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FFAR Grant Supports Climate Smart Beef and Dairy Production 

FFAR Grant Improves Chickpeas’ Protein Content & Quality 

Fast Tracking Climate Solutions from Global Germplasm Banks 

Year Awarded  2021

FFAR award amount   $5,000,000

Total award amount   $11,500,000

Location   Texcoco, Mexico

Matching Funders   Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Grantee Institution   CGIAR

The most dangerous impact of climate change is the disruption of global agriculture and food systems through disasters such as drought, heat and flooding. These disruptions, including decreased agricultural production and reduced harvests, are hardest on the approximately half a billion smallholder farmers living on less than two dollars a day. This initiative, led by CGIAR, advances transformative approaches to expand the use of genetic diversity from germplasm banks. The research ultimately aims to develop new climate-smart crop varieties for millions of smallholder farmers worldwide.

Kirchner Food Fellowship Inaugural HBCU Cohort (2021-22) 

Year Awarded  2021

FFAR award amount   $75,000

Total award amount   $273,000

Location   Jacksonville, FL & Washington, D.C.

Matching Funders   The Kirchner Impact Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Burroughs-Wellcome Fund

The Kirchner Fellowship HBCU cohort is part of a $1 million five-year collaboration between the Kirchner Impact Foundation and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research to increase diversity within the venture capital industry by training HBCU students to become agriculture technology venture capitalists. Kirchner HBCU fellows invest capital in early-stage food and agriculture companies applying ground-breaking technologies to provide sustainable solutions to address global food challenges.

Kirchner Food Fellowship Announces Inaugural HBCU Cohort 

Reinvigorating Soybean Yield for 21st Century Agriculture 

Year Awarded  2021

Total award amount   $450,002

Location   Ithaca, NY

Grantee Institution   Cornell University

Soybeans are an important protein source and generate billions in economic growth in the United States. However, soybean yields lag other staple crops due to knowledge gaps concerning hybrid breeding—breeding between genetically distinct parent crops. This research focuses on increasing yields through a two-pronged approach. The team is using biotechnology to introduce a male-sterility/male rescue system that prevents soybean from self-pollinating, along with CRISPR gene editing to enhance soybean floral traits that will attract bees to outcross, or cross different breeds of soybeans. This hybrid breeding system has the potential to introduce genetic diversity, potentially creating trillions of dollars in additional economic and agricultural growth.

Understanding the roots of soil health 

Year Awarded  2021

Total award amount   $449,563

Location   Lexington, KY

Grantee Institution   University of Kentucky

Plant roots are highly efficient at building soil organic matter, suggesting that increasing root growth in cropping systems can improve soil health. However, there are knowledge gaps that limit our ability to take full advantage of soil health benefits that roots could provide—for example, the contributions of living roots vs. decaying root litter to soil organic matter are unclear. This research is determining how living roots and decaying litter affect soil organic matter in low and high fertility soils and evaluating cover crops as a tool to capitalize on the benefits of roots in cropping systems.

Enhancing the sustainability of finfish aquaculture to increase production and public acceptance 

Year Awarded  2021

Total award amount   $450,000

Location   Pullman, WA

Grantee Institution   Washington State University

Salmon and trout farming provides high quality seafood that can meet the growing demand for protein. However, the fish farming industry struggles with fish escaping to breed in the wild and disease management challenges that restrict the industry’s growth. New genome-editing applications hold promise for improving aquaculture sustainability, yet the field is in its infancy. This research is using advanced CRISPR gene editing to produce sterile rainbow trout and develop rapid disease diagnostic tests, which could address challenges the industry currently faces.

Major enhancement of U.S. swine industry preparedness and responses to large-scale infectious foreign animal diseases through harmonizing biosecurity plans and advancing interpretable machine learning 

Year Awarded  2021

FFAR award amount   $449,988

Total award amount   $479,988

Location   Raleigh, NC

Matching Funders   NC State University

Grantee Institution   NC State University

In the U.S., swine producers protect their herds from infectious diseases using biosecurity practices; however, the effectiveness of these practices varies greatly because there is insufficient information about which practices work best for different types of diseases and farms. There is also no central database of farms and their biosecurity plans. This research is partnering with commercial pig producing companies, swine producers and local veterinary health officials to create a secure database of all swine farms in the country, their biosecurity plans and other potential risk factors for disease outbreaks. Using this information, the team can run computer simulations of outbreaks to test which biosecurity practices are most effective at containing infections and protecting farms. The team will combine secure databases and computer simulations into a user-friendly app to enhance biosecurity for farms and prepare for future outbreaks.

Fermentation to unlock the potential of underutilized Indigenous plants – an integrated traditional ecological knowledge innovation toward bio- and techno-functional benefits 

Year Awarded  2021

Total award amount   $449,697

Location   Bozeman, MT

Grantee Institution   Montana State University

The transition from Indigenous food systems to industrialized farming with ultra-processed food continues to threaten native habitats and the health of Indigenous people. As efforts emerge to explore underutilized crops to meet nutritional needs and to sustain local ecosystems, fermentation has uncharted potential to unlock the possibility of Indigenous crops. This research is partnering with smallholder women farmers in Senegal to examine the nutritional and culinary benefits of fermenting Indigenous crops for developing healthy school meal items.