2004 STEEP PROGRESS REPORT RESEARCH PROJECT TITLE: Strategies for Profitable Conservation Tillage Farming in the Pacific Northwest INVESTIGATORS: Doug Young (PI), School of Economic Sciences, WSU. Cooperators are Herb Hinman and Hong Wang, School of Economic Sciences, WSU; John Burns, Bruce Frazier, Rob Gallagher, Robert Papendick, William Pan, William Schillinger, Joe Yenish, Richard Koenig, and Hans Kok, Dept. of Crop & Soil Sci,, WSU; Dave Huggins and Frank Young, USDA-ARS, Pullman; Dennis Roe, USDA-NRCS. INTERIM REPORT PROJECT OBJECTIVES: 1. To evaluate the economic feasibility of oil seeds, food legumes, and spring grains in conservation tillage crop rotations. 2. To identify equitable farmland leases for conservation tillage farming systems. 3. To assess the potential for precision weed control to cut costs in conservation tillage. 4. To identify effective financial risk management strategies for adopting conservation tillage. 5. To disseminate the results on profitable strategies for conservation farming to growers, policy makers and others. KEY WORDS: Conservation tillage, crop rotations, economics, risk STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: The STEEP advisory committee communicated several research priorities for fiscal year 2002 proposals which relate to concerns about the economic viability of conservation tillage systems. These include the feasibility of various alternative crops, strategies for improving farmland leases, and concerns about grass weed control costs. Surveys also show growers are worried about the financial risks of no-till drill acquisition. This project will provide economic analysis on all four of these issues. Long term collaboration between the PI and scientist cooperators ensures that economic results will be based on a foundation of quality biological and physical data. This collaboration will improve the value of the results to the regions farmers. Responding to growers priority research requests on key barriers to adoption of conservation tillage in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) will reduce the long run economic and environmental losses from soil erosion in the region. ZONE OF INTEREST: Dryland farming agro-climatic zones with 10- 22 in/yr av. ppt. ABSTRACT OF RESEARCH FINDINGS: No-till continuous spring grains are clearly an environmental success. Modeling has indicated that these systems can reduce predicted dust emissions during severe wind events by 94% compared to winter wheat-fallow (WW-F). However, no-till hard red spring wheat (HRSW) at Ralston and at the Horse Heaven Hills have lagged WW-F by about $40/ac and have shown more economic variability. No-till spring crop rotations with soft white spring wheat (SWSW) at Ritzville showed equivalent average profitability with WW-F , but still exhibited more year-to-year risk.