Through the Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, Penn researchers are responding to a significant science-to-policy gap.
Ag Fund Visiting Scholar Lindiwe Majele Sibande toured New Bolton Center with Thomas Parsons, the Marie A. Moore Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics at Penn Vet.
According to the United Nations, about a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are connected to agricultural systems. Meanwhile, the growth of clean energy infrastructure is making growing demands on agricultural land. If the global economy is to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources, it’s going to mean significant changes for farmers and the land they use.
Since 2022, the Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy has convened researchers, planners, and designers at Penn and around the globe in an effort to illuminate the links between agriculture and energy. Along the way it’s touched on everything from the siting of solar energy facilities to carbon sequestration in urban farms and recapturing nitrogen from agricultural land before it enters watersheds.
“Energy and agriculture have responded to the big policy frameworks of the last few years in parallel, and real gains live in the gap between them,” says Thabo Lenneiye, managing director of the Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund. “That’s the space the Fund is aiming to fill.”
The Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund, the “Ag Fund” for short, was established in 2022 with a gift from Wharton alumnus Carl H. Goldsmith (W’88), setting out an agenda for research on sustainable agriculture. The agenda has blossomed since then, incorporating work by students as well as scholars, at Penn and around the world.
That agenda crystallized this spring in a working paper, “The Energy-Agriculture Nexus: A Multi-Year Research and Policy Agenda,” co-authored by Lenneiye, Angela Pachon, Kleinman’s international program director, and Research Assistant Shubham Love. The paper makes a deliberate move to isolate the bilateral relationship between energy and agriculture as a major direct and indirect energy consumer through synthetic fertilizers and on-farm operations, and as an energy producer through agrivoltaics and biofuels. Contrasting realities in the global north and the global south, it locates the argument within the post-2020 policy landscape that includes the Inflation Reduction Act, and its curtailment, the European Green Deal, and the COP28 UAE Declaration, where the mechanisms are expanding and, the authors argue, in need of greater cross-sectoral coordination.
An early marker of the Fund’s international ambition came in its inaugural visiting scholar appointment, Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, at the time the Global Co-Chair of CGIAR, the world’s largest network of agricultural research centers. Her week at Penn included a podcast taping for Energy Policy Now and exchanges across the veterinary school, Penn Medicine’s Center for Global Health, and Perry World House. That footprint also runs through a collaboration that began at the studio scale and has since grown into a multi-year institutional relationship.
Penn, University of Maseno, and GLUK students in discussion with government officials in Kisumu
With support from the Weitzman School, PennPraxis, and Penn Global, Lenneiye co-led a landscape urbanism studio in 2024 with David Gouverneur, an associate professor of practice in the Department of Landscape Architecture, and Karli Molter, a fellow Penn alum, that brought a group of students to Kisumu, Kenya, on Lake Victoria to study the pressures of urbanization on agricultural land, as one aspect. The resulting relationship with Great Lakes University of Kisumu (GLUK) has evolved into a broader research partnership.
“All policies should be informed by evidence, and it is at the universities that we can actually generate that evidence,” says Hazel Miseda-Mumbo, the vice chancellor of Great Lakes University of Kisumu. The collaboration between Penn and Kisumu grew out of relationships between individual scholars, Miseda says, and continues to evolve, with future work consulting with the Lake Victoria Basin Commission.
A parallel thread runs through the Fund’s review of indigenous regenerative agriculture practices in Africa. The research set out to provide evidence to support policies that build on successful practices. They include methods like the climate-smart agriculture practice, pfumudza, a soil-management practice that promotes greater crop output on small plots. When combined with modern fertilizer treatments, the practice can increase yields fivefold. What began as a Kleinman-funded review attracted matching support from Penn Global, and the combined investment was leveraged into a grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service that now supports in-country research collaborations in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. The Fund is working to publish a dashboard of such practices to inform regional policies.
Closer to home, over the last two years the Ag Fund has sponsored late-stage research by Penn faculty and affiliates on the links between agriculture and clean energy, with land use emerging as a recurring theme. That focus has also drawn in scholars from beyond Penn; Grace Wu of UC Santa Barbara’s Spatial Climate Solutions Lab and Jonathan Thompson, director of the Harvard Forest, joined a Penn Energy Week panel on the tradeoffs of siting renewables on agricultural and forested land, and later spoke on the Kleinman Center’s Energy Policy Now podcast on an episode titled “Renewable Energy's Land Use Reckoning.”
One such Penn faculty project explores how public policy can support—or hinder—the development of agrivoltaics, the twin use of land for agriculture and solar energy. Tom Daniels, the Crossways Professor in City and Regional Planning, who is leading the research, says solar panels can produce about 30 times more energy than corn grown for ethanol on the same area of land. But a growing number of communities are blocking solar development in hopes of preserving farmland. Combining the two practices by promoting sheep grazing, vegetable production, or pollinator habitats on land built out with solar panels can serve a range of goals at once. It’s an opportunity Daniels is helping Penn Vet explore at its New Bolton Center in Kennett Square.
“Can we write a model local solar ordinance or zoning ordinance that requires agrivoltaics in order to develop a solar project?” Daniels says. “There’s been some anecdotal evidence that when an agrivoltaic project is proposed it stands a better chance of approval by local governments as opposed to just putting solar panels on the land.”
As a member of the Penn delegation to COP28, the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference, Thabo Lenneiye (third from right) spoke at a panel at the Thailand pavilion (with Cid Blanco, Lisa Richmond, Kelly Alvarez Doran, and Kotchakorn Voraakhom).
In April the Ag Fund invited Daniels and other funded researchers at Penn to present their work in a seminar-style format. Lenneiye emphasizes that a central goal of the Fund is connecting scholars working on agriculture across different parts of Penn.
“Each of these projects are focused on consequential work,” she says, “and by bringing them together through our colleagues from different schools, including Penn Vet, Weitzman, Engineering, Law, and SP2, a community is starting to emerge.”
That community is growing and gaining institutional support. The Ag Fund and Penn Climate are finalizing a collaboration, titled The Climate + Agriculture Exchange, to develop and co-fund projects, host convenings, and champion work at the intersection of climate and agriculture. “The University is poised to make great contributions in this space, which is critical to both providing climate solutions and supporting healthy and sustainable agricultural systems,” says Sanya Carley, who is the Vice Provost of Climate Science, Policy, and Action at Penn as well as the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning.
“We’re in a moment where the energy-agriculture relationship has been brought into sharp focus; land-use conflicts, food-versus-fuel debates, shocks in oil markets propagating across fertilizer markets,” Lenneiye says. “The research shows it. Our part is figuring out how the evidence and potential solutions can be translated outside the walls of academia, and into real-world policy and practice.”
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