Integrating Crops and Livestock for Sustainable Agricultural Systems
Purpose
To address critical issues impacting agriculture and U.S. food security resulting from escalating energy costs and related production inputs, depletion of water and other natural resources, declining soil productivity, environmental challenges including global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, and economic risk. These efforts are aimed at conducting long-term, field-scale agricultural ecosystem research on integrated crop, forage, and livestock systems compared with plant and animal monocultures to elucidate system, ecological, and economic behavior such that systems can be designed to meet the critical needs of agriculture.
Relevance
The Texas High Plains provides a model for factors driving change and solutions found here can provide the principles that other ecoregions can follow. Once a vast grassland, the semi-arid Texas High Plains has become one of the most intensive agricultural areas in the U.S. Agriculture conservatively accounts for over 40 percent of the region’s economy but depends heavily on water for irrigation from the Ogallala aquifer at non-sustainable rates of extraction. About 30 percent of the cotton and 25 percent of the cattle on feed in the United States are located here, primarily in monoculture systems. Today, agriculture is changing in response to impending depletion of the Ogallala, a rapidly expanding dairy industry, the national mandate for biofuels, and escalating energy and grain prices.
Potential Impacts
- Integrated Systems. Long-term integrated systems research exists in few locations in the United States. Requested funding positions Texas Tech to build on its existing platform to offer research and educational opportunities not available elsewhere in the United States or around the world
- Agricultural Ecosystem Research. Provides opportunity to participate in a network of long-term agricultural ecosystem research sites
- Economic Viability. Provides continued economic viability of producers and rural communities and sustained agricultural production in the Texas High Plains in systems that consume less water and energy and produce fewer greenhouse gasses
- Conserve Resources. Prolongs useful life of the Ogallala aquifer and conservation of other natural resources
- Agricultural Diversity. Overall economy is aided through adding another facet of diversity to existing infrastructure and to agricultural income
Lead Agency: Texas Tech University
Federal Funding Request for FY 2010: $3.5 million