Almanac 2022sciencesenvironmentalandagriculturalofCollegeUGA
survey NEWS, PERSPECTIVES AND POINTS OF INTEREST FROM THE COLLEGE AND UGA EXTENSION4 Forecast THE IDEAS DRIVING THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES 13 Salt marshes, like this one on Jekyll Island, are vital parts of the ecosystem along the Georgia coastline. Georgia 4-H students learn about the importance of preservation on page 64. CHRIS GREER
Contents Implement NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT LANDSCAPES OF WELLNESSENTREPRENEURSHIP,ANDGROWTH31 Propagate MUTUALLY SUPPORTIVE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PEOPLE, THEIR COMMUNITIES AND THE LAND 47 Preserve THE EARTH’S ECOSYSTEMS AND NATURAL RESOURCES THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION61 digital edition Many of the stories in this issue have additional photos and features at edu/Almanac2022.discover.caes.uga.
JAY B. BAUER Before joining CAES as a creative design specialist in 2000, Jay B. Bauer spent five years rendering airplane designs for Boeing. He crafts, constructs, welds, paints and sculpts at his studio in Hoschton, Georgia, under the supervision of Katherine Holt and two stalwart dogs.
2 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences contributors ALMANAC is published annually for alumni, friends and supporters of the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences by the Office of the Dean and Director and produced by the Office of Marketing and Communications. Dean and Director Nick T. Place Chief Communications Officer Cassie Ann Kiggen Editorial Director Erin ManagingYates Editor Maria M. Lameiras Art Director Katie Walker Digital and Social Media Strategists Emily Davenport, Carly Mirable Contributing Writers Anna Bentley, Eric Butterman, Emily Davenport, Gary Goettling, Caroline Hinton, Carlisa Johnson, Becky Mills, Jordan Powers, Eric Rangus, Allison Salerno, Claire Sanders, Leonor Sierra, Josie ContributingSmith Artists and Photographers Rinne Allen, Anthony Barkdoll, Jay B. Bauer, Kelsey Brioch, Peter Frey, Chris Greer, Caroline Hinton, Dorothy Kozlowski, Dennis McDaniel, Blane Marable, Sean Montgomery, Shannah Montgomery, Megan McCoy, Sarah Neuberger, Hannah Perry, Josie Smith, Sue Myers Smith, Sarah Swain, Andrew Davis Tucker, Jesse Walker, Cassie Wright ADMINISTRATION Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Josef M. Broder Associate Dean for Extension Laura Perry Johnson Interim Associate Dean for Research Harshavardhan Thippareddi Interim Assistant Provost and Director, UGA Griffin campus G. David Buntin Assistant Dean, UGA Tifton campus Michael D. Toews Senior Director of Finance and Administration Sean SeniorRogersDirector of Development Mary Ann Parsons Director of Diversity Affairs Lakecia Pettway Director of Industry Partnerships and Project Based Learning Chris Rhodes Letters, photos and stories with a CAES connection are encouraged. Please send content ideas, letters to the editor and questions to maria.lameiras@uga.edu. FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA CAES @UGACAES@uga_collegeofag UGA College of Agricultural and EnvironmentalSciences @UGA_CAES@UGA_CollegeofAg EXTENSION @UGAExtension@ugaextension University of Georgia Extension @UGAExtension the university of georgia is an equal opportunity, affirmative action, veteran, disability institution
CARLISA JOHNSON Carlisa Johnson is a multimedia journalist based in Atlanta. As a journalist, she seeks to tell stories that amplify the voices of grassroots organizers, community activists and those working to promote equity around the world.
LEONOR SIERRA Leonor Sierra has more than 10 years of experience in science communication and science policy. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently a freelance science writer based in Athens, Georgia.
MEGAN MCCOY Megan McCoy is an illustrator and creative design specialist with CAES. With a bachelor’s degree in drawing and painting, she specializes in oil painting and digital illustration.
CHRIS GREER Chris Greer is an awardwinning photographer, author, professor and television producer. He produces and cohosts “View Finders” on Georgia Public Broadcasting, which chronicles the adventures of two photographers in search of beautiful locations.
JESSE WALKER Jesse Walker is a photographer and videographer based in Athens, Georgia. Using his lens and background in journalism, he explores creative ways of illuminating details to capture and keep viewers’ attention through storytelling.
COVER HANNAHARTISTPERRY
Hannah Perry is an artist and farmer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute with a bachelor’s degree in illustration and design. She loves working with plants, bees and singing harmonies.
The art and stories in the CAES Almanac were curated to celebrate the balance and breadth of expertise that CAES provides and teaches. In homage to the iconic Farmers’ Almanac, these pages are a window into the work being done at CAES to make the world increasingly healthy, equitable and sustainable.
