Integrating Vegetable, Poultry, and Cover Cropping to Enhance Resiliency in Organic Production Systems

The overall goal of this multi-regional (IA, KY, and CA) four-year project is to assist organic vegetable producers better integrate poultry and cover crops in their rotations. Crop, animal, and cover crop integration, along with diverse crop rotations will increase soil quality, reduce off-farm input, increase farm diversity and profitability.This project will also investigate food safety, meat quality, and wellness attributes in plant-animal integrated systems.Field objectives - 1) Evaluation of vegetable, cover crop, and bird performance in integrated organic production system, and 2) Investigation of impact of integrated systems on soil health indicators (physical, chemical, and biological properties, weed population, etc.) and pest management - meet priorities of organic producers. Given current updates in Food Safety Modernization Act, this project will provide baseline analysis of microbiological load and concentrations (Salmonella) in crop-poultry integrated system. We will also conduct economic analysis of integrated crop-poultry system and compare it with existing practice of strictly raising vegetable crops. Economic analysis outputs would include enterprise and partial budgets, sensitivity analysis, and decision-making tools that assist whole farm planning and facilitate grower adoption of integrated organic systems. The field and laboratory studies of this project will train graduate and undergraduate students and provide Cooperative Extension personnel opportunities to realize the importance of on-farm diversity. Based on input from organic producers we conducted a preliminary trial in 2017, which validated the feasibility of establishing an integrated system. This project will constitute an advisory panel (growers, industry leaders, and processors) that will assist in implementation, evaluation, and disseminating project results and outcomes.Grower and industry outreach will include information dissemination through existing sustainable agriculture websites, blog, on-farm trials, field days, and trade journal articles