Keywords
cropping system, data standardization, resource assessment
Start Date
25-6-2018 2:00 PM
End Date
25-6-2018 3:20 PM
Abstract
Approximately 40 percent of the land in the United States is farmland, about 370 million hectares. Farmers cultivate 158 million hectares, making daily decisions to improve the productivity of their land. Through technical assistance program providers and agricultural retail consultants, they use several tools to assess the sustainability of their operations, analyzing soil health, water management, agricultural chemical inputs, energy use, among other concerns. These tools currently provide more than 1 million assessments annually on farm fields across the country, including models and metamodels estimating water and wind erosion, soil organic matter trend, farm fuel use, nutrient and pesticide loss potentials, nutrient balance, PM10 air particulates (dust), soil carbon and nitrogen sequestration. The tools operate from common national soil and climate data. Central to on-farm analysis is the cropping system applied by the farmer. With many programs and initiatives supporting assessments overall, standardizing cropping system data becomes crucial, focused on the farmer’s crop rotation, the operations applied on the ground, and the basis for management inputs to the suite of tools. We define a Conservation Resources (CR) cropping system as a series of events, each event having a date and farming operation. An operation may associate to a crop or amendment. From this simple structure, we associate tool-specific input parameter sets to the core entities. The underlying CR database contains ~25,000 cropping system templates across 75 crop management zones, ~550 farming operations, and 118 crops. We provide a suite of data web services fetching data for running the tools.
Standardizing Cropping System Data for Integrated Agricultural Resource Assessment
Approximately 40 percent of the land in the United States is farmland, about 370 million hectares. Farmers cultivate 158 million hectares, making daily decisions to improve the productivity of their land. Through technical assistance program providers and agricultural retail consultants, they use several tools to assess the sustainability of their operations, analyzing soil health, water management, agricultural chemical inputs, energy use, among other concerns. These tools currently provide more than 1 million assessments annually on farm fields across the country, including models and metamodels estimating water and wind erosion, soil organic matter trend, farm fuel use, nutrient and pesticide loss potentials, nutrient balance, PM10 air particulates (dust), soil carbon and nitrogen sequestration. The tools operate from common national soil and climate data. Central to on-farm analysis is the cropping system applied by the farmer. With many programs and initiatives supporting assessments overall, standardizing cropping system data becomes crucial, focused on the farmer’s crop rotation, the operations applied on the ground, and the basis for management inputs to the suite of tools. We define a Conservation Resources (CR) cropping system as a series of events, each event having a date and farming operation. An operation may associate to a crop or amendment. From this simple structure, we associate tool-specific input parameter sets to the core entities. The underlying CR database contains ~25,000 cropping system templates across 75 crop management zones, ~550 farming operations, and 118 crops. We provide a suite of data web services fetching data for running the tools.
Stream and Session
C12: Connecting Environment, Technology, and Society: Integrated Decision Support Tools for System-Level Analysis