Webinar: Evaluating Agricultural Sustainability Outcomes with APEX

Описание: Farms are under growing pressure to improve environmental sustainability while managing rising costs and challenging markets. Successfully adopting sustainable practices requires understanding trade‑offs among interconnected environmental outcomes—such as soil health, water quality, carbon sequestration, and greenhouse gas emissions—and agronomic outcomes like crop performance and input efficiency.

Many existing assessment tools focus on a single aspect of a farm’s environmental footprint, making it difficult to evaluate these competing objectives together. This recorded webinar presents a more holistic, multi‑objective approach to agricultural sustainability assessment using the USDA‑supported Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender (APEX) model.

In the webinar, Dr. Jody Stryker describes a multi‑objective APEX calibration and validation framework designed to generate robust, field‑scale predictions of the long‑term environmental and agronomic impacts of management practices. The presentation also demonstrates how this approach is implemented within a web‑based farm assessment tool.

This work is enhancing Vermont’s Farm‑PREP platform, enabling more comprehensive evaluations of land management across mixed‑use farms, including cropland, pasture, and non‑agricultural working lands.