Boosting ecosystem services and farm economics with crop diversity and livestock integration using a validated modeling approach

Agriculture provides essential ecosystem services. Management influences the degree of their trade-offs and synergies. Here, we investigate the potential for ecological intensification of the US Midwest agricultural landscape by comparing at high spatial resolution (4-km-sided grids) over three decades, the impact of 18 diverse management scenarios on multiple services, using a validated crop simulation model. The assessment of numerous system performance criteria that includes productivity stability and resistance to extreme weather events, profitability, soil carbon accumulation, nitrate leaching, and greenhouse gas emissions, helps identify trade-offs and leverage synergies among these services. Increasing crop number and diversity—from a corn monoculture to a corn–soybean–wheat rotation with cover crops—increases productivity stability up to 65%, and a lower nitrogen rate decreases greenhouse gas emissions by 28%, converting scenarios from net sources of carbon to net zero or sinks. Pasture-cattle integration increases resistance to extreme droughts (5% compared to a maize monoculture) and provides greater productivity stability (159%). Increasing crop diversity and reducing nitrogen fertilization are key synergistic management strategies. Our innovative approach across twelve states and covering 46 million hectares, connects geographic scales from local to regional, without data loss and mismatch due to aggregation, quantifying the relative changes in these landscape services that are coincident in time and place to determine potential management additionality and inform decision-making.