Our future is rooted in improving agriculture and protecting the environment.
At the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, we are leading the way in instruction, outreach and innovation to care for our global ecosystems, enrich our communities and equip the next generation of leaders.
To follow along with what is growing on at CAES, use the QR code to access our digital content directory of story channels and to subscribe to our news, stories and updates.
Throughout this issue, look for QR codes to enhance your reading experience with digital content. To scan a QR code, open your smartphone's camera app and point it at the code. When prompted, tap the link. Scan the code at left to visit the CAES digital content directory for links to more story platforms and social media pages.
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In January 2021, fresh out of an nine-year tenure as director of the Florida Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Florida, Nick T. Place arrived in Athens, Georgia, excited to trade in his orange and blue for the University of Georgia’s red and black.
Over the last year and a half, he’s led the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, an organization with more than 2,500 faculty and staff across the state of Georgia and nearly 2,000 students enrolled in programs on UGA campuses in Athens, Griffin and Tifton. a sense of Place
How do you feel that your experience in Extension, both at University of Florida and elsewhere, has equipped you to lead an organization like CAES?
CAES places significant emphasis on experiential learning – how do you think this impacts the student experience?
– By Claire Sanders, photo by Katie Walker
CAES is also committed to innovation in research. What is one area where you’re excited to make progress? There really are numerous incredible things going on inside CAES, with some of the best and brightest faculty in the world. We’re working on research and outreach that moves the needle forward in agriculture and the environment.Integrative precision agriculture is an incredible example of collaboration among disciplines to solve big problems in agriculture and the environment. At UGA, we have experts in not only plant and animal sciences, but also engineering, computer sciences and data management. Food production must increase nearly 70% by 2050, so our ability to accomplish that goal is of utmost importance. Our faculty members are working diligently to discover creative, data-driven answers that support producer success and societal health. From planting methods to harvesting technology and animal production to product packaging, CAES is innovating for a future with a higher global population that demands equitable access to safe, healthy foods.
Agriculture has changed tremendously in your lifetime –what excites you about how CAES is a part of that change? I grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania in the 1960s, so the size and scale of production has shifted dramatically. With that, efficiency and profit margins have changed as well. At CAES, we are working to advance critical technologies through integrative precision agriculture, plant sciences, food science, and many other disciplines. Beyond production agriculture, CAES is moving into new areas like regenerative bioscience, which allows researchers to bring together animal science and human biology to find cures for diseases like Parkinson’s, heart disease and other conditions that currently have no cure. At CAES, the work we are doing is making a meaningful difference in the world around us.
Training the next generation is a critical part of what we do to ensure a secure future for agriculture and the environment.
My background has really been one where I started as an Extension agent and worked at various levels over the years. I spent time working in agricultural sales, I have farming experience, I’ve worked with Extension internationally in Poland — I’ve had some really incredible opportunities to see agriculture and the environment from multiple perspectives. Every single opportunity prepared me for the next one. I’ve always been able to take what I learned in one position and build on those experiences. Specifically, I think my understanding of the scope of the land-grant mission has been critical in my work at CAES. It’s helped me have a more wellrounded decision-making process because I’m able to consider how decisions will affect all of our stakeholders: students, faculty, staff and citizens of the state of Georgia. Land-grant universities are intended to be stewards of public trust and agents of public good — that’s my goal in leading CAES.
CAES Dean and Director Nick T. Place offers his perspective on the future of the college’s land-grant mission
College was the time when agriculture became a science to me. As an undergrad in soil science courses, we examined soil structures, how water and fertilizer affect growth, and other soilrelated questions I had never even considered. I started to see that agriculture was more than just “the way it had always been done.”
This is why experiential learning is so important for our students – we are graduating career-ready students who have experience before even taking their first job. Experiential learning gives students the opportunity to take risks and safely make mistakes, which better equips them to handle challenges post-graduation and in their careers.
