- Agriculture has a big impact on climate change worldwide.
It accounts for about 20 percent
of global greenhouse gas emissions.
There's also a lot of emissions from livestock production.
So cows especially produce methane in their stomachs,
and that's a potent greenhouse gas.
The good news, though,
is that agriculture also has the potential
to become a part of the solution for climate change.
There's a number of different ways in which agriculture
contributes to climate change.
The biggest is through emissions from soil.
So those are nitrous oxide emissions
that come from the application of fertilizers.
In conventional agriculture, nitrogen fertilizer
is made using natural gas.
So it has a big fossil fuel footprint behind it
just to create that fertilizer,
and then there are additionally emissions from the soil
once it's applied.
OpenTEAM is a collaborative effort
to harness the technology that's being developed
that helps farmers monitor, measure,
or model greenhouse gas emissions
and soil health on their farm
and bring these technologies together
in a way that farmers can efficiently access the technology
and use the technology to provide site specific
decision support on their operation
about their opportunities for improving soil health.
Most farmers will start using OpenTEAM
through a record keeping tool,
And these tools are designed as two different entry points
to the platform.
LandPKS is a pretty basic app
that you can use anywhere in the world
to assess your soil health and your soil type
and access some basic information
about the soils that you're working with,
farmOS is a more robust record keeping tool
that can track all of the activities
that are happening on the farm,
whether that's cropping patterns, livestock movement,
personnel, equipment.
So there's two different ways
that a farmer can start using the OpenTEAM platform
through one of those record keeping tools.
And from there, they can then move their data
through a variety of different tools.
We can pull in information from a tool like Quick Carbon,
which is a camera that you can use to do spectral analysis
of the carbon levels in your soil.
And by taking pictures of your soil over time,
you can accurately measure change in the level of carbon
that is being stored in your soil.
We can pull in data from satellites,
so we can use remote sensing imagery
which tells us about things like vegetative cover
and the health of that vegetation
and the moisture content of that vegetation.
And we can start to infer a lot of things
about the health of soil from those images.
And then we can move all of that data
through tools like COMET-Farm or DNDC
or the Cool Farm Tool.
And from there, all of this information
can be moved into decision support tools,
and this is where it becomes useful to the farmer
because we can pull in tools like
a Cover Crop decision support tool,
which can provide a farmer with site specific information
about the kinds of cover crops they should be planting,
how they should be planting them,
and when they should be planting them
to maximize the benefits from using those cover crops.
There are already many elements
to the way our farmers are farming,
that are beneficial from a climate change perspective.
For instance, Wolf's Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment,
where OpenTEAM is based,
is going to be one of the hub farms,
and they've been doing a lot of work over the years to take a look at
how they can improve soil health
by doing things like changing their grazing practices and increasing the intensity
of their rotational grazing
so that they can build carbon in their pastures.
The next revolution in agriculture
is going to be a knowledge-based revolution.
Improving soil health is really about putting information
into the hands of farmers
so they can identify the practices,
the changes in cropping system, that they might need to make
in order to improve their soil health over time,
helping farmers move from an input-based paradigm
to a knowledge-based paradigm.