By Ronica Stromberg
For Makki Khorchani, figuring out the best way to manage agricultural land is similar to working a math equation. He uses historical data and models to identify management practices most likely to best benefit all.
“It's like an equation,” the ecosystem modeler said. “You are always trying to change those parameters of the equation and look to the result.”
Some of the parameters he is studying in Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network projects are productivity, changes in soil properties, greenhouse gas emissions and changes in the water cycle. He recently published his first paper related to his LTAR work in Agricultural Water Management. In it, he and his coauthors compared three systems: irrigated continuous corn, irrigated corn-soybean rotation and rain-fed, corn-soybean rotation. They found the most water-efficient system was the irrigated corn-soybean rotation.
On the Grand Challenges ADAPT project, Khorchani leads the data management and integration work, focusing mostly on greenhouse gas emissions and productivity in grazing systems in Nebraska. The team is using eddy covariance towers and remote sensing to estimate gases in the air.
“We're trying, at the end, to develop tools that farmers and stakeholders can use to estimate their carbon uptake in those rangelands so they can more or less tell if their rangelands are capturing carbon or are emitting carbon,” he said.
Hired as a postdoc in June 2022, he became a research assistant professor in March 2024. He had earned his doctorate and master’s degree in Spain and undergraduate degree in Tunisia, where he grew up.
Although he studied changes in agricultural land management in Spain also, such studies in Nebraska differ in many ways, he said. The largest differences he noted are that Nebraska has greater funding available and far more use of technology. He had not, for example, worked on data from eddy covariance towers before. These towers can measure gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the air. All 18 LTAR sites have used the towers and make the data available to LTAR researchers.
“That's not something you can get in many other places,” he said. “It's not easy to have that information. And having these data going back 20 years of eddy covariance measurements, that's huge!”
The LTAR sites monitor everything related to management and weather, so scientists know that if temperatures increase, that could have an effect on water efficiency, he said. They look at what is most affecting each parameter they’re interested in and then look at ways to improve the system, making it more efficient and resilient to climate change.
Khorchani said having access to all the data from the LTAR sites gives scientists a lot of potential and opportunity to study whatever they want. He studies the historical data and develops models to test different scenarios, such as what could happen on agricultural land if temperatures increased by three degrees.
“I enjoy doing what I do, trying to look to different changes and see what happens to the whole ecosystem in changes in these parameters that we are interested in and try to look for what's the best conditions or the best management system that we should use to get to the best results,” he said. “That's the question I always try to look for, what's the best management system that would be beneficial for everyone?”
Scientists typically compare conventional management strategies to alternative management strategies they see as more sustainable or otherwise better for the region, he said.
“If we see that our alternative scenario is good enough, is economically viable, productive enough for the region and everything, then we try to convince the farmers and stakeholders to adopt that practice,” he said.
Although he doesn’t come from a farming background, he noted the LTAR project has benefited him, too—through the large LTAR network. He said he has met a tremendous number of people through project work and annual meetings drawing about 150 participants.
“All these are opportunities to work together, to network and to have opportunities for the future,” he said. “That's huge for me. I feel that's something very unique about this project.”
Tala Awada, the associate dean in the Agricultural Research Division, who hired Khorchani as a postdoctoral researcher, said her team is fortunate to have him on it. She noted he is committed to LTAR and its mission to advance research on productivity sustainability and resilience of agroecosystems.
Khorchani echoed this with a simple statement of his future goals.
“I’ll continue on this,” he said.