Increasing Extension Expertise to Assist Agriculture Adaptation to a Changing Climate

This webinar featured Daren Mueller, Associate Professor and Extension Plant Pathologist at Iowa State University. Mueller is the coordinator of the ISU Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Program which, among other things, develops several publications about field crop pests, leads the ISU Field Extension Farm and is involved in several STEM education projects. In this webinar, Mueller explores how climate change and changing management practices can affect corn and soybean diseases.

Rising temperatures, greater variability, shifting precipitation patterns, and more extreme rain events due to climate change pose current and future challenges for cities. Impacts permeate across many aspects of municipalities – infrastructure, health, recreation, utilities, emergency operations, etc. Proper adaptation requires a knowledge and understanding of climate projections and how future changes will influence specific municipal concerns. This webinar featured Dr. Martha Shulski of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and discusses the Climate for Cities program which aims to enhance decision-making and increase capacity of both small and large communities to effectively plan for change.

2019 saw record-setting flooding across many parts of the North Central Region, and many areas are continuing to deal with excess water. This is especially top of mind as we head into the spring. This month’s webinar featured Kevin Low, river forecaster for the National Weather Service’s Missouri Basin River Forecast Center, who summarized the operations of the National Weather Service Missouri Basin River Forecast Center and provided a briefing on the 2020 Spring flood risk across the basin.

COVID-19 has drastically impacted our nation’s people, economy, and politics.  This webinar features David Ripplinger of North Dakota State University Extension who discussed the current social, economic, and political situation as it pertains to biofuels and ecosystem services and what you can expect moving forward.

Slide deck at https://northcentralclimate.org/files/2020/04/Ripplinger-Bioenergy-and-Ecosystem-Services.pdf?x24082. 

Tile drainage is widespread throughout the Midwest.  As weather patterns continue to shift toward more precipitation outside of the growing season and less precipitation during the growing season, water management will need to continue to adapt to provide resilience. Conservation drainage is a concept that incorporates methods of storing water or treating water in the landscape or edge-of-field to increase resilience and improve water quality while maintaining the agronomic benefits of tile drainage.  This webinar will cover some of the recent research in conservation drainage, how they can be incorporated into new and existing practices, and what the future of conservation drainage might look like.

The University of Nebraska Extension has developed a program in which farmers are certificated at different tiers for their use of practices science knows to promote resilience to extreme weather events.  This webinar featured a discussion of the development of that curriculum, current issues, and related resources for use by those in other states.

The Animal Agriculture in a Changing Climate (AACC) project was conducted with the goal of building capacity among Extension professionals and other livestock advisors to address climate change issues. The AACC project team learned some pivotal lessons early during the multi-regional project that were foundational to the development of key products and delivery of regional and national programs to over 1400 professionals. This webinar highlights lessons learned along with program deliverables and impacts. It also discusses the issue of methane production in beef cattle and some specific techniques that either increase or decrease production per day, per body weight, and per production outcome (like weight gain).

This webinar highlighted a recent project engaging specialty crop growers in the Midwest to better understand the seasonality of their decisions and drought information needs. The project has resulted in graphical decision calendars for grape, apple, cranberry, and irrigated potato production. Decision calendars describe the timing of management practices and decisions that are made throughout crop planting, growing, harvest, and dormant seasons, along with the climate-related concerns that impact the outcomes of management decisions. Decision calendars can help identify opportunities for inserting climate information into a decision process. This webinar discusses how decision calendars can be used to communicate and improve the usability of drought/climate monitoring and prediction science.

Climate change across the eastern Corn Belt Region (ECBR) is projected to bring higher temperatures, more variable and extreme levels of precipitation, and longer growing seasons. While these possibilities imply opportunity for increased production in the ECBR, managing change sustainably is increasingly challenging.

The Agroecosystem Resilience Project is engaged in research that will elevate the capacity of decision-makers in the ECBR to adapt to a variable climate. Their approach is to identify how changing seasonal and extreme precipitation patterns induce changes in land use and management patterns driven by heterogeneous farmer adaptations. To assess multiple goals related to agricultural production, conservation, and societal well-being, they are building an integrated set of models of the climate system, regional economy, and agroecological outcomes and use this to evaluate policies and programs by projecting their impacts on the sustainability and resilience of this regional agroecosystem under varying futures.

This webinar discusses the project, their approach, progress to date and outcomes. For more information, please visit Agroecosystem Resilience Project.