Across four continents, Rattan Lal, a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), has pioneered ways to reduce deforestation, control soil erosion, and enrich soil, leading to sustained or higher crop yields.

Agricultural practices that Lal has helped mainstream are now at the heart of efforts to improve agricultural systems in the tropics and globally, making agriculture part of the solution to environmental problems.

“My source of inspiration has been the challenges farmers of the world face, especially the resource-poor and small landholders. The majority of these are women farmers,” Lal said.

“Their struggle in trying to make a living from degraded and depleted soils under harsh and uncertain climate conditions is the driving force and source of my motivation to find land-based, natural solutions for them.”

Without damaging the environment, Lal’s agricultural strategies increase the soil’s ability to grow food, meeting an ever-expanding demand. At the same time, those techniques help slow the rate of climate change.

Plants grown on healthy soil can best take in climate change-causing carbon dioxide from the air when those plants perform photosynthesis.

In 1997, Lal co-wrote the first documented report showing how restoring degraded soil could also defend against rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

“Our entire Buckeye community congratulates Dr. Lal on receiving this incredible honor,” said Ohio State President Kristina Johnson. “It is fitting recognition for a lifetime spent uplifting humankind on a vast scale. As a scientist, mentor and colleague, he is an inspiring example that one person with vision and dedication truly can change the world.”

Lal was chosen for the Arrell Award because of the overall global impact of his career and how important his work is—and will continue to be—in dealing with climate change, said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

Lal’s work has become “fundamental to the science community” and is “applicable to small-holder farmers around the world,” he said.

“As one of the world’s foremost soil scientists, Professor Lal’s decades of work have helped advance knowledge and shape practices in how to conserve one of the world’s most important and fragile resources.”

Around the world, Lal has promoted agricultural techniques including eliminating plowing, retaining crop residue left after harvest, planting cover crops, minimizing the use of chemical fertilizers by reducing losses, and setting aside some land and water for nature, rather than for agriculture or other purposes. Each practice comes at low cost, affordable even to farmers in the developing world.

In the early part of a career spanning five decades, Lal served as a soil physicist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. There, he helped in efforts to restore the productivity of soils in Africa and throughout the tropics.

“Perhaps no single individual has contributed more to the knowledge base of African agriculture,” wrote Ronnie Coffman, a Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University and one of four scientists who nominated Lal for the Arrell Award.

“He is most certainly a researcher who has advanced the understanding of food production with a significant positive impact on society.”

While growing up on a small farm in northern India, Lal first became interested in healthy soil’s potential.

Experiencing frequent droughts and brutally hot temperatures, Lal came to realize that soil can play a critical role in being a buffer against harsh climate conditions by holding onto water and nutrients. Even in bad years, farmers could survive, but that survival depended on the health of the soil.

While his elder siblings worked on the farm, Lal was the only one in his family who went to school, the only one who learned to read and write. That fueled his intense drive to make the most of his education and research to help farmers and influence how agricultural land is managed.

“Dr. Lal has been extremely successful in influencing sustainable agricultural practices around the world, and the ripple effects of his work come, in part, through those he has mentored—just over a thousand undergraduates and graduates, postdocs, and visiting scholars,” said Cathann A. Kress, Ohio State vice president for agricultural administration and dean of CFAES.

“He has brought about a paradigm shift in sustainable soil management. His approach recognizes the need for increasing food production with the necessity of improving the environment.”

For the Arrell Global Food Innovation Award, Lal will receive $76,000, which he plans to donate for soil science research and education.

In June, Lal was named the 2020 recipient of the World Food Prize. A faculty member at Ohio State for 33 years, Lal in 2019 became the first Ohio State scientist and the first soil scientist to ever receive the Japan Prize.

He was listed by Thomson Reuters as among the top 1% of most-cited scientists in agriculture for 2014–2019 and among the world’s most influential scientific minds in 2015. Lal was recognized for his contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Lal first came to Ohio State to work on his doctorate in soil science, which he completed in 1968.

