Strategies to Reduce Hurdle Rates for Double Cropping.

Land resources are becoming progressively more constrained with increasing demands for food, feed, fiber, and now fuel production. Developing strategies to intensify crop production without increasing the negative impacts on water, soil, and air resources are critical. Much of the best agricultural lands are dominated by corn-soybean rotations with winter fallow periods. There has been interest in spatially diversifying and temporally intensifying production of the farm landscape to improve water quality. Winter cover crops are one strategy to reduce nutrient losses over winter, but they have not been widely adopted. Harvested cover crops, or double crops, of winter small grains are common in some regions. Our objective was to quantify and evaluate strategies to reduce the hurdle rates for double cropping in corn-soybean growing regions in the US. We found that identifying a new market for straw, such as a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol, significantly improved the economic viability of barley and wheat further north into the Corn Belt.