UGA Cooperative Extension agents provide research-based information to Georgians through science-based programs and educational opportunities in agriculture, the environment, family well-being, and 4-H youth development and leadership. In FY 2021, Extension’s reach included partnered initiatives to provide vaccine education; offer health, wellness and financial security programs; and address supply chain issues by connecting producers with consumers. 1.2 acrossin-personmillioncontactsgeorgia georgiayouth97,000+servedby4-h
survey National3,400+andinternational media mentions for CAES and Extension Downloads121,853webpagesVisits2,633,928Visits1,451,583coveragetotheCAESsitetoExtensionpublicationofExtensionpublications Views5,000+Visits220,593+totheCAESNewswireofournewstorytelling platform, Cultivate, which showcases CAES faculty, alumni, students, and industry innovators (launched in December 2021) Improving Lives Through Research $43.8M Total grant expenditures in FY 2021 increased 8.3% from $40.4M $35M Competitive federal grant expenditures grew 8.6% from $63.7M$32.3M New awards increased in FY 2021 10.6% from $57.6M; new competitive federal grants grew 6.3% from $49.3M to $52.4M paying it forward In FY 2021, CAES had its secondhighest fundraising total of the past decade, raising $15.12 million, 161% of the original $9.4 million goal. AlumniTotal19,943livingalumni909donationsinFY 2021 Alumni12,484livinginGeorgia 35 OUTREACH 38% $262.6M TEACHING 35% RESEARCH$241.3M 27% $182.3M
servedCounties159
The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences generated an economic impact of $686.3 million in Georgia in 2021, the third-highest of any college or unit at UGA, which set a record with an annual overall economic impact of $7.4 billion in 2021. Divided among teaching ($241.3 million), research ($182.3 million) and outreach ($262.6 million) according to a recent university-wide report, CAES’ economic impact was at its highest level since the university began publishing a report in 2015, said CAES economist Michael Adjemian, who authored the report. making an impact
Raising Our Visibility digital directory Scan the QR code for a link library to CAES Newswire, Cultivate and social media at com/CAESdigital.tinyurl. COMPILED JAN.–DEC. 2021 5almanac 2022
In the decades since Keith Kelly graduated from the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences with his degree in agricultural economics, he has built a diversified slate of agricultural businesses encompassing 17 distinct brands.
For years, Kelly has also applied his business and agricultural knowledge to help CAES and its students achieve the same success he believes the college equipped him to Kellyachieve.has maintained close ties with UGA and CAES, serving as a member of the UGA Foundation Board of Trustees and helping found the CAES Rural Scholars Program with his wife, Pam Kelly, and fellow CAES alumnus Robert Varnadoe and his wife, Layne Varnadoe. He is also a founding sponsor of the FABricate entrepreneurial initiative
In the first phase of the project, researchers will collect microbiome samples from cattle raised by producers across the country and analyze them in the lab at Kelly Products. The bioinformation from that sequencing will be connected to economically important traits that the individual cattle display in terms of feed efficiency and production value.
efficiency of production for cattle and other ruminants.
reductioninitiativeaMicrobiometheled(ADS).Animalfromtothatsustainabilitybusiness,agriculture-relatedorenvironmentalorbusiness.ItwasthroughthosetiesKellyhadtheopportunitymeetwithresearcherstheDepartmentofandDairyScienceThatmeetinghastothedevelopmentofKellyProductsInc./UGACollaboration,multidisciplinaryresearchfocusedonmethaneandimproving
6 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences competition, which encourages UGA students to develop ideas for a new food product, agricultural technology, food- or
The microbiome collaboration will use the latest technology — including state-of-theart MiSeq DNA sequencing equipment — in a dedicated lab at Kelly Products headquarters in Covington, Georgia, where UGA faculty and students will work with Kelly’s scientific staff to test cattle feed efficiency in thousands of individual animals from cattle populations across the U.S.
Once the researchers process the data from those samples, which will include information from both high-performing and low-performing animals, the team will develop strategies for improving feed efficiency and reducing methane emissions by improving the health of the cattle microbiome.
CAES partners with Kelly Products to reduce cattle greenhouse emissions through microbiome research Keith Kelly and his wife, Pam Kelly, have close ties with UGA and CAES. CAES and Kelly Products Inc. are teaming up to combine new technology with the expertise of UGA’s Department of Animal and Dairy Science.
UGA’s researchers hope that the addition of this microbiome information will give them greater confidence in identifying cattle with superior feed efficiency and other relevant traits earlier in the animal's life. In later studies, researchers will use two GreenFeed systems, supplied through support from Kelly Products, that will allow for the direct measurement of greenhouse gases — including methane and carbon dioxide — produced by cattle that differ in feed efficiency at UGA’s Double Bridges Beef Teaching and Research Unit. The GreenFeed technology also will track how much oxygen cattle release.
It is estimated that a 10% improvement in feed efficiency would translate to more than $1 billion in increased profits for the cattle industry in the U.S. alone, a statistic that spurred UGA’s initial research into improving cattle feed efficiency.
ADS researchers — including Professor Dean Pringle, Associate Professor Todd Callaway and Assistant Professor Jeferson Lourenco — will focus on the DNA of each animal’s genome and the DNA associated with the microorganisms they identify and quantify from the animal’s microbiome.
