Location: Cotton Ginning Research
Project Number: 3050-41000-010-080-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 15, 2024
End Date: Aug 14, 2028
Objective:
Develop and evaluate sustainable technologies and strategies to improve productivity and process efficiencies, reduce agricultural environmental impact, identify new products and byproducts, as well as alternative mechanized approaches for specialty crops grown as cotton companion crops.
Approach:
Cotton companion specialty crop producers and processors across the United States are being pushed to adopt more sustainable practices to reduce the environmental impact while improving quality and safety. They face challenges in maintaining productivity and profitability and utilizing for value-added products the considerable amounts of post-harvest by-products that are typically incorporated back into soils or fed to livestock.
This project will leverage ARS expertise and establish research collaborations to bring together efforts in production and post-harvest processing to develop a model for circular specialty crop systems. A specialty crop and byproducts innovation group will be established with New Mexico State University to investigate sustainable approaches to production and to develop byproducts that provide value and bolster sustainability for specialty crop producers and processors. Initial efforts will focus on evaluating specialty crop byproduct properties to develop a library of characteristics for designing research programs for optimizing existing processes and investigating new ones to realize the potential of byproducts and increase business sustainability.
