Developing Decision Criteria for Soil Salinity Management Options on Cropland: A Case Study in Southeast North Dakota

Nazea H. Khan Chowdhury, David Roberts, Thomas DeSutter and David E. Clay

No 205902, 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Soil salinization is an important research topic in North Dakota, and the issue may be growing in importance due to changing cropping patterns throughout the Northern Great Plains. Soil salinity is generally determined by measuring the electrical conductivity (EC) of soils. This study is based on EC measures recorded throughout 40 fields by a Veris® sensor, and were subsequently mapped. Simulated yields (based on EC), production costs, and expected profits were used to determine which of eight crop rotations maximize expected profit based on a given field’s average EC, as well as the variance of EC within the field. Principal components analysis was used to develop a single measure of EC that incorporates information about both the mean and variance of EC throughout a field. Results illustrate that for very low field-level EC (low salinity) the two most profitable rotations are corn-soy and continuous corn, while for field-level EC above 4.5 the most profitable rotation is wheat-barley. Preliminary results are also presented to indicate how precision agriculture technologies (mapping, row controlled planters, and swath controlled sprayers) could increase profit for each rotation by eliminating input expenditures in portions of a field where a loss is expected.

Keywords: Crop; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/205902/files/Roberts_AAEA%202015_poster.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea15:205902

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.205902

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().