Cara Peterson

PhD student

Cara Peterson completed her MS in the Agroecology Lab at the University of Maryland and she is staying on for a PhD. She conducts her research with the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Lab (SASL) at the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. She is co-advised by Dr. Kate Tully at UMD and Dr. Steven Mirsky at the USDA. Her interest in agriculture stemmed from studying agricultural development and community environmental management projects in sub-Saharan Africa while an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill and working on diversified vegetable farms in the U.S. In her graduate work, she is interested in the scaling of pieces of small-scale sustainable farming methods to large-scale, mechanized cropping systems in the U.S. Her work at UMD will explore the potential of interseeding cover crops into short-season soybeans preceding a corn rotation.