Produced as a by-product by specific microorganisms in the rumen (first stomach) of cattle as they digest cellulose and fiber, methane is then released into the environment through eructation — also known as burping. This methane represents a loss of carbon and energy for the animal and an environmental concern.
– By Maria M. Lameiras and Jordan Powers, photo by Peter Frey
“It is exciting to think that this microbiome research may produce solutions for better feed efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, two of the biggest challenges facing the beef industry today,” Kelly said.
“A reduction in methane production by beef cattle would be a win-win because it would result in more dollars to producers through increased feed efficiency while helping to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere,” said Kelly, whose roots in agriculture go back generations in Morgan and Jasper counties.
taking
The CAES Rural Scholars Program was founded through the vision and philanthropy of Keith Kelly, a 1980 CAES graduate and founder, president and CEO of Kelly Products, and 1983 CAES alumnus Robert Varnedoe and theirTheyfamilies.endowed two scholarships in 2020 to provide perpetual funding for students from rural areas, as well as two additional, non-endowed funds to provide immediate support to other rural students. After the program was launched, the UGA Foundation Board of Trustees allocated funds to endow a third scholarship to fund an additional scholar each fall. Funds from other donors have supported recruitment, professional development and scholarships, bolstering the program over the past year.
Extracurriculars: Alumni Relations Committee member for Delta Gamma sorority and medical assistant volunteer at a free health clinic
bigtowns,Small,dreams
Aubrey Fraser-Tarpley Hometown: Toccoa, Georgia Major: Animal health Favorite class: “Effects of Global Agriculture” Extracurriculars: Georgia Club Dance Team, Delta Gamma sorority, and the Guide Dog Foundation Favorite instructor: Professor Dean Pringle in the Department of Animal and Dairy Science “He is always open to helping his students. And no matter the question, he is always willing to answer and apply real life examples to the lectures instead of bombarding us with generic information.”
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The 2022 cohort of Rural Scholars will start at UGA this fall and includes Jacob Allen Harper from Pelham, Georgia; Michael Scott Howard from Jackson, Georgia; and Madison Alexis Perdue from Rabun, Georgia. The inaugural cohort of the Rural Scholars Program shares their perspectives and what they enjoyed most in their first year as Bulldogs.
Favorite instructor: Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs Doug Bailey “He is very knowledgeable of the subject matter and provides his students with interesting, hands-on learning opportunities.”
2022
“As a rural student, I was intimidated by the size of the university at first. Being an avian biology major, I can experience a smaller, more tight-knit department, which I enjoy. Walking into the poultry science department building, I know that I will always be welcomed by a friendly face."
Extracurriculars: Block and Bridle
Favorite instructor: Assistant Professor Andrew Benson
Rural Scholars completes first year, new cohort chosen
succeed.”andopportunitiestomusttheourprovidersarecommunities“Ruralthefoodfornationandworld.Wetakeactionenhancetheirhelpthem —Keith Kelly, UGA Foundation trustee
Gracie Grimes
Hometown: Metter, Georgia Double major: sciencecommunicationAgriculturalandanimal Favorite class: “Animal Practicum” and “Livestock Evaluation Composition" Extracurriculars: Sigma Alpha professional agricultural sorority, Block and Bridle, Young Farmers and Ranchers, and Collegiate 4-H Favorite instructor: Professor Dean Pringle in the Department of Animal and Dairy Science
Mary anne mccord
Inaugural cohort of CAES
Favorite class: “Plants of the Bible” and “Effects of Global Agriculture”
Hometown: Sylvania, Georgia Major: Biological science with a minor in exercise and sport science
GEorgia orman Hometown: Watkinsville, Georgia Major: Avian biology Favorite class: “Introductory Poultry Science”
– Compiled by Maria M. Lameiras, photos by Andrew Davis Tucker support rural scholars Scan the QR code to learn more and support the Rural Scholars program. almanac
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“Dr. Pringle taught ‘Livestock Evaluation Composition.’ He made the class interesting and fun, always making sure you understood the information. He genuinely cared about your success within the class. ”
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As producers of the 2022 Flavor of Georgia top product, Hart Dairy was awarded an exhibit space at the Georgia Food Industry Association annual convention (a $1,500 value) and three consultation sessions from the UGA Food Product Innovation and Commercialization Center (FoodPIC) on product or process design, ingredient functionality, sensory testing or shelf-life determination. Continued on page 10
Hart Dairy is an ethically driven dairy company based in Waynesboro, Georgia, led by Tim Connell and Richard Watson. The cows are pasture raised, never confined and grass fed 365 days a year, practices the dairy promises are better nutritionally, better for the environment and better for the animals.
It was a sweet victory for Hart Dairy, winner of the grand prize at the 2022 Flavor of Georgia food contest for their Pasture Raised & Grass Fed 365 Days Per Year Chocolate Whole Milk.
