Abstract
Agricultural research monies are becoming increasingly scarce and therefore subject to additional scrutiny. To analyze the impact of transferring site-specific research recommendations to a larger region (roughly 2.4 million hectares of farm land in Eastern Arkansas), a set of soybean production parameters are varied in a biophysical simulation model using two representative soils and three climatic profiles. Mathematical programming was used to obtain site-specific, profit-maximizing production practices. Transfer of these optimal production practices to other environments resulted in operating losses up to $13.62 and $5.34 per hectare across soil and climatic region, respectively. This translated to annual estimated losses of $0.183- $3.877 million for the study region. Given the study specifications, guidelines for spatial replication of soybean research are (i) to provide recommendations using the poorer of the two soils and (ii) to give higher research priority to research replication across soils than climatic region.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 213-226 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Agricultural Systems |
| Volume | 81 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2004 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was funded through the support of the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board and the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station. The authors wish to acknowledge the agronomic expertise of Dr. Terry Keisling and the help on managing the soil series definitions and soils data base from Amanda Aescoba. Finally the authors are also grateful for the help of Patrick Manning.
Keywords
- Best management practices
- Research transfer
- Spatial research replication
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Animal Science and Zoology
- Agronomy and Crop Science