Organic vs Conventional Farming Impacts on Nitrate Leaching and Crop Yields

Natalia Rogovska's dataset evaluates the impact of organic farming on water quality and crop yields in artificially drained midwestern Mollisols of central Iowa. The 7-year study compares tile nitrate loss and yields under three cropping systems from 2014 to 2020. It comprises monthly subsurface drainage discharge, nitrate concentrations, nitrate-nitrogen mass, and annual harvested grain and biomass yields.

Use Cases

• Comparing nitrate leaching rates between organic and conventional corn-soybean rotations based on monthly flow-weighted nitrate concentration data.
• Assessing the trade-offs between crop productivity and environmental impact using annual grain and biomass yield files.
• Modeling the relationship between precipitation and subsurface drainage discharge using the cumulative monthly precipitation data.
• Analyzing the effect of diversified crop rotations (including oats and alfalfa) on long-term nitrate loss from tile drainage.

Strengths

• Provides a direct 7-year comparison of three distinct cropping systems, including a perennial pasture treatment.
• Includes detailed management metadata (Field Operations.xlsx) describing practices for each crop and year.
• Contains monthly time-series data for key water quality metrics (discharge, concentration, load) across 30 experimental plots.

Limitations

• Column names for core data files are not explicitly listed in the provided metadata.
• The dataset size (134323) is given, but the exact row count for each file is unknown.
• The last update date (2026-03-18) appears to be a future date, which may indicate a metadata error.

Provenance

Source

Natalia Rogovska

Collection Method

Data likely collected from a controlled field experiment comparing three cropping systems on 30 plots.

Time Range

2014 to 2020

Freshness

2026-03-18

Geography

Central Iowa, USA (Midwestern Mollisols)