Location: Wind Erosion and Water Conservation Research
Project Number: 3096-13000-010-025-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 15, 2025
End Date: Aug 14, 2026
Objective:
We have a large-scale research project in Martin and surrounding counties with the overall objective to establish a relation between rainfall and crop yield. To establish this relation we need to characterize soil physical, chemical and biological properties as they impact storage of rainfall in the soil. This research is mostly done in collaboration with producer's on production size field fields. We propose to create a database that provides an inventory of measured soil properties and environmental variables as they relate to crop yield. This database will be used as input in a Geographic Information System format to cropping systems models to quantify crop yield across the landscape.
Approach:
Our approach is to measure soil properties using standard procedures and to format the measured values using spatial coordinates to create a database to relate measurements to crop yield. Further, we have identified fields on the major soil series to compare the effect of cover crops and tillage operations on crop yield. Within these fields, producers use different cover crops and terminate them at different times and likewise tillage operations are field-specific. In our approach we do not interfere with management decisions each producer follows. Rather, we document and include this in our dataset. Our end goal is to provide answers to producers questions in attempting to maximize crop yield.