Improving agricultural practices for sustainable development

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The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This SEES Fellowship project focuses on food sustainability.Finding ways to increase the global food supply without further exacerbating climate change, reducing biodiversity, or degrading water resources is one of the most important challenges facing humanity. The goal of this project is to create information that can be used by policy makers and farmers to promote the adoption of more sustainable agricultural practices in two of the largest food growers and exporters in the world. In particular, this project investigates what enabling conditions (policies, market mechanisms, and extension programs) are needed to help farmers transition from specialized production practices to integrated crop and livestock systems (ICLS). The project also examines the robustness of ICLS under future climate and price scenarios.Prior ecological research suggests that ICLS have the potential to vastly reduce the environmental impact of agriculture, but it is not clear whether ICLS are socio-economically suitable to producers and other stakeholders. If these systems do not address the core needs of farmers (by generating income, decreasing risk, and smoothing out income flows), it is unlikely that they will be adopted. Furthermore, it is essential to understand whether ICLS will meet farmers' needs under future prices and climate scenarios. This project addresses these knowledge gaps by answering the following questions: 1) What are the problems faced by farmers in a given region? 2) How do the benefits provided by ICLS solve these farmer-defined problems as compared to other potential competing technologies? 3) Where are integrated systems most likely to be profitable, given underlying biophysical conditions and transportation infrastructure? 4) What socio-economic and biophysical factors have the largest influence on farmers' willingness to adopt ICLS? 5) How will future changes in these socio-economic and biophysical factors influence future adoption or retirement of ICLS? This project utilizes multiple methods and spatial scales: comparative case studies at the national level, regional statistical and mechanistic models, and local fieldwork.