ASSESSING THE POTENTIAL OF DIVERSIFIED FARMING SYSTEMS FOR IMPROVED SUSTAINABILITY ON THE PALOUSE

Katherine L. Smith

doi:10.7273/000007831

Diverse farming systems aim to leverage both environmental and economic benefits through strategies that promote soil health, improve resource-use efficiency, and reduce risk by diversifying revenue and stabilizing yields. Yet, widespread adoption beyond practices like reduced or no-till and temporally diversified crop rotations remains limited. More complex systems that incorporate livestock, annual and perennial forage crops, intercrops, and/or organic management for system diversification face practical barriers and uncertainty around regional variability in long-term agronomic and economic performance. It remains that transformative socio-economic change at the policy level is likely required to overcome our current model of agriculture and the associated structural barriers that constrain broader adoption of diversified farming strategies. To achieve this, there is a need for more comprehensive, long-term field studies that move beyond productivity and provide a broader assessment of the potential for these strategies to succeed across varied contexts that have not yet been explored. Throughout three chapters, this research investigates the long-term impacts of conventional no-till, organic, and mixed crop-livestock systems on economic and soil health outcomes. The dataset produced was robust and was curated for future use by researchers. Intercropping has been heavily studied globally and may fit into each studied farming system. However, little information is available on its utility and impact on the soil microbiome in the Palouse watershed. The research presented gives insight into the utility and impact of two intercropping systems. In Chapter 2, we examine the potential of several diversification strategies for improved system sustainability in the annual cropping zone of the Palouse River watershed region of eastern Washington by summarizing 12 years of productivity, profitability, and soil quality outcomes. The four systems were as follows: (i) a no-till system with a three-year crop rotation of grains and conventional fertilizer and chemicals (NT); (ii) a no-till mixed crop-livestock system with a similar rotation but incorporating livestock and green manures with reduced inputs (MIX); (iii) an organic mixed crop-livestock system that utilized livestock, green manure crops, and intercropping in a mainly annual crop-focused rotation (ORGcrop); and (iv) an organic hay system based on perennial hay crop production and livestock integration (ORGhay). In Chapter 3, the data set produced from the long-term agroecosystem field study is summarized. The dataset produced spans over a decade (2012–2023) of observations and contains data from nearly 4,000 soil samples, 1,172 harvest samples, and economic metrics from 192 individual enterprise budgets. Finally, in Chapter 4, we evaluate the agronomic and microbial responses to intercropped versus sole cropped spring canola, peas, and chickpeas in a small-plot assessment of a potential intercrop combination for the region. The sole cropped and intercropped treatments were followed by winter wheat to determine the impact this cropping system could have on the region’s most prominent grain crop.

ASSESSING THE POTENTIAL OF DIVERSIFIED FARMING SYSTEMS FOR IMPROVED SUSTAINABILITY ON THE PALOUSE

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