Six new research projects are being announced for the Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) at the University of Vermont (UVM). They join 29 projects already in progress. This work is funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Hatch and Hatch Multistate Capacity Grants.
As the only research university in Vermont and as a land-grant institution, UVM is charged with integrating higher education, research, and Extension to meet the needs of Vermont citizens, communities, and organizations. The UVM College of Agriculture and Life Sciences accomplishes this, in part, with research conducted through the AES. Faculty propose new projects each year in response to the contemporary problems, needs, and challenges of our changing state and world.
The six new projects and the critical issues they aim to address are listed below.
Department of Community Development and Applied Economics
Sustainable Agriculture and the Farmer Value-Action Gap: Identifying Barriers and Opportunities in the Adoption of Sustainable Production Practices
Personnel Involved:
Abstract
There is increasing recognition that social sustainability, a domain of sustainability that has been largely overlooked by researchers and policymakers, must be better understood to achieve transitions to sustainable agricultural systems. Emerging theoretical frameworks highlight the importance of farmers’ values in explaining sustainable food and agriculture outcomes. However, empirical evidence has insufficiently captured farmers’ ability to enact their values (a linkage known as the value-action gap) in their farm management decisions, due to various mediating influences including policies, institutional context, and social norms and identities.
This proposal aims to articulate the pathway between farmer values and actions through three cases situated in the northeastern United States: diversified animal agriculture, organic vegetable production, and the cultivation of culturally meaningful seed. The cases will first be conducted independently and then integrated through multiple case analysis. This will enable identification of the commonalities that farmers experiences across production systems, providing important evidence for policy reforms that would encourage farmers to enact their full range of values. By more clearly developing the linkage between values and actions, this project will provide critical insight for Vermont and regional policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, while contributing theoretically novel research advancing the understanding of how social sustainability functions, and can be promoted, in food and agriculture systems.
Primary Critical Issue Addressed – Sustainability of Vermont Agriculture, Food and Forests.
Sustainability and Resilience of Upstream Input Value Chains Supporting Small and Medium-scale Farms in Rural Vermont
Personnel Involved:
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- Travis W. Reynolds, Ph.D.
- Emily Schalkham, CDAE MS candidate
Abstract
Farmers’ input choices (or non-choices in the case of scarce available alternatives)—whether for seed, fertilizer, energy, equipment, training, or financial credit—can all have consequences for food system sustainability. But the broad array of economic, social, and environmental impacts of upstream input value chains remains largely unstudied. Existing national and regional data on farm inputs are almost entirely reported in simple quantities and costs, with little opportunity for researchers or farmers to understand potential trade-offs between alternative input sources (e.g., local versus imported inputs, diversified versus centralized input sourcing, own-produced versus purchased inputs). And though a nascent literature suggests farm input decisions can play key roles in the sustainability and resilience of food systems, and a more expansive literature shows farm input purchases can be vital to secondary economies that produce inputs for the agricultural sector, little has been reported about the impacts of Vermont farm input purchasing for the Vermont economy or for rural Vermont communities today.
In an effort to help fill these knowledge gaps, this project applies quantitative and qualitative methods to examine input value chains across three important agricultural sectors in Vermont: dairy, maple, and the diversified vegetable sector. By highlighting dynamics within and across sectors in terms of input availability and costs, as well as considering broader economic, social, and environmental consequences of farm input sourcing among alternative input channels, the project seeks to better understand vulnerabilities in input value chains and identify opportunities for policy to support more resilient farms and food systems.
Primary Critical Issue Addressed – Sustainability of Vermont Agriculture, Food and Forests.
Promoting Perennial Dominant Urban Agroecosystems: Updating Victory Gardens for Sustainable Communities
Personnel Involved:
Abstract
Agriculture is the most important economic sector yet also a leading threat to the continued provision of vital ecosystem services equally essential to human survival. We require new approaches to agriculture that produce sufficient food while reducing and repairing ecological damage. Perennial agroecosystems require fewer inputs than conventional agriculture, are more resilient to worsening weather extremes, and actively generate important ecosystem services. In urban areas, perennial-dominant agroecosystems can generate food and ecosystem services where they are most needed by replacing turfgrass, which provides little if any of either.
