May 12, 2023

Making agriculture more eco-friendly

 Maine Public Broadcasting -Through its global collaborative called OpenTEAM, Wolfe's Neck Center and its partners will develop agricultural technologies, collect data on carbon storage in soil, and share best practices for improving soil quality. Money will also be passed through to farmers when they adopt certain practices that have climate benefits.

Wolfe's Neck Executive Director Dave Herring said the goal is to launch around 500 pilot projects with farms across the country, with a focus on supporting dairy in the Northeast, rice in California and grain in Colorado and the mountain west.

“We like to talk about the future of agriculture being less input intensive, and being much more knowledge intensive," Herring said. "Instead of increasing the inputs that we're putting into our farm system, like more fertilizer, and more pesticides, we're really trying to gain more knowledge from the farming that we're doing.”

Wolfe’s Neck Center’s project is one of 141 projects nationwide, funded by more than $3 billion in grants. The national project hopes to reach 60,000 farms over more than 25 million acres of working land, which could have a significant impact on agricultural systems that account for 10% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and about a quarter of global emissions.

Note: Wolfe's Neck Center was started by your editor's parents as Wolfe's Neck Farm, an early organic effort, in the early 1950s. Your editor began driving tractors and trucks on the farm when he was 13 years old.

 

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