SAgE Program: Green Teams Project

For the second year in a row, the Foodshed Alliance’s SAgE Program is excited to welcome back a “Green Team” through Montclair University’s PSEG Institute of Sustainability Studies (ISS) summer internship program.

The program through PSEG ISS welcomes students from universities and community colleges from all over the country to exercise their diverse areas of study and interest to support nonprofit organizations, communities, and corporations in innovative projects that support sustainability. All of the teams consist of 5 student interns, and 2 project managers.

This year, the Foodshed Alliance’s Green Team will be building upon a project started last year that utilized Arduino Uno, a microcontroller computer, to monitor soil conditions in one of the farm fields at the SAgE Farm in Andover – specifically the Sussex County Community College’s Student Farm plot.

To advance this model and further study how to improve soil conditions, this year’s project will focus on applying three separate inputs, plus control areas, in replicated strips throughout the field to study how each input improves the soil over the roughly two month period that the program runs. The inputs that will be applied are biochar, highly-concentrated food waste compost, and a combination of the two. After inputs are mixed into the given experiment areas, we will plant a buckwheat cover crop to provide as much homogenous plant life to the strips as possible. 

Simultaneously, the students will be conducting a replicated study in the lab back at Montclair University to study the same inputs in a controlled environment.

Once the strips have been established, the students will focus their efforts on utilizing robotics and ArcGIS to monitor soil conditions, including soil moisture, biological activities, temperature, plant growth, and more.

We look forward to working with the Green Team students this summer, and are eager to learn more about the science behind improving soil through dedicated inputs!