Study looks at conservation, profitability balance

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — A research team is in its second year looking at how conservation practices can affect crop productivity and profitability.

The Illinois Soybean Association checkoff program, in collaboration with University of Illinois Professor Kaiyu Guan and Assistant Professor Bin Peng, is funding the research that includes on-farm trials with farmers resulting in science-based data.

Guan is founding director of U of I’s Agroecosystem Sustainability Center and NASA Acres Consortium chief scientist, NASA’s flagship program in advancing U.S. agricultural research. Peng is ASC water initiative lead.

“We want to zoom into your particular field, provide the information related to your productivity, but most importantly your environmental impact such as greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sequestration capability, also potentially an assessment of different major conservation practices,” Guan said.

“If you adopt these practices, what will be the implications of your field. Particularly, we’re talking about cover crops, reduced tillage or no-till and the smart nitrogen fertilizer applications.

“So, when farmers conduct the production for a particular year, they get a crop yield, but more importantly we also care about whether this field can be sustainable and productive in all the years ahead for future generations. This makes the environmental sustainability aspect also important.”

Farmer participation includes a field location, if possible, up to three years of practice data. In return, participants receive cutting-edge estimates of historical carbon emissions and detailed analyses of potential environmental benefits from key climate-smart practices such as cover crops, reduced or no-till farming and optimized fertilizer use.

The information will help make informed decisions about which conservation practice might be most beneficial.

“This is a project that uses the historical field level-collected information, as well as the newly collected project information from the ISA to bring all of them together integrated with the novel scientific technology, including satellites, supercomputers and models,” Guan said.

“The project brings all of them together to generate field-level-specific information related to greenhouse gas emissions, soil carbon sequestration and water quality-related metrics so farmers can gain a comprehensive understanding about not only their fields’ productivity, but also the environmental outcomes and the impact.

“The most exciting thing for me is we have done so much research work in the lab, in front of computers, using a supercomputer, measuring things in the fields. We hope to reach a point that we can put all of this information, lump that into something useful to farmers or even make it very easy for farmers to have at their fingertips.

“This is a project that will help us move to that direction, and we’re going to actually touch on some of those real-world impact that brings some useful tools to the farmer’s hands, and then they’re going to tell us whether it’s useful, or, if not, where to improve.

“We’re excited about filling these critical information gaps for farmers. We’re excited about contributing to this overall journey of more sustainable agriculture production.”

Farmers interested in participating in this research can visit ISA’s Field Advisor Research Hub website at https://fieldadvisor.org/research/.