In response to growing threats of drought, extreme temperatures and other climate-related natural disasters, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has established several funding programs to support innovative practices that could lead to more resilient food ecosystems and science-backed steps to reduce U.S. farming’s carbon footprint.
These funds stem from broad grant programs such as USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities and its Sustainable Agricultural Systems Program, as well as the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)’s 1890 Land-grant Institutions Programs, which are specifically earmarked to support the work of researchers at America’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Between 2021 and 2024, NIFA has provided at least $21 million for projects led by 1890 Land-grant University partners within its climate change science programs. Funding support is compounded when considering dollars awarded to HBCUs working as partners on larger, multi-university grants.
“Training the next generation of scholars at 1890 land-grant universities who will lead the transition to more climate-resilient food systems is an exciting focus of NIFA’s work,” says Megan O’Rourke, NIFA’s national science liaison for climate change.
Carbon Capture
Last summer, Sakthi Kumaran, research associate professor of soil science and agronomy at Central State University, an Ohio HBCU, began work on a five-year, $10 million USDA-funded project to determine whether specific, climate-smart farming techniques — including use of cover crops and rotational grazing — can help increase soil health and promote soil-based carbon sequestration.
“Only about 5 percent to 6 percent of American farms have moved to cover crop adoption, even though it’s so beneficial for soil health and improving other ecosystem services like water quality,” Kumaran says. “There are a lot of knowledge and performance gaps that still exist, which is what we’re trying to address in this project.”
Kumaran and research partners at The Ohio State University, the University of Missouri and Missouri HBCU Lincoln University plan to work with small farmers to incorporate targeted climate-smart farming techniques. Teams will eventually undertake soil studies and drone-based, multispectral ground sensing to measure potential improvements to soil quality and carbon capture capacity on farmland that uses these techniques.
“In Ohio alone, we have more than 400 soil types. As a scientist, my role is to identify where these practices are going to work and where they’re not going to work so we can help farmers make informed decisions about where, for example, cover crops are going to perform the best,” Kumaran says.
Nitrogen Reduction
At Prairie View A&M University in Texas, agriculture associate professor Peter Ampim is in the early stages of a three-year, $600,000 NIFA-supported project to study nitrogen use efficiency traits in sorghum that can help minimize the loss of nitrogen from cropping systems.
“Between 50 percent and 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizers used in agricultural applications can be lost due to leaching, which leads to polluted groundwater or even ocean dead zones, or as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas more potent than CO2,” Ampim says.
His research team, in partnership with associate professor Sakiko Okumoto at Texas A&M University, hopes to study plant mechanisms in sorghum and capitalize on its innate ability to inhibit nitrogen loss, a process known as biological nitrification inhibition (BNI).
Ampim’s long-term goal is to find ways to identify sorghum cultivars with high BNI traits that, when planted alongside other traditional crops, could serve as a low-cost, environmentally friendly way to improve farms’ nitrogen use efficiency by up to 30 percent.
Food and Farm Security
Nineteen HBCUs are currently participating in a long-term project called the Climate Resiliency Initiative, which launched in October 2022 and is supported by NIFA’s Evans-Allen grant program.
The project’s key goals include investigating smart agriculture practices and their effects on soil health; promoting sustainable growth techniques, including efficient water usage; and supporting limited-resource, historically marginalized farming communities.
“We have roughly 18 Southern and border states involved in this study, and we’re looking at the effect of climate change on low-income communities, in particular,” says Alton Thompson, executive director of the Association of 1890 Research Directors. “These are communities of color who tend to be limited-resource farmers.”
Key insights from the climate resiliency project are being shared with universities across the nation thanks to HBCU researchers’ participation on national task forces, including one that helped create USDA’s National Climate Change Roadmap in 2023.
“This project is very timely, especially as many federal agencies, including the USDA, have identified climate change as an existential threat to U.S. food security,” Thompson says.
Changing Weather, New Crops
At Alcorn State University in Mississippi, agricultural faculty members are currently at work on 15 USDA-supported, climate-related projects, including five awarded in 2024.
Chunquan Zhang, an Alcorn State associate dean for research and associate professor of plant pathology, is exploring ways to improve plant stress tolerance and disease management using beneficial microbes with the goal of helping crops better withstand changing climate conditions.
Shifting weather patterns are also a focus for Jingfang Zhang, an Alcorn State assistant professor of agricultural economics, who is researching how altered growing seasons may affect food production and the livelihoods of small farmers.
Other Alcorn researchers, including Yan Meng, an assistant professor of plant genetics, are focused on new plant strain development, specifically high-protein, stress-tolerant sweet potatoes.
“Sweet potato performs very well in relatively poor soil and harsh environments and in a limited growing season, so it is a very suitable crop for limited-resource farmers,” Meng says.
Boosting Biofuel
Research teams led by Jonathan Cumming, chair of the department of natural sciences at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, are field testing the feasibility of switchgrass as a cover crop and biofuel ingredient.
Launched in October 2023, the five-year project is funded through USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service and includes partners at the University of Maryland and Chesapeake Utilities.
The multifaceted research is an attempt to measure switchgrass’s ability to perform ground-based carbon capture and resist drought. At the same time, harvested switchgrass is being adopted as a booster in novel processes to turn chicken litter — excrement and bedding left as byproducts of poultry production — into biofuel.
“If we use just chicken litter (as a fuel source), it functions OK, but there’s actually too much nitrogen in it. So, we need to put more pure cellulose into it,” Cumming explains. Switchgrass makes “biogas production even more efficient,” he says.
The work could provide a dual win for the environment, since it may eventually lead to a scalable means of “clean” energy production derived from waste whose traditional use as fertilizer frequently led to excessive phosphorus and nitrogen levels in soil and groundwater.
The final step of the process uses what’s left after biofuel production as a stable, non-leaching crop fertilizer.
“It’s wicked good fertilizer, much better than raw chicken litter,” Cumming says. “Using it, we see we have better plant growth, which means that those plants are capturing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and putting more carbon dioxide in the soil.”