BIOAg Projects & Impact
This story is part of the 2024–2025 CSANR Biennial Report.
For nearly 20 years, CSANR’s Biologically Intensive Agriculture and Organic Farming Program (BIOAg) has supported sustainable agricultural research.
BIOAg provides WSU researchers with competitive grants to test new ideas and explore emerging opportunities in sustainable agriculture. Many of these small projects later expand into large initiatives, supported by major external grants. Since 2020, direct investment of $1.46 million in funding through BIOAg helped researchers secure more than $20 million in extramural support. In 2024 and 2025, projects spanned seven departments and included eight new faculty, exploring topics from soil carbon and compost incentives to honey bees, pest management, livestock forage, and youth farmers markets.
2024 Projects
- Scalable soil carbon assessment for incentive programs
- Biopesticides to protect honey bees from Varroa mites
- Erosion reduction through conservation tillage
- At-school youth farmers markets and healthy food choices
- Forage protein reservoirs to enhance cattle diets
2025 Projects
- Identifying Delia root maggots in vegetables
- New codling moth pathogens for tree fruit growers
- Compost incentive programs: motivations and challenges
- Tannins as sustainable biopesticides for potato diseases
- Biomass-derived pyrolysis oils to manage insect-vectored diseases