Winter-Spring 2024 INAG News

INAG News

CONTENTS

Growing Gardens

4 Student Life

6 Ag Technologies

8 Turf Terps

9 Class Notes

11

Cover: INAG123 student Rell Trivits harvesting hops at the Anne Arundel County Extension Urban Agriculture Research Clinic led by IAA instructor Dave Myers.

From the Director’s Desk

Winter is a quiet time for many people in the agricultural industry. It’s the balance for the hectic (sometimes even grueling) summer months, when many agricultural folks work long, hot days for weeks on end. For most people, work doesn’t stop in the winter, but for a lot of agriculture folks, it does slow down.

Similarly, early January is a slower, more contemplative time for most academic people. We get a respite between fall semester and spring semester. There’s time to think about new teaching ideas, plan for the future, and catch up on other things that got pushed to the back burner during the teaching semester. This year, there were even snow days!

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I treasure this interlude every year. It gives me time to refresh my teaching materials, learn new skills that I didn’t have time to study when classes were in session, and reflect on what I learned over the past semester. I think it’s natural for many of us to use these weeks of short days and cold weather to rest and recharge. Our building is quiet; when I start a task, I finish it, because nothing happens to interrupt.

And then faculty and students flood back to campus, ready to start fresh, filled with new-semester energy. Colleagues and students pop into my office in a steady stream to ask questions, share ideas, or just say hello after the holiday break. As much as I value the focused work time in early January, I like the collaborative nature of the new

semester even more. As I’ve spoken to faculty and staff over the past week–and attended meetings with colleagues all over campus–I’ve heard all kinds of exciting ideas for the spring semester. IAA faculty have countless exciting things planned, from new field trips to innovative assessments. They’re building on teaching successes from last semester, solving problems, creating new lessons. If you want to be inspired, all you have to do is listen in the halls at the IAA for a few minutes.

I can’t wait to see how all of these plans pan out! I hope you have had the opportunity to relax and reflect over the holidays, and I hope your spring season contains as much joy and excitement as mine.

Heather McHale Interim Director

Heather McHale Interim Director

Rebecka Tetter Graphic Designer

RECORD ENROLLMENT Since 2000

Written By: Rebecka Tetter

The University of Maryland's Institute of Applied Agriculture (IAA) has experienced its highest enrollment in over two decades. For the Fall 2023 semester, the program had a total of 92 students, marking a significant upswing since the year 2000.

The IAA, known for its commitment to providing students with a comprehensive set of entrepreneurial, leadership, and technical skills, has become a hub for those aspiring to launch successful careers in agriculture and natural resources. The curriculum is designed not only to prepare students for immediate entry into the workforce but also to provide pathways for further education within the broader agricultural and natural resources programs at the University of Maryland, College Park.

With the record-breaking enrollment in the Fall 2023 semester, the University of Maryland's Institute of Applied Agriculture continues to play a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of leaders and innovators in the industry.

If you know of a student that may be interested in our program, send them our way! The Student Services Manager, Rebecka Tetter, can be reached at rjones98@umd.edu for more information.

GROWING GARDENS from Grants

$30,000 Sustainability Fund Grant Helps Campus Garden Fight Food Insecurity

Originally Posted by SustainableUMD at go.umd.edu/CLG-growing

Written By: Clare Gallagher

ISPRING 2023

t’s an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in October at 10 AM. Most UMD students are still asleep, but a dedicated group of student volunteers already have their hands in the dirt of the campus Community Learning Garden.

Work hours are hosted on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays at the garden. Meg Smolinski, the Outreach Coordinator for the UMD Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, often facilitates these hours. “If you come to a work hour, you’re gonna get your hands dirty,” Smolinski said.

Planted next to the School of Public Health in 2010, the Community Learning Garden is a student-created, student-run teaching and learning garden partially funded by the University Sustainability Fund. Depending on the season, the garden grows everything from summer squash and cucumbers to basil and tomatoes and more. The garden serves as an educational resource for students to learn about sustainable agriculture techniques and a producer to help alleviate food insecurity on campus.

