Agricultural residues provide a substantial opportunity for bioenergy and animal feed production. However, residues play a number of important roles within the agronomic system, and the collection of residues must be done carefully to ensure long term sustainability of the agronomic system.
SustainR2 was built to provide a mobile application in support sustainable, economically viable residue removal decisions.
Agricultural residues are materials other than grain, i.e. stalks, leaves, husks, cobs, etc., produced from traditional row crops. The traditional row crops which are considered in this decision support framework are corn, wheat, barley, grain sorghum, and rice.
The decision support framework provided through this application utilizes USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service tools to model the impacts of residue removal on soil erosion from wind and water, and soil organic carbon.
SustainR2 interfaces to the Residue Removal Assessment Framework or RRAF. RRAF is an integrated and dynamic residue removal analysis tool that facilitates the investigation of residue removal rates relative to the six agronomic limiting factors (see http://bioenergyldt.inl.gov.
SustainR2 has been developed to enable testing and evaluation of an integrated modeling framework assembled for agricultural residue removal decision support. The results are highly dependent on the scenario setup and should be considered preliminary. To ensure compliance with USDA conservation management planning guidelines it is necessary to work with the local NRCS field office.