OpenTEAM Partners

Bob Adams consults and lectures internationally on the topics of sustainability, innovation and transformation with an emphasis on using a design-based process for identifying business and organizational opportunities, and envisioning strategies to achieve them. From 2013-2016 he served as the Director of Design Strategy at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health and as Executive Director of the Sustainable AgTech Innovation Center at the University of California at Davis. There he worked closely with researchers to translate research concepts from the laboratory into market-facing application to grow the innovation ecosystem for agricultural and food systems.

Previously he developed and led the Design for Sustainability initiative at IDEO, one of the world’s leading design consultancies, where he remains an IDEO Fellow. During Bob’s tenure at IDEO, he worked to broaden the context surrounding the human-centered design process and to incorporate this approach into the core competency of the firm. Trained in mechanical engineering, product design, and agronomy, Bob has been working on the integration of the design process with principles of sustainable development since 2000 when he joined The Natural Step and authored the formative white paper Designing Towards Sustainability. Throughout the 1990’s Bob led a research group at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto focused on improving human-computer interaction by leveraging sensory cognition and perception in digital experience. Bob has worked in the field of design for over 30 years, with corporate experience including Hewlett Packard, Interval Research Corporation, and J.N, Marshall Pvt. Ltd. (Pune, India). As a consultant he has advised such companies as Procter and Gamble, Cargill, Adobe Systems, Walmart, Nissan, Mars, Natureworks, and Pangea Organics on questions of the incorporation of sustainability into products, services, and business models. He has worked in the not-for-profit sector with such organizations as ACDI/VOCA, Sustainable Conservation, Meridian Institute, and Business for Social Responsibility.

Bob holds five patents and has been the recipient of several international design awards. Since 1985, he has taught extensively at Stanford University, the Royal College of Art, and UC Davis across topics of product and industrial design, design for sustainability, human-computer interface design, and technology studies. Since 1994, Bob has owned and operated a diversified small farm in the Sacramento Valley of California where he produces award-winning olive oil, organic vegetables, fruits, grains and hay.

Greg is an open technology advocate, member/owner of Our Sci LLC, co-organizer of the Gathering of Open Science Hardware GOSH and the Gathering for Open Ag Tech (GOAT). He’s a jack of all trades capable of getting an idea off the ground quickly and inexpensively. Prior to Our Sci, he helped create the MultispeQ, a low-cost photosynthesis meter, and PhotosynQ, a platform for collecting and sharing plant health data.

In addition to his work at Wolfe’s Neck Center, Dorn is a farmer working his 250-acre certified organic family farm in New Hampshire. As a founder of the FarmOS software platform and the Farm Hack community, he is passionate about sharing open-source agricultural tools, software, and data to accelerate innovation and quantify environmental services from regenerative agriculture. He has a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire in Natural Resources and Earth Systems Science.

Aaron has worked in a wide range of areas including desktop programming in C++ and C#, back-end and front-end web development, and embedded and FPGA work. As an avid environmentalist, harnessing the technology to benefit the planet and its inhabitants has been a long-time dream.

Mark Easter is a Senior Research Associate at the Natural Resource Ecology laboratory. His work focuses on greenhouse gas inventories and greenhouse gas decision support systems in agriculture and forestry. Mark contributed analysis to multiple IPCC reports on greenhouse gas inventory methods, and has contributed to national-level inventories of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and forestry in the United States, Brazil, Kenya, Jordan, India, Spain, and Italy. He is the project coordinator for the COMET-Farm project and technical lead for the Carbon Benefits Project, and collaborates on the COMET-Planner project. Mark has been working on greenhouse gas inventories and decision support systems since 1999, and it remains a principal focus in his work. He earned a M.S. in Botany with an emphasis in Physiological Ecology at the University of Vermont in 1991, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1982.

Franklin Egan serves as the Education Director for PASA, a Pennsylvania-based sustainable agriculture research and education organization. Franklin and the PASA team support farmer-to-farmer learning through our conference, events, and member networks; administer formal apprenticeships for beginning farmers; and coordinate farm-based research benchmarking the soil health, financial viability, and environmental footprints of PASA member farms.

Franklin holds a PhD in Ecology from Penn State University, and he has led research on topics including biodiversity conservation on farmland, environmental risks from genetically-modified crops, and soil health. Prior to joining PASA, Franklin worked as a research ecologist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service. He has also worked on vegetable and dairy farms in New York and Wisconsin.

