New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award Archives

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.

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.

Improving soil health by engineering a rhizobacterium to depend on a plant and stimulate its immune system

Year Awarded 2021

Total award amount $450,000

Location Newark, DE

Grantee Institution University of DelawareUniversity of Deleware

Beneficial microbes in a plant’s rhizosphere—the root-soil interface—increase plant growth and soil health, but not enough is known about how microbes, plants and soil interact and how to ensure microbes do not spread outside of the target soil, which could have unintended consequences. This research is examining whether a laboratory microbe can provide long-lasting pathogen resistance to crops, while also preventing the microbe’s growth, allowing it to be contained to a specific area. This project furthers development of targeted capabilities in crops to help them survive future stresses.

Creating a nitrogen fixing symbiont for cereal crops

Year Awarded 2021

Total award amount $450,000

Location Fargo, ND

Grantee Institution North Dakota State University

Nitrogen fertilizer increases crop yields to meet growing food demands, but because less than 50 percent of applied nitrogen fertilizer is used by plants, the excess fertilizer can threaten environmental and human health. Legume crops can create their own nitrogen through root nodule symbiosis with certain microbes. While research efforts are underway to engineer popular cereal crops to form root nodules, there is not a strong effort to generate a compatible microbial partner for these crops. This research is investigating root nodule symbiosis to develop microbes that can thrive in the cereal microbiome, initiate nodule formation and self-adapt for efficient nitrogen fixation and nutrient exchange with their host plant.

Advancing Water Policy for Agricultural Sustainability

Year Awarded 2021

Total award amount $422,976

Location Davis, CA

Grantee Institution University of California Berkely

Meeting future food needs requires effectively managing scarce groundwater. California is addressing this problem through the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which ensures better groundwater use and management. This research is using the act as a case study to identify policies that enhance water sustainability and minimize regulation costs.

Building our understanding of soil health practice adoption through knowledge co-production with farmers

Year Awarded 2021

FFAR award amount $170,333

Total award amount $208,712

Location Omaha, NE

Matching Funders The Nature Conservancy

Grantee Institution The Nature Conservancy

A promise of big data is the ability to better understand and predict relevant social-ecological phenomena. However, modern machine learning and statistical analyses of big data often fail to embed the human context needed to uncover and predict these phenomena more fully. In this project, researchers are engaging farmers to create regressions trees—a type of decision-making algorithm—that describe individual farm-level decisions to adopt cover crops. This research is improving the efficacy of big data to predict not only when and where cover crops are likely to be adopted on the landscape but also why.

Getting to the Root of the Problem: Fastidious Pathogens

Breakthrough for A Novel Bioassay for Culturing and Characterizing Fastidious Phytopathogens