RESEARCH
Farida Belksami:
Borlaug Fellow at AIGR
AS A MEMBER OF THE FACULTY AT MOHAMED EL BACHIR EL IBRAHIMI UNIVERSITY IN ALGERIA , FARIDA BELKSAMI HAD DEVELOPED A KEEN INTEREST IN ANIMAL HEALTH AND PRODUCTION. WHEN A COLLEAGUE TOLD HER THAT THE RESEARCH FOCUS OF THE 2019 USDA FOREIGN AGRICULTURAL SERVICE BORLAUG INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM WAS IN EXACTLY THOSE AREAS, SHE SEIZED THE OPPORTUNITY.
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he submitted her application and soon learned she had won a prestigious Borlaug Fellowship. Based on her research interests, the Borlaug program paired her with her future mentor, Dr. Arthur Goetsch, of the American Institute for Goat Research (AIGR) at Langston University. They corresponded and together designed a research program.
Belksami leapt into her work at AIGR. Mentored by Goetsch, she spent most of her 15-week stint on research trials using three breeds of hair sheep to evaluate the “Effects of Nutritional Plane Before and After Breeding on Reproduction Performance.” As she cared for the animals, she collected data for the initial phase of her research, which will end at lambing in the spring 2020. She was particularly interested in using body condition scoring in a research setting and learning more about small ruminant nutrition. And with the help of AIGR scientists, Belksami honed her laboratory and other skills in the areas of calorimetry, feedstuff fiber analysis, general laboratory skills, and RNA extraction. In addition, having expressed a desire in her fellowship application to delve into statistical analysis techniques, including modeling and regression, Belksami was especially grateful when Dr. Terry Gipson stepped in to provide training sessions using the SAS statistical software suite and the R statistical analysis environment.
In August 2019, Belksami arrived in the U.S. and at Langston University. Her first impressions were somewhat overwhelming. Belksami had never traveled to the U.S., and her ideas of America had been formed by movies, television, and news. The real U.S. was not exactly what she anticipated. For one thing, it was bigger. “There is a lot of land and big houses,” she recalled. The U.S. was also more rural than she had expected – in the media, she had seen mostly cities and urban areas. Langston University and the region around it were quite different from her bustling home of Bordj Bou Arréridj, a northern Algerian city of 200,000 inhabitants. Fortunately, language was not a surprise – in addition to her native Arabic, Belksami speaks f luent Farida Belksami records data from tri-axial French and English. accelerometers used to measure rumination and lying/standing time.
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LANGSTON UNIVERSITY
Borlaug fellows are encouraged to travel during their program, and Belksami took advantage of her opportunities, (continues on page 40)
