For the inland Pacific Northwest, climate change predictions including wetter springs and drier, hotter summers leads to production system uncertainties and risks for dryland, small grain farmers. Annual precipitation is projected to increase by about 5-15% by 2050 except during the summer months where precipitation is projected to decrease, resulting in decreased soil moisture during the late summer months.
I have seen it work. As a graduate student, I researched cover crops in a California dryland wheat system, comparing a wheat-fallow system to one with a cover crop replacing fallow (McGuire et al., 1998). A wet winter allowed for successful wheat yields in both systems. However, research results suggest that this is often the exception in dryland agriculture. More often, water use by the cover crop reduces the yield of the following cash crop.
“What were they thinking?” It’s a common question asked by agricultural scientists about the design of long-term cropping system experiments. Starting a long-term study is a big investment and having asked those questions ourselves while working with multi-decadal trials, you can imagine how daunting it was to be tasked with setting up a Long-term Agroecological Research and Extension (LTARE) site through the Washington Soil Health Initiative (WaSHI). In 20 years, would people be wondering what the heck we were thinking.
The last two years taught us how to adapt to rapid changes in our daily lives, including the major pivot to remote education. Remote education is nothing new, as WSU has delivered remote video and audio education since the late 1980’s in response to the to the state legislature’s directive for increased accessibility.
In September 2021, WSU began leadership of a new Agriculture-Artificial Intelligence (AI) research Institute: the AgAID Institute. As the growing population increases food demand, agriculture faces complex challenges related to labor, water scarcity, weather events and climate change. The AgAID Institute is developing AI solutions to help address these pressing challenges and spur the next agricultural revolution with the use of AI.
The Biologically Intensive Agriculture and Organic Farming (BIOAg) Program is an integral part of CSANR’s mission to promote innovative and applicable research into sustainable agriculture.
Soil has been called “the living skin of the Earth.” The effort to maintain the health of this “living skin” in Washington got a boost in 2021 when the State Legislature passed the Washington Soil Health Initiative…
The world is green with plants. The world also has thousands of species of plant-eating insects and other organisms. Why don’t all those insects eat all the plants? Why does the world stay green? TCR White, an entomologist from New Zealand, asks this question in a book (White 2005) and a series of fascinating papers. White argues that the answer is not…
I previously covered reasons why the results of many biodiversity studies do not apply to agriculture. Here, I want to emphasize a related issue: how ecological biodiversity research has distracted us from figuring out the actual causes of benefits in crop mixtures.
I explored opportunities to reduce environmental impact related to food preparation and food waste in previous Perspectives on Sustainability articles. However, transportation in the food supply chain is a significant contributor to carbon emissions: all the transportation and miles in between the farm and your plate are part of …
