TECHNOLOGY EXTRAPOLATION DOMAINS FOR BRAZIL: OPTIMIZING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH RESOURCES
Felipe A. A. Soares & Fabio R. Marin
Given the high cost and time to evaluate new field studies or replicate existing technologies to other regions for commercial production in such a big country like in Brazil, the TED framework approach is a useful approach to optimize the time and resources used in agricultural research. We found weather and soil databases useful and viable option for the generation of homogeneous zones maps to different crops and regions.
We were able to optimize the number of sites in Brazil to represent a large area in a few TEDs, without losing the variations of weather and soil conditions of a crop, and facilitate the technology transfer to different Brazilian regions. A low number of TEDs are needed to represent a large part of the acreage of sugarcane (32 TEDs to coverage 50.8% of area), maize (21 TEDs to coverage 50.5% of area) or soybean (17 TEDs to coverage 50.0% of acreage).
This study can help several areas of the agricultural sector, such as assistance in new research that works in areas with large scales, areas not explored yet, or areas that do not have climate and soil data. The shapefile delineating the TED spatial framework for Brazil is available for downloading here.