Jeff is a soil scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He has published widely on a variety of topics including rangeland soil health, restoration, simple tools for rangeland soil and vegetation monitoring, and reducing rangeland monitoring costs, and rangeland soil. He holds adjunct faculty appointments at New Mexico State University (NMSU) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder. He is a member of the International Resource Panel and serves as the US science representative to the UNCCD. He led the development of the nationally (US) applied rangeland monitoring protocols, and co-led the development of the assessment system, both of which have been adapted for use in a number of other countries. He currently leads development of the global Land-Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS), an open-source mobile app for land inventory, evaluation, management and monitoring that is being applied globally.

Gregory is co-founder and Chief Regeneration Officer of Regen Network. Regen Network is leading the way towards tracking and funding ecological regeneration using blockchain technology. Before founding Regen Network, Gregory co-wrote Regenerative Enterprise (2012), a groundbreaking book outlining pathways to achieve ecological and social regeneration through business, and co-founded and grew Terra Genesis International from a Regenerative Agriculture consultancy and design firm, into a leader in the Regenerative Agriculture and Economy movement.

Gregory’s passion for creating healthy relationships through trade and agriculture has lead him on a journey to explore all phases of the value adding process from farming and agriculture through processing and manufacture to marketing to the end customer.
Out of these ecosystem based farming approaches he has helped to grow an ecosystem of businesses and organizations dedicated to expressing the essence of a product through the entire value adding process.

Britt Lundgren is the Director of Organic and Sustainable Agriculture at Stonyfield, an organic yogurt company based in Londonderry, NH. She has over a decade of experience working to advance agricultural sustainability through policy and supply chain initiatives. Prior to Stonyfield, Britt was an agricultural policy specialist for Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. She holds a Master of Science in Agriculture, Food, and Environment from Tufts University. Britt serves on the boards of the Organic Trade Association and the Sustainable Food Lab, and as an advisor to the AGree, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, Food Policy Action, and the New Hampshire Conservation Law Foundation. She has worked on several organic farms, and is an avid fiddle player.

Daniella directs the Sustainable Food Lab’s climate work and serves as Deputy General Manager for our flagship project, the Cool Farm Alliance bringing together growers with multinational food companies, NGOs, and academics to measure the potential for agricultural practices to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, with methodology now extending to water and biodiversity. Daniella has a background in project management, cultural communications, journalism, environmental education, software engineering and farming. She received her B.A. in Literature and Society from Brown University.

Zia Mehrabi is a Research Associate at the University of British Columbia, where he works on the food system, climate change, and agricultural technology, and is appointed at The School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability, and the Center for Sustainable Food Systems. At UBC he helps teach and mentor students, develop ideas, data sets, software, data science, and data analysis on sustainable food systems. He received a BA in Biology, and a DPhil in Food Security from the University of Oxford. He is a contributing author to The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a member of the Global Land Programme, and is the working group lead on developing baselines for data driven agronomy for the CGIAR’s Platform for Big Data in Agriculture. He is engaged in public outreach and communication for a better understanding of science, and recently launched the data driven open art exhibit “”The Colours of Food Security” with the Land Use and Global Environment Laboratory at The University of British Columbia.

Dr. Steven Mirsky is a research agro-ecologist in the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (Beltsville, Maryland). His program quantifies how soil and climate interact with cover crop management and genetics to influence crop production and resilience, weeds, economics, soil health, and environmental impact. Dr. Mirsky directs the Northeast Cover Crop Council, an organization dedicated to address sustainable agriculture knowledge gaps, conduct extension and outreach to agricultural professionals and farmers, and provides web-based decision support to growers. Dr. Mirsky is the PI for a National Legume Cover Crop Breeding project and a national herbicide-resistant weed management project. Finally, Dr. Mirsky manages two long-term cropping systems experiments and is part of the National Long-term Agricultural Research Network. He is working with a team of agricultural scientists and data scientists to develop modular cover crop-based decision support tools and to integrate precision and sustainable agricultural practices.

Keith Paustian is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and Senior Research Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. A major focus of his work involves modeling, field measurement and development of assessment tools for soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions from soils. He has published over 260 journal articles and book chapters. Previous and current research activities include development of models and inventory methodology used to estimate US soil C and N2O emissions that are reported annually by EPA to the UNFCCC; development of a web-based tool (COMET-FarmTM) for estimating on-farm greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sequestration used by USDA (http://cometfarm.nrel.colostate.edu/) and project-scale systems for GHG assessment of sustainable land management projects in developing countries. He also serves as project director for the Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies which is a consortium of universities, industry and the US Forest Service, researching the potential for sustainable bioenergy production from beetle-kill trees and forest residues. Professional service activities include Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC 2006 National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Methods and the IPCC 2003 Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) and two National Academy of Science committees (in 2010 and 2018) related to land use, greenhouse gases and climate change mitigation. He is a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America and 2015 recipient of the Soil Science Society of America’s Outstanding Research Award.

