Harnessing the potential for agricultural technology and systems design to ensure resilience at the landscape-level.

Issue

As collective interest in multifunctional agriculture and the need to address climate change grows, producers have become willing to embrace new production paradigms and increasingly sophisticated tools. This initiative aims to catalyze research, education, and outreach to fulfill a vision of a vibrant, technologically savvy, climate-smart, and environmentally friendly agriculture that provides diversified services. Pennsylvania’s abundant water supply and heterogenous landscape offer ample opportunities to embrace a regenerative and climate-smart agriculture that can be the linchpin of resilient and networked supply chains.

The convergence of agriculture and climate solutions

Fields are no longer considered discrete, isolated, and homogenous production units. Powered by new remote and proximal sensing systems, relational data assembly, artificial intelligence, modeling systems, and the internet of things, the field as a management unit is being reconceptualized as a collection of highly heterogenous subunits that can be tailor-managed to accomplish production and environmental goals. These systems have a largely untapped potential to store soil carbon, suppress the emission of greenhouse gases where they are emitted, capture solar radiation, and produce food with a low carbon and low pollutant intensity. Simultaneously, there is an increasing awareness and understanding that processes which ensure resilience can operate at the landscape scale. Agricultural fields alter the abiotic and biotic fabric around them, and in turn, are altered by the same fabric; these ecosystem services and disservices need to be quantified.

Researchers in this initiative aim to harness emerging opportunities to turn the table on existing challenges and create innovative solutions for a society that is increasingly willing to account for the cost and pay for the benefits of regenerative and climate-smart agriculture.

Convener

Daniela Carrijo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist, Grain Production
Department of Plant Science

Associated Members

Associates

Affiliates

Related College of Agricultural Sciences Research Impact Areas