Future Research Needs

Authors: Marissa Kopp and Dave Abler

Introduction: Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the Next 25 Years

The Thriving Ag project has made over six years of progress towards our goal of achieving an economically prosperous and environmentally sustainable agriculture along the rural-urban continuum. We aimed to achieve this goal over the next 25 years, and we reflected on how far we have come and where we are going next. We made strides in connecting with stakeholders in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (CBW), improving farm profitability, managing on-farm nutrient losses, improving models across scales, estimating the value of best management practices, making outreach more effective, and training the next generation of agricultural researchers, educators, and Extension specialists. Our findings have practical implications for farmers and growers; agricultural conservation assistance providers; land use planners and farmland preservation program officials; regional food hubs and food/agricultural supply chains; local, state, and federal government agency officials; and researchers.

There are opportunities to expand on these findings in both reach and research. First, we can expand our reach beyond the CBW. We used the CBW as a timely case study of the largest estuary in the U.S.; yet our research findings are translatable to agriculture in other urbanized landscapes which, together, account for over 60% of U.S. net farm income. Second, we can expand our research into the uncovered gaps that represent possible future focus areas. Specifically, we identified four core themes that build on our work and discussions to drive us towards achieving sustainable agricultural systems.

Research Focus Areas: Four Themes for the Future

We identified core themes for potential future research focus areas through multiple perspectives and disciplines. The Thriving Ag Project Team held several discussions to share ideas on knowledge gaps and new opportunities for the project’s next iteration. To enrich these discussions, the final project workshop included breakout sessions alongside stakeholders to provide feedback on existing needs and paths forward. Together, these ideas are summarized into four themes:

Theme 1. Incorporating technological and industrial solutions.

The Thriving Ag project envisioned stakeholder-informed scenarios as alternative approaches to achieving long-term economic and environmental sustainability for agriculture along the rural-urban continuum. These scenarios involved impactful but relatively modest changes in farming in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (see Scenarios 1–4). However, there may be a role for major technological and industrial solutions that future-proof agricultural systems. This theme would examine how new or expansion of existing technologies might reimagine sustainable agriculture in the U.S. Example research questions include:

• What is the role of non-arable land-based practices, such as greenhouses, aquaculture, and urban growing, in U.S. sustainable agriculture?
• How can we make alternative revenue streams related to more niche agricultural products economically and environmentally viable?
• How can fertilizer decision support tools use AI and Big Data to help farms apply fertilizer precisely when and where it is needed?
• How can we synergize the expansion of both U.S. energy production and food production—for example, solar and agriculture co-location, manure to biogas, and manure to pelletized organic fertilizer?

Theme 2. Adopting best management practices.

Future strategies to mitigate the environmental impacts of agricultural runoff will continue to include best management practices (BMPs). These practices must be balanced with management feasibility and economic viability for farmers to increase BMP adoption, maximize co-benefits, and minimize unintended consequences. Thriving Ag teams synthesized our current knowledge on farmer motivations to adopt BMPs and contributed new knowledge on techniques that are most effective at increasing adoption through message design, outreach event design, and payment strategies. This theme builds on these findings to dive deeper into BMP adoption behaviors and consequences. Example research questions include:

• What are the unintended consequences of implementing BMPs, such as management complexity and pollution shifting, and how do we reduce them?
• How can we leverage payments to incentivize the adoption of conservation practices that would not have otherwise been adopted?
• How can BMPs be integrated into overall farm economic and environmental sustainability, particularly as lands transition in use and ownership?

Theme 3. Measuring total environmental benefits.

Accurately quantifying all of the direct and indirect environmental benefits of a given conservation practice or program remains challenging. For example, Thriving Ag teams have found that the benefits of different BMPs may arise across gradients of space, soil depths, and time, among other factors. Capturing this variability is important to ensure that existing benefits of BMPs are being fully measured and that the placement and timing of new BMPs maximizes total benefits. This theme would address these challenges through questions such as:

• How do we better quantify the net benefits of conservation programs?
• How do water quality protections and co-benefits differ across local scales?
• How do these benefits change with targeted or clustered spatial arrangements of best management practices (BMPs)?

Theme 4. Addressing larger systemic issues.

Agricultural management approaches often focus on the field-scale. While farm-tuned practices are critical, we can complement these approaches with insights at the system scale. For example, Thriving Ag teams examined how food grown from local farms moves between regions through system-wide trade networks and how future scenarios could impact these flows. This theme would continue to explore system-level benefits, policies, and uncertainty to inform decisions at a broader scope. Example questions include:

• How does legacy pollution across the system complicate quantifying modern benefits?
• How can we shift towards system-wide policies in nonpoint source pollution that internalize externalities?
• How can we standardize uncertainty across the entire system?

Conclusions

The Thriving Ag project both moved us towards more sustainable agricultural systems along the rural-urban continuum and uncovered new pathways to continue that movement. Future work can aim to leverage technological and industrial advancements to achieve economic and environmental sustainability (Theme 1), better understand what drives BMP adoption and implement those findings effectively (Theme 2), measure and credit the total environmental benefits associated with those BMPs (Theme 3), and scale these local practices to system-level benefits and public policies (Theme 4).