State offers grants for innovative farm projects

The challenge has vexed Jason Amundsen for a few years. He’s brought in engineering students from the University of Minnesota Duluth and St. Thomas University in St. Paul. He’s hired one of them full-time to tackle the problem.

At Farm LoLa in Wrenshall, the mission is capturing water from the air — in a sense, making the concept of the indoor humidifier work outside.

Amundsen said the world is starving, and he wants to find a way to better water crops. He cites endangered citrus crops in Texas and olive orchards in Spain.

“Right now, the event of our lifetime is hunger,” he said. “There are as many as 25,000 people a day dying of hunger. Let’s focus on that.”

It was announced this week that the Minnesota Department of Agriculture will be helping Amundsen and his team with a $49,000 grant to further develop what is officially called “atmospheric water collection.” The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s Gitigaaning gardening program also received a Sustainable Agriculture Demonstration grant for $25,000 to study regenerative agriculture, like amending soil and keeping it healthy, versus conventional farming.

Grantees must match each dollar amount as they work on projects.

At Farm LoLa, the honeyberry season was short. Too much rain, and then sudden heat, Amundsen said. A regular seven-week season was reduced to just under three.

But the water capture project isn’t for his own benefit on a typical farm that sees weather patterns mess with the bottom line. It’s about solving a world problem, and “making water where you need it,” right at the plant, avoiding costly irrigation and providing moisture during drought years like the region experienced the past few years.

It started with the idea of using a “simple, durable, inexpensive” 12-volt battery, Amundsen said. He laughed, saying early study showed that all of the assumptions he and the engineers had going in were “wrong.” They are now incorporating solar and wind power.

“The need is so huge,” Amundsen said. Aquifers are drying up and temperature extremes are continuing, and any additional water will help crops, he said.

The state awarded nearly $350,000 to 12 projects across the state focused on researching sustainable ag practices and systems. The MDA has been awarding annual grants for the past decade.

The grants fund innovative research or demonstration projects that “explore the energy efficiency, environmental benefit, and profitability of sustainable agriculture techniques — from the production through marketing processes.”

Farm LoLa has been part of the program before, as its honeyberries and those of two other such farms in the state were studied in order to see if the new crop will work across climates.

Topics being researched by this year’s grantees range from cover cropping, solar land access, in-row weeding systems, biocontrol techniques, and cut flower production.

Grant project updates are published annually in the MDA’s Greenbook, which provides a summary of each active project along with results, management tips, locations of previous projects, and other resources to help encourage widespread adoption of sustainable practices.

It’s a smorgasbord of interesting and emerging farm technology and sustainability details.

The next round of demonstration grants will open in the fall.

“There’s always water in the air,” Amundsen said. “We just need to figure out how to move it, heat it, and pull moisture out of it.”

The water capture fits nicely into UMD’s Capstone Project for mechanical engineers, which asks students to “utilize their acquired mechanical engineering skills and demonstrate their mastery of mechanical engineering concepts by completing a well-defined project that addresses a real-world problem.”

Amundsen said he isn’t looking to “reinvent the wheel,” but is instead working with known technology. The engineers “get it,” he said. “They get excited. It’s a real problem” they get to solve.