Hi
my name is Greg Johnson I'm a faculty
member in the Department of Agronomy and
Plant Genetics at the University of
Minnesota
and I work out of the Southern Research
and Outreach Center in Waseca
I'm part of a much larger group of
faculty
at the U of M that are working to create
more robust resilient
and adaptive cropping systems across the
state
agricultural innovation and
intensification are required
in response to these local regional and
global challenges
solutions for transforming agriculture
to meet the
challenges that are outlined on this
slide is going to be highly complex
so this necessarily requires a long-term
approach when we deal with these issues
and we need to understand these complex
plant soil and microbe interactions
that change over time they change over
place
and they're also influenced by
management and climate factors
to better address the comprehensive and
integrated nature of these challenges
the U of M initiated a Long-Term
Agricultural
Research Network which we call LTARN
in 2011. this provides us with this
regional platform for the development of
novel and adaptive agricultural
production practices
specifically the LTARN is focused on
strategies that facilitate these
positive interactions amongst the plants
soil water microbes with the goal of
improving
overall cropping systems efficiency
productivity and stability
in the long term but we have to do this
in a way that minimizes
negative environmental impacts so it's
understanding these trade-offs
that are the central component of our
LTARN network
Minnesota LTARN is currently comprised
of
three geographically representative
research sites in the state
uh we're fortunate to have one of these
sites in Grand Rapids
the other sites are at the Southern
Research and Outreach Center in Waseca
and at the Southwest Research and
Outreach Center in Lamberton
the Grand Rapids site is particularly
important to us and that it provides
this
network with unique soil weather
growing conditions that allow us to
develop
systems that are more robust and
adaptive
across the state of Minnesota currently
there are series of
cropping systems that are same across
all of these sites
they range from simple two crop
rotations to more complex
perennial-based rotations the cropping
systems at Grand Rapids represent a corn
soybean rotation a corn soybean wheat
rotation
we have corn alfalfa we have corn
soybean with a rye cover crop we have
corn soybean
with an oil seed cover crop uh we
even have a native uh prairie planting
for
bioenergy and lastly a
pasture hay mix that is
you know more representative of that
farming uh landscape up in up in
Grand Rapids so we take a lot of data on
these sites uh
and  the first part of the data here
is just trying to assess
the environmental data the weather the
climate the soils
and we do this we have a pretty large
and sophisticated weather station at the
site
and we take a number of different soil
parameters as well the agronomic data
that we're taking is very detailed and
then again this is taken throughout
the entire network so we can compare
sites
and this is very valuable to us same
with the soil data
a rich database of soil information is
going to come out of these sites that
we can use in the long term other data
would include nematodes of course the
microbe community
but then we're using the various
technologies uh
such as remote sensing to um
to help us gather that data and look
longer down the road and how we
integrate the technology
into our farming operations research
conducted at the LTARN at the North
Central and Outreach Center in
particular
really helps us to improve to improve
the long-term
capacity of agriculture to provide that
resilient
source of food fiber health bio
materials
and we want to do this by creating crop
and livestock systems that are nimble
resilient and efficient while achieving
our economic and environmental goals
so we're now in the process of analyzing
some of our long-term data
and we will definitely share that with
you as they become available
to learn more about the Long-Term
Agricultural Research Network
please go to our site listed on the
slide
or you're certainly welcome to email any
one of us
we'd be more than happy to talk in more
detail about what we have planned for
the future
we're excited to be working on the LTARN we're particularly excited to be
at Grand Rapids and we look forward to
sharing a lot of this information with
with farmers and other ag professionals
in the in the very near future
