Abstract
Ensuring an adequate food supply in systems that protect environmental quality and conserve natural resources requires productive and resource-efficient cropping systems on existing farmland. Meeting this challenge will be difficult without a robust spatial framework that facilitates rapid evaluation and scaling-out of currently available and emerging technologies. Here we develop a global spatial framework to delineate ‘technology extrapolation domains’ based on key climate and soil factors that govern crop yields and yield stability in rainfed crop production. The proposed framework adequately represents the spatial pattern of crop yields and stability when evaluated over the data-rich US Corn Belt. It also facilitates evaluation of cropping system performance across continents, which can improve efficiency of agricultural research that seeks to intensify production on existing farmland. Populating this biophysical spatial framework with appropriate socio-economic attributes provides the potential to amplify the return on investments in agricultural research and development by improving the effectiveness of research prioritization and impact assessment.
Highlights
Agronomy is the science of crop and soil management to produce food, fiber, and forage in a sustainable manner that does not deplete or degrade resources upon which future production depends
As a first step towards identifying a suitable technology extrapolation domain’ (TED) framework, we focus on the biophysical attributes that define a TED for rainfed crop production while acknowledging the need to supplement this biophysical framework with appropriate socio-economic attributes
We evaluate the capacity of this spatial framework to account for variation in crop performance and management practices across spatial and temporal dimensions using two different databases: (i) county-level maize yield data over a 10 year (2005–2014) time period (USDA-NASS 2016), and (ii) field-level soybean yield and management data from 3276 producer fields across the US Corn Belt collected over three years (2014–2016, see section S4 in supplementary material)
Summary
Agronomy is the science of crop and soil management to produce food, fiber, and forage in a sustainable manner that does not deplete or degrade resources upon which future production depends. Field experiments across many thousands of sites evaluating crop response to new technologies that result from this investment seek to identify those practices that raise yields, reduce risk, increase profits, and are more environmentally friendly. Extrapolation of findings from these experiments to facilitate adoption by farmers is limited by the lack of a robust spatial framework to identify cropland ‘cohorts’ with similar soils and climate where a comparable response to a given set of technologies would be expected. The ability to utilize these results to support more effective research prioritization and impact assessment is limited by the lack of an appropriate spatial upscaling method to estimate outcomes of technology adoption on crop production and natural resources at regional, national, and global scales (Grassini et al 2017, Kouadio and Newlands 2015)
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