Sweet Success Flavor of Georgia top honor goes to delight
dairy
2022 Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest Category Winners 1. Barbecue Sauces Habanero Soulful Sauce, Brooksmade Gourmet Foods Inc., Alpharetta 2. Honey and Related Products Hot Honey, Savannah Bee Company, Savannah 1
3. Condiments and Salsas Peach Hibiscus Chutney, Pride Road LLC, Lithonia See related story, page 36 4. Sauces and Seasonings Komodo Black, Komodo Sauces, Kennesaw 5. BlueberryBeveragesCider, Byne Blueberry Farms, Waynesboro 6. People's Choice Award HIBO Classic Hibiscus Superdrink + Peach, HIBO LLC, Bishop 5 3 2 4 6
Continued from page 8 Hart Dairy was among 32 finalists chosen from 148 entries to the 2022 contest. All finalists received a personalized press release, use of the Flavor of Georgia finalist logo on their label and promotional materials, and the opportunity to present their product to a panel of food industry experts at the final judging.
Finalists also received a one-year Georgia Grown membership, courtesy of the Georgia Department of Agriculture Flavor of Georgia, a Signature Event for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences organized by the Department of Food Science and Technology, has helped launch small, start-up food companies while garnering recognition in new markets for established brands since 2007. By Jordan Powers, by Sue Smith
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photos
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2022 Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest Category Winners (continued) 1. Jams and Jellies Strawberry Lemonade Marmalade, We Bee Jammin' LLC, Pooler 2. WhiteConfectionsGoldPecan Toffee, Maybird Confections, Alpharetta 3. Snack Foods Mokipops Basil Lemonade Frozen Fruit Bar Popscicle, Mokipops LLC, Atlanta 4. SpicedMiscellaneousAppleCider Hickory Syrup, Sutton Mill Creek Syrup Co., Clarkesville 5. Meats and Seafood Pastured Pork Bacon, White Oak Pastures, Bluffton 2 3 4 5 1 have a second helping Learn more about all the 2022 Flavor of Georgia contestants and view the digital contest directory at flavorofgeorgia.caes.uga.edu.
A strong advocate for agricultural policy and a pioneer in poultry were inducted into the Georgia Agricultural Hall of Fame on April 9 during the 66th University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Alumni Association Awards in Athens. The honorees are Georgia Farm Bureau president and thirdgeneration farmer Tom McCall, a 1980 CAES animal science alumnus, and the late J. Henry Massey, a steadfast leader in the Georgia poultry science industry who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the CAES poultry science department.
Tom McCall McCall, who owns and operates a grain and livestock farm in Elberton, Georgia, served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1995 through 2020, representing House District 33. During his tenure, he chaired the House Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee from 2005 until 2020 and served on the Natural Resources and Environment; Transportation; and Game, Fish and Parks committees. He authored important legislation in 2009 and 2019 that protected producers’ rights to farm and operate mostGeorgiabusinesses.agritourismHailedas“oneofagriculture’smodestand influential stewards” in his nomination to the Georgia Agriculture Hall of Fame, McCall was instrumental in legislation pertaining to agriculture that passed the Georgia General Assembly during his 25year GeorgiaHistenure.rootsinagriculture are strong, having served as Georgia Farm Bureau Young Farmer Chairman in 1982, as president of the Elbert County Farm Bureau, as a member of the Farm Service Agency’s Elbert County committee, as a state board member for the Georgia Farm Bureau from 1984 through 1996, and as a Soil Conservation District supervisor. McCall is an active member and volunteer with the Friends Helping Friends Club, a nonprofit service organization dedicated to providing inclusive educational opportunities to specialneeds students in Elbert County at no cost to the school system or the students served. The organization was formed by his daughter, Katie McCall Archer, in honor of his late son, Bud McCall.
forchampionsagriculture
Leaders in poultry, policy are the 2022 inductees to the Georgia Agricultural Hall of Fame
Known nationally as an industry leader in poultry science, Massey spent 26 years with UGA Cooperative Extension, starting as a specialist and ultimately serving as head of North District Extension and Extension Poultry Science. Throughout his career, Massey developed applied-research and educational programs for his constituents, finding practical, research-based solutions for the state’s poultry producers, and many credit his leadership during the 1950s and 1960s with facilitating the success of what is now Georgia’s No. 1 agricultural commodity.