Amanda Sames, a recent graduate of UMD, was active in the garden for much of her college career and served as the group’s president from 2021-2023. During her fall term as president, Sames noticed that the garden's raised beds were in poor condition. With part of the garden located on a steep slope between Eppley Recreation Center and the School of Public Health, the raised bed area had long provided an accessible portion of the garden to some campus community members who require accessibility accommodations. As the staff and students that coordinate the CLG wanted to preserve the portion of the garden that was accessible to all, they sought to improve this area with the Sustainability Fund grant.

In 2022, Sames applied to the Sustainability Fund and was awarded $30,000 to rebuild the Community Learning Garden’s raised beds. The new raised beds were built during this past summer. They are located on a flat stretch of land at the top of the garden, which has revamped the portion of the garden that is accessible to most.

“We would not have had the funds to rebuild these beds without the Sustainability Fund grant,” Smolinski said. She added that the Sustainability Fund has long played a crucial role in the garden and their efforts to alleviate food insecurity on campus.

For the past seven years, the Community Learning Garden has donated a portion of their harvest to the Campus Pantry. However, food insecurity significantly increased on campus with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

FALL 2023

“Before the pandemic there were about 70 visitors a week to the Campus Pantry; during the height of the pandemic that number shot up to 400,” Smolinski said.

From that point on, the Community Learning Garden has committed to donating one hundred percent of their harvest to the Campus Pantry. Passion for this mission to relieve food insecurity in the campus community is shared by members of the garden’s student group.

“Being able to donate everything we have to the food pantry where any [student, staff, or faculty] is allowed to come in and get free food, that’s super important to me,” says Grace Walsh-Little, the group’s current president.

These new raised beds should last about 25 years. “The raised beds we have now, the difference between them is insane,” Walsh-Little said.

Right now, the new beds are filled with a cover crop, but in January the student group will host their seed picking event. During this event, club members get to sort through a catalog and pick out which crops they want to plant in the brandnew raised beds.

If you have any questions about the Community Learning Garden or are interested in getting involved in the student group, please contact Meg Smolinksi: msmolins@umd.edu.

Photo Credits: (Before and After) Grace Walsh-Little, UMD Community Learning Garden.

IAA Student Life FALL 2023 SNAPSHOT

1. Charlotte Knight and Grace Overcash enjoyed "Pizza & Plants" to kick-off the Fall 2023 semester.

2. Faculty Dane Grossnickle and Eric Dunning greet students at the AGNR Welcome Back Bash.

3. Students in Geoff Rinehart’s INAG231 Insects of Turfgrass and Ornamentals (such as Chase Thompson) headed out for a collecting trip to a large meadow at the UMD golf course. Since Monarch butterfly populations are threatened, this butterfly captured by Chase was photographed, and then released, so it could continue its migration south.

4. Meredith Epstein’s INAG123 Digging into Sustainable Agriculture students participated in an afternoon filled with vegetable harvesting and lots of talk about different pollinating insects and their role in the fertilization of fruit and vegetable crops. Peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash were ready to be picked. With a total of 107.45 pounds of vegetables that were then donated to the Campus Pantry.

5. Rebecka Tetter's INAG289 Professional Development and Internship Experience students prepared presentations about their internships for their classmates and IAA faculty to learn more about their experiences. James Heffley presented on his internship experience with the University of Maryland Extension.

6. IAA and other AGNR students met with Former CEO of Perdue, Randy Day, to learn from his experiences before the 5th Annual Cornerstone Event focusing on advancing agricultural production systems.

INAG237: We Have LIFTOFF...

Written By: Tom Mazzone

After a 2 year hiatus, the Institute of Applied Agriculture was excited to reintroduce INAG237 for the Fall 2023 semester. Along with its reintroduction came a new name: INAG237: GPS & Drone Applications in Surveying. Historically, the course introduced students to traditional surveying skills and GPS mapping. The new version still exposes students to GPS mapping exercises, but also brings a new drone component to the course. To make room for drones in the curriculum, traditional surveying was moved and is now incorporated in our INAG251: Landscape Construction course.

