The LTAR Cropland Common Experiment at Central Mississippi River Basin.

The Central Mississippi River Basin (CMRB) Common Experiment, with its marginal soils and southern Corn Belt climate, is an ideal location for evaluating progress toward environmental, productivity, and climatic adaptation goals. Sustainable production with conventional row-crop systems is more challenging than in the upper Corn Belt, making evaluation and adoption of alternative farming practices crucial. This Common Experiment has a hydrologically restrictive layer causing reduced plant available water capacity in the root zone.

A new perspective when examining maize fertilizer nitrogen use efficiency, incrementally.

For maize (Zea mays L.), nitrogen (N) fertilizer use is often summarized from field to global scales using average N use efficiency (NUE). But expressing NUE as averages is misleading because grain increase to added N diminishes near optimal yield.

Nitrogen release rates from slow- and controlled-release fertilizers influenced by placement and temperature.

Controlled-release and slow-release fertilizers can effectively supply nitrogen (N) while mitigating N loss. To determine the suitability of these fertilizers for plants in semi-arid environments, these fertilizers need to be evaluated under varying placement and temperature conditions. Several urea fertilizers were evaluated, including: uncoated, sulfur-coated (SCU), polymer-coated-sulfur-coated (PCSCU), and polymer-coated (PCU) with projected release timings between 45 and 180 d.