Global Centers Track 2: Climate-Smart Food-Energy-Water Nexus in Small Farms

Globally, more than 2 billion people live on 570 million small-scale farms with 40% of them on incomes of less than 2 U.S. dollars per day. The United Nations projects that small farms are key to achieving the goal of 70% increase in food production required to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Unfortunately, smallholders are highly vulnerable to extreme climate, water scarcity, and high costs of agrochemicals, energy, and labor while lacking access to innovative technologies and equipment.

It is imperative to develop a climate-smart circular smallholder farming system; however, no single research or stakeholder network can encompass the full spectrum of scientific, technological, economic, and societal insights to develop such a system, yet each network is crucial to the integrated solutions. The adoption of food-energy-water (FEW) nexus technologies and infrastructure presents a resource-efficient solution to these problems by making small farms climate-resilient and less dependent on exogenous supply of energy, water, and fertilizers.The overarching goal of the project is to develop a scalable platform for integrating siloed research and providing tangible FEW nexus solutions that ensure prosperity of climate-vulnerable small farms.

This goal will be achieved by converging the leading and most adaptable FEW technologies, experiences, and knowledge that are currently siloed in different networks and various countries in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The partners are selected according to diverse experiences in agricultural production and bioeconomy development, geopolitical feasibility, and the connections our team has established through NSF and USAID projects.

The project aims to create a scalable platform—based on the principles of circular bioeconomy—for integrating siloed research into a systematic technical roadmap that can guide the development of regenerative, robust, and resilient solutions for transforming small farms into climate-smart, carbon-negative, and profitable units with high public acceptance. This goal will be achieved by converging the leading and most adaptable FEW technologies, experiences, and knowledge that are currently distributed in different networks and various countries in North America, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Specific objectives include (1) designing sensor-driven angle-adjustable solar arrays above crop canopy to generate electricity, increase crop production by protecting crops from excessive radiation, wind, and rain, and collect/divert rainwater to on-site storage, such as wetland pond, for subsequent precision irrigation, (2) producing and upgrading biogas from livestock manure, (3) valorizing biogas digestates and crop residues into biofertilizers, (4) promoting approaches that favor soil regeneration and health, (5) developing socioeconomic models to ensure affordability, viability, and equitability, and (6) training future workforce in circular bioeconomy. The project engages students from historically black colleges and universities through new curricula, study abroad programs, senior design courses, and student workshops.

Project results will be disseminated via outreach activities, publications, presentations, and social media.

This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.

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.