While drones are a hot topic in agriculture and natural resources, courses utilizing them on campus are few and far between. This is largely due to financial, seasonal, and location restraints. Despite these hurdles, the IAA is proud to be a pioneer of this type of instruction in College Park.

As with much of the tech industry, new, more capable drones are quick to come to market. Staying up to date with the latest drone technology is difficult, but we strive to do it in order to give students the most realistic experience possible that mimics what they may encounter in the actual work field. This course was largely made possible by 3 different grants written by the course lecturer Tom Mazzone. Money awarded from the Teaching and Learning Center on campus, and the Maryland Agriculture Council totaling nearly $22,000 allowed us to buy a variety of different drones. To date, we have 1 multispectral drone, 1 mapping drone, 2 thermal drones, and 3 photography drones.

The goal of the course is to expose students to as many different types of drone surveying operations as possible. Each week, students are assigned a different drone and complete a lab exercise to acquire data. With the multispectral drone, students collect Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data that allows them to pinpoint areas of stress in a standing crop. Stress can come from drought, insect, and disease pressure. With the mapping drone, students mapped the Chesapeake Bay shoreline at Terrapin Nature Park in Stevensville, MD. The thermal drones were used to detect irrigation deficiencies at the Central Maryland Research and Education Center (CMREC), and detect animals at Deere Valley Farm in Dickerson, MD. The photography drones were used to inspect land, as well as capture footage of operation which students could use to create an advertisement.

Seasonal and location constraints were taken into special consideration when designing the course. By design, academic and agricultural calendars do not line up, which means that students are not in class during the prime crop scouting season. The course was chosen to run in the fall due to there still being a crop stand early in the semester. Location challenges also come into play as drones are not permitted within a ~35-mile radius surrounding Washington DC. Unfortunately, College Park falls within this no-fly zone, meaning that all drone labs must be conducted away from campus. We were very fortunate to utilize CMREC, Deere Valley Farm, and Terrapin Nature Park to conduct labs.

Once data was collected, students learned to post process the data utilizing Pix4d software. This software allowed students to develop prescription maps that could be used to spot treat affected areas of a standing crop. Looking into the future, we hope to incorporate a spray drone into our lineup that will give students the full rounded experience of scouting, analyzing, and treating via drone. Pix4d also allowed the students to stitch and render acquired mapping images that can used to analyze erosion, topography, distances, and volumes.

Drone surveying set aside, students were also prepared to take their Part 107 Commercial Drone Pilot exam as part of the course. A Part 107 license is required anytime the operator monetizes from drone flight. This could include working for an employer, charging a client for your services, or even uploading drone footage to YouTube. This value-added component of the course helps make students more marketable in their respective application processes and gives them a credential they can take with them.

Pictured: INAG237 students and instructor using the drones during class.

TURF Terps 2024

Written By: Lori Sefton

On January 22, two teams of UMD undergraduate students and their coach set out to compete in the first of two national turfgrass competitions at the Sports Field Managers Association (SFMA) in Daytona Beach, FL. A week later students competed in the Turf Bowl at the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) conference in Phoenix, AZ. The teams had been working since August to prepare for these competitions, meeting weekly to practice. Areas of study included: Turfgrass Soils; Soil Fertility; Irrigation; Drainage; Turfgrass Mathematics; Pest Management; Turfgrass Identification; and Sports Field Management.

The team first competed in the National Sports Field Managers Association Student Challenge in Daytona, Florida, against twenty-nine other national schools, such as Penn State, Ohio State, and Purdue. Here, students were challenged to solve problems applied to sports field management. Maryland's top team, consisting of Luke Murnane, Matt Miller, Connor Todd, and Gabe Gammill placed 6th out of 29 teams.

One week later, the UMD team flew to Phoenix, Arizona for the National Golf Course Superintendents Association of America Turf Bowl against a pool of sixty-three other national teams. Murnane, Miller, and Todd, with another teammate, Sam Burke, placed 12th out of 63 school teams.

