Benchmarking Yield and Input Use Efficiency of Irrigated Corn Production in Nebraska.

In 1972, Nebraska created a statewide association of 23 Natural Resources Districts (NRDs) with the common aim to individually work to conserve, sustain, and improve the natural resources and environment. These NRDs collect data on crop management practices from individual farmers every year. The range of data type vary from the type of crop grown, crop yield, soil nitrate residuals, nitrogen application rates, amount of irrigation applied, type of irrigation system used and so on. Every NRD has their own board to set their own guidelines. Data collected by them are not publically available. However, these NRDs have developed a partnership with University of Nebraska-Lincoln to utilize these datasets to help in benchmarking irrigated corn production yield and input resource use efficiency. This partnership is unique in the sense that we have multiple-years of data from multiple fields across Nebraska. The limitation of this kind of survey data is that we cannot apply traditional statistical approaches for the analysis but the power of this data is that we can test various hypotheses with a high degree of confidence. Initially, we have selected three different NRDs (Lower Niobrara, Tribasin, and Central Platte) that have ten years of consistent data (2004-2013). These three NRDs are representative of varying environment of irrigated corn production system in Nebraska. Data analysis will be focused on to understand corn yields and input resource use efficiency and identify opportunities to improve water and nitrogen use efficiencies.