Three Emory University researchers received $5,100,000 as part of a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) project to help measure and promote climate-smart practices that support small-scale, diversified vegetable farmers in the Southern Piedmont. A plateau below the Appalachian Mountains and above the coastal plain, the Southern Piedmont is a banana-shaped region spanning a bit of eastern Alabama, up across part of northern Georgia and into North and South Carolina and Virginia.
Emory is one of 12 organizations involved in the $25 million project, headed by the Rodale Institute and titled “Quantifying the Potential to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Increase Carbon Sequestration by Growing and Marketing Climate-Smart Commodities in the Southern Piedmont.”
The five-year project is part of the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. “This effort will increase the competitive advantage of U.S. agriculture both domestically and internationally, build wealth that stays in rural communities and support a diverse range of producers and operation types,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack says of the initiative.
The Emory team encompasses three faculty from the Department of Environmental Sciences: Emily Burchfield, Eri Saikawa and Debjani Sihi.
• Burchfield combines spatial-temporal social and environmental data to understand the future of food security in the United States.
• Saikawa is an atmospheric chemist who models global soil nitrous oxide emissions and quantifies soil greenhouse gas fluxes.
• Sihi is an environmental biogeochemist who researches soil organic matter dynamics and greenhouse gas emissions from natural and managed systems.
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