NSF Engines Development Award: Creating climate-resilient opportunities for plant systems (NC)

This Regional Innovation Engines Development Award seeks to build an innovation ecosystem that builds climate resilience into farming communities in North Carolina (NC). Underserved and small farms in the state are predicted to be most vulnerable to the effects of climate change as they are often located in areas more exposed to risks associated with extreme weather events.

Building climate resilience into small farms requires a vibrant innovation ecosystem in which farmers’ needs are communicated to researchers, discoveries are translated to demand-driven products, and farmers are incentivized to adopt new technologies and practices to build environmentally and economically sustainable farms. The CROPS project confronts entrenched sources of social, economic, and racial inequity by igniting the full potential of an innovation corridor to meet the needs of small- and mid-sized farms, especially underserved farmers, in the face of climate change.

The overall goal is to develop an overarching CROPS ecosystem that seeds more equitable and needs-centric knowledge sharing, technology development, and creation of incentives to de-risk adoption among farmers, universities, industry, and stakeholder communities. In this Development phase, CROPS builds a strong organizational infrastructure that promotes and sustains this ecosystems’ growth and maturity.

CROPS prioritizes diversity within our multifaceted stakeholder ecosystem – farmers, researchers, policy makers, funders, and industry. CROPS focuses on key nodes of systemic connectivity between underserved farmers, consortium research partners, and education-focused academic and extension agents who are dedicated to preparing a future ready workforce, while addressing climate, technological, economic, and societal challenges faced by NC farmers.

Although the major NC metropolitan regions of the Research Triangle Park (RTP) and the Piedmont Triad (PT) have promoted technological innovation and economic opportunity, there has been insufficient economic impact in the underserved rural counties of Eastern and Central NC whose focus on agriculture. This award mechanism better positions the RTP and PT regions to cultivate and bolster interdisciplinary, multi-organizational teams of researchers, industry, entrepreneurial, and non-profit partners, and other stakeholders to work collaboratively with underserved farmers, small business owners, and landholders.

The lead institution of this engine is North Carolina A&T State University, the largest HBCU in the nation, which has a long history of working with a diverse group of farmers to improve their success through its extension network. Core CROPS partners also include Alamance Community College, Duke University, East Carolina University, NC Biotechnology Center, NC State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, RTI International, and Wake Forest University.

The proposed 42-county NC Agricultural Tech Innovation Corridor mobilizes innovative research, accelerates product commercialization, and trains the workforce needed to sustain the ecosystem. This Development Award will enable the team to engage in a regional, collaborative planning process to prepare a future Engine to meet these goals, mobilizing partnerships and resources to drive economic development and prosperity within NC’s rural agricultural economies along the NC Ag Tech Corridor.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.