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How the New Climate Bill Would Reduce Emissions
The bill’s big tax incentives for low-carbon technologies could allow the country to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
Biden-Harris Administration Announces Historic Investment in Partnerships for 70 Climate-Smart Commodities and Rural Projects
WASHINGTON, Sept. 14, 2022 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today that the Biden-Harris Administration through the U.S. Department of Agriculture is investing up to $2.8 billion in 70 selected projects under the first pool of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding opportunity, with projects from the second funding pool to be announced later this year.
USDA Launches First Phase of Soil Carbon Monitoring Efforts through Conservation Reserve Program Initiative
Biden-Harris Administration Announces an Additional $325 Million in Pilot Projects through Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, for Total Investment of $3.1 Billion | Natural Resources Conservation Service
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today that USDA will invest an additional $325 million for 71 projects in the second Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding pool.
Ag Data Commons | Providing Central Access to USDA’s Open Research Data
Ecological Data Services, LLC
The DASHI Project – Agricultural Informatics Lab
Texas Blackland Prairie Crop Yields
This visualization was created using data from the Gridded National Soil Survey Geographic Database via Microsoft’s Planetary Computer. Related blog
Get Involved | NSF NEON | Open Data to Understand our Ecosystems
In this section: Papers & Publications Published research related the NEON project. If you would like us to add a paper, please contact us at neonscience@BattelleEcology.org
Home | NSF NEON | Open Data to Understand our Ecosystems
The Transformative Partnership Platform on Agroecology
pspan style="font-size:16px;"A joint initiative to address critical knowledge gaps about agroecological transitions, to provide evidence to underpin advocacy and inform policy makers and donors about the potential of agroecological approaches to foster innovation that can sustainably improve livelihood and landscape resilience. /span/p
Enterprise Neurosystem
Central Intelligence Platform
This will be the core framework where the AI models reside and operate. This workstream proposes a self-describing digital asset catalog as a foundation for community use, and will eventually lead to a cross-correlation AI engine for deeper pattern analysis.
Secure AI Connectivity Fabric
This track is building secure connectivity between AI models, data resources and the cross-correlation engine. It will use application layer messaging techniques found in other open source projects, in conjunction with a new policy engine
Agriculture data sharing: Conceptual tools in the technical toolbox and implementation in the Open Ag Data Alliance framework
There are several composable, reusable concepts for designing privacy-focused systems in agriculture.
Data privacy concepts can be deployed via the OADA framework.
Clear privacy design patterns exis...
USDA ERS - U.S. Agricultural Baseline Projections
The Agricultural Baseline Database's Visualization tool allows users to illustrate the 10-year projection data, and is updated annually in November. The Visualization tool covers projections for major U.S. field crops (corn, sorghum, barley, oats, wheat, rice, soybeans, and upland cotton) and livestock (beef, pork, poultry and eggs, and dairy) commodities.
Protect Your Investments in the Soil: USDA’s Modernized Lab Data Mart Website Provides User-Friendly, State-of-the-Art Data | Natural Resources Conservation Service
The newly updated Lab Data Mart website, also known as the National Cooperative Lab Characterization Database, brings valuable soil data in an interactive map.
Just Because You’ve Been Successfully No-Tilling & Seeding Cover Crops for 17 Years Doesn’t Mean You’ve Got to Forgo Cashing in on Carbon Sequestration Payments
When it comes to carbon sequestration payments, the major frustration we hear from many no-tillers is that they don’t believe they’ll be accepted due to the “additionality” requirements of some programs.
Regenerative Research: Carbon Markets
Issue Summary: Global carbon markets are starting to mature as fears of greenwashing are being realized. Meanwhile, the scale and effectiveness of the carbon market industry’s role in regenerative agriculture is still un...
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Can farmers fight climate change? New U.S. law gives them billions to try
Cutting emissions from fertilizer and livestock will be key, scientists say
$25 billion to expand and safeguard forests and promote farming practices thought to be climate friendly.
Those include no-till agriculture and “cover crops,” plants cultivated simply to protect the soil. Researchers, environmental groups, and the farm industry agree that paying and training farmers to adopt those measures will improve soil health and water and air quality. “I think pretty much everyone across the board is pretty happy,” says Haley Leslie-Bole, a climate policy analyst with the World Resources Institute. But how much these practices will slow global warming is unclear.
