Recently, ProFarms Gateway was awarded a technical assistance grant from USAID's Farmer-to-Farmer program through WinRock International to help design the layout of our demonstration farm.
Dr. Karen Endres will be on the PFG site for 10 days at the end of November to review and improve on the existing site map and design and assist the team in designing the layout (to include structures, infrastructure, growing and production areas) of a fully-integrated, climate-smart, sustainable agricultural “demonstration farm.” The purpose of the demonstration project is to grow, process, and package produce onsite in a regenerative manner, taking into consideration the topography and lay of the land, especially for water conservation purposes. It is expected that this technical assistance will help PFG adequately structure the farm and establish a Sustainable Agriculture Model. This system recycles nutrients by combining crop and livestock production into a circular ecosystem; essentially, the plants feed the animals, and the animals feed the plants.
Dr. Endres has a PhD. in Environmental Engineering and Civil Engineering. She specializes in research and project implementation on marine and riverine systems for
habitat restoration and enhancement using satellite and innovative modeling.
She's developed a nationwide database for the National Weather Service for Flash Flood prediction and has awarded, designed and implemented grants for watershed
management. She has designed and implemented groundwater modeling software in
FORTRAN with optimization using heuristic techniques. Dr. Endres was awarded the ASCE Herring award for a paper in the Journal of Environmental Engineering. She also developed an innovative water modeling code and optimization methods for surface and groundwater specializing in coupled modeling with external data acquisition.
The John Ogonowski and Doug Bereuter Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) Program provides voluntary technical assistance to farmers, farm groups, and agribusinesses in developing countries to promote sustainable capacity building. The program relies on the expertise of U.S. volunteers from diverse backgrounds – farms, land grant universities, cooperatives, private agribusinesses, nonprofit farm organizations and others - to respond to the needs of host country farmers and organizations. Volunteers have come from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. In general, volunteers are not overseas development professionals, but individuals who have domestic careers, farms, and agribusinesses, or are retired and want to participate in development efforts. Typically volunteers spend about 20 to 30 days in the host country. Volunteers have completed over 12,000 assignments in 103 countries since the program began in 1985.
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