Integrating farmers’ perspectives into Earth system model development: Interviews with end users in the Willamette Valley, Oregon to guide actionable science

Abstract

This paper analyzes findings from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 31 farmers in the Willamette Valley in which farmers were asked about their needs for climate data and about the usability of a range of outputs from the Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2) for their soil management practices. Findings indicate that climate and soils data generated from CESM and other Earth system models (ESMs), despite their coarse spatial scale resolutions, can inform farmers' long-term decisions, but that the data would be more usable if the outputs were provided in a format that allowed farmers to choose the variables and thresholds relevant to their particular needs and if ESMs incorporated farmer practices including residue removal, cover cropping, and tillage levels into the model operations so that farmers could better understand the impacts of their decisions. Findings also suggest that although there is a significant gap in the spatial resolution at which these global ESMs generate data and the spatial resolution needed by farmers to make most decisions, farmers are adept at making scalar adjustments to apply coarse resolution data to the specifics of their own farm's microclimate. Thus, our findings suggest that, to support agricultural decision-making, development priorities for ESMs should include developing better representations of agricultural management practices within the models and creating interactive data dashboards or platforms.