I recently reported on an applied research initiative at Maine’s Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment that has the potential to help save the world.
Some 14 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and reducing that figure will be essential to mitigating climate change. One way to do that would be to help farmers have healthier, more carbon-rich soil, as that would in effect suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while boosting farm yields, revenues, and resiliency to flooding and drought. As I reported in the Portland Press Herald, doing that is ultimately a matter of good, very high resolution data, which is hard for smaller farmers to get in an affordable, integrated fashion.
The OpenTEAM initiative — a partnership between the Center, Stonyfield Organic, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research aims to change all that via the field testing of new hardware, software, and data sharing systems.
Maine is suddenly at the forefront of efforts to confront climate change, with statutory requirements in place to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and become carbon neutral by mid-century.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.