J. Henry Massey
A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Massey earned the Okinawa Battle Star during World War II, then spent 33 years in the Marine Reserves, serving as president of the Georgia Reserve Officers Association and on the Resolutions Committee of the National Reserve Officers Association. He was a recipient of the Brigade Volunteer Award, only the fourth Georgian to receive the recognition.Masseyserved on the Governor’s Committee on Georgia Agriculture and the Advisory Council for Vocational Education in Georgia. After his passing in June 1995, both the Georgia Senate and House of Representatives recognized Massey’s outstanding accomplishments with separate resolutions commending him for his service to Georgia agriculture and the state. digital extras Scan the QR code to watch a video about Henry poultrycontributionsMassey'stoscience. digital extras Scan the QR code to watch a video about Tom McCall's career in advocacy.agricultural
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– By Maria M. Lameiras
The CAES Alumni Association recognized eight outstanding college alumni and inducted two Georgia agricultural leaders into the Georgia Agricultural Hall of Fame at the 66th UGA CAES Alumni Association Awards banquet in April. From left, Julie Massey Jenkins (daughter of the late Henry Massey), Garth Boyd, Joy Carter Crosby, Swagata "Ban" Banerjee, Patricia Blitch (wife of the late Jimmy Blitch), CAES Dean and Director Nick T. Place, Anna Reddish, Samantha Kilgore, Lanie Riner, David Cromley and Tom McCall.
Each year, the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Alumni Association honors a slate of outstanding alumni at its Alumni Association Awards. This year’s celebrated alumni represent a broad range of service in academics, production agriculture, consulting, public service, communications and industry.
Samantha Tankersley Kilgore B.S.A., Communication,Agricultural2011
Swagata “Ban” Banerjee Ph.D., Agricultural Economics, 2004 Swagata “Ban” Banerjee is an associate professor of economics and finance at Kentucky State University's School of Business, where he helped establish the Center for Economic Education and Financial Literacy to help high school students fulfill their economic and financial literacy requirements before graduating high school.
Garth B.S.A.,BoydAnimal Science, 1980; M.S., Animal Science, 1982 Garth Boyd is a principal at The Context Network, a strategic and management consulting group for the agricultural industry. A recognized global expert on sustainability issues for agricultural systems, Boyd was a founding partner of AgPower Partners, which helped develop the largest swine-to-energy system in the U.S.
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David B.S.A.,CromleyAnimal Science, 2009 David Cromley is a partner at Nellwood Farms in Brooklet, Georgia, where he manages the production, health and marketing of crops and livestock and oversees employees and financial records. Since joining Nellwood Farms in 2009, Cromley has implemented farm improvements including increasing winter grazing utilization and rotational grazing, with the goal of reducing the amount of feed hay required.
Awards of Excellence
Outstanding alumni
Joy Carter Crosby B.S.A., Communication,Agricultural1997; M.A.L., Agricultural Leadership, 2007 Joy Crosby is assistant executive director of the Georgia Peanut Commission, editor of Southeastern Peanut Farmer digital magazine and owner/operator of Joy Carter Photography, where she specializes in photographing agricultural events. She is a past president of the Georgia FFA Alumni Association and a National FFA Alumni Life Member. Crosby is a 2001 graduate of the Advancing Georgia’s Leaders in Agriculture and Forestry program.
Samantha Kilgore is a managing partner with Association Services Group and executive director of the Georgia Watermelon Association, where she coordinates and manages day-to-day activities of client associations and staff including board meetings, membership, conferences, budgets, marketing, communications and promotional projects.
Alumnisurvey
Young Alumni Awards
Lanie Huff Riner B.S.A., Horticulture, 2005 Lanie Riner is executive director of the Georgia Green Industry Association and president of Thunderwood Farms in Woodbury, Georgia, a commercial greenhouse operation. Thunderwood Farms participates in commercial plant trials for CAES to bring the best of new plant genetics to the marketplace. Riner has been a guest lecturer for nursery management and horticulture classes at CAES. – Compiled by Maria M. Lameiras, photo by Blane Marable
James M. “Jimmy” Blitch B.S.A., Agriculture, 1954 James A. “Jimmy” Blitch, who passed away in January 2022, was owner and operator of Blitch Place Farm, a five-generation diversified farm in Bulloch County, Georgia, now operated by his son, Matt, and grandson, Matthew. For more than 60 years, Blitch worked as an active ambassador for agriculture in the community, state and nation, encouraging young people to pursue agriculture and strengthening the relationship between the public and the agricultural community.
Anna Daniel Reddish B.S.A., Animal Science, 2008; M.A.D.S., Animal and Dairy Science, 2009 Anna Reddish is a university relations liaison with IDEXX, a leader in pet healthcare innovation, where she establishes, sustains and promotes strategic relationships with universities and colleges of veterinary medicine. Previously, Reddish was the associate director for veterinary career services at the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and co-host of the “My Veterinary Life” podcast.