The guiding philosophy for his work has long been that the well-being of humanity starts in the ground.

“Sustainable management of soil and agriculture is critical,” Lal said. “The future of humanity and of the planet depends on the health of the soil.”

The study has taken an initial glimpse at these skirmishes in a sample of Ohio homes, offering the first known data on joint consumer decision-making around household temperature settings and potential effects of those actions on energy use.

The study identified three types of interactions around thermostat settings: agreement, compromise and conflict.

The research also found that men were more likely to report their interactions with other household members around the thermostat as compromises or agreements, and women were a bit more likely to describe their interactions as conflicts. These differences could relate to individuals’ perceptions of the nature of the interactions or imply that in this war story, women don’t typically prevail.

“It’s possible that women are losing the thermostat battle,” said Nicole Sintov, lead author of the study and assistant professor of behavior, decision making and sustainability at The Ohio State University. “The data hint toward that being what’s possibly going on here.

“A woman might construe as a conflict what a man might construe as a compromise. That could be an alternate explanation and it’s something we want to explore in future work,” she said. “The fact that we also found that women in our study were uncomfortable more often suggests that the thermal environment was not catering to their needs.”

The study is published today (Nov. 13) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Sintov’s work focuses on understanding consumer behavior around energy use – say, installing solar panels on a house or buying a hybrid car – by accounting for the fact that in many cases, these decisions follow discussions among two or more adults. And after those discussions, do resulting decisions trend toward energy consumption or conservation? And what role, if any, does gender play in all of this?

“Here, we’re using the thermostat as an example. This is an everyday behavior. Most households have one thermostat and multiple occupants, and through some process of negotiation – because we all have differing thermal comfort preferences – a thermostat setting gets chosen,” she said.

“That has not been examined before: how people interact around an energy decision in a household. This is a starting point.”

Individuals from 112 households in central Ohio completed a survey and provided daily diary entries for at least one week, and ideally two weeks, about thermostat-related decisions and behaviors. One person was selected to represent all occupants in the home, and at least two people lived in each household – which had to have an adjustable thermostat.

The survey measured individuals’ preferences for warm or cool environments, attention to monthly energy bills and whether the home had a programmable thermostat – and if so, whether it was programmed.

(In related news, the results revealed that having the thermostat programmed had no bearing on whether a household was making adjustments to the thermostat. “It’s counterintuitive,” Sintov said. “You’d assume they’d stick to the program and make fewer adjustments.”)

Each night, participants were reminded to complete their diaries, answering two questions: “Did you or anyone else in your household adjust the thermostat in your home today? What adjustments were made and by whom?” and “Others in your home may have different thoughts about how warm or cool it is in the house. Tell us about any related discussions you had.”

Three interaction types surfaced in the analysis: agreement, when two or more occupants agreed on their comfort level and any related decision regarding the thermostat; compromise, when the interaction began with disagreement but resulted in agreement; and conflict, when occupants disagreed at the beginning and end of the discussion.

In addition to finding that men tended to report more agreements and compromises while women reported marginally more conflicts, the study revealed that thermostat adjustments tended to be more likely to occur after agreements and compromises, but conflicts were associated with fewer temperature changes.

“It seems like if you disagree with someone on thermal comfort and what you want to do to moderate that, the thermostat is less likely to get changed,” Sintov said. “I’m not here to say that’s a good or bad thing. It suggests there’s a stalemate for some reason that we don’t know. It could be that one person puts on a sweater to warm up while another opens a window to cool down.

“Alternatively, one person might exert authority over the thermostat to cater to their needs while other household members’ needs are sidelined. There are some negatives for those involved in conflicts – because you have two or more people who are already uncomfortable, and you also now have interpersonal conflict, which is not pleasant.”

Sintov noted that in this work, and in most of the limited literature on this topic, only households occupied by men and women are represented. Hence, she said, it is unclear how results may translate to other gender identities, and this is an area future research should examine.

