The corn-soybean rotation is the dominant cropping system on farmland throughout central Canada and the midwestern United States. However, long-term research shows that this rotation has lower crop yields, soil quality, resilience to climate change, and profitability.
The corn-soybean rotation is the dominant cropping system on farmland throughout central Canada and the midwestern United States. However, long-term research shows that this rotation has lower crop yields, soil quality, resilience to climate change, and profitability.
Nitrogen fertilizer use in agriculture has been increasing; unfortunately, the same is true for nitrogen losses to the environment. Weather, as well as the frequency and timing of nitrogen applications, can affect how efficiently nitrogen is used by the crop to produce yield and how much is lost. One way to improve nitrogen fertilizer use in corn is to split the application so that some is applied at planting and the rest is applied in the growing crop. Farmers can then adjust the rate and timing of the second application depending on the weather.
Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth – including the algae that grow in rivers and lakes. When phosphorus is lost from agricultural soils into waterways, it can allow algae to grow rapidly, which causes problems for fish and humans.
Plants can’t access all of the water that’s stored in the soil. Some water is held tightly in very small pores, some water freely drains through large pores, and some is held loosely by the soil so that it isn’t lost but plants can still use it.
Using fertilizer efficiently is vital for managing agroecosystems sustainably. It makes the most of crop productivity while protecting the environment. As agriculture has intensified, the use of synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizers has increased.
The warming of the earth’s climate and an increasing global population is presenting enormous challenges for the agricultural industry to increase food production. More frequent extreme weather events caused by climate change, such as drought, are problematic for the Northern Corn Belt, where simple two-crop rotations of corn and soybean are common.
Diverse crop rotations - those with a greater variety of crops over time – have been recently promoted as a means to conserve or increase of soil organic carbon, a key indicator of soil health. But taking a critical view of this claim, is it supported by science?
To till or not to till, if only there was an easy answer! Thankfully, a long-term research trial at the Ontario Crops Research Centre-Ridgetown can give us a place to start.
While cover cropping is a promising option for increasing soil carbon storage in the long-term, the economic return on cover crops in cropping systems is understudied.
University of Guelph
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