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24 February 2021 Best Management Practices for Sustaining Agricultural Production at Choctawhatchee Watershed in Alabama, USA, in Response to Climate Change
Mahnaz Dil Afroz, Runwei Li, Khaleel Muhammed, Aavudai Anandhi, Gang Chen
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Abstract

Climate change will ultimately result in higher surface temperature and more variable precipitation, negatively affecting agricultural productivity. To sustain the agricultural production in the face of climate change, adaptive agricultural management or best management practices (BMPs) are needed. The currently practiced BMPs include crop rotation, early planting, conservation tillage, cover crops, effective fertilizer use, and so on. This research investigated the agricultural production of BMPs in response to climate change for a Hydrologic Unit Code12 sub-watershed of Choctawhatchee Watershed in Alabama, USA. The dominating soil type of this region was sandy loam and loamy sand soil. Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator and Cropping Systems Simulation Model were used to estimate the agricultural production. Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and RCP8.5 that projected a temperature increase of 2.3℃ and 4.7℃ were used as climate scenarios. The research demonstrated that crop rotation had positive response to climate change. With peanuts in the rotation, a production increase of 105% was observed for cotton. There was no consistent impact on crop yields by early planting. With selected peanut-cotton rotations, 50% reduced nitrogen fertilizer use was observed to achieve comparable crop yields. In response to climate change, crop rotation with legume incorporation is thus suggested, which increased crop production and reduced fertilizer use.

© The Author(s) 2021 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Mahnaz Dil Afroz, Runwei Li, Khaleel Muhammed, Aavudai Anandhi, and Gang Chen "Best Management Practices for Sustaining Agricultural Production at Choctawhatchee Watershed in Alabama, USA, in Response to Climate Change," Air, Soil and Water Research 14(1), (24 February 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/1178622121991789
Received: 21 September 2020; Accepted: 11 January 2021; Published: 24 February 2021
KEYWORDS
cotton
crop yields
fertilizer use
legumes
peanuts
rotation
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