When asked what was the most challenging part of the competitions, Scott Godfrey, a second-year student in General Turfgrass, stated, "There is a lot of material; grasping what is important information and what is not" is hard. Especially challenging for the team was the variety of insects, weeds, diseases, and irrigation management calculations on which they were tested. Murnane, a junior student in Turfgrass Management, said, "Weed identification was challenging, as many weeds were from the west." This meant the team had to do much of their preparation from textbook info since actual samples were

not available on campus. "My labs are usually out in the field or on the course, or at least include actual specimens of insects, weeds, grasses, diseases, and seeds," stated Geoff Rinehart, Turf Grass Management Senior Lecturer and Advisor and Coach of the UMD Team.

Beyond the opportunity to compete, team members meet and mingle with turfgrass professionals. Kyle Thompson, a two-year member of the UMD Turf Bowl team, spent part of his time in Phoenix meeting and interviewing with Jess Humphrey, the Superintendent of Snowmass Club. One week later, Humphrey offered Kyle a position as Second Assistant to Superintendent at the Club in Snowmass, CO. Kyle will graduate with his Golf Course Management certificate this May. "The competition is hard work, but it greatly benefits our students," said Rinehart. "They leave the experience with knowledge, confidence, contacts, and team connections, all of which will benefit their careers for years to come."

Team members agree with Rinehart. "Turf Bowl is a unique experience. The competition is educational rigor and team building," shared Joe Poulas, a first-year Golf Course Management student. "I have no doubt my teammates and I will be better students because of the opportunity to compete together. I'm already thinking about next year's Turf Bowl and how we can improve!"

Students Kyle Thompson, Connor Todd, Luke Murnane, Matthew Miller, John Burton, Samuel Burke, Joseph Poulas, and Ryan Kasner represented UMD at the 2024 Turf Bowl in Phoenix.

Seeking Nominations for Alumni Awards INTERNSHIP PHOTO CONTEST WINNER

PARKER MILLER Ag Business Management

This summer he had the privilege to pursue his internship at the 4-M’s Farm LLC - a row-crop farming operation on the Eastern Shore. His favorite job revolved around the summer wheat harvest where he had the opportunity to operate the John Deere 9610 combine in the attached picture.

The Institute of Applied Agriculture is seeking nominations for our two 2024 awards: Distinguished Alumni and Early Career Alumni. Our 2023 winners were Sharon Loving and Marvin Martinez.

The IAA Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes alumni who, over their careers, have accomplished significant achievements of enduring value to their professions and society. Nominees should have attained notable achievements or made enduring contributions through their professional, philanthropic, or voluntary endeavors.

The Early Career Award honors IAA graduates who have earned a certificate in within the past 7 years and have made significant progress in their career and/or have shown outstanding service to their industries and/or the IAA.

The Institute of Applied Agriculture’s alumni are extraordinary individuals who contribute to their professions, the IAA, and society. Let’s recognize and celebrate your accomplishments.

Nominations are due by March 31, 2024. For the criteria and to nominate, please visit go.umd.edu/alumni-awards. Self-nominations are encouraged and welcomed.

Class Notes

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Marina Karides (AG BUS ‘22) began as a Program Support Specialist at the Southern Maryland Resource Conservation & Development Board.

Chelsea Patterson (AG COMM ‘22) is in Madagascar as an Agriculture Extension Agent in the US Peace Corps.

Tara Strasser (AG BUS ‘22) joined the US Environmental Protection Agency as a Program Analyst.

Brett Wilcom (GOLF ‘22) is now a Level II Maintenance Worker at MarylandNational Capital Park and Planning Commission.

Shana Burke (AG BUS ‘20) started as a Soil Conservation Technician at the Southern Maryland Resource Conservation & Development Board.

Jade Loewenstein (AG BUS ‘18) started a new position as a Grants Management Specialist for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Ruby Fishbein Wistreich (AG BUS ‘17) began as the Marketing Coordinator at Truss Vet - Veterinary Urgent Care.

Marvin Martinez (TURF ‘15) joined the City of Gaithersburg as a Head Supervisor.

Billy Willard (AG BUS ‘08) and his family were inducted into the Governor's Agriculture Hall of Fame by Governor Moore.

Thanks for all that came out; watch your emails for our next event!

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