An Undergraduate Course entitled “Use of Crop Models for Cropping Systems Design” was organized by The Department of Crop Production from Faculty of Agronomy at Univesidad de la República in Uruguay during the week of May 26-30, 2025 at Estación Experimental Dr. Mario A. Cassinoni, Paysandú, Uruguay. This Undergraduate Course was attended by 36 students from Agricultural Engineering. The course was coordinated and taught by Dr. Gonzalo Rizzo with assistance provided by MSc. Santiago Alvarez and MSc. student Gian Franco Rodríguez.
Participants learned about the processes that regulate crop development and growth and the interaction of crops with soil water. This was a hands-on course in which participants had to quality control weather data, and prepare the weather and soil input files to run Cropping System Model (CSM) of the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT). Students explored concepts and approaches to calibrate cultivars for different crops. However, the main focus of this course was to use DSSAT as a tool to support agronomic decisions. Therefore, the workshop participants worked on questions that have to be answered when designing a cropping system or managing a single crop, and then used DSSAT to find answer to those question via analysis of CSM output.
This course was a follow up to the course that was held in 2024 at the Estación Experimental Dr. Mario A. Cassinoni, Paysandú and organized by the Univesidad de la República in Uruguay.
