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Enabling sustainable soil and water management through microbe-powered RF soil sensing 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $450,000

Location   Santa Cruz, CA

Grantee Institution   University of California Santa Cruz

Monitoring soil properties is an effective way to decrease resource consumption while maintaining crop yields. However, most farms do not use sensor data to guide soil inputs and irrigation, primarily because traditional sensor networks are costly and require significant labor to install and maintain. This research is creating a new technique for agricultural soil sensing that pairs wireless underground tags with an aboveground mobile reader.

Award Winner

Agroecosystem responses to climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity in the United States and Latin America 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $446,474

Location   Syracuse, NY

Grantee Institution   University of Florida

Climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity are three of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. To address these, agroecology stresses the importance of promoting biodiversity conservation and food sovereignty in our food system. This research uses interdisciplinary, multiregional, and community-based approaches to examine the impacts of environmental change on biodiversity and human livelihoods, and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services in rural and urban agricultural landscapes.

Award Winner

Targeted On-Demand Disease Management Practices/Therapies 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $450,000

Location   Raleigh, NC

Grantee Institution   NC State University

Increased agricultural trade, human movement, rapid pathogen evolution and a changing climate make many of the tactics used to combat pathogens impossible to implement. This research is developing an ecological community-level understanding of how plant pathogenic bacteria survive and compete in agricultural microbiomes and aims to develop new management and diagnostic tools and host/microbiome interaction models.

Award Winner

Establishing Predictive Genomics to Improve Pollinator Health 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $449,816

Location   West Lafayette, IN

Grantee Institution   Purdue University

Most bee breeding methods were developed almost a century ago and do not use genome-enabled breeding techniques. This research program sets out to work directly with bee breeders to develop and evaluate genome-enabled breeding techniques while producing a large genomic database for honeybees across the country.

Award Winner

Establish Power-to-Food by Cultivating and Processing Hydrogenotrophic Single Cells to Design New Sustainable Protein Supply Chains Without Arable Land 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $430,485

Location   Amherst, MA

Grantee Institution   University of Massacheusetts Amherst

Alternative sustainable protein supply chains not reliant on traditional agriculture are needed for future food security. This research is studying high-protein bacteria that use hydrogen as an energy source, which can be produced sustainably and using less land than traditional agriculture.

Award Winner

Holistic Irrigation Strategies for Climate-Smart Agriculture 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $448,339

Location   College Station, TX

Grantee Institution   Texas A&M University

Currently, agriculture decision support tools for water management are unsuitable for climate-smart agriculture because they mostly serve the single purpose of increasing crop productivity. This research is developing water management strategies that not only optimize crop productivity, but also increase carbon sequestration, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote soil health and resilience.

Award Winner

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.

Award Winner

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.

Award Winner

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.

Award Winner

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.

Award Winner