Presented by Dr Uwe Grewer
Using Cropping Systems Models for Applied Agricultural Research: Answering the Unknown or Fruitless Thought Experiment?
Over the past 30 years, cropping system models have become a well-established tool in agricultural research. However, the expectations of their value proposition and use cases have changed significantly in recent years.
Originally, crop models were conceived to analyse cropping scenarios for reference locations of agricultural trial sites. Only the lessons learned from those scenario analyses were meant to be disseminated to farmers and agronomists located in similar agro-ecological and socio-economic settings.
In the past two decades, the expectations for crop models have changed significantly. The expansion in high-resolution data on meteorology, soils, and management provides a novel basis to use crop models beyond calibration sites, across gridded analyses, while still aiming at site- and system-specific analyses. In expectation, crop models have thus transitioned from being tools for rather theoretical thought experiments, to being a workhorse of digital precision agriculture. However, how much does the current practice and state of crop modelling research live up to such high expectations?
In this presentation, Dr Uwe Grewer will provide you with an overview of recent and potential pathways for crop modelling to contribute to applied agricultural research. Specifically, he will present an overview of crop modelling analyses to identify suitability zones of cultivar maturity groups, as well as a comparison of cropping system strategies that underpin the decision-support tool “Agricultural Risk Management of Crop Rotations” (RotationARM; https://www.armonline.com.au/ra).
Please join our upcoming seminar, featuring Dr Uwe Grewer as our respected speaker.
Dr Uwe Grewer is a researcher in agricultural development economics and bio-physical modelling of farming systems. His core research interests focus on the economics of drought as well as the interlinkages between environmental sustainability and socio-economic outcomes of farming systems.
His current research analyses whether selected crop rotations prove to be generally more drought-resilient than others and provide farmers with a higher and more stable farm income. He also investigates which decision thresholds are suitable for deciding when to engage in opportunistic intensification in wet periods and fallowing in dry periods.
Dr Grewer’s ongoing research in sub-Saharan Africa investigates how the effectiveness of agricultural intensification and of climate adaptation measures varies across spatial gradients. My research aims to inform agricultural extension policies at the sub-national level.
His core methodological expertise includes crop modelling, econometrics, mathematical programming, and data science.
Please share amongst your networks and if you have any questions, please reach out to the CSAS ROA, via email at CSAS@unisq.edu.au or Professor Tek Maraseni (CSAS Deputy Director and Seminar Moderator) on Tek.Maraseni@unisq.edu.au.