The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative: a Public-private Partnership for Productivity, Profitability, and Environmental Performance

The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative has a vision to provide Iowans with the best nitrogen science in the world for the benefit of productivity, profitability, and environmental performance. To do this we have developed a public-private partnership among Iowa farmers, their advisors, and Iowa State University. Our partnership leverages the latest advances in precision agriculture to conduct scientifically robust nitrogen fertilizer rate experiments on hundreds of farmer fields, every year. The large amount of data collected from these experiments enables Iowa State University scientists and engineers to use the latest data-hungry advances in process modeling, advanced statistics, and machine learning to better understand and predict optimum nitrogen management for specific fields in specific years. This presentation will describe our vision, workflow, and preliminary results. Working together, we can increase nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency and yield while reducing environmental nitrogen losses.