Purdue University is leading a $1.5 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Midwest Climate Hub to help a highly diverse group of farmers and landowners in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa learn what practices will help them elude the worst effects of climate change.
The project, titled Integrated Midwest Partnerships for Actionable Climate Tools and Training (IMPACT2), is funded by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Purdue’s partners in the project are Iowa State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
IMPACT2 will complement the Purdue-led, USDA-funded $10 million Diverse Corn Belt Project, which was launched in 2021. That project explores how diversifying crop production will make farms and farmers in the Midwest more resilient to the impacts of climate change and other challenges facing farming.
“Projections show that corn won’t do as well in a changing climate,” said IMPACT2 co-leader Linda Prokopy, professor and head of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture in Purdue’s College of Agriculture. “It doesn’t yield as well as temperatures increase.”
The changing climate also will bring more extreme weather. Midwest agriculture thus faces near- and long-term issues, said IMPACT2 co-leader Dennis Todey, who directs USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub. Adapting to the currently changing climate is the near-term issue.
“Agriculture can adapt, but we want to help adapt even more quickly to the changing conditions,” Todey said.
The long-term issue is to figure out how to limit further problems.
“We call that the mitigation part,” he said. “Agriculture has an ability to sequester greenhouse gases to make itself further resilient to coming climate changes. How then do we prepare for, help mitigate and reduce some of the potential longer-term issues?”
A major project goal is addressing these issues by reaching and serving a widely diverse audience across the Corn Belt.
“Historically, the USDA and others working in agriculture have focused their efforts on conventional row-crop farmers, but there are numerous types of farmers out there that we need to work with, including urban farmers and small-scale horticultural farmers,” Prokopy said.
These diverse audiences include long-time and beginning farmers who operate large or small farms devoted to corn, soybeans or vegetables.
“We’re going to make sure that our materials work for the full gamut of farmers out there,” Todey said. “Even people who aren’t farming but who are thinking, ‘Maybe I can acquire some land. What should I grow? How should I farm it?’ We’re trying to get to people early so as they’re entering agriculture, they’re doing the right things.”
The IMPACT2 team will offer some scenario-based activities to these diverse stakeholders in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa to help them envision a different future.
“What does that look like? And what support from Extension do they need? What type of information do they need to help answer questions that those scenarios bring up?” Prokopy said.
The team aims to reach at least 2,000 stakeholders via an online portal and deliver training to 500 or more farmer producers and landowners.
Many of the Impact2 team worked together on the Useful to Usable (U2U) project from 2012 to 2018. The group includes a mix of social scientists, climatologists and experts from other fields.
“In the U2U project we developed decision-support tools for corn farmers to help them adapt to climate change,” Prokopy said. As the team introduced the tools in public meetings, they also gathered data from the users about their likes and dislikes.
Source: eurekalert.org
Photo Credit: GettyImages-shotbydave
Categories: Indiana, Crops, Corn, Soybeans