Critical contribution that will allow us to get the Davis College Water Center off the ground and will help develop strong trans-disciplinary teams across the five themes of crop and animal improvement; soil water-plant-atmospheric sensors; ecosystem services and modeling; forage, rangeland, and livestock; and economics and rural development. This gift is intended to help the Davis College Water Center to get off the ground and develop highly trans-disciplinary tools and solutions to address local and regional challenges surrounding water conservation.

Water conservation and effective utilization of available water from the Ogallala aquifer is at the heart of sustaining farming and livestock industries in the Southern High Plains. The predicted increase in frequency and magnitude of drought events combined with extreme heat waves will further increase strain on the availability of irrigation water from the aquifer. Added to that, a continuous and uncontrolled withdrawal and poor water conserving practices in the region is rapidly pushing the region from an irrigated to rainfed farming, which will ultimately result in a significant negative impact on the regional economy. Fluctuating water availability across farms, soil and nutrient variability, risk tolerance of producers, market scenarios and a culmination of other factors influence decision making, hence requiring innovative and effective solutions to address this multi-dimensional challenge. Though there are efforts ongoing to address this challenge, there are multiple dimensions that have a significant impact on the system-level sustainability that have not received attention. Therefore, the trans-disciplinary research and education/outreach team's goal is to address novel and unaddressed dimensions of this challenge to strengthen ongoing efforts to enhance sustainability of the Ogallala aquifer and economic outcomes of the producers in the region.

The collaborative team with expertise in multiple disciplines objective is to answer four unaddressed questions in parallel to ascertain their advantages and trade-offs on water conservation and overall system sustainability, which include:

1. Does restoring playa lakes provide quantifiable impact on recharging Ogallala aquifer?
2. What extent do weeds, and their composition determine water use efficiency in a cropping system?
3. Can improved perennial wheat or alternate forages support year-round grazing? and
4. Do high wind speeds in the Texas High Plains determine crop and forage productivity more so than temperature and water conditions?

With the team's pursuit to address these novel questions provides an excellent platform for engaging both high school and college students to expose them to complex, real world challenges and provide the opportunity for undergraduate students to tackle these through trans-disciplinary research. The proposed project will have multiple high impact outputs that will extend beyond the timeframe of the project, which include:

1. A trans-disciplinary collaborative research culture across departments within the college, that can potentially extend to other colleges in the university;
2. High quality preliminary data for four novel ideas related to water conservation and sustainable agriculture, positioning the college to target a number of large federal grants in parallel; and
3. An integrated trans-disciplinary research and education pipeline established in collaboration with local schools and colleges that can benefit other research teams across the college and university.

The effectiveness of the Travelling Lab Kit's developed and the collaborative impact on enhancing the local schools and colleges capacity in sustainable agriculture will be evaluated by an education program evaluator. The proposed project aligns with the vision for the "Grand Challenges Catalyst Competition", wherein the novel ideas will catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration with a focus on "Water Conservation and Sustainable Agriculture" to address a local, regional, and global problem. The integrated project involves aspects related to all seven strategic priorities of the Davis College and aligns primarily with two (Climate Resilience and Thrive! Rural America) of the five themes established by the TTU office of Research and Innovation Strategy framework. Specifically, the grand challenge themes that the project will deal with includes:  Climate Resilience, Sustainable Use of Natural Resources, Education, and Workforce Development and Rural Prosperity. In summary, a dynamic team with a wide range of expertise will embark on unraveling the relevance of key unexplored research questions to strengthen ongoing efforts towards water conservation and simultaneously establish a truly trans-disciplinary research, educational and outreach pipeline envisioned to extend beyond the timeframe of the project.

The project goal is to continue our demonstration of economically viable methods of soil and crop management that conserve irrigation water and improve capture and storage of rainwater. Quantifying aspects related to improved soil health through incorporation of cover crops into existing cropping systems or through crop rotations in combination with new and emerging irrigation technology require multi-year assessment. Hence, we believe additional years of replication will lead to more robust and reliable results. Lack of appropriate guidelines on soil water balance and economic risks to subsequent crops has hindered adoption of cover crops. Evaluating the water use and economics of multiple species, reduced tillage, and method of termination of cover crops will enable producers to make informed decisions.

Specific objectives are to:

1. continue to monitor soil water balance on selected producers' fields where minimum tillage, crop rotation, and multi-species cover crops are compared with conventional tillage and no cover crops;
2. compare benefits related to water conservation and soil health in cotton/sorghum rotation versus multi-species cover crops;
3. demonstrate new irrigation technologies by expanding autonomous pivots with cameras and sensors from one (2022) to at least three (2023) producers to measure soil moisture and irrigation scheduling;
4. revive the TAWC tools using the expanded West Texas Mesonet network for refining irrigation scheduling;
5. analyze economic returns of such practices; and
6. demonstrate and disseminate results to crop producers through field visits, online presentations, and information guides.