Location: Dale Bumpers Small Farms Research Center
Project Number: 6020-21500-001-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Feb 22, 2024
End Date: Feb 21, 2029
Objective:
1. Develop harvested conventional and organic forage systems that optimize productivity, resilience to climate change, and environmental benefits.
1A. Improve soil health and provide greater forage resources in organic cropping systems with cover crops.
1B. Evaluate long-term management strategies that conserve soil and protect water quality, while also optimizing production in pasture and hayfields.
2. Develop grazing management strategies that address animal performance and selection for greater resistance and resilience, health, and well-being within increasing climate changes and extremes.
2A. Improve management practices for livestock grazing endophyte infected tall fescue to ameliorate fescue toxicosis and meet growth potential and minimize health inputs through red clover supplementation.
2B. Develop low input strategies and genetic and genomic selection to mitigate gastrointestinal nematodes and disease in grazing sheep, and select for climatic resilience and robustness.
2C. Improve ecosystem health and increase resistance to environmental pressures with novel grassland system utilizing native warm season grasses.
2D. Reduce carbon output and increase animal welfare and production with silvopasture systems.
3. Develop novel technologies that allow precision management of forage-livestock, row crops, and agroforestry systems.
3A. Develop spatially explicit soil property maps for precision management of forage production on small farms.
3B. Use precision management tools on pasture to detect health issues in livestock.
3C. Develop baseline information on soil-water dynamics and relationships to the performance of forages, crops, livestock, and silvopastoral systems at the farm scale.
Approach:
Our goal is to increase long-term sustainability of small farms by integrating
management of pasture and silvopasture-based livestock systems to augment whole-farm productivity and profitability, encourage crop diversification which spreads
biological and financial risk, and enhances ecosystem services. Involving both
short- and long-term studies, we will determine practices that provide environmental and economic benefit to small farms. Studies will focus on improving forage and/or livestock production while enhancing soil, landscape and forage attributes at multiple scales. These studies include examining conventional and nonchemical parasite control on sheep production efficiency, grazing management on forage finished beef and lamb, and improving nutrient-use efficiency on forage pastures. Additionally spatial information will be used to understand interactions at multiple scales to develop decision support tools for increasing efficiency for soil-forage system management. We will also continue a long-term study that utilizes controlled watersheds to determine the impacts of various pasture management strategies(rotational grazing, overgrazing, haying, tree buffers) on pasture hydrology and nutrient runoff. To evaluate diversification, we will examine effects of integrating agroforestry management with crop and/or livestock production.