Leaders, innovators and champions of agriculture among 2022 CAES Alumni Association Award honorees
Forecast
“There’s also real opportunity to take things into clinical trials faster with these new therapies and apply them to actually start treating patients — human and animal.”
From stem cells to therapiesnew— can we do more to treat disease injuries?and
By Leonor Sierra While current medicine can slow down the progression of many diseases, the relatively new field of regenerative biology uses stem cells and advanced therapies to treat or reverse the course of disease and injuries. The Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC) at the University of Georgia has become a leader in this field.
14 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences GROWING THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE
The regenerative bioscience field developed in the early 2000s after scientists realized the potential of stem cells — a special kind of cells from which every other cell in our body develops — to treat many diseases, both in humans and animals.
The RBC has been a pioneer in this field and was one of the first groups to show how neural stem cells can be grown in a lab. The RBC researchers were ultimately able to generate a therapy for stroke they hope will enter clinical trials in 2023. A key focus for the center is understanding the regenerative processes and mechanisms so that researchers, and ultimately medical practitioners, can guide the body to regenerate tissue that is lost in disease or injury, Stice explained.
“What was driving me then, and still does, are the huge unmet needs for reversing degenerative diseases, whether in the bone or in the brain,” said Stice, who has directed the RBC since its founding and serves as a D.W. Brooks Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair at UGA.
Biotechnology expert Steven Stice already had broad experience in the field, including having founded a stem cell start-up, when he helped found the center in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in 2004.
To support this work, RBC researchers are developing new ways to test and evaluate diseases. This all requires a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, which many RBC researchers feel is the key to success in this area. As researchers at RBC and around the world have dug deeper into the field, its complexity has become apparent.
“I think, at the beginning, we had the fanciful thought that all we had to do to cure disease is make a nerve cell and introduce it into the brain,” said Stice. “Now we know
DOROTHY KOZLOWSKI
– Steven Stice
Undergraduate researcher and animal biology major Morgan Cunningham examines MRI images of a pig brain. Opposite page: Steven Stice joined UGA in 1998 as the Georgia Research Alliance endowed chair and has shepherded the creation and growth of the Regenerative Bioscience Center.
Combining his knowledge in large animal veterinary surgery with research in stem cells, Peroni and other veterinary researchers have been employing stem cells to treat tendon and ligament injuries, which are very common and debilitating for horses.
“For years, the study of neurodegenerative diseases was focused on the neuron aspect,” said Lee. “More recently, people have become more interested in how the immune system could interact or intercommunicate with the brain.”
“We found that platelet lysate significantly decreases bacterial growth,” said Peroni. “We realized this when we provided platelet lysate to one of the clinicians in our hospital to promote healing on skin grafts placed on an injured horse. The graft had a surface infection, but after topically applying the lysate for a few days, the infection disappeared, which got us really excited about exploring thisPeronifurther.”isnow exploring how to apply lysate as an antibiotic in different veterinary settings to learn if it can be a valuable substitute for traditional antibiotics to treat infections. If successful, this could present a huge advantage in infection control because it appears that bacteria cannot develop resistance to the lysate.
Stice’s colleague and collaborator, John Peroni, who was recently appointed the first Dr. Steeve Giguère Memorial Professor at the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine, agrees. “Much has been learned about stem cell biology over the years and this knowledge has led to a departure from thinking that these cells replace injured tissue,” Peroni said. “It’s more likely that stem cells, specifically mesenchymal stem cells, release factors that guide the inherent tissue recovery processes to optimize healing.”
Jamise Lee, an assistant professor in physiology and pharmacology and a researcher at RBC, is interested in how a type of innate immune cells present in human blood — called natural killer cells — could have wider applications in neurodegenerative diseases. When a cell becomes cancerous, is infected by a virus or stops working as it ages, natural killer cells attack the cell and clear it from our bodies. Using a mouse model of Parkinson’s, Lee also found that the disease becomes worse if natural killer cells are removed. This could have applications to find markers for early diagnosis and possible therapies to treat Parkinson’s disease.
15almanac 2022 Forecast breakthroughs that it takes much more than that. So, a lot of the work at the RBC is around what helps support the cells once they get there so they can do the things that they need to do.”
DENNIS MCDANIEL
RBC scientist Hongxiang Liu has been studying taste buds for more than two decades, identifying stem cells that eventually become taste buds and generating understanding of what happens at the molecular level to lead to specific cells. The body is constantly generating new taste bud cells, which have a lifespan of only 12 days on average. Stem cells become progenitor cells, which develop into specialized cells in the body. Liu has shown that not all types of taste bud cells come from the same type of progenitor cells — bitter and sweet taste bud cells may develop from different progenitors than sour taste cells. By understanding how these different taste buds develop, Liu hopes this work will lead to therapies that help restore“Manytaste.ofus take taste for granted,” said Liu. “But the loss of taste often compromises quality of life and could help us understand diseases better.”