“It’s probably going to be positive, but how positive we don’t really know yet,” says Jonathan Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. A major factor is whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spends the money on the practices most likely to have climate benefits. Another challenge is measuring and quantifying the reductions, a task complicated by the great diversity of U.S. land and farming practices and the complex biogeochemistry of the carbon cycle.
The new bill expands funding for those programs, allowing more farmers to get a per-acre payment for a wide range of activities expected to reduce or sequester carbon emissions, including no-till and cover crops.
Those interactions vary enormously with soil type and environmental conditions, and it can take years for the impact of changes in crop types or farming techniques to emerge.
Another reputedly climate-friendly practice is no-till farming, which is growing in popularity. By not plowing fields, farmers protect the topsoil from erosion. They also save on diesel, which benefits their bottom line and reduces carbon dioxide emissions. Crop yields can increase as carbon accumulates in the upper root zone, enriching the soil and helping it retain moisture.
Many climate advocates say the most cost-effective way to help the climate through agriculture is simply to farm less land and raise less livestock. That means persuading farmers not to convert grasslands or other carbon-rich lands to row crops such as corn and soybeans. But the bill includes no additional funding for USDA’s main program for protecting sensitive private land, the Conservation Reserve Program.
the bill also includes a special pot of $300 million for USDA and partners to collect field data on carbon sequestered and emissions reduced—data could help target future climate efforts more effectively, he and others say. “That’s really significant,” says Alison Eagle, an agricultural scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “This investment can help direct the next set of funding to the right place.”
The new money will expand on grants USDA recently funded, such as a 5-year project Ellen Herbert, an ecologist with Ducks Unlimited, is leading to measure carbon in wetlands across the central United States. She hopes to learn whether restoring wetlands or protecting adjacent land boosts the carbon they store. To resolve that, they’re taking unusually deep soil cores, delving to 1 meter or more. “It’s sometimes like trying to pound an aluminum tube through a brick,” Herbert says.
Also in the Midwest, agro-ecosystem scientist Bruno Basso of Michigan State University and colleagues are tracking how improved fertilizer strategies can lessen nitrous oxide emissions. In addition, they’re measuring soil carbon tucked away by perennial grasses planted on less productive parts of fields from North Dakota to Mississippi. Those grasses can be harvested for biofuels or hay—as well as cash for the carbon left by the roots—which perks up farmers’ ears, Basso says. “I say listen, you know what, there is a new crop and it’s called carbon.”
Data from the three projects will improve biogeochemical models that estimate daily fluxes of key greenhouse gases from agricultural land. One such model is DayCent, used by the Environmental Protection Agency and others for the national greenhouse gas inventory. “The accounting is not glamorous,” Himes says, “but if you don’t get that right, nothing else works.”
What are nature-based solutions?
Nature had its day in the sun last November at the global climate talks in Glasgow.
The Underground Retail Movement
How Precision Soil Input Recommendations Deliver Greater Customer Returns
Mycorrhizae
Not everyone knows that plant roots have symbiotic relationships with certain types of fungi. These mycorrhizae help the plant absorb nutrients from the soil that are otherwise difficult to obtain and often provide some protection against soil-borne diseases. In exchange the plant suppliesfood to the fungus. To learn more about mycorrhizae, read this article...
Soil respiration
Diversifying Anaerobic Respiration Strategies to Compete in the Rhizosphere
The rhizosphere is the interface between plant roots and soil where intense, varied interactions between plants and microbes influence plants' health and growth through their influence on biochemical cycles, such as the carbon, nitrogen, and iron cycles. The rhizosphere is also a changing environment where oxygen can be rapidly limited and anaerobic zones can be established. Microorganisms successfully colonize the rhizosphere when they possess specific traits referred to as rhizosphere competence. Anaerobic respiration flexibility contributes to the rhizosphere competence of microbes. Indeed, a wide range of compounds that are available in the rhizosphere can serve as alternative terminal electron acceptors during anaerobic respiration such as nitrates, iron, carbon compounds, sulfur, metalloids, and radionuclides. In the presence of multiple terminal electron acceptors in a complex environment such as the rhizosphere and in the absence of O2, microorganisms will first use the most energetic option to sustain growth. Anaerobic respiration has been deeply studied, and the genes involved in anaerobic respiration have been identified. However, aqueous environment and paddy soils are the most studied environments for anaerobic respiration, even if we provide evidence in this review that anaerobic respiration also occurs in the plant rhizosphere. Indeed, we provide evidence by performing a BLAST analysis on metatranscriptomic data that genes involved in iron, sulfur, arsenate ...
