Browse by Topic: Planning

The New England Adaptation Survey draws upon the experience of 193 fruit and vegetable growers surveyed in 2017 and 2018. It explores emerging adaptive management strategies, perceived climate related risks, and adaptive capacity.

This short guide for Land Trusts gives you a starting point to help you design and implement adaptation actions in your work, with a special eye toward stewardship activities. It draws on the five-step Adaptation Workbook process to help you consider how climate change will affect your lands and your associated goals for land conservation and stewardship. By intentionally considering the potential impacts, challenges, and opportunities from climate change, you can then use this lens to identify actions that enable ecosystems to cope with stressors and adapt to changing conditions, while also addressing conservation priorities.

NOFA-VT’s Farmer Services Team offers flexible, responsive services to support farmers in assessing their level of climate risk and identifying adaptation strategies to increase their resilience. Submit Services Questionnaire to connect with the team

This technical bulletin contains information and resources designed to help agricultural producers, service providers, and educators in the Midwest and Northeast regions of the United States integrate climate change considerations and action-oriented decisions into existing farm and conservation plans. An Adaptation Workbook provides producers a flexible, structured process to identify and assess climate change impacts, challenges, opportunities, and farm-level adaptation tactics and continuously evaluate adaptation actions for improving responses to extreme and uncertain conditions. A synthesis of Adaptation Strategies and Approaches serves as a “menu” of potential responses organized to provide a clear rationale for making decisions by connecting planned actions to broad adaptation concepts.

We propose a method to improve surveys to define adoption in agriculture as a dynamic process. Our approach represents adoption as a flow of adopters moving through stages. We show how innovation diffusion is the result of individual adoption journeys converging into common pathways. Our approach provides a highly informative way to unpack the diversity of dynamic adoption. Our approach can assist agricultural researchers and extension agents to predict future adoption.

A GIS-based computer program for precision design of vegetative filter strips around agricultural fields. The tool analyses the terrain for spatial patterns of overland runoff and designs a variable-width configuration that matches those patterns to provide a constant, user-selected, level of performance along the field margin. The tool also can assess the performance level of existing or hypothetical configurations.

Bar and pie-graphs representing GHG emissions by state, broken down by sector.

Production, business, and funding resources from the University of Vermont.

Air quality current and forecasted data by location. Also includes historical archives, fire information, and the option to sign up for alerts.

Participants will learn how to use available UNIX-based scripts to automate access to free weather data from NOAA/NWS databases, as well as examples of how such data can be translated into weather-based farm management decisions by automated analysis and export of presentation graphics through Microsoft Excel.

Participants will become aware of the social, ecological and economic drivers and implications of certain management practices that may reduce farm-scale risks producers in the northeast face because of climate change.

A comprehensive guide to business planning for farmers, pulling from all available resources, including farmers and other business experts, that could be used to create a business planning primer—a guide that will help today’s alternative agriculture entrepreneurs work through the planning process and to begin developing their business plans.

This guide is written for anyone seeking help from federal programs to foster sustainable and innovative initiatives associated with agriculture and forestry in this country and territories. Sustainability can be understood to embrace the triple concepts of economic, environmental and social viability. A reader can find information about program resources pertaining to economic development; farm loans; insurance and risk management; local food systems, value added and marketing innovations; natural resources conservation and management; nutrition and consumer food access; renewable energy and energy conservation; and research and outreach. The guide can help farmers, researchers, entrepreneurs, community developers, private landowners, conservationists, and other individuals, as well as private and public businesses and organizations. It describes program resources ranging from grants and loans to technical assistance and information resources.

The main questions this tool helps the user answer are: 1) What are the climate adaptation and/or mitigation strategies that might be most appropriate for my operation? 2) How should I make decisions about implementing these strategies? 3) How will I know if I have achieved success with a given strategy? This tool is designed as a template, or “open workbench” for the user to enter information based on their operation and goals. The tool is not a diagnostic tool and does not recommend specific solutions for a given climate related production issue. The tool can be used across any farming system and allows you to choose strategies based on your own ideas and research, reflecting the realities of your farm system, location, microclimate, local markets, or other relevant variables.

John Oliver humorously explains what carbon offsets are, what they claim to do, and how they might be making climate change even worse.

Draws together a wide range of resources for farms in transition to more climate change resilient production, processing, storage and distribution practices. Includes videos, resilience planning, best practices, and resources for underserved farmers.

This worksheet is designed to help farmers go through the 5 step climate adaptation planning process and have a word document to produce a complete plan.

The economic tools, visualizations, and resources on this website were designed with and for small, medium, and beginning farmers and ranchers in New England to help address their unique challenges in adapting to a changing climate. These resources are available for three agricultural practices - silvopasture, irrigation, and tarping - that were identified as areas of particular interest and need among New England farmers.

This tool provides near real-time analysis of monthly temperature and precipitation for the globe and is intended for the study of climate variability. Data is provided globally, by hemisphere, by regions, and by land and ocean surface components. The interactive mapping tool allows analysis of the spatial patterns of global and regional analysis. Recently, various parameters (e.g. heating/cooling degree days and drought indicators), expanded regional options (e.g. counties, river basins, agricultural belts, etc.) and new analyses (e.g. Haywood plots and climatological rankings) have been added to enhance and broaden the capabilities of this tool.

This publication explores climate-related challenges to perennial fruit and nut production, including drought, frost, flooding, and extreme weather events. It discusses steps growers can take to build resilience into their farming operations through diversification, water stewardship, and soil building, as well as technology, information, and policy.

This report details the findings from the Capacity Discovery project, an online survey implemented in spring 2015 that documented the current and future capacity of land-grant universities in the Northeast to address climate change research and Extension work in the agriculture, natural resources, and forestry sectors.

A still-relevant summary from 2015 of the observed past and projected future climate changes in the region that are relevant to wildlife and ecosystems, as well as what we know and don’t know in order to raise managers’ confidence in their planning.

Scientists agree: human-caused global warming is real, and it’s bad. Severe weather is impacting all regions of Earth and will continue to increase in intensity and frequency as warming continues. The climate crisis demands our attention and our collective action towards restoring balance with natural Earth ecosystems. Climate-beneficial farming practices are one of the many pathways to mitigate climate change, while simultaneously building resilient ecological systems that can help farmers and ranchers adapt to unpredictable and unprecedented climate disruptions. This article summarizes the effects of climate change on agriculture, agriculture's role, and mitigation.

A platform for visualizing climate and weather forecast models. Site content is organized into three general categories: Weather Forecasts, Climate Charts, and Research Tools. Pages within the first two groups are the easiest to use and include maps, map animations, and interactive time series charts (with data export options). Research Tools include pages for generating custom maps, time series, and linear correlations from monthly climate reanalysis, gridded data, and climate models.