Global Maize Project in the United States: West Lafayette, Indiana

Fertilizer use efficiency, and especially N use efficiency, continues to be a national research priority at the interface between agriculture and the environment. Research to better understand the relationships between fertilizer N practice and N losses to water and air continue at Purdue’s Water Quality Field Station. Greenhouse gas emissions, nitrate losses to surface waters, and N uptake efficiency by maize are being compared within maize cropping systems (maize-soybean; continuous corn; stover removal or not; manure versus urea N).

Modeling is useful for predicting site- and soil-specific maize yield potential and response to the environment, including climate change. Recent results indicate unsatisfactory validation of the Hybrid-Maize model when using weather from the eastern Corn Belt. This project is aimed at improving the accuracy of Hybrid-Maize for predicting yields in the eastern U.S. Corn Belt. Hybrid-Maize output will be compared with that of other decision support tools including DSSAT (Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer). We believe that excess spring moisture may be the primary reason for poor accuracy since this component is not currently represented in Hybrid-Maize.

Finally, we submitted a large multi-institutional (seven state), transdisciplinary proposal that focused on adaptation of maize to climate change as well as on maize management strategies that have the potential to mitigate climate change. This project brought together over 60 scientists working with climate modeling, life cycle analysis, soil fertility, soil biology, ecology, physiology, crop modeling, economics, and human dimensions — with maize as the focal point. Pieces of this large effort will be redeployed as new opportunities to fund maize research present themselves. IPNI-27