Use of Crop Models for Climate-Agricultural Decisions.

Crop models are useful tools for translating climate forecasts and climate change scenarios into changes in yield, net returns, and other outcomes of different management practices in specified environments. These tools provide information to complement results from both experiments and practitioners’ experiences. These models are now widely used by researchers to analyze agricultural decisions for adapting to climate change and to estimate benefits of adaptive management in response to climate variability and forecast information. Example decisions are changes in crop management (planting dates, water management, varieties, nutrients, etc.), crop insurance decisions, marketing, technology adoption, and policy impacts. One objective of this paper is to present recent examples of climate-agricultural decision analysis studies in the context of model limitations and uncertainties. Because of the impressive capabilities of crop models, many researchers have promoted their use by decision makers at farm to policy levels for supporting climate-agricultural and other decisions. However, many attempts to make crop models available to decision makers failed, primarily due to not considering social and institutional aspects of decision making processes. A second objective of this paper is to describe our efforts to implement crop and climate model-based information for use by decision makers in the context of lessons learned from past failures. We have worked with extension services and social scientists to provide climate forecast and crop model-based information for use by local extension agents as they advise farmers. This work clearly demonstrates that the complexities are more related to human dimensions associated with decision making instead of technological issues. Further, we conclude that the use of crop models for decision support must provide some tangible benefit to have an impact, and should be undertaken by trusted advisors working with practitioners.