The ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is one of the primary reasons that they require water. As a result, plants’ carbon and water cycles are intertwined. Using this fundamental principle, researchers from the University of Missouri and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have identified sustainable farming methods for supporting staple crops like corn and soybeans in the face of increasingly severe weather in the Midwest.
Agriculture and Forest Meteorology was the journal that published the study.
Through an examination of water and carbon fluxes in three distinct ecosystems, this study investigated how farming practices affect crop resilience to climate change: a conventional tilled cropping system, an aspirational no-till cropping system with cover crops, and an ecosystem composed of native tallgrass prairie.
Adam Schreiner-McGraw, a research hydrologist with the USDA, stated, “One of the big goals is what we call climate-smart agriculture, which can mean using crops to absorb carbon from the air, but it also means trying to adopt farming practices that help farms adapt to the changing climate.” Plants become more stressed as the temperature rises, resulting in lower yields frequently. Understanding adaptation and working toward more resilient agroecosystems are the primary goals of this study.
“One of the main objectives is what we call climate-smart agriculture, which can involve using crops to absorb carbon from the air but also involves attempting to adopt farming practices that help farms adapt to the changing climate,”
USDA research hydrologist Adam Schreiner-McGraw.
Ecosystems’ evapotranspiration and carbon dioxide exchange rates were compared, revealing intriguing patterns. Evapotranspiration is the process by which water moves from the ground to the atmosphere. The native prairie ecosystem had higher rates of evapotranspiration than the tilled cropping system, according to data analysis from the previous four years. In any case, in examination, the grassland’s pace of evapotranspiration didn’t vary much from that of the no-till editing framework. Further, both editing frameworks had higher measures of plant development (i.e., carbon take-up) than the local grassland.
The “flux tower” device for eddy covariance is housed in this aspirational plot, which is covered in soybeans. Credit: Jeffrey Wood.
According to Schreiner-McGraw, who works in the USDA’s Cropping Systems and Water Quality Research Unit on the MU campus, these findings suggest that the tilled cropping site is more susceptible to changes in the environment than the native prairie, which is more resistant to extreme weather. Also, the no-till system had the most variable rates of evapotranspiration because it has the most crop diversity, including corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay. Schreiner-McGraw attributes this phenomenon to agricultural management strategies.
Understanding variable paces of evapotranspiration assists researchers with gauging whether the “arranged” climate inconstancy affects the water and carbon financial plans more than the “impromptu” climate inconstancy, which can assist with expectations for crop water and carbon take-up as outrageous weather conditions deteriorate.
According to Jeffrey Wood, an assistant professor in the MU School of Natural Resources, planting a diverse crop rotation over a long period of time is yet another strategy for constructing environmental resistance. Understanding how to best support crop adaptation and which crops to plant when has become increasingly important as climate fluctuations become more intense—for Missouri, this means warmer, wetter winters and drier summers with fewer rains.
“People are always willing to share ideas, which makes it easy to work together and contribute to research that expands in scope from the problems one researcher might be working on locally to those another might face on a larger scale,” Wood stated. “The type of work we do lends itself to collaboration because we all share data in a community-based network.”
Megan E. Metz, John Sadler, and Kenneth Sudduth are the co-authors.
More information: Adam P. Schreiner-McGraw et al, Agriculture accentuates interannual variability in water fluxes but not carbon fluxes, relative to native prairie, in the U.S. Corn Belt, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2023.109420
