Exploring opportunities for crop intensification during the summer season: maize-soybean double crop in the Southern US
Traditionally, increasing yield has been a successful way to increase global production without land expansion, yet this task is becoming more challenging for both breeders and agronomists. Therefore, rotation intensification, associated with more crops per year, emerges as a valuable strategy for meeting an increased food demand. This alternative is scarcely tested in most of the cropland area in North America, as the dominant production systems are cereal and legume on a single crop per year rotation.
Furthermore, in this region the explored temporal intensified cropping systems have been associated with summer legumes and winter cereal rotational schemes. For this reason, we hypothesized that unexplored cereal–legume double summer crop system provides untapped potential to increase land productivity of suitable farming systems in the Southern US region.
The primary objective of this research project is to evaluate the feasibility of cultivating maize-soybean double crops through field data and crop simulation using the APSIM model framework.
Ignacio Massigoge
Ph.D. Student |
Ecophysiology |
Crop Modeling |
I was born in Tres Arroyos, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since a child, I discovered my passion for agriculture on my family's farm, encouraged by several relatives related to this activity. With this motivation, I decided to pursue my Agronomics degree, graduating in 2019 at the National University of Mar del Plata (UNMdP), located in Balcarce, Argentina.
In my undergraduate thesis, I studied the effect of water stress on the vegetative and reproductive development of maize crop. This positive experience led me to start my Master's in Vegetal Production at UNMdP in 2019, where I researched the effect of tillers on maize water economy and reproductive plasticity in restrictive environments. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at Kansas State University, focusing on crop intensification alternatives and crop modeling.
Additionally, I was a professor of Crop Eco-Physiology in the Graduate Program of the Agronomy Department at the UNMDP. I also researched for the Regional Consortium for Agricultural Experimentation Argentina (CREA) about the effect of cover crops on maize water and nitrogen dynamics. Finally, I performed maize field experiments for three years for breeding companies (Corteva AgScience and KWS Group) in the Southern Pampean Region of Argentina.
Research interests:
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Crop eco-physiology.
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Crop management.
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Crop modeling.
Maize planting date and maturity in the US central Great Plains: Exploring paths for intensification
The US central Great Plains (Kansas-Oklahoma) region is a major producer of field crops, accounting for roughly 20 MT of maize production. Despite the relevance of the region, most of the literature regarding optimizing management strategies has focused on the northern corn-belt. Therefore, further efforts are needed to provide farmers with this critical knowledge.
The primary objective of this research project is to explore planting date by hybrid maturity combinations via a crop growth model using the Agricultural Production System Simulator (APSIM) with phenology calibrated hybrids to define environment-tailored management strategies. This information could provide opportunities to increase i) production per unit of land and/or ii) number of crops harvested per unit of time.
Crop Science
Contribution of tillers to maize yield stability at low plant density
