Location: Integrated Cropping Systems Research
Project Number: 3080-12620-006-015-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Apr 1, 2024
End Date: Dec 31, 2026
Objective:
Use remote sensing to quantify benefits and trade-offs among crop health, productivity, and quality when diversifying corn-soybean cropping systems with small grain-forage intercrops. Benefits include increased biomass light and water utilization, improvement of soil quality, reduced needs for synthetic nitrogen inputs. Tradeoffs include reduced water availability for a corn crop and reduced milling quality in small grains. The ability to predict these benefits and tradeoffs will facilitate high-throughput prototyping of next-generation cropping systems that increase the productivity, reliability, and sustainability of Northern Plains agriculture.
Approach:
Cooperator will collect multispectral data at critical growth stages using a multispectral sensor mounted on an unmanned aerial system, and from these data derive indices of plant health, stress, and performance. These indices will be compared with destructive samples that directly assess plant health and performance collected by ARS.
