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about why they did or didn’t rotate, but the information was never recorded in a systematic manner. “We made a lot of assumptions about why growers don’t rotate, but nobody ever asked them,” she said. This led Sara Rosenberg, a UC Davis doctoral student in horticulture and agron- omy, to conduct a large rice grower survey in 2020. She talked to 42 growers about their perceived benefits and challenges of crop rotation. Of those, 20 were in continuous rice, 12 rotated with annual crops and 10 were farming organically. In addition, Rosenberg sought to identify factors influ- encing decision-making and barriers to rotation adoption. “I think some economic research can be based on fixed assumptions, and we wanted to show the ranges of outcomes that growers may experience because there are so many different scenarios that growers are dealing with,” Rosenberg said. Seeing a need for an online tool where rice growers and pest control advisors could play “what if” with crop rotations, Brim-DeForest said they applied for and received funding from the Western Integrated Pest Management Center. They worked with UC IPM computer programmer Chinh Lam to develop the online tool.
A new online tool helps rice growers consider crop rotations, including sunflowers, safflower, dry beans or process- ing tomatoes. About 10% of California rice acreage is rotated to different field crops.
Brim-DeForest said they settled on the four rotational crops based on survey re- sults. Most of the economic data was de- rived from UC cost of production studies. Throughout the process, they sought the input of a rice-grower focus group to ensure the results were valuable for the target audience. As the online tool neared completion, Brim-DeForest sent it to oth- er growers, key stakeholders and PCAs to gather feedback. She said the overall response was, “This is a pretty cool tool.” But there were also some functions that had to be changed because they were confusing or a bug pre- vented them from working properly. Rosenberg cautioned that the tool
results are based only on a snapshot of switching from rice to a different row crop. “In a long-term rotation, you have a lot of things that will impact economics that are not captured in this tool,” she said. To help address some of those issues, Rosenberg is looking at how long-term crop rotations of two different scenarios compare to contin- uous rice over a period of 15 years. Users begin by choosing one of the four rotational crops. The tool features a catego- ry drop-down menu with several choices, including baseline information for the ro- tational crop. From there, users can drill down the costs tied to specific categories, such as seed, straw management, field re- construction, irrigation and harvest.
The tool presents the results in an easy-to-read bar chart that provides a fi- nancial snapshot of switching to the ro- tational crop compared to staying in rice production. Users can quickly go back to a category and change a field, such as pro- cessing tomato yield per acre, to determine how it might affect overall profitability. With the framework in place, Brim- DeForest said programmers can easily update data. She said it also will be much easier for farm advisors or others within the UC system to launch similar decision tools for other crops. (Vicky Boyd is a reporter based in Modesto. She may be contacted at vlboyd@att.net.)
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