Adaptive Management As a Process to Improve Nitrogen Recommendations for Corn.

Adaptive management was first developed in the 1970s by two ecologists, C.S. Holling and C.J. Walters, from the University of British Columbia to improve the management of large ecosystems. The concept is being used in agriculture to improve management of nutrients, especially nitrogen. In its simplest form adaptive management is a process of assessing an ecosystem by collecting data in a systematic way, and then using the data from the assessments to improve the management of the ecosystem. The adaptive management process is especially effective for use by farmers to improve management at the field level because assessments of practices are easily completed and improvements in practices often can be easily implemented by farmers. The draft definition of adaptive management developed by the NEERA 1002 committee is: An on-going process of developing improved management practices for efficient production and resource conservation by use of participatory learning through continuous systematic assessment. Participants include producers, agricultural service providers, policy makers, regulators, scientists, and other interested stakeholders. Implementing an adaptive management program requires these items: 1) A team of people available and capable of implementing an assessment of a management practice, 2) An objective and reliable test to assess the practice, 3) Capability to summarize and present results of the assessments to farmers in time for use by the farmers either in current season or in next season, 4) A participatory process to learn from results of the assessments from individual fields and from aggregate summaries of results, and 5) A process for farmers to make changes to their practice based on results of assessments from at least two years of data. The strength of an adaptive management program is mainly due to the systematic assessment of a practice combined with a program of participatory learning from the results of the assessments.