Systems Lab at Iowa State, will manage one of the experimental locations and will conduct modeling for all locations using the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM), an international computer model he runs for Iowa State, the hub of the APSIM platform in the United States. Archontoulis has updated APSIM’s hydrologic component to account for shallow water table fluctuations, an important research focus of this new project.
Click here to read more iastate.edu
Photo Credit: istock-fotokostic
Categories: Iowa, Crops, Corn