About the Project

Our Purpose

Thriving Future Cropscapes is a four-year NSF-funded project bringing together stakeholders from many sectors, regions, and disciplines to anticipate and prepare for the major changes likely to shape cropping systems in the southern and central US over the next five decades.

Our Goals

Understand current realities

Using historical information and modeling, combined with insight from farmers and industry leaders, we have assembled the best of what we currently know about the diverse forces shaping major cropping systems in each state and the current conditions that drive or limit future change.

Anticipate future change

We are working with community partners to identify technologies, crops, management practices, and policies with the potential to transform regional cropping systems, as well as the on-farm realities shaping access to these new opportunities.

Leverage opportunities

With community partners, we are co-creating regionally tailored strategies that leverage emergent opportunities to foster thriving agricultural futures in each state.

Where

Our project focuses primarily on Georgia, Nebraska, and Ohio — three important and diverse farming states that are likely to experience distinct social, economic, and climatic challenges and opportunities over the coming century.

Our Approach

Cropping systems are shaped by many intersecting forces: regional soils, producers' goals, national policy priorities, and more. To capture as many of these dimensions as possible, our interdisciplinary team combines historical analyses, predictive modeling, expert surveys, and iterative conversations with farmers. This mixed-methods approach helps harness the best of computational and social science approaches to better understand what the country's agricultural futures will hold and why. We aim not only to generate more useful, accurate, and interesting projections of future cropscapes, but also to conduct engaged and responsive research that attends equally to agriculture's human and environmental worlds.