AgryCODR

Incentivizing farming families in disease hotspot areas to increase and maintain the lands health providing natural resources as well as paying youth for disease data collection from their farms.

T.R. Price 26 year old Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. Masters in Environmental Studies Sustainable Development and Climate Change. PhD candidate Environmental Economics. 

Farming families are not incentivized for some of the largest public benefits their farms produce, ecosystem services (or the ability of the farmland to influence the quality and quantity of air, water and other resources). Without monetarily rewarding ecosystem services farming family members leave the farm in search of opportunity elsewhere. When the family member starts living elsewhere they might realize that the opportunity they thought there would be isn’t there.  When not provided with opportunity young women and other people are liable to become pregnant early and potentially suffer from complications, there is increased obesity, more drug use and declining mental health.

Without the help or support for the farm that there used to be, the farm owners sell their family farm to large agriculture. Large agriculture then turns this farmland into a monoculture area further lessening the health providing ecosystem services the land produced. When the land is converted, animals that used to live without much human pressure are forced to live in other areas. By pushing the animals to live in other areas, the animals become stressed and are more liable to invade farming lands in an unhealthy state furthering the risk of emerging infectious disease. 

Our work tangibly benefits farming families, youth of these families and educational institutions. It indirectly benefits the healthcare community, and the rest of the world. Farming families are paid for regenerative farming practices, reforestation and other sustainable behavior. These families are educated by local professionals about more sustainable farming behavior and the biodiversity that exists on their land. Youth of these families are given the opportunity to pursue higher education and if there are commercialized discoveries from the data they help to collect, are financially supported for a longer amount of time. Educational institutions help us to train the farming youth, further educate them, standardize disease data collection procedures, and ensure that we comply with the local laws and regulations. For this they are financially incentivized to join the AgryCODR program. The data gathered by the youth provides the healthcare community with information that may lead to medical discoveries as well as signals if there may be a potential disease spillover when levels get too high in the samples. The proactive intervention techniques help maintain healthy communities and decrease the probability of disease spillover. This benefits the global community as it decreases their risk of being impacted by emerging infectious diseases. 

AgryCODR provides data from fecal matter and soil samples in an open access website. This data can be used by the scientific research community. By proactively implementing interventions the global community is at a decreased risk for diseases. 

This will create tangible impact for farmers and their kids. The kids will be able to have opportunities they might not of otherwise had and the farmers will have more resources to do agricultural practices.

The AgryCODR program is set to start in one country. After demonstrating success in that country the AgryCODR program will spread to other developing countries.

Success is measured by the amount of people participating in the AgryCODR program, as well as the amount of health providing ecosystem services that have been increased or maintained. 

Currently we are financially limited and can not start GOSAIC. The technical expertise for spatial analysis is there but need better expertise in the realm of fecal and soil sample analysis. Legally we need to formulate the contracts that we enter into with educational institutions and make sure to comply with their local cultural customs and policies. 

Being a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Paraguay this solution has connections to both Paraguay and Brazil. The educational institutions in Brazil have many experts in the soil sciences due to the money they have received from carbon credits. They also have technical experts for fecal sample analysis. These experts will help AgryCODR to overcome the technical barrier. The educational institutions are familiar with the laws, policies and customs that a business needs to comply to when doing business in their country. 

Video Source: Justin Johnson (2015) MESH 5min Carbon Example. Retrieved 4/14/21 from http://justinandrewjohnson.com...

Treetable LLC

The Trinity Challenge will allow for the AgryCODR collaboration to be launched with great publicity. Many of the founding members of the Trinity Challenge already have relationships in developing countries worldwide. These relationships will help AgryCODR to easily connect with partners in those countries. This opportunity also provides the startup capital needed to establish AgryCODR. 

AgryCODR would like to partner with the Global Virome Project to better understand how youth in these areas could better help them in disease research as well as to have the Global Virome Project identify potential partners for AgryCODR. AgryCODR would also like to partner with HKU Med, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. These partnerships would allow AgryCODR to better understand the how farming youth could better collaborate for disease research, develop standards for sampling and potentially provide analysis equipment to partner institutions in other countries.