Diversity of Agricultural Landscapes

Agriculture is undeniably the anthropogenic process that has had the greatest impact on what covers the earth’s surface. Advances in agricultural technology have revolutionized how we farm and have led to major increases in our ability to produce food and fibers to meet the needs of a growing the human population. However, as “big ag” has worked to achieve “economies of scale” there has been a dramatic simplification of land use and associated loss of biodiversity and ecosystem health. This has undermined the services, such as pollination, that ecosystems provide to agricultural systems, reducing the long-term ability to maintain productivity. Our goal is to provide solutions for sustainable agriculture by characterizing how and why landscape simplification affects ecosystem health and agricultural productivity and by identifying barriers to landscape diversification.

This project is funded by USDA NIFA (Grant 2020-67019-31157). Collaborators on the grant are Dr. Emily Burchfield at Emory University and Dr. Jeremy Cowan at Kansas State University.

Key findings include:

• Higher levels of both crop diversity and entire landscape diversity of counties in the U.S. are associated with higher yields of corn and wheat.
• Counties with both moderate landscape complexity (complexity of configuration) and high diversity are associated with corn and wheat yields of ~20% higher than the U.S. average.
• The effects of diversity on crop yields are of a similar strength as the effects of precipitation and soil suitability.
• Chemical inputs and governmental monetary support are strongly associated with yields that are surprisingly high considering biophysical conditions.
• Counties with surprisingly high yields are not associated with improved farmer revenues.

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