Savanna Institute

Savanna Institute

Savanna Institute

Combining indigenous knowledge and emerging technology to scale agroforestry and transform agriculture into a climate solution.

Madison, WI, USA

USA

Nonprofit

Food production and land use produces 22% of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike the electricity sector which is starting to cut emissions, agriculture’s continue to rise. Climate change harms farms as well, through extreme weather, floods, drought, heat stress on farm labor and livestock, and more. These changes are projected to get worse. To make significant impacts on global emissions from agriculture, we must transform agriculture from the roots up. Business-as-usual agriculture causes compounding challenges and disproportionately impacts underserved communities. Water pollution from fertilizers and agrichemicals poisons fisheries and the communities that rely on them. Erosion and damage to soil health costs farmers roughly $85.44/acre each year. Loss of habitat and biodiversity from farming poses a global emergency. And farm consolidation contributes to the gutting of rural communities. These impacts reflect decades of policies that prioritized production over all other concerns. Productivist agriculture harms farmers, rural communities, and all of us who eat and live in our world.

Agroforestry integrates trees with crop and livestock production. Forms include: alley cropping (tree rows in cropland); silvopasture (trees in pasture and rangeland); forest farming (shade crops under trees); windbreaks (linear plantings to block wind); and riparian buffers (plantings along rivers and streams to protect water quality). Agroforestry can sequester excess atmospheric carbon, enhance farm resilience to climate change, improve water quality, boost soil health, and diversify farm revenues. Barriers to scalability and adoption include underdeveloped tree crop cultivars and a lack of best practices for large-scale agroforestry systems. While agroforestry has been practiced for millennia, the Savanna Institute is addressing these barriers using new technologies, including computer vision, artificial intelligence, and genomic sequencing to accelerate precision tree crop breeding; cloud computing and climate change modeling to forecast and map tree crop suitability across the US (demo here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJVtQueze4&t=25s); and drone-based LiDAR and machine learning to more accurately measure carbon sequestration and crop yields across agroforestry systems. By utilizing these technologies, we aim to de-risk and scale agroforestry adoption by developing more productive and profitable tree crop cultivars, and identifying and modeling best practices for large-scale agroforestry.

Our target population is farmers in the Midwestern US and food consumers globally. Farmers are among the groups most directly impacted by climate change. Mitigation is of critical importance to the long-term success of these farm businesses. Meanwhile, adaptation is essential now, and more and more so every year. These farmers are currently underserved due to insufficient access to training, credit, technology, and markets needed to integrate agroforestry practices into their operations. We will meet the needs of farmers by: connecting them to a network of established and beginning agroforestry practitioners; developing technologies and more reliably productive tree crops to help them design, establish, and manage profitable agroforestry operations; and providing technical assistance from agroforestry experts. Monoculture agricultural systems are vulnerable to shocks from economic pressures, extreme weather, and disease. By diversifying and perennializing agriculture with productive and nutrient-dense tree crops, widespread agroforestry has the potential to strengthen global food systems. Alongside agroforestry’s co-benefits of improvements to water quality, pollinator habitat, and more, the widespread adoption of agroforestry will impact populations most at-risk of environmental harm and food insecurity.