Agricultural & Environmental Letters最新文献

A changing climate offers new opportunities to expand agriculture in northern latitudes, and understanding forest-to-agriculture land conversion impacts is critical to ensure soil sustainability. Using the Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health (CASH) framework, we identified a minimum suite of indicators with little collinearity to reliably predict soil impacts during the conversion of boreal forest to agriculture and a time since conversion gradient (forest, <10 years, >10 and <50 years, and >50 years since conversion). We sampled paired forest and agricultural sites and used multiple linear regression to assess 16 indicators and found four- and six-indicator models predicted the CASH score with varying but reasonable accuracy depending on conversion class. Organic matter, water aggregate stability, and pH were consistent predictors across all classes, as well as one or more micronutrients. The CASH framework appears to be more suitable for agricultural soils and as time since conversion proceeds.

The editorial board of Agricultural & Environmental Letters is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Editor's Citation for Excellence. These awards recognize the outstanding professional commitment and dedication of volunteer reviewers and editors who, through their excellent insights and comments, have helped maintain the high standard and quality of papers published in the journal. Recipients were nominated based on their thorough, competent, and timely reviews or editing of manuscripts.

In the last two decades, permanganate has been used to define what is assumed to be a labile or “active” soil carbon (C) pool, commonly referred to as “permanganate-oxidizable carbon” (POXC). However, uncertainties in the reduction reaction (Mn⁷⁺ → Mn⁴⁺/Mn²⁺) and even greater uncertainties in the oxidation reaction (C^? → C^?) as well as the reaction of non-C reductants in the soil sample preclude the calculation of milligram C per kilogram of soil oxidized. Combined variation in the reduction–oxidation reactions can entail up to fivefold variation in how much soil organic C is oxidized per unit permanganate reduced. Without determining final reduction state of Mn and the initial and final oxidation states of C, the amount of C oxidized cannot be calculated. Unless a concrete understanding of the reduction and oxidation half-reactions is achieved, an alternative expression of permanganate reactivity of a soil sample (i.e., not mg C kg⁻¹ soil) is needed.

Cover crops are promoted by agronomists and governments due to their on-farm and off-farm benefits. Incentive programs were created because high planting costs have hindered cover crop adoption in the United States. Crop insurance discount programs are novel incentives that subsidize farmers’ crop insurance premiums by $5 per acre ($12.36 ha⁻¹) on cover cropped land. While this payment is smaller than those typically offered through the Natural Resources Conservation Service and state-level cost-share programs, crop insurance discount programs have the potential to reach a significant proportion of farmers who purchase crop insurance. This paper uses data from a survey of Iowa farmers to quantify whether participation in the Iowa Crop Insurance Discount Program (ICIDP) affects the area planted to cover crops. I find that 11% of the ICIDP area would not have been planted to cover crops in the absence of the program, which is similar to other programs after considering the lower payment rate.

In April 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced a workplan for pesticide registration and reregistration to meet obligations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which included a menu of suggested mitigation measures to reduce potential for exposure of nontarget species to runoff, spray drift, and erosion. If adopted on registered product labels, it enables a prospective registrant to meet more stringent ESA criteria for registration, even during non-ESA-issued interim decisions. This paper identifies and evaluates complexities posed by the mitigation menu approach that could undermine good intentions underlying this new process and uses existing economic considerations to analyze positive and negative externalities. Several points of complexity demonstrate how the mitigation menu approach would benefit from further regulatory development or refinement. Changes should be informed by fundamental questions about the dynamics between landowners and land managers and, crucially, different motivations decision-makers face in adopting voluntary versus regulatory mitigations.

Understanding where, when, and why agroecosystems are changing requires quality information about ecosystems that span land tenure, ecological processes, and spatial scales. Over the past two decades, land management agencies and research groups have adopted a suite of standardized methods for monitoring rangelands, which have been implemented at over 85,000 monitoring locations globally. However, the ability to use these data to understand agroecosystem dynamics and change across scales and across land ownership has been limited because, until now, these data have not been available in a harmonized, accessible format for analyses, modeling, and decision-support tools. We present the Landscape Data Commons, a cyberinfrastructure platform that harmonizes and aggregates standardized agroecosystem data, enables linkages to models, and facilitates analysis and interpretation of data within decision-support tools. The Landscape Data Commons provides a community platform for users to contribute data and develop next-generation tools to support agroecosystem management through the 21st century.

This study evaluates cover crop (CC) effects on microbial community structure in a winter wheat–sorghum–fallow rotation with pea, oat, and canola; mixtures of pea and oat; pea and canola; pea, oat, and canola; and six species mixture (SSM) of pea, oat, canola, hairy vetch, forage radish, and barley as CCs, and fallow as treatments. Soil microbial community structure was analyzed at CC termination (phase I), 36 days (phase II), and a year (phase III) after termination using an ester-linked fatty acid methyl ester analysis. Total microbial biomass (TMB) under oats was significantly greater than under canola (by 47%) in phase I (p ≤ 0.05). The TMB was >48% under pea, pea + canola, and SSM, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi was 70%–93% more under pea, canola, and their mixtures than fallow in phase II. While microbial abundance varied with CCs at and after 36 days post-termination, these effects did not persist for a year. Long fallow period after cropping or cover cropping appears detrimental to microbial community proliferation.