Creating Nutrient Sustainability Indicators For Dairies Nationwide

This paper was presented at the 2018 Cornell Nutrition Conference. For more information, please visit ansci.cals.cornell.edu/CNC.Many industries have, in recent years, focused on development of Sustainability Performance Indicators, reflecting the desire by food processing companies to implement a profitable agricultural supply chain that protects the environment through adoption of sustainable practices. Such indicators should be fairly easy to derive, be verifiable, be meaningful, and responsive to change in management over time. With the nutrient mass balance assessment, we present a farmer-focused approach of a sustainability stamp for three key nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). We will present 10 years of results for New York dairies that participated in the development of this approach, and compare this to developments in other states and internationally.Department of Animal Scienc

Participatory On‐Farm Research during Graduate School: Challenges and Opportunities

Including farmers, growers, and ranchers (hereinafter referred to as producers) as active participants in the development of knowledge, through extension and on-farm research programs, is an effective method of agricultural technology and innovation transfer. The emerging interest in understanding agricultural systems’ complexity has fostered collaborations between producers and land grant universities, particularly across graduate programs focused on applied research. While the concept of on-farm research is not new, the scale and impact of on-farm studies conducted by researchers in partnership with producers are expanding (Kyveryga, 2019). Can master’s and Ph.D. research projects be conducted at the farm scale and generate data-driven recommendations to improve producers’ management decisions? Based on our graduate school experiences working with on-farm trials in agronomy, crop science, soil science, and entomology areas, our opinion is that the answer to both of these questions is a resounding “yes.” Recognizing the opportunities and challenges in conducting on-farm studies as part of master’s or Ph.D. projects, we offer our reflections and recommendations to hopefully help and encourage other graduate students who may be considering initiating on-farm studies