University of Minnesota Develops New Tool to Help Farmers Make Crop Input Decisions

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and nitrogen water pollution from agriculture are top environmental priorities in the United States. Key to achieving climate goals is helping producers navigate carbon markets, while also helping the environment and improving farm income.

A new tool developed by a University of Minnesota research team allows farmers to create a budget balance sheet of any nitrogen reduction plans and see the economic and environmental cost, return and margins, all customized to fields under their management.

"With these numbers in mind, farmers can make more informed decisions on nitrogen mitigation that not only saves them money, but also significantly reduces pollutants to the environment," said Zhenong Jin, who led the research and is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering (BBE) in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS).

Previous tools did not allow for customized predictions for every field in the U.S. corn belt, as the computational and storage costs of running these crop models at large scale would be very expensive.

As outlined in an article published in IOPscience, the research team built a series of machine-learning-based metamodels that can almost perfectly mimic a well-tested crop model at much faster speeds. Using the metamodels, they generated millions of scenario simulations and investigated two fundamental sustainability questions -- where are the mitigation hotspots, and how much mitigation can be expected under different management scenarios.

"We synthesized four simulated indicators of agroecosystem sustainability -- yield, N₂O emissions, nitrogen leaching, and changes in soil organic carbon -- into economic net societal benefits as the basis for identifying hotspots and infeasible land for mitigation," said Taegon Kim, CFANS research associate in the BBE department. The societal benefits include cost savings from GHG mitigation, as well as improved water and air quality.

"By providing key sustainability indicators related to upstream crop production, our metamodels can be a useful tool for food companies to quantify the emissions in their supply chain and distinguish mitigation options for setting sustainability goals," said Timothy Smith, professor of Sustainable Systems Management and International Business Management in CFANS's BBE department.