Reducing the negative environmental impacts of agriculture presents one of the most pressing sustainability challenges of the 21st century. Agroecosystem management influences the supply of ecosystem services by impacting underlying ecological processes, and alternative management approaches have the potential to increase the supply of some ecosystem services, compared to conventional agricultural production methods. Improvements in agroecosystem management seek to enhance water quality, increase landscape flood resiliency, and mitigate agriculture’s contribution to climate change, all while remaining economically viable, yet implementation may not achieve all these goals.
Assessments of tradeoffs and synergies among ecosystem services with farm management changes have primarily focused on single practices or single ecosystem services, and are often conducted using modeling to simulate environmental outcomes. Likewise, the integration of social influences on adoption of new practices is rarely conducted alongside biophysical research. Measuring the delivery of ecosystem services through a transdisciplinary, participatory approach that integrates farmers’ knowledge could support an agroecological transition toward sustainability; such an approach has the potential to reveal both the social and ecological drivers of change, and promote on-the-ground implementation.
Results/Conclusions
This study presents a holistic assessment of how two practices influence the supply of ecosystem services—the use of an aerator prior to manure application in haylands, and the stacked use of manure injection, cover crops, and reduced tillage in corn silage production. Field data are contextualized by semi-structured interviews and focus group that identify influences on adoption. In our study, unseen nutrient pathways are the least understood, but potentially the most important in determining the impact of a practice on ecosystem services supply. Subsurface runoff accounted for 64% to 92% of measured hydrologic phosphorus export. Average soil surface greenhouse gas flux constituted 38% to 73% of all contributions to the equivalent CO2 footprint of practices, sometimes outweighing carbon sequestration. Farmers identified interest in better understanding unseen nutrient pathways, expressed intrinsic stewardship motivations, but highlighted financial considerations as dominating decision making. Our analysis elevates the importance of financial supports for conservation, and the need for comprehensive understandings of agroecosystem performance that include hard-to-measure pathways.
