Building Team Chemistry: The Bigger Picture Behind Cows & Climate
Conor McCabe
Animal Biology Graduate Student, UC Davis
Program Contact
Allison Thomson
athomson@foundationfar.org
Year Awarded 2021
FFAR award amount $79,966
Total award amount $159,933
Location Bloomington, IL
Program AgMission
Matching Funders PepsiCo
Despite the potential environmental benefits of various conservation practices, practice adoption rates remain low. The reasons for the low adoption rates remain unclear although contributing factors could be a lack of information or evidence about success rates for these practices.
Precision Conservation Management (PCM), a conservation program of the Illinois Corn Growers Association (IL Corn) is a farmer-driven effort addressing natural resource concerns on a field-by-field basis. PCM identifies conservation practices that effectively address environmental issues in a financially-viable way. By joining PCM, farmers agree to allow IL Corn to collect and anonymize data in a way that demonstrates how conservation practices affect both farm income and local resource concerns.
Through AgMission, FFAR entered in MOU with PCM to implement the Sustainable Farming Program improvement plan focused on regenerative agriculture in Gothenburg, Nebraska. PCM is coordinating and implementing the Program to identify farmers with high nitrogen application and invite farmers to enroll in the Program. PCM will advise PepsiCo and FFAR of the total aggregate number of acres enrolled on a collective basis by all participating farmers in the Program and of the total number of cover crops acres that each individual Participating Farmer has planted.
This MOU will bolster information and knowledge about the effectiveness of conservation adoption practices. This research supports thriving farms and environmental resilience.
PepsiCo
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