By Sotirios Archontoulis, associate professor of agronomy, ISU

Project Collaborators:

• Mike Castellano, professor of agronomy, ISU
• Mark Licht, associate professor of agronomy, ISU
• Greg Tylka, professor of plant pathology, entomology and microbiology, ISU

Progress Report (February 2024)

Project summary

The idea is to initiate research on the continuous soybean cropping system in Iowa to accumulate relevant knowledge to aid decision making. Currently, there is no soybean after soybean cropping system in Iowa, but this may change in the coming years, and we need to be prepared. For instance, in Argentina, soybean after soybean is a very common. Farmers adopted the soybean-soybean system because of the increased profitability (no nitrogen fertilizer input, less field operations).

We propose to establish long-term plots at three locations in Iowa (TBD). In each location, we will establish four systems: 1) soy-soy, 2) soy-corn, 3) corn-soy, and 4) corn-corn, to have all crop phases every year. Each system will be replicated 3-4 times and will have large plots (e.g., 24 rows x 200 ft). This way, different teams can work on different research questions on the same plots (so we connect agronomy – plant pathology – soil science), while have enough area to measure crop yields. The experiments will be designed by getting input from the multi-disciplinary team and will be instrumented with sensors to support system level assessments and extension demonstration efforts.   

Selected for funding October 2022