August 2, 2019

Helping farmers fight climate change

Brunwick Times-Record, ME -As part of a $10 million collaboration, Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment is attempting a “farming revolution” to combat carbon emissions and the effects of climate change, according to the Freeport nonprofit’s executive director, David Herring.

Working with Stonyfield Organic, the USDA’s LandPKS project and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, Wolfe’s Neck announced the launch of the Open Technology Ecosystem for Agriculture Management (OpenTEAM), a “farmer-driven, interoperable platform to provide farmers around the world with the best possible knowledge to improve soil health,” officials said in a news release.

It will provide “any farmer anywhere with free access to site-specific data, providing quantitative feedback on millions of acres of farmland by 2024.” This data allows farmers to make informed decisions about land-use management.

Wolfe's Neck Canter -Currently, farmers are faced with an ever-expanding assortment of decision-making software; however, these tools often do not “communicate” with each other, making it difficult to transfer, share or use by farmers and scientists or in supply chains. With OpenTEAM, farmers are not only in control of their own data, but also able to enter data once to access all available tools in the OpenTEAM collaborative.

OpenTEAM offers field-level carbon measurement, digital management records, remote sensing, predictive analytics and input and economic management decision support in a connected platform that reduces the need for farmer data entry while improving access to a wide array of tools. The platform will support adaptive soil health management for farms of all scales, geographies and production systems. OpenTEAM will also accelerate scientific understanding of soil health by providing more high-quality data to researchers collaborating on the project.

In addition to the founding partners, more than one dozen partner organizations have joined to develop, fund, and implement OpenTEAM to date. These include The Soil Health Partnership; General Mills; Colorado State University/USDA-NRCS Comet Farm; Applied GeoSolutions, LLC; DNDC Applications, Research and Training; Dagan, Inc.; Michigan State University Global Change Learning Lab; Sustainable Food Lab and Cool Farm Alliance; Nori; Purdue University Open Technology and Systems Center (OATS); University of British Columbia Center for Sustainable Food Systems; Regen Network; Our.Sci; Quick Carbon at Yale F&ES; U.S. Cover Crop Council decision tools; Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC); The University of Colorado Boulder; and FarmOS.

Video on project

Sam Smith - One reason I'm excited about this project is because Wolfe's Neck Center was originally Wolfe's Neck Farm, an early organic farm started by my parents in the 1950s.  Your editor was an early summer staffer and started driving a tractor and double-clutching a six wheel farm truck when I was 13. More recently,  I've served on the board for almost 30 years. The farm has been repeatedly ahead of the curve including the first woof chipper and the frist round hay bailer in the state. Even before Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring,' property had won a settlement from Central Maine Power Company not to spray anyone's property in the state who didn't want it. 

1 comment:

Greg Gerritt said...

The agricutlural revolution is amajor factor going forward for prosperous communiites. Corporate farming will not feed the world and will cause soil erosion.