Collecting on-farm environmental data: towards resilient organic vegetable varieties
Ceres Trust Graduate Student Grant – Final Report
Investigators:
- Graduate Student: Virginia Moore, Department of Agronomy, UW – Madison
Email: vmmoore@ wisc.cdu - Undergraduate Student: Indigo Leslie, Department of Plant Pathology, UW – Madison
Email: [email protected] - Faculty Adviser: Erin Silva, Department of Plant Pathology, UW – Madison
Email: [email protected] Project Period: 2015-2016
Introduction
This project, “Collecting on-farm environmental data: towards resilient organic vegetable varieties,” was an effort to pilot the collection of weather and soil data in conjunction with an existing organic vegetable variety trial project. The investigators work on the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC), a variety trialing network in the northern tier of the U.S., which tests commercial varieties and breeding lines for adaptability to organic systems in Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, and New York. This grant enabled us to collect weather and soil data on the farm and research station sites where we conducted the variety trial, with the long-term aim of integrating environmental data to understand varietal stability in variable weather conditions. The main short-term objective of this project was to pilot the use of on-farm weather stations at the Wisconsin trialing sites and identify challenges and opportunities for wider use of weather stations in future projects.