What was not resolved in this study is whether the adjustments made to thermostats were energy consuming or energy saving – the responses were not specific enough to gauge those effects, Sintov said.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Additional Ohio State co-authors were Lee White and Hugh Walpole of the School of Environment and Natural Resources.

This year’s bloom is expected to measure 7.5 on the severity index, but could range between 6 and 9. An index above 5 indicates blooms having greater impact. The severity index is based on a bloom’s biomass – the amount of algae – over a sustained period.

The largest blooms occurred in 2011, with a severity index of 10, and 2015, at 10.5. Last year’s bloom had a severity index of 3.6, while 2017 was 8.0.

The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory and Ohio Sea Grant hosted NOAA’s annual HABs Forecast for western Lake Erie today.

Lake Erie blooms consist of cyanobacteria – also called blue-green algae – that are capable of producing the liver toxin microcystin, which poses a risk to human and wildlife health. Such blooms may result in higher costs for cities and local governments that need to treat drinking water, prevent people from enjoying fishing, swimming, boating and visiting the shoreline, and harm the region’s vital summer tourism economy. These effects will vary in location and severity due to winds that may concentrate or dissipate the bloom.

“Communities along Lake Erie rely upon clean, healthy water to fuel their community’s well-being and economic livelihoods,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, acting director of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. “This forecast provides timely and trusted science-based information to water managers and public health officials so they can better anticipate blooms, mitigate impacts and reduce future outbreaks.”

The size of a bloom isn’t necessarily an indication of how toxic it is. For example, the toxins in a large bloom may not be as concentrated as in a smaller bloom. Each algal bloom is unique in terms of size, toxicity and, ultimately, its impact to local communities. NOAA is actively developing tools to detect and predict how toxic blooms will be.

This year, the lake temperature has remained relatively cool due to the higher-than-average rainfall in the region, so the bloom is not expected to start until late July when the water temperature reaches 65 to 70 degrees. This contrasts with 2018, when exceptionally warm weather at the beginning of June caused an early start.

Calm winds in July, especially in western Lake Erie, tend to allow the algal toxins to concentrate, making blooms more harmful. The bloom typically peaks in the western part of the lake in September. Most of the rest of the lake will not be affected.

“This extremely wet spring has shed light on the movement of nutrients from the land into Lake Erie,” said Christopher Winslow, director of Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory. “Despite the predicted size of this year’s bloom, portions of the lake will be algae free during the bloom season and the lake will remain a key asset for the state. Ongoing research continues to help us understand bloom movement and toxin production, and remains vital to providing our water-treatment facilities with the tools, technology and training they need to keep our drinking water safe.”

The Lake Erie forecast is part of a NOAA ecological forecasting initiative that aims to deliver accurate, relevant, timely and reliable ecological forecasts directly to coastal resource managers and the public. In addition to the early season projections from NOAA and its partners, NOAA also issues HAB bulletins twice a week during the bloom season.

NOAA continues to expand the use of satellite data into its Lake Erie Harmful Algal Bloom Forecast System, which is helping improve the accuracy of bloom forecast products. The data comes from the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite, which has instruments that measure coastal water color and have proven to be especially useful for detecting and tracking algal blooms. NOAA is also continuing to work with its academic partners to refine and improve the models used to develop the forecasts.

“This spring brought regular, heavy rainfall to the Maumee River watershed which would normally carry a lot of nutrients into the lake,” said Richard Stumpf, NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science’s lead scientist for the seasonal Lake Erie bloom forecast. “However, due to the amount of rain this year, farmers were unable to plant their fields, which reduced the nutrient concentration. That, combined with higher than normal lake levels, presents an opportunity to test the accuracy of our models.” 

Nutrient load data for the forecasts came from Heidelberg University. The various forecast models are run by NOAA’s NCCOS, the University of Michigan, North Carolina State University, LimnoTech, Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. Field observations used for monitoring and modeling are done in partnership with NOAA’s Ohio River Forecast Center, NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory, University of Toledo and Ohio EPA.