Hello Nature | Innovative Leader in Biostimulants and Organic Fertilizers
Quality, passion, innovation, and respect for Nature have always been the values that guide us. Present today in over 80 countries.
Lettuce Soil Microbiome Modulated by an L-α-Amino Acid-Based Biostimulant
Maintenance of soil health is of foremost importance to sustain and increase crop productivity, while meeting the demand of a rising global population. Soil microbiome is gaining increasing attention as a modulator of soil health. Microbial communities confer traits to the soil as a living organism, which functions holistically and conforms part of the plant holobiont, reassembling the human-gut axis. Novel strategies in biostimulant development advocate for modulation of the native soil microbiome and the reinforcement of microbial networking to outpace pathogen inclusion. Consequently, we hypothesize that Terramin® Pro may promotes beneficial microorganisms, depending on the native microbiota of soil, which would lead to an improvement of crop performance indicators. We proposed a soil microbiome-based approach to characterize the effect of an L-α-amino acid based biostimulant (Terramin® Pro) on resulting plant phenotypes in lettuce cultivars (Lactuca sativa L.) to address our hypothesis. First, product application promoted Actinobacteria group in assorted soils with different track of agronomic practices. Secondly, biostimulant application improved chlorophyll content in particular soils deviating from standard conditions, i.e., sick or uncultivated ones. Specially, we observed that product application at 30 L ha−1 improved lettuce phenotype, while potentially promoted entomopathogenic fungi (Beauveria and Metarhizium spp.) and suppressed other lettuce disease-related fungi (Olpidium spp.) in nematode-infested soils. Further investigations could deepen into Terramin® Pro as a sustainable prebiotic strategy of soil indigenous microbiota, through in-house microbiome modulation, even in additional crops.
Rhizosphere - Wikipedia
The rhizosphere is the narrow region of soil or substrate that is directly influenced by root secretions and associated soil microorganisms known as the root microbiome. Soil pores in the rhizosphere can contain many bacteria and other microorganisms that feed on sloughed-off plant cells, termed rhizodeposition, and the proteins and sugars released by roots, termed root exudates. This symbiosis leads to more complex interactions, influencing plant growth and competition for resources. Much of the nutrient cycling and disease suppression by antibiotics required by plants, occurs immediately adjacent to roots due to root exudates and metabolic products of symbiotic and pathogenic communities of microorganisms. The rhizosphere also provides space to produce allelochemicals to control neighbours and relatives.
Soil and Intercrop Ecology - The Land Institute
Soil Ecology studies bringing critical soil functions of natural systems into agriculture, such as nutrient retention, carbon sequestration, and soil regeneration.
SBIR/STTR FY23 Phase II RFA Technical Assistance Webinar
NIFA's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs offer competitively awarded grants to qualified small businesses to support high quality research related to important scientific problems and opportunities in agriculture that could lead to significant public benefits. In this webinar, program staff will provide an overview of the program’s Phase II and discuss details included in the Request for Applications (RFA). Time will be reserved to respond to audience questions. NIFA's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs offer competitively awarded grants to qualified small businesses to support high quality research related to important scientific problems and opportunities in agriculture that could lead to significant public benefits. The programs’ Phase II funding opportunity, which is only open to previous Phase I awardees who have not already applied for a Phase II grant, focuses on continuing the research and development undertaken in Phase I with a goal of commercialization — bringing the innovation to market as the Phase II project completes. In this webinar, program staff will provide an overview of the programs' Phase II and discuss details included in the Request for Applications (RFA). Time will be reserved to respond to audience questions. Register for Webinar Program Contacts David Songstad, National Program Leader, david.songstad@usda.gov Melinda Coffman, Program Coordinator, melinda.coffman@usda.gov Nurun Nahar, Program Specialist, nurun.nahar@usda.gov Tammi Neville, Program Specialist, tammi.neville@usda.gov If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in this meeting, please contact the SBIR/STTR Office at sbir@usda.gov no later than February 8. Language access services, such as interpretation or translation of vital information, will be provided free of charge to limited English proficient individuals upon request.