Useful to Usable, a multi-institution effort led by Purdue that includes several UNL researchers, earned the National Institute of Food and Agriculture Partnership Award for mission integration, presented Oct. 22 in Washington, D.C.
U2U offers online tools to help farmers and agricultural advisers manage increasingly variable weather and climate conditions across the Corn Belt. They provide historical climate data that help inform purchasing, marketing and activity planning throughout the growing cycle. The team is led by Linda Prokopy, a professor in Purdue's Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.
U2U released four decision support tools in 2013-14, all free and publically available at http://www.agclimate4u.org. A new Irrigation Investment tool is scheduled for release late this year.
The tools display climate information in ways that help farmers make specific decisions.
"Mapping climate information to specific decisions captures the essence of U2U," said Martha Shulski, director of the High Plains Regional Climate Center at UNL and one of the co-PIs.
"This award speaks to how well we performed as a group. There were twenty co-PIs and nine institutions. Our success in large part is thanks to the leadership of Linda Prokopy and Melissa Widhalm (U2U project manager)," Shulski added.
"The U2U project is a great collaborative effort, bringing together a broad group of social, climate, and agricultural scientists and other collaborators to develop new tools to help farmers make important management decisions," said Cody Knutson, leader of the Planning and Social Science program at UNL's National Drought Mitigation Center, also a co-PI on the project.
Other UNL contributors were Roger Elmore, professor of Agronomy and Horticulture; Tonya Haigh, a rural sociologist and survey specialist with the drought center; Juliana Dai, a Natural Resources graduate student focusing on climate assessment and impacts; and Tapan Pathak, formerly a climate Extension educator at the School of Natural Resources, now at University of California-Merced.
More details at: http://agclimate4u.org