Profitability versus environmental performance: Are they competing?

Excerpt

There is a common perception that environmentally sustainable management practices are competitive with profitability in primary Corn Belt production systems. Sustainable conservation practices in many cases (1) utilize land resources that could be producing commodities and (2) require financial inputs often with limited direct financial returns (USDA NRCS 2014a; Pannell et al. 2006). Furthermore, land tenure dynamics and high costs of production often make near-term financial returns the critical decision point for today's independent farming businesses. These characteristics of our current production systems can lead to conflict between environmental and financial performance. However, we believe that emerging precision agriculture technologies, specifically the ability to make decisions and implement management practices at a smaller spatial scale, provide opportunities for simultaneously improving environmental and financial performance of primary Corn Belt production systems. The first step toward this goal is understanding how subfield variability impacts both environmental and economic performance. The following discussion uses a case study example to show how emerging precision data are helping us quantify subfield variability in our systems. The example is then used to quantify environmental and financial performance at a 10 m (33 ft) resolution scale for the field. The results demonstrate how focusing on increased profitability,…