Climate change and unpredictable seasonality can make it difficult for farmers to make important business decisions on crop management. For example, one common inefficiency of crop management is in irrigation, which is largely based on weather forecasts. When water is imprecisely applied, it can contribute to profit loss, nitrogen leaching and yield gaps.
Researchers at the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute (DWFI) and their partners are working to solve these problems through a powerful synergy of tools to help growers around the world achieve the required critical food production goals, while overcoming environmental challenges and keeping farms profitable.
The Dashboard for Agricultural Water Use and Nutrient Management
The Dashboard for Agricultural Water Use and Nutrient Management (DAWN) project aims to provide farmers a powerful, predictive decision-making support tool to sustain food and energy crop production. DAWN is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture and is a collaborative effort among several universities and organizations.
DAWN combines modeling previously developed by DWFI and its Director of Research, Christopher Neale—the Spatial EvapoTranspiration Modeling Interface (SETMI) and Global Daily Evapo-Transpiration (GloDET) tools. Both SETMI and GloDET are tools for measuring evapotranspiration (ET)—or, the process by which water evaporates from the soil and simultaneously transpires from plants and enters the atmosphere. SETMI utilizes remote sensing via satellites to estimate evapotranspiration and predict rainfall and irrigation needs, while GloDET is the data set of evapotranspiration used in assessing water budgets, water productivity, plant stress and drought.
Through DAWN, collaborators hope to provide a more accurate set of seasonal forecasts one-to-nine months in advance, as well as one-to-six-day short-term forecasts during the growing season. These more reliable forecasts can translate into concrete decision-support tools useful for growers to optimize crop productivity while minimizing environmental impacts.
The DAWN project also aims to make this technology easy to use by providing recommended actions with an irrigation scheduling tool based on tailored input. It will also help farmers manage risk by giving planning scenarios that allow producers to explore how crops will fare under different conditions. Altogether, this will provide crucial information to producers in understanding the costs and benefits of different management strategies, help to close water usage gaps and make significant advances in advancing food security.
Parallel 41 Flux Network ground truths satellite data
DWFI uses its Parallel 41 Flux Network—a series of eddy covariance flux towers across the central United States—to determine movement of water vapor and other gasses in crop fields. The variance in this movement and the composition of the air helps measure ET more exactly and ground truth the satellite data in GloDET. Accurate and timely ET data is necessary for assessing water budgets, water productivity, plant stress and drought—ultimately helping growers precisely apply the amount of water that crops need, when they need it, to achieve the best possible yields. The Irrigation Innovation Consortium provides additional funding to expand the network of towers.
Measuring greenhouse gasses through the network
The Parallel 41 Flux Network and SETMI also provide an opportunity to measure greenhouse gas emissions in corn production fields supplying the ethanol industry—a protocol that eventually could be used with other crops in other countries. DWFI and University of Nebraska researchers were awarded a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and another half-million dollars of matching funds to add gas analyzers to the flux towers to measure carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane fluxes in the air and underground.
These technologies, combined with extensive soil and plant sampling for nutrients, carbon and nitrogen, allow researchers to estimate a complete carbon balance that can then be fed into lifecycle analysis models. These, in turn, provide data that shows how successful different production systems are at minimizing harmful effects of nitrous oxide emissions as well as efficiency in fixing carbon, which can provide a profit incentive in the form of carbon credits to the farmers in future carbon markets.
The combination of greenhouse gas measuring technology and modeling will lead to an increase in overall profitability as farmers adopt more efficient production systems in fixing carbon and management approaches to reduce emissions. Widespread adoption of efficient production systems is important, because mass producer adoption gives us the best chance to significantly and sustainably improve water productivity, food production and environmental quality in Nebraska and other states. Furthermore, once the technology is completed, tested and perfected, it can be applied to production agriculture in other parts of the U.S. and the world.