Wartime victory gardens proved it is possible to dramatically increase urban food production in a short time in response to national security threats. This project will promote a similar scaling up of urban agriculture, with an emphasis on perennial polycrops, to address climate change and ecological degradation, the health impacts of poor diets, food system resilience, and the inequitable distribution of food. With funding from Hatch and the future grants it will enable, we will identify the factors that inhibit homeowners from converting lawns to agroecosystems and discover incentives to overcome these obstacles; design agroecosystems that can generate a variety of specific ecosystem services at a landscape scale; create a public communications campaign to promote their adoption; work with social justice/food security organizations to match available land with potential farmers and ensure food is distributed to those who need it most; work with government officials to develop policies promoting urban agroecology; and measure the ecological and economics benefits it provides.
Critical Issues Addressed – Development and Sustainability of Communities.
Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences
Enabling Food Systems Resilience in the Face of Current and Future Crises
Personnel Involved:
Abstract
Enabling food systems resilience in the face of current and future crises is critical for future food security and agricultural livelihoods.
Dr. Meredith Niles currently serves as principal investigator (PI) or co-principal investigator (Co-PI) on seven externally funded projects related to enabling food systems resilience for current and future crises, including climate change and extreme events, pandemics, and supply chain disruptions. Collectively, these seven projects total more than $3.5 million in direct funding to the University of Vermont, and create integrated opportunities to enable farmers, agriculture, food system actors, and consumers to build and access more resilient food systems. Furthermore, these existing seven projects individually and collectively address ALL of the priorities of the Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station.
This thematic Hatch project therefore incorporates these seven currently funded research projects which together will offer insights into a variety of agricultural and food systems topics. Hatch funding will not be used for operational costs, but instead for FTE and graduate student support.
Critical Issues Addressed – Animal Health, Production, and Products; Development and Sustainability of Communities; Nutritional Value, Food Security and Food Safety; Quality of the Natural Environment; Sustainability of Vermont Agriculture, Food and Forests.
Department of Plant Biology
Dissecting the Genetic Basis for Negative Correlations Between Plant Growth, Yield, and Stress Resilience
Personnel Involved:
Abstract
Negative correlations among traits are common in biology, but whether they are due to inherent tradeoffs (e.g., competition for resources), as opposed to other inputs that can be overcome (e.g., antagonistic pleiotropy or selection), is still a matter of debate for many cooccurring traits. From an agricultural standpoint, rapid growth rates prior to flowering are generally favored when they increase vegetative biomass (i.e., vegetable and biofuel crops) and/or inflorescence yield (i.e., fruits and grains). However, if there is a tradeoff between growth and abiotic stress resilience, this means that selection will favor slow growth and low resilience in low stress environments and fast growth and high resilience in high stress environments.
To determine the extent to which negative correlations between growth and resilience occur in the economically important Pooideae grasses, the proposed work will analyze the relationship of these traits across naturally occurring accessions of the model temperate grass species Brachypodium distachyon. Furthermore, to determine if this relationship can be understood from the genetic architecture underlying these traits, this project proposes to characterize two genes and their protein products previously implicated in antagonistically affecting growth and drought/freezing tolerance. Results of this study will inform the scientific community on the nature of apparent tradeoffs, and potentially open the door to breeding crops with optimal yield in ever-increasingly stressful environments. It will also provide excellent training opportunities to a diverse set of undergraduate and graduate researchers.
Critical Issue Addressed – Foundational and Exploratory Research in Agriculture.
Department of Plant and Soil Science
Managing Effects of Hemp Seedborne Disease and Agronomic Practices to Improve Stand Establishment and Yields
Personnel Involved:
Abstract
Hemp, a non-psychoactive variety of Cannabis sativa L, is a crop of historical importance and is re-emerging as a popular crop as it is sought out for a wide variety of consumer and industrial products. As of April 2023, there are currently 23 Vermont farmers registered to plant an estimated 400 acres of hemp. As growing practices are established, the impacts on crop loss due to lack of/or improper soil and disease management have become more evident.
The need for scientifically based research and education is critical so farmers can succeed with this new crop. This project will create research that fills informational gaps identified by the S1084 multi-state hemp project including the need to identify and determine the role of seedborne pathogens on stand establishment, and will provide agronomic knowledge to farmers specific to the environmental conditions of northern New England. This project will connect farmers, the industry community, and researchers through community outreach, field days, and on-farm research trials. Research results and educational materials will be distributed to over 250 industrial hemp growers in the Northeast and shared with states represented by Multistate Hemp Project S1084: Industrial Hemp Production, Processing, and Marketing in the U.S.
Critical Issue Addressed – Foundational and Exploratory Research in Agriculture.