Publications related to PGC!
Kentucky bluegrass (KBG) has poor seed establishment in the fall when used as a perennial groundcover in corn production. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of various seed treatments and soil amendments on the establishment of KBG under drought and non-drought conditions, simulated in a growth chamber.
Pottawatomie County (PT) is the fastest growing county in Kansas, featuring never-plowed Flint Hills prairie, Oregon trail ruts, and high-end cattle production. Population, income, and most wellbeing metrics have increased, especially in PT’s southern subdivisions bordering the Kansas river, where more than 80% of PT’s population is concentrated.
This thesis proposes a novel visualization system for communicating the timing of field operations, for example planting cover crops and strip tillage, as might be required to adopt more sustainable farming practice. Grounded in the context of increasing environmental challenges and the pressing need for conservation agriculture, this work explores the historical evolution of visualization formats and techniques, underscoring their significance and benefits across various domains, before focusing on field operations of cropping systems.
Modern, conventional row crop agricultural production relies on clean tillage of croplands and bare soil during the dormant season. While this paradigm of crop production has undoubtedly led to great increases in grain yields and efficiency, it has also resulted in significant soil erosion, groundwater contamination, degradation of local ecology, and hypoxic deadzones in US watersheds.
Perennial groundcover (PGC) has promise as a scalable approach to generating natural resource benefits and sustainable biofuel feedstock while preserving the high yields of annual row crop production. Partnering row crops with temporally and spatially complementary low-growing, shallow-rooted perennials, such as Kentucky bluegrass (KBG) (Poa pratensis L.), is one example of an emerging PGC system. PGC’s ecosystem benefits can only be fully realized if commercial-scale adoption occurs, which hinges on its economic feasibility. This paper utilizes an enterprise budget framework to detail and compare the expected cost and revenue of establishing and maintaining PGC in row crop systems with standard continuous corn (SCC) (Zea mays L.) production, including stover harvest, but excluding economic incentives for ecosystem services. Optimistic and pessimistic assumptions were used, along with Monte Carlo simulation, to characterize the uncertainty in results. In the optimistic stover market scenario, Year 1 net returns for PGC averaged USD 84/ac less than for SCC; Year 2+ net returns averaged USD 83/ac more, meaning that cost parity with SCC occurs by the second PGC system year. Without stover revenue, parity is achieved after five years. These results affirm that PGC’s economic viability is critically impacted by a groundcover’s lifespan, the yield parity with SCC, and the availability of a stover market.
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The increasing global demand for meat – and, therefore, animal feed – drives multiple environmental challenges. Mitigating the environmental consequences of the intensive livestock and crop production systems in the Midwestern United States requires multiple innovative approaches. This dissertation explores several such approaches relevant to food production, bioenergy generation, and cropping systems. Four interrelated chapters investigate the challenges and potentials associated with cultured meat (CM), anaerobic digestion (AD), and cover cropping in the United States agricultural landscape.
While the ecological benefits of regenerative agriculture (RA) are becoming clearer, its effects on farmers themselves are less well-understood. This paper's aim is to understand how farmers experience transitions from industrial agriculture to regenerative agricultural practices. Drawing on the ‘good farmer’ concept of identity, we provide a qualitative, narrative analysis of 51 farmers in United States' Central Great Plains region, who, at various points in time, began transitioning to RA. We found that transitioning farmers set themselves apart from those practicing industrial agriculture, including their past selves, who constituted an ‘other’ against which they contrasted their emerging identities as ‘regenerative’ farmers. These farmers used the discourse of addiction to describe industrial agriculture, seeing RA as a form of recovery from the chemical-intensive and subsidy-fueled treadmill of production that characterizes industrial agriculture. RA is experienced as a process of recovery that entails shifts in farmers' identities as ‘good’ farmers.
Integrating perennial groundcovers (PGC) — sometimes referred to as living mulches or perennial cover crops — into annual cash-crop systems could address root causes of bare-soil practices that lead to negative impacts on soil and water quality. Perennial groundcovers bring otherwise absent functional traits — namely perenniality —into cash-crop systems to preserve soil and regenerate water, carbon, and nutrient cycles. However, if not optimized, they can also cause competitive interactions and yield loss. When designing PGC systems, the goal is to maximize complementarity — spatial and temporal separation of growth and resource acquisition — between PGC and cash crops through both breeding and management. Traits of interest include complementary root and shoot systems, reduced shade avoidance response in the cash-crop, and PGC summer dormancy. Successful deployment of PGC systems could increase both productivity and profitability by improving water- and nutrient-use-efficiency, improving weed and pest control, and creating additional value-added opportunities like stover harvest. Many scientific questions about the inherent interactions at the cell, plant, and ecosystem levels in PGC systems are waiting to be explored. Their answers could enable innovation and refinement of PGC system design for multiple geographies, crops, and food systems, creating a practical and scalable pathway towards resiliency, crop diversification, and sustainable intensification in agriculture.