Chris serves as an agronomist working on sustainable production of feed grains. He is the Director of Research at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) in Goldsboro, North Carolina and Chair of the Southern Cover Crops Council. He serves as a university representative on the Digital Research Stations Committee to prepare a vision for the North Carolina legislature on revamping technology at the 18 stations across the state. Chris is a frequent lecturer nationally on cover crops, low cost technology, and integrating on-farm trials into regional research projects.

Dr. William Salas is President of Applied GeoSolutions, LLC and President of DNDC Application, Research and Training, LLC. He received a Ph.D. Natural resources from University of New Hampshire (UNH). He worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UNH Complex Systems Research Center. His work and research focuses on the use of geospatial technologies for climate change analyses, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission studies, and environmental applications including remote sensing, geospatial modeling. He is an expert in developing and applying spatial biogeochemical models for assessing agricultural ecosystem services. He is active in the design and development of MRV systems for Ecosystem Service Markets and GHG reporting in the AFOLU sector.

Sieg has been a member of the American Society of Agronomy and Soil Science Society of America since 1983, was elected a fellow in 2010, awarded the International Service Award in 2015, and Fulbright Fellowships in 2009 and 2016. She has published two books, 128 journal articles and dozens of extension bulletins as well as an innovative learning lab website for sustainable land management and food security in Africa. She provided soil fertilizer recommendation advice that has informed fertilizer formulations for voucher programs throughout East Africa, and is a pioneer in participatory action research and extension approaches that support co-generation of knowledge that is relevant for smallholders. Her highly collaborative approach to sustainable systems science has helped bring to the world’s attention the inadvertent negative consequences, tradeoffs and synergies of sole versus diversified cropping, and the urgent need for biologically sound soil and crop management. Open science through meta-analysis, citizen science and handheld soil/plant monitoring is a current focus, for evidence based agronomy that improves decision making. Soil fertility related research in Africa:

1. Develop and scale out fertilizer recommendations for smallholder rainfed maize systems. The last two decades have seen numerous field trials and soil monitoring exercises in Africa to quantify crop response to fertilizers, yet there are few successful efforts. My research has shown that nitrogen is the primary driver of cereal yields, and improvements in soil health, organic C and good agronomy (weed control and timing) are required to improve fertilizer efficiency, leading to the urgent need for extension recommendations to be delivered to farmers through a targeted, season-long mobile campaign that tailors recommendations to local conditions and weather. This is a response farming recommendation approach: a basal NP fertilizer is applied with timely weeding, and the local rainfall pattern and soil conditions dictate recommendations on multiple split nitrogen fertilizer applications. By comparing farmers who receive general advice with targeted advice we will test if nitrogen targeted response is a breakthrough approach, and if tailored agronomic recommendations can be scaled through mobile voice and text advice.

2. I lead a ten year sustainable intensification of agriculture project in Malawi through a contract with IITA on the ‘Africa RISING’ project funded by USAID and a four year SIIL project in Tanzania on ‘Raising crop yields in maize and bean systems through bidirectional learning and SI’. Soil health and environmental monitoring at multiple scales, linked to socio-economic data, is our unique approach to understand drivers of crop and soil management.

3. Through participatory research and geovisualization of spatial and temporal ‘niches’ for crop diversification I have worked with transdisciplinary teams to 1) document poor productivity of sole-maize and lack of response to fertilizers and 2) supported adoption by over 10,000 farm families of multipurpose legume crop diversification of maize, such as the pigeonpea-groundnut doubled up legume technology. Recent evidence is consistent with widespread adoption of doubled up legumes into neighboring countries and this technology is now officially approved by the Malawi government, Technology Release Committee.

Michael is working to build farmOS, an open source record keeping and data management system for farmers, ranchers, and agricultural scientists. He developed the vision for farmOS while working simultaneously as a farm apprentice and a web developer, and has since lead the farmOS code and community development efforts in an open and transparent way. Michael works closely with farmers, organizations, and universities including Cornell, the University of Vermont, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), and the United States Forest Service. He hosts monthly community calls over the internet to inform the direction of the project, and helped to organize the first annual GOAT Conference (Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology) in Spring 2018, which aims to bring together members of the growing open source community around farm tools, software, data, and research. His process is rooted in direct experience working on and with farms around the country, both in the soil and in computer code.

Dan TerAvest is soil scientist and co-founder of Our Sci, LLC, which supports community-based research through appropriate open source hardware and software and training. Prior to co-founding Our Sci, he was part of the PhotosynQ project at Michigan State University, where he managed international research collaborations in Africa and South America. His duties included building and training a network of researchers across more than 5 countries to use the open source MultispeQ device and PhotosynQ platform to build local research capacity. Before joining PhotosynQ, Dan spent over 5 years living in eastern and southern Africa working with smallholder agricultural systems.