Over many decades, Wolfe’s Neck Center has been a space for innovation and change making in agriculture. As one of the first organic beef operations in the country, we have built on this legacy of innovation to provide a space for researchers, scientists, and thought leaders to convene, learn, and accelerate the rate of change in agriculture and climate science. Using our unique set of resources, Wolfe’s Neck Center is an outdoor living laboratory focused on agricultural production and ecosystem health in the face of a changing climate.
C3, Coast-Cow-Consumer (formerly B3), is a multi-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and includes a multidisciplinary team of scientists, researchers, and farmers. Through this project, Wolfe’s Neck Center’s Organic Dairy team works with scientists from Bigelow Laboratory to study the effect of Maine seaweed in a cow’s diet and its potential for methane emissions reduction.
Wolfe’s Neck Center hosts a site for long-term ecosystem monitoring projects at our research station. By providing site access, we are supporting long-term efforts to collect data on climate change over time. Through these partnerships, data collected on our campus is connected to hundreds of similar monitoring efforts across the country measuring air and water quality, tracking season changes, and deepening the understanding of greenhouse gas fluctuations in pasture lands.
We work closely with our network to support collaborative on-farm research on our unique campus. As a fully operational farm, we are a perfect testing ground for collaborative research and trialing of new approaches and techniques. Some recent examples include monitoring pasture biodiversity, implementing pasture forage species trials, and testing emerging monitoring tools and technology.
To inquire about a potential research partnership, please email Alex Gulachenski, Farm Networks and Research Collaborations Manager, below.
The NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant will demonstrate methods for increasing pasture and hay land productivity and soil health through low and no-till establishment of forage crops. Our Northeast pastures are dominated by cool-season grass species that struggle to thrive in the hot and dry summer months and lead to low feed quality for dairy cows. The solution may be in more weather resilient warm season forages. These are often more drought tolerant and grow rapidly in the summer months, in turn providing high quality feed all year and improved soil health.
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