Resilience and Productivity in Integrated Crop and Livestock Systems.

In face of global climate change, productive, resilient, and stable agricultural systems are needed to endure increasingly frequent climatic crisis. Resilience is defined as the ability to withstand a crisis, and stability as the minimal long term variability in productivity. The goal of this project was to quantify and understand resilience and stability at the cropping system level (crop rotations). Mixed models analyses were performed on the long term dataset of the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial. Quantitative measures for resilience and stability were calculated. The hypothesis that rotations with higher diversity and perenniality were more resilient and stable than annual monocultures. The Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial (WICST) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, was established in 1989 in response to farmers and others concerns for long-term research on low-input farming. WICST goal is to research on the productivity, profitability and environmental impacts of crop rotations with contrasting management. Over the past 26 years, WICST generated a large database on 60 acres of land at the UW-Madison Arlington Agricultural Research Station comparing conventional and organic cash grain and dairy forage systems, with various levels of diversity and perenniality (Sanford et al, 2012).