Project Number: 5436-13210-005-00
Project Type: Appropriated

Start Date: Aug 05, 2008
End Date: Aug 04, 2013

Objective:
1. Develop strategies for irrigated production systems using increased crop diversity, reduced tillage, and emerging technologies to improve agricultural chemical, water and nutrient use efficiencies. 2. Develop biological based disease control strategies for NGP production systems. 3. Develop dryland production strategies with increased crop diversity and advanced technologies to improve agricultural chemical, water, and nutrient use efficiencies to increase competitiveness and enhance natural resource quality.

Approach:
This project involves eight scientists (8 SYs) and many collaborators that represent a broad range of disciplines focused on the long-term, 10- to 12-year goal of developing sustainable strategies for both irrigated and dryland crop production systems for the MonDak region of eastern Montana and western North Dakota. The ASRU is organized to address basic and applied research issues using an interdisciplinary team approach where multiple hypotheses are tested in four large ¿Unit Projects.¿ The ¿Unit Project¿ objectives are designed to encompass cropping system development, concurrent development and application of ¿metrics¿ or indicators of system performance, and the assessment process by which systems are evaluated and judged. There is considerable overlap, but responsibilities can be generally divided into two broad, overlapping categories with four scientists (Allen, Evans, Lartey and Stevens) primarily examining the systems aspects, and four scientists (Caesar-TonThat, Jabro, Lenssen and Sainju) focusing their research on developing and evaluating various metrics of cropping system performance. These Unit projects focus on biologically diverse cropping systems. Biological control research (Obj. 2) of two plant diseases spans both dryland (Obj. 3) and irrigated (Obj. 1) systems. Three of the Unit projects (one irrigated and two dryland) are currently underway and one new irrigated project will be initiated in 2009. Each Unit project will be replaced by a new Unit project as they are completed.