TEXAS A&M AGRILIFE ROLLING PLAINS AGRONOMY PROGRAM

Soil Health Demonstrations to Increase Regenerative Agricultural
Intensification in the Southern High Plains

PI: Dr. Joseph Burke

This project aims to sustainably intensify agricultural production on the Southern Great Plains through adopting soil health management in semi-arid cropping systems. To achieve the project’s goals, the key objectives are to:

1. Identify and overcome adoption barriers to soil health management system (SHMS) and pathways to overcome them,
2. Demonstrate successes through implementation on-farm and dissemination of knowledge of SHMS,
3. Increase understanding of field-level processes, effects, and optimization of agricultural intensification using SHMS,
4. Quantify the field and regional effects of SHMS, and
5. Evaluate the economics of SHMS adoption at farm and regional scales.

On-farm SHMS demonstrations will be initiated on 10 Innovation and 100 Observation Farms within the region. We expect this project will increase cover crop adoption by 20% and no-tillage by 25% in the Southern Great Plains region and, thus, agricultural production will increase by 25% while decreasing the environmental footprint.

Grower participation will be available in 2025!