New Publication – An Online Decision Support Tool for Organic Farmers

Weeds remain the most commonly cited concern of organic farmers. Without the benefit of synthetic herbicides, organic farmers must rely on a host of ecological weed management (EWM) practices to control weeds. Despite EWM’s ability to improve soil quality, the perceived rate of integrated EWM strategy adoption remains low due to ineffective outreach practices.

Christian Beaudrie (Compass Senior Associate) and Clayton Schroeder (Compass Web Developer), worked with Doug Bessette (Michigan State University) and Robyn Wilson (Ohio State University) to develop an online decision support tool (DST) to help organic farmers make informed choices about adopting improved weeding strategies. The DST helped farmers to identify their on-farm objectives, characterize the performance of their practices, and evaluate EWM strategies using the principles of Structured Decision Making (SDM).  Multiple choice tasks were used to help farmers evaluate the short- and long-term trade-offs of EWM strategies, while also focusing their attention on their most important objectives.

Research conducted with organic farmers across the United States showed considerable movement in participants’ (n = 45) preferences from practices focused on reducing weeding costs and labor in the short term to EWM strategies focused on improving soil quality in the long term. Indeed, nearly half of those farmers (48%) who initially ranked a strategy composed of their current practices highest ultimately preferred a better-performing EWM strategy focused on eliminating the weed seedbank over 5 yr.

This research was recently published in the journal Weed Science:

Bessette, D., Wilson, R., Beaudrie, C., & Schroeder, C. (2019). An online decision support tool to evaluate ecological weed management strategies. Weed Science, 67(4), 463-473. doi:10.1017/wsc.2019.21

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/weed-science/article/an-online-decision-support-tool-to-evaluate-ecological-weed-management-strategies/36A62D8585DA00C00616A6B417ECF9F0

The Organic Weed Manager tool is available at www.organicweedmanager.com