Agroecosystem management research at Grace Drake Agricultural Laboratory
The Agroecosystem Management Program (AMP) has been leading a planning process with OSU faculty, staff, and students to expand the use of Grace L. Drake Agricultural Laboratory (or GDAL) as a site for long-term agroecological farming systems research, teaching, and engagement.
GDAL is a roughly 1,700-acre facility operated by the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University, located to the east of the CFAES Wooster campus near the town of Apple Creek. GDAL has been used for decades as a teaching lab that offered hands-on experiences for Ohio State Agricultural Technological Institute (ATI) undergraduate students, and as a production facility for OSU Agricultural Experiment Station farm operations.
Dr. Douglas Jackson-Smith, AMP Director, notes that "interest in regenerative agriculture is on the rise, but there are many unanswered questions about how different ‘sustainable’ farming approaches impact long-term agronomic, economic, and environmental outcomes across diverse working landscapes.”
GDAL offers resources to answer these questions. The site includes a mosaic of mixed row crop fields, grazed pasturelands, and forested parcels that are representative of the complex mix of land uses on farms across the eastern corn belt, upper midwest, and eastern uplands bioregions.
Over the last three years, with funds from an OSU Ohio State Energy Partners (OSEP) grant, AMP has collaborated with researchers, teachers, and farm operations staff to design a long-term management plan. The plan places GDAL crop fields, pastures, and forests into contrasting agroecological vs standard management tracks. As this plan is implemented, we will instrument these fields to track how changes in farm management impact soil, plants (crops, weeds, forests), biodiversity (insects, wildlife), and water resources over time.
As the plan develops, the GDAL facility will also provide an opportunity to move plot- and lab-scale research and precision agricultural technologies to more realistic field-, farm-, and landscape scales. It will also continue to serve as a site for hands-on experiential student learning and stakeholder engagement through our OSU teaching and extension programs.
Initial Steps: Gather Historic Management Data and Build a Geodatabase
Beginning in 2023, AMP GIS specialist Kevin Armstrong has compiled data from historic farm operations records, remote sensing layers, and other geospatial datasets on soils, hydrology, topography, and built infrastructure to create an integrated geodatabase that helped inform the design of the GDAL Farming Systems Plan. Ohio State employees can use their university credentials to access the resulting dashboard to explore the layers of data and derived statistics.
Next steps: Iterative Planning Process to Brainstorm a Management Plan
Group planning discussions began in the fall of 2023 with 20 faculty and staff who already work at Grace Drake Agricultural Laboratory or are doing relevant work in other locations. Meeting attendees shared their thoughts and ideas for using the proposed GDAL facility. Because the farm includes traditional row crops, pasture, and woodlands, many recognized the exciting opportunities to study management impacts on a wide range of agricultural and environmental indicators. Attendees were especially interested in using GDAL to:
- Connect research, teaching, and extension work
- Help define and test what "regenerative" agriculture should include
- Provide a setting for students to think holistically about farming systems
- Host research on a scale large enough to provide relevance to farmers
- Study relationships between agriculture and broader landscape-scale systems (carbon, nutrient, and water cycles, food webs, pollinators, microbiome, neighbors and nearby communities, etc.).
Since 2023, AMP has organized monthly meetings with a planning group of faculty and staff, funded new field data collection by student interns, and held annual check-in meetings with larger groups of internal and external stakeholders. These meetings have helped refine the location of fields designated for either ‘standard’ or ‘agroecological’ management.
Final steps: Drafting and Implementing a Management Plan
A draft management plan has been developed with input from many stakeholders. It outlines how different fields and areas will be assigned to either standard or agroecological management tracks (Figure 2), and the types of practices to be utilized within each category (Figure 3).
Currently, the draft management plan is circulating for feedback and approval from the college farm operations leadership team. Once formalized, it will guide management decisions for crop rotations, soil amendments, weed and pest management, and the intensity and frequency of grazing rotations (among other things).