WASHINGTON (February 11, 2021)— Agriculture accounts for nearly ten percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US. A shift in agricultural management practices can play a key role in mitigating climate change. The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) awarded a $748,836 Seeding Solutions grant to the American Farmland Trust (AFT) to track various soil health practices using geospatial tools to determine which practices can best reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hudson Carbon and Dagan both provided matching funds for a $1,513,612 total investment.
Farmers and ranchers are facing increasing challenges from climate change, such as more frequent droughts and flooding, which can devastate crops. Extreme weather imposes drastic changes that ultimately threaten food security. The future of sustainable food and agriculture relies on deploying climate-smart solutions. One such solution is sustaining soil health, which is crucial for enhancing the profitability of farmers and ranchers and reducing the impacts of climate change. Nationally, about 50-70 percent of soil is depleted. However, sustaining soil health provides a solution not only to reducing the impacts of climate change, but also enhancing the profitability of farmers and ranchers.
The grant’s research team, led by AFT’s Climate Initiative Director, Dr. Jennifer Moore, is developing a data-driven decision platform that can be used at various capacities to analyze current global warming potential (GWP) for major agronomic systems with the ability to prioritize key areas within states or regions. The decision platform is being built by Dagan’s Operational Tillage Information System (OpTIS) and Denitrification-Decomposition (DNDC) modeling tools. Researchers are targeting four diverse farming systems cultivating a variety of crops, in locations across the country, to investigate the climate and ecological benefits of soil health best practices. To ensure best management practices, researchers are using local climate and soil information to develop a county-level baseline collection of GWP estimates for the top agronomic crops for several states in the Pacific, Northwest and Northeast.
“Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing farmers, ranchers and scientists today,” said FFAR Executive Director, Dr. Sally Rockey. “At FFAR, we believe that agriculture can be a solution to climate change. This project is an excellent example of how agricultural research can be leveraged to provide farmers with the tools and technologies they need to adapt soil health practices that are profitable and beneficial to the environment.”