Recipient Organization
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
1680 MADISON AVENUE
WOOSTER,OH 44691
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Widespread and long-term adoption of Climate Smart Agricultural Practices (CSAP) on farms represents a critical element of the U.S. national strategy to achieve a 50% reduction in net carbon emissions by 2030. Nowhere is adoption more important than the Midwestern Corn Belt (MWCB), where 60% of the nation's corn and 58% of its soybeans are currently produced. To date, however, the rate of CSAP adoption has been slowed by (i) low carbon incentives that reflect market uncertainty and unknown interactions between private markets and federal funding; (ii) novel emerging carbon science that compounds existing farmer hesitancy and uncertainty due to unknown tradeoffs or synergies with important goals like food production and water quality; and (iii) an inability to tailor federal contract or private payment structures to account for vast heterogeneity amongst farmer types and field biophysical characteristics. This project will address these challenges by translating the science of soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration and farmer behavior into actions that increase SOC stored in agricultural fields of the MWCB while balancing other economic and environmental goals. To accomplish this outcome, we will develop an integrated policy and decision support system that quantifies economic and environmental outcomes of CSAP adoption from field to regional scales. The decision support system will enable the development of educational and extension resources, including a multi-scale integrated model enabled through knowledge-guided machine learning; an expanded conservation management decision support tool leveraging COMET-Planner (CarbOn Management and Emission Tool) to quantify trade-offs, synergies, and risks of CSAP adoption; a virtual policy scenario dashboard; an under-represented minority undergraduate STEM research experience; a transdisciplinary graduate training program; and an online carbon science and policy certification program for professionals. The resulting tools will encourage more widespread adoption of CSAP through improved application of government and private incentives for carbon storage, combined with enhanced knowledge of the relationship between the carbon cycle, hydrologic cycle, and water quality. The project will achieve a longer-term impact through its undergraduate research program and transdisciplinary graduate student cohort, both of which will inspire novel thinking about future complex science problems and their solutions.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
25%
Applied
50%
Developmental
25%
Goals / Objectives
This project seeks to increase the uptake of climate smart agricultural practices in the Midwestern Corn Belt by addressing key challenges associated with translating the science of soil organic carbon sequestration and farmer behavior into actions while balancing other economic and environmental goals.This overall goal will be accomplished bybuilding an integrated policy and decision support system that quantifies economic and environmental outcomes of Climate Smart Agricultural Practices (CSAPs) adopted by farmers and translates this information into customized extension and educational resources. The specific objectives are to: (1) assess the knowledge gaps and information needs of stakeholders related to C markets and the economic and environmental trade-offs, synergies, and risks of CSAP adoption; (2)develop an integrated data and modeling platformto link a field-level CSAP adoption choice model with a new ecosystem biogeochemical model and multi-scale economic and biophysical models using our team's expertise in the emerging field of knowledge-guided machine learning (KGML) to generate consistent predictions of CSAP adoption, crop production, SOC storage, land use, and water quality in the MWCB for baseline conditions; (3) predict costs, tradeoffs, and synergies of changing land management practices at the field level and across the MWCB landscape under a range of market and policy scenarios; (4) generate and disseminate training programs and tools to assist key stakeholder groups, including extension specialists, in making decisions relating to land use, SOC, and water; and (5) develop and implement innovative inter- and transdisciplinary curricula and educational programs for URM undergraduate and graduate students relating to SOC, water and C-related decision-making in agri-business, agronomy, and sustainability.
Project Methods
This project deploys a variety of methods.Under objectives 1 and 2, we will1) conduct focus groups and survey researchto advance knowledge of farmer behavioral responses to various external stimuli (environmental, climate, policy);2) collate available data on soil physical-chemical and biological paramaters relevantto modeling SOC dynamics;3) resample long-term soil plots in MWCB, supplement with new soil plots to obtain soil and microbiome data to implement Distilled and Refined Annotation of Metabolism (DRAM), which translates microbiome-based genomic information into a catalogue of microbial traits, including traits controlling soil C;4) develop process-based models: MEMS 2 to simulate soil organic carbon processes across a heterogeneous landscape; CSAP-LU to simulate heterogeneous farmer decisions to predict CSAP adoption andland use at the field level; update and apply SWAT+ watershed model to the MWCB region under consideration; modify and downscale SIMPLE-G to the regional level and link with CSAP-LU model;and5) utilize Knowledge Guided Machine Learning to integrate the process-based models.Under objective 3, we will6) conduct policy analysis guided by novel policy scenario development team, composed of national and international policy carbon and agricultural policy experts;Under objective 4,we will7) develop model curriculum for carbon offset market accreditation programs implemented in the Midwest and linkwith partner institutions to conduct training on newly developed web-based decision tools.Under objective 5 we will8) deploy modern educational approaches to encourage under-represented minorities to enter STEM fields by placing them in paid internships and research experiences wtih academics at partner institutions; deploy modern educational appraochs to train a transdisciplinary cohort of graduate students from multiple institutions in the science of carbon and land management.