Rationale for FEWS Research Funding for the Solar Corridor Farming System Science
By LeRoy Deichman
The Solar Corridor Concept offers a uniquely productive Interdisciplinary Vision that
enables us to do the following eight priorities for FEWS progress:
1. To make more effective use of a vast renewable resource
Which we naturally have access to - atmospheric sourced Solar Radiation.
2. To effectively turn another vast (potential) energy resource, that contributes to climate
instability, into a vast (actual) resource - atmospheric CO2 for carbon sequestration
through the fundamental design of the farming system.
3 - 6. To enable more effective use of and conservation of water, reduction of soil
erosion & stream bound sediments.
7. To improve the quality & quantity of soil biota, active carbon and soil sustainability.
8. To enable more efficient use of essentially all soil based nutrients required to
produce corn and potentially many other commodity and specialty crops for food and
bio energy.
7. To enable more productive use of our most fundamental basic but diminishing
resource - productive arable farm land and water, basic elements of the FEWS.
8. To enable more (hybrid specific) corn production per unit of seed.
These requirements to improve FEWS efficiency to meet the burgeoning needs food in
the next decades of the 21st century will, however, require the investment of more
human resources through scientific research and technology development around most
effective use of the sun in all elements of the farming systems of the future which are
not diminishing like productive arable farm land.
Our corn yield hypothesis has been tested by our preliminary research, validated by the
U.S. patent Office (cl. 2, yield tables 1-14 of 6052941) and replicated by peer review
research published in Nelson, K.A., table 2, "Corn Yield Response to the Solar Corridor
in Upstate Missouri", in the Feature Article & full cover page of Vol.106 Issue 5,
Agronomy Journal.
It says, that, on a hybrid specific basis, we can produce 2X (double) production per
linear distance of row of high yielding corn varieties. In other words we can now
achieve as much corn per 60 inch (152 cm) wide twin row as we can produce in two 30
inch (76cm) state of the art narrow rows and free up I/2 of the rows per acre/hectare for
additional crop yield &/or soil conservation & soil improvement.
Environmental and ecological performance improvements in FEWS also depend on a
new farming system paradigm centered in the Solar Corridor Farming System Science.
Seminal research by Kremer, et al in the Feature Article and full cover page of Vol.106
Issue 5, Agronomy Journal indicate the potential for greater sequestration of carbon into
the (soil) rhizosphere—observed and potential greater than 25%.
We need extensive fundamental research funded in nearly all supporting bio disciplines
to turn this concept into appropriately designed, developed and deployed
comprehensive site specific Solar Corridor Crop Systems throughout the United States
and world that increase the production of nutrient dense foods and non-nutrient dense
calories that may be converted into renewable biofuels (that do not inject carbon
combustion emissions from the carbon cycle that cycled during the dinosaur era, into
our current carbon cycle).
At one time in the Eighteen Century in America (after the colonists broke through the
Cumberland Gap), the ratio of people to farmland was the most limiting factor in the
FEWS equation, not the ratio of good arable available land to people. Now the efficient
use of available arable land is the more limiting factor in the equation than the human
population to farm it.
Thus the paradigm to address the former situation until now determined the priorities of
the farming system research around the population to land density, water and nutrient
design, and farming system design optimization around other priorities than sunlight.
Now, however, a new paradigm is necessary for quantum improvements in the FEWS
Nexus to prioritize the most efficient use of sunlight itself which must we believe must
become a fundamental locus of NSF research in the FEWS Nexus. This priority in
farming system design will also enable all other research priorities and dissemination
activities in the FEWS Nexus to become more effective and outcome efficient when
implemented within a Solar Corridor Farming Systems Science framework. But this
requires a robust Solar Corridor Farming Systems Science funding.
What was for centuries a most successful paradigm for farming systems FEWS
efficiency improvements is now inadequate to the task. The 21st century agricultural
progress requires a Solar Corridor Farming System. NSF funding of the fundamental
research will reverse this systemic FEWS knowledge gap.