Understanding Tradeoffs in the Context of Farm-Scale Impacts: An Application of Decision-Support Tools for Assessing Climate Smart Agriculture

Climate change and enhanced climate variability will have differing impacts on agricultural producers worldwide. The increasing utilization of precision farming and mobile technologies, together with improvements in data management software, offer expanding opportunities for an integrated data platform that links farm-level management decisions and corresponding behavioral changes to site-specific biophysical data and analytical tools. The goals of this paper are to illustrate how decision support tools can be designed to address the farm-scale economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with changes in climatic conditions and how these farm-scale tools could be linked with regional based analyses to scale up to the information needed for better science-based policy.