Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) aims at improving farm productivity and profitability in a sustainable way while building resilience to climate change and mitigating the impacts of agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions. The idea behind this concept is that informed management decision can help achieve these goals. In that matter, Precision Agriculture goes hand-in-hand with CSA. The Colorado State University Laboratory of Precision Agriculture (CSU-PA) is conducting research on CSA practices that can help increase crop productivity, profitability, build resilience to climate change and mitigate the effect of agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions. Nitrogen fertilizer is the most widely used nutrient on the planet and the most important anthropogenic contributor of nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural sources. With increasing pressure to produce more food globally, many economies have been increasing nitrogen consumption. The global nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) estimates are in the proximity of 40%, which indicates that a lion share of nitrogen is lost in the biosphere every year. For farmers, to practice climate smart agriculture mandates enhancement of NUE. Long-term research at Colorado State University since 1997 has developed and demonstrated site-specific management zones as an effective tool for CSA. This research observed a reduction of up to 46% in nitrogen loadings without impairing grain yields. Coupling site-specific management zones with more recent innovations such as active proximal sensors enables the management of both, macro- and micro-variability in farm-fields and may result in further improvement of nitrogen use efficiency and reductions in N loadings in the biosphere. Increasing NUE with such advanced decision making process decreases the dependence on fossil fuel costly conversion of N2 to urea and reduces the unused amounts of nitrates in the field contributing to N2O emissions. Improving NUE through precision agricultural techniques has great potential to mitigate climate change. On the other hand, it is expected that most of the impacts of climate change will be related to water. At CSU-PA, research is also being conducted to better understand the mechanisms determining the basis of precision irrigation. It has been demonstrated that spatial variability of soil water content exists even in leveled fields. Addressing this variability using precision irrigation could help farmers build resilience to climate changes by increasing their water productivity. Overall, research at CSU-PA confirms that more informed decision can help achieve the goals of CSA.
