Imagine buying a dozen eggs at a grocery store, but when you get home and open the carton, there’s only a half dozen inside because you weren’t buying a dozen eggs. You were buying approximately 12 eggs, plus or minus six.
That’s how Andrew VanLoocke often describes a project he has led to develop a more reliable way to estimate how tillage, the methods farmers use to prepare their farmland for planting crops, affects soil carbon levels and yield. The accuracy of those estimates is important to farmers because yield is always a baseline concern and sufficient levels of organic carbon make soil more productive and stable.
Tillage’s impact on soil carbon is also important to companies that pay farmers to reduce tilling to help meet corporate carbon emissions goals.
“These companies want the best most transparent estimates possible to ensure they're getting a dozen eggs instead of six,” said VanLoocke, an associate professor of agronomy at Iowa State University.
A database built by Iowa State University researchers aims to provide more certainty by digging deep into the effects of tillage, integrating the results of more than 250 peer-reviewed studies.
“We’ve taken a lot of useful science already done by many different people in many different places and put it together in a way that can be even more useful,” VanLoocke said.
The project began about five years ago when Zach Simpson – at the time a post-doctoral research associate for Marshall McDaniel, an associate professor of agronomy at Iowa State University – began collecting data to analyze how tillage affects multiple aspects of cropping systems.
“I think he was just tired of everyone coming up with different answers,” VanLoocke said of Simpson, now a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.
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