Gloria Montaño Greene, deputy undersecretary of farm production and conservation at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), visited FAMU to discuss the department’s partnership with the university. FAMU recently received three grants from the agency totaling $15 million.
“We’re excited to celebrate what this wonderful investment means, and not just for FAMU, but also for the development and strengthening of agriculture in making it more centered in some of the spaces it has not been previously,” said Montaño Greene. “Understanding the pipeline and the direction of how we’re moving forward with agriculture will help us serve better, learn from the past, and impact how we think and prepare, so we really thank you for this partnership.”
“It was about a year ago today that the Agriculture Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack announced this opportunity for climate imprint,” she said. “We decided to create this funding opportunity in response to the constant theme of concerns and problems we heard from consumers wanting to know what agriculture is doing to mitigate or address climate change. There was a need to figure out how to do something different.”
For this partnership, FAMU principal investigators will carry out fundamental research in climate-smart practices over the next five years, that will expand markets for climate-smart commodities, leverage the greenhouse gas benefits of climate-smart commodity production and provide economically viable climate-smart cropping options for small and underserved producers, ultimately benefiting the environment, agriculturalists, and manufacturing sectors.
USDA’s partnership with FAMU will fund the following:
Odemari Mbuya, Ph.D.,an agricultural sciences professor and director of the FAMU Center for Water Resources, has been awarded $4.9 million and will serve as principal investigator, focusing on research that will improve the carbon sink by encouraging small and under-served farmers in the southeastern U.S., specifically Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana, to plant industrial hemp, a crop with high carbon sequestration efficiency and a climate-smart commodity crop.