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New England Groups Team Up to Fight Climate Change - With Tech and Soil
By: Rowan Walrath
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report, detailing how climate change has already changed life on land, the tight relationship between land use and global warming, and the relative scarcity of land—you know, the thing that we use for all aspects of life. The dire takeaway: Humans must fundamentally overhaul our relationship with land, which has, for most, only become more extractive over the last several hundred years.
At the front line of this change are farmers.
“If we want to make a meaningful impact on climate change, ultimately, the only way that we can do that is by working with our farmers to help them reduce emissions from their farms,” said Britt Lundgren, director of organic and sustainable agriculture at Stonyfield Organic in Londonderry, New Hampshire.
Lundgren is one of the masterminds behind a new initiative by Stonyfield and several other New England-based partners to help farmers improve soil health and implement climate change-fighting agricultural practices, all by leveraging technology. The initiative is called OpenTEAM, shorthand for “Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management.”
The platform, launched at the end of July, offers field-level carbon measurement, digital management records, remote sensing, predictive analytics and input and economic management decision support for farmers.
Partnering with Stonyfield on OpenTEAM are Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s LandPKS project and Foundation for the Food and Agriculture.
Dorn Cox, a researcher at the Freeport, Maine-based Wolfe’s Neck Center and himself a farmer working 250 acres of land in New Hampshire, has been working in open-source agriculture for over a decade. He and Lundgren first started talking about what would eventually become OpenTEAM years ago, as they were both interested in “providing better decision support around agricultural management, especially soil health,” Cox said.
This is old hat for Lundgren, too. She began her career as a policy consultant with the American Farmland Trust before working for years as an agricultural policy specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund.
“I had a front-row seat to see the role that the agriculture sector played in [politics],” Lundgren said, including in the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as the Waxman-Markey bill, that would have created a cap-and-trade system for heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions if it had been passed by the U.S. Senate. Now in the private sector, fighting climate change is still Lundgren’s major focus. This week, Stonyfield announced a science-based target to reduce its carbon output by 30 percent by the year 2030.
For Lundgren and her team, including Cox, agriculture is really a collaborative effort, not one that’s strictly the realm of farmers.
“Agriculture is really a shared endeavor, and it’s multidisciplinary,” Cox said. “I think we have some really exciting possibilities, with the reduced scale and miniaturization and economies of scale that that software and recent hardware advances have offered, to democratize access to environmental knowledge and agricultural knowledge. The full potentials really have yet to be reflected in agriculture.”
OpenTEAM’s big idea? To support adaptive soil health management for all kinds of farms—and then to give researchers access to the data collected by those farmers. (Farmers, Cox emphasized, are completely in control of their data.) That way, knowledge can scale rapidly, providing information about what does and doesn’t work for different kinds of farms—in different climates, with different precipitation levels and types, you name it—to folks on the ground. Then, farmers can make adjustments to fix their soil, reap more bounty and implement regenerative practices while they’re at it.
“They’ll be able to take advantage of things like spectral analysis: take a photograph of the soil and assess the carbon content of that soil,” Lundgren said. “They’ll be able to take advantage of things like remote sensing data and weather data. And then we’ll be able to move all of that information through greenhouse gas models that can tell us the emissions from the farm. We’ll be able to move all that information through decision support tools. Then, farmers can get better information back in a more site-specific, tailored way to provide them very specific recommendations for how they can improve soil health and sequester more carbon.”
Lundgren said OpenTEAM will be working with Indigo Ag, the Boston-based unicorn agtech company whose current focus is carbon sequestration, i.e. adjusting soil so it can suck carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere and effectively counteract emissions.
The agricultural sector stands to be among the hardest-hit by climate change. Already, farmers and ranchers in the South and Midwest have faced historic flooding that is bound to seriously affect next year’s food supply across the U.S. In California, dairy farmers are required by law to reduce their operations’ methane emissions, and fruit farmers in the state are working on ways to reduce their water consumption in the face of escalating drought.
The next step for OpenTEAM will be bringing in more farmers to use the platform. The team will provide training to farmers so they can use the software easily. Later on, OpenTEAM will offer financial rewards to farmers based on how much carbon they can capture.
Lundgren thinks improving soil health is a win-win: Farmers help fight climate change by sequestering carbon, but they also ultimately improve the ability of their soil to hold water, making it more resilient both to drought and to severe rain and snowstorms. In the increasingly urgent realm of climate change mitigation, she said, this is something that’s actionable and immediate.
“It can be pretty depressing to work on climate change and to keep current with where we’re at,” Lundgren said. “I think that this opportunity around soil health and agriculture is exciting and hopeful and one of the ways where you really can start to see a clear path to a solution. We can do this. It’s entirely within our grasp. And we can do it in a timeframe that can make a difference.”
