LTRAS -- "The World's Youngest 100-year Experiment"

UC Davis's Long Term Research on Agricultural Systems project has been evaluating the sustainability and environmental impact of conventional & alternative agriculture since 1993.

  • June 2004 Listening Session
  • Year 12 Assessment & Planning Process
  • Report of LTRAS Review Team, May 2002                                             Sponsors
  • Visiting LTRAS                                                                                         Staff email & phone numbers
  • Overview                                                                                                  Our 10 cropping systems
  • Newsletters & Publications                                                                      More pictures (most are clickable)
  • Research opportunities at LTRAS                                                            Research Authorization Request
  • LTRAS weather graph(Project REMOTE)                                              LTRAS database input and retrieval

    • Overview

    The Center for Integrated Farming Systems (CIFS) at Russell Ranch near the UC Davis campus is the location of a long-term, cropping systems comparison and various shorter-term experiments, all focused on improving the sustainability and environmental impact of agriculture. The long-term experiment (called LTRAS or Long Term Research on Agricultural Systems) was inspired by results from other long-term experiments showing that short-term trends can be poor predictors of long-term sustainability.

    The primary objective of this project is to understand the relationships between sustainability and external inputs. The 10 cropping systems in the main experiment differ mainly in how much irrigation water or fertilizer (particularly nitrogen) is used.  One system follows organic farming guidelines and several include nitrogen-fixing legume cover crops.  Sustainability will be determined from long-term trends in yield, profitability, efficiency in use of limited resources (such as water or energy), and environmental impact, such as leaching of nitrate or pesticides.  Changes in key soil properties, such as organic matter, weeds, pH, salinity, and economic indicators are monitored to see whether any of these are good predictors for long-term sustainability.  Long-term research is an essential part of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences commitment to agricultural sustainability (“Why Long Term Research").

    While acting as an "early warning system" to detect gradual but potentially harmful long-term trends, the project also provides important short-term contributions to agricultural science at the CIFS.  An important example is the recent decision by the Sustainable Agriculture Farming Systems (SAFS) team to relocate to the LTRAS site to carry out research on how reduced tillage practices might be incorporated into conventional, organic, and low-input approaches. New projects being discussed include work on other types of farming systems in California including:  dairy-forage systems, market gardening, woody perennials like orchards and vineyards, restoration ecology, and bio-fuels production.  Currently, plans are being made to improve the current cropping system mix in the core, long-term experiment (CIFS Overview).   The CIFS is primarily a research facility, but we also contribute to U. C. Davis’ extension and teaching missions by hosting field days, class field trips, undergraduate interns and graduate student research.
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    LTRAS Staff

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    Major current supporters of research at LTRAS include:

    Those who provided significant support to help us get started include:

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    LTRAS Newsletters

    We recommend downloading the newsletters as PDF files, which can be viewed or printed using Adobe Acrobat Reader Web (HTML) versions of some issues are also available, but may differ from PDF versions.