IMPROVING CROP RESIDUE BURNING AND MANAGEMENT RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE ARKANSAS DELTA REGION

The primary goal of this large-scale, collaborative project is capacity building for the Arkansas State University (A-State) College of Agriculture to participate in high quality research and extension, while enhancing hands-on teaching opportunities. A-State's collaborations with the University of Arkansas-Center for Advanced Spatial Technology (UA-CAST), the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture (UAEX), the Miami University (MU), and the University of Delaware (UD) will raise the potential for faculty to conduct impactful research and work with Arkansas State extension to disseminate critical information to crop producers. Capacity building will be directly supported by a project focused on improving crop residue burning practices in the Arkansas Delta Region. Intentional burning is an important practice for rice producers because it provides timely, cost-effective removal of harmful post-harvest residue. However, burning adversely affects communities in the surrounding areas. While voluntary burning guidelines (VSMG) exist, they have not been validated and could be improved through collaborations with farmers on in-field burn experiments and the provision of burn recommendations via a real-time web application. Additionally, little is known about how producers might be incentivized to comply with VSMG or adopt alternative no-burn or low-burn practices. As such, this project also proposes to use a suite of coupled smoke transport models and on-farm experimental burns conducted with farmers to improve VSMG recommendations. Another major goal will be to improve our understanding of how producer and community members value burn and no-burn practices, respectively. Producer and community member surveys will be conducted to elicit community members' willingnes-to-pay for compliance and producers willingness-to-accept to comply or eliminate burning. Finally, improved burn recommendations will be integrated into a user-friendly application for producers and extension collaborations will help ensure its adoption. These major goals are supported by the following objective:Create a suite of coupled smoke transport models to improve burn forecasting with weather information and in situ sensors to decrease impacts on regional populations.Quantify the effectiveness of the Arkansas Voluntary Smoke Management Guidelines for Row Crop Burning and smoke transport models with planned crop residue burns.Investigate the economic potential for incentivizing VSMG compliance and alternatives to crop residue burning through producer and community member surveys.Provide a user-friendly web application for improved on-the-go burn recommendations based on smoke transport models and producer inputs on geo-location, field size, fuel type, and fuel load.Increase producer awareness about intentional cropland burning, VSMG recommendations, and residue management through field days and extension publications.