Transferability issues of soybean research: a regional example

Abstract

Agricultural research monies are becoming increasingly scarce and therefore subject to additional scrutiny. To analyze the impact of transferring site-specific research recommendations to a larger region (roughly 2.4 million hectares of farm land in Eastern Arkansas), a set of soybean production parameters are varied in a biophysical simulation model using two representative soils and three climatic profiles. Mathematical programming was used to obtain site-specific, profit-maximizing production practices. Transfer of these optimal production practices to other environments resulted in operating losses up to $13.62 and $5.34 per hectare across soil and climatic region, respectively. This translated to annual estimated losses of $0.183–$3.877 million for the study region. Given the study specifications, guidelines for spatial replication of soybean research are (i) to provide recommendations using the poorer of the two soils and (ii) to give higher research priority to research replication across soils than climatic region.