USDA awards Purdue $1.5 million to research organic farming ecology

Purdue University has received a four-year, $1.5 million grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to research the ecology of organic cropping systems in Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. The research will include collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Western Illinois University in Macomb. Driving the research is the desire to make U.S. agriculture more sustainable for the long term.

“The bottom line... is that things are changing rapidly, both on the side of consumers, who ask and pay more for organic produce and meat, and on the side of farmers, who are very interested in these new ideas,” Christian Krupke, professor of entomology at Purdue said in the release. “We’re trying to do what the most progressive growers might do and then compare that to a conventional organic approach, which many growers are already embracing.”

Purdue will assess weed, insect and pathogen pressure on corn, soybeans and small grains cultivated under standard and ecologically intensified organic farming systems, along with comparing yields across systems, according to a news release.

“In the ecologically intensified approach, we try to harness as many of the benefits that nature and ecology provide as we can, all to improve soil health and minimize erosion,” said Krupke. That includes using inoculants on the seed, planting crops that attract beneficial insect predators and testing novel crop rotations.

“Ecology is happening no matter what,” Krupke said in the release. “Our challenge as researchers and farmers is to harness more of that ecology for our benefit.”

The fieldwork will take place at the Northeast Purdue Agriculture Center, the University of Wisconsin Arlington Agricultural Research Station and the Western Illinois University Allison Organic Research and Demonstration Farm.

“This is an exciting opportunity to expand our work with the organic community in Wisconsin and beyond,” Shawn Conley, professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in the release. According to Conley, Wisconsin leads the nation in organic field crop acreage.

The research collaboration will enable the three universities to study ecological processes at work in organic farming systems more intensively than ever before, said Joel Gruver, professor of soil science and sustainable agriculture at Western Illinois University.

The standard and ecologically intensified organic farming practices will be tested at both university-owned research farms and commercial organic farms in all three states. The university researchers will transfer what they learn on their test fields to cooperating commercial growers to see if they can achieve the same performance on much larger fields.