Connecting Communities through Smart Tools and Sensors to Deliver Enhanced Ecosystem Services and Economic Returns from Regenerative Farmland Management

The way that we manage our agricultural lands is at the nexus of two of the greatest challenges facing humanity: 1) reversing land and soil degradation while maintaining sustainable production of food and fiber to meet growing global demands, and 2) harnessing the potential of soil carbon sequestration for drawdown of atmospheric CO2 to help stabilize global climate. To accomplish these goals will require fundamental changes in agricultural land management and the broader structure of our food systems. Central to this restructuring must be an emphasis on improving soil health and managing agricultural systems to provide environmental ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, improved water quality, reduced erosion, biodiverse pollinator habitat, etc.) as important coproducts to crop yields. Supporting the transition to, and maintenance of, this so-called regenerative farmland management requires monetizing the value of the various environmental services provided and ensuring that farmers retain a greater proportion of the value of both the crops and environmental services they cultivate. Our proposal seeks to develop a greater understanding of the opportunities for and barriers to adoption of regenerative agricultural practices, as well as collective decision-making about land use management by regional farming communities.

To carry out this investigation, this project will bring together the nation's leading soil scientists and social scientists with Pecan Street's award-winning engineering team to design an integrative research project laying the technological and social foundations for facilitating regenerative farmland management. This project will 1) enhance and expand an existing farm greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting system (COMET-Farm) with state-of-the-art sensors and geospatial datasets to better facilitate landscape-scale assessments for rural communities, and 2) pilot that system in select communities with a goal of nudging farmers off individual-level decision-making towards collective decisions about regenerative farmland management that will result in improved, marketable carbon sequestration and ecosystem service provisioning.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.