The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative is the recipient of the 2025 Team Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University. Team members from the agronomy department are Mike Castellano, Sotirios Archontoulis, Melissa Miller, Mitchell Baum, Raheel Osman, Isaiah Huber and Amy Cooper.
The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative is a private-public partnership with a vision to provide Iowans with the best nitrogen science in the world for the benefit of productivity, profitability and environmental performance. Nitrogen fertilizer is among the most critical inputs to crop production – and one of the costliest. When applied at the optimum rate, nitrogen boosts productivity and profitability and avoids the environmental costs of excess application. However, finding the optimum application rate can be a challenge: it can vary by more than 100% from field-to-field and year-to-year.
The Iowa Nitrogen Initiative team is working alongside agricultural service providers, farmers and their advisors to design, execute and interpret hundreds of coordinated on-farm, scientifically robust nitrogen rate trials every year. These trials provide data that helps them understand the interactions among genetics, weather, soil type and management, and how those impact cropping system outcomes. This on-farm data infrastructure will allow Iowa State to use the latest advances in super-computing and quantitative modeling to forecast best management practices and demonstrate how Iowa farmers can maximize efficiency of their operations.
This effort began in 2020 when Castellano and Archontoulis began meeting with a small group of external stakeholders. These scientists, farmers and farmer-representatives shared and shaped a vision to collaboratively improve the productivity, profitability and environmental performance of Iowa agriculture. In 2021 and 2022, farmers carried out N fertilizer rate experiments using variable rate technology as a “proof of concept” for what would become the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative.
In 2022, convinced of the program’s value to the state, the Iowa Legislature passed a $1 million appropriation to fund this work through the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, supplementing approximately $400,000 in funding from the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, the Iowa Soybean Association and the Iowa Pork Producers Association. In all, the Iowa Nitrogen Initiative has amassed more than $5 million in funding since 2022.
A colleague stated, “The INI team at Iowa State University exemplifies top-tier collaboration within a university, but also between the university, NGO’s, industry and commercial farmers. It is clear to me that the breakthroughs from the INI team have potential to improve Midwestern U.S. agriculture.”