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Abstract Climate-smart agriculture can be used to build soil carbon stocks, decrease agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and increase agronomic resilience to climate pressures. The US recently declared its commitment to include the agricultural sector as part of an overall climate-mitigation strategy, and with this comes the need for robust, scientifically valid tools for agricultural GHG flux measurements and modeling. If agriculture is to contribute significantly to climate mitigation, practice adoption should be incentivized on as much land area as possible and mitigation benefits should be accurately quantified. Process-based models are parameterized on data from a limited number of long-term agricultural experiments, which may not fully reflect outcomes on working farms. Space-for-time substitution, paired studies, and long-term monitoring of SOC stocks and GHG emissions on commercial farms using a variety of climate-smart management systems can validate findings from long-term agricultural experiments and provide data for process-based model improvements. Here, we describe a project that worked collaboratively with commercial producers in the Midwest to directly measure and model the soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks of their farms at the field scale. We describe this study, and several unexpected challenges encountered, to facilitate further on-farm data collection and the creation of a secure database of on-farm SOC stock measurements.
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Coproduction of solar energy on maize farms – experimental validation of recent experiments
Abstract—Developing methods for the sustainable coproduction of food, energy and water resources has recently been recognized as a potentially attractive solution to meeting the needs of a growing population. However, many studies have used models, but have not performed an actual experiment to directly validate all their predictions. Here, we report a recently-constructed test site on the ACRE farm in West Lafayette, Indiana, consisting of single-axis trackers in a novel configuration atop a maize test plot. We present a methodology to measure irradiance therein with 10-minute temporal resolution, which allows us to validate prior PV aglectric farm irradiance models. Keywords—aglectric, agrophotovoltaic, agrivoltaic, photovoltaic
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735282
- PAR ID:
- 10184487
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Coproduction of solar energy on maize farms – experimental validation of recent experiments
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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