“The end result of stem cell treatment is improved organization of the healed tendon so that, compared to an untreated tendon, scar tissue formation is minimized, resulting in a more organized tendon matrix that is better suited to sustain loads and therefore less prone to re-injury,” he said.
While stem cells are a central part of regenerative biology research, it is possible that they may not be needed to unlock some of the promises of regenerative medicine. The key could lie not only in the stem cells, but in the small nano-sized bubbles that all cells produce, as well as other biological products in our body, Stice said.
“It takes scientific teams of diverse talents to develop solutions to complex biomedical injuries and diseases and then translate them into real treatments quickly and efficiently.”
For example, Peroni has found that a blood-derived product made from concentrating platelets — platelet lysate — can perform as an antibiotic on a variety of bacteria.
Continued on page 18
In his 27 years at CAES, van Iersel’s research has focused on developing sustainable and cost-effective ways to ensure that crops get the amount of light they need to grow.
• Provided farmers with yield and profit maps for cotton, allowing them to identify the most profitable areas of their fields.
Marc van Iersel (left) and WenZhan Song collaborate on InterdisciplinarytheSeed Grant Program in a research greenhouse.
by eric butterman
Traditional agriculture is highly weather dependent, and many producers of high-value crops are shifting over from field production to controlled environment agriculture. That is where the University of Georgia’s Marc van Iersel comes in. Van Iersel, the Vincent J. Dooley Professor of horticultural physiology in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, defines controlled environment agriculture, or CEA, as both greenhouse production that relies on natural sunlight and vertical farms that use an electrical light source.
Responding to climate challenges
“One of the reasons a shift is happening is that 90% of all leafy greens produced in the United States are produced in California and Arizona. That area is in a megadrought and there is no end in sight. Because of this, they may not really be able to have water available to grow the crops in what is essentially a desert,” van Iersel said. Controlled environment agriculture is appealing to producers who are “looking for production systems that may not use as much water in controlled conditions where you can get predictable, year-long production.”
• Developed automated methods of harvesting blueberries, one of Georgia’s top three fruit crops, behind watermelons and on par with peaches.
“The greenhouse has to respond to weather conditions changing all the time,” he said. “You have shorter fluctuations from morning to afternoon to evening and year-long fluctuation in many parts of the United States in winter. You need to adjust to it.”
ofcontroltakingthefutureofagriculture
What is precisionintegrativeagriculture?
Next time you sit down to a crisp, green salad, take a moment to think about where your leafy greens come from.
Photo by dorothy kozlowski
• Developed information-centric approaches to improve efficiency in greenhouse production, saving water, energy and input costs.
Based on his research, van Iersel co-founded Candidus — an agricultural technology company — in 2017 with Erico Mattos, who received his doctorate from UGA in 2013. The company provides lighting control systems that use a compact, powerful industrial microcomputer to monitor light sensors, calculate optimal lighting conditions, and control the lighting in controlled environment systems via a local Wi-Fi network.
17almanac 2022 Forecast with precision
Integrative precision agriculture increases yields and improves sustainability through data-driven decision-making and insights from fields including engineering, plant genomics and forestry. At UGA, integrative precision agriculture researchers have:
• Helped identify the financial benefit of applying GPS guidance to planting and inverting peanuts, as well as the feasibility of variably applying defoliants and other critical inputs on cotton.
“My lab is trying to figure out what management systems should be used in hydroponic systems for controlled environment agriculture,” said Ferrarezi. “We also have a focus on figuring out how we manage the fertilizer solutions in a controlled environment to bring a benefit in using less fertilizer for production.”
UGA AGRICULTUREINTEGRATIVEINSTITUTEESTABLISHESFORPRECISION
The creation of the institute complements investments from the university and the state of Georgia in new faculty, seed grant funding and equipment. Precision agriculture maximizes yields through data-driven decision making enabled by technologies and tools such as such soil moisture sensors, drones, satellite imagery and robotics. Integrative precision agriculture (IPA) expands the range of opportunities for optimization using artificial intelligence, machine learning and “big data” analysis. It also expands the scope of agricultural sectors involved by incorporating insights from fields as diverse as engineering, plant genomics and forestry. IPA faculty will address a range of commercially important sectors that include poultry, peanuts, cotton, fruits, vegetables and controlled environment agriculture. Integrative precision agriculture researchers will be housed in departments within the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, College of Veterinary Medicine and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Current state funding for IPA at UGA totals $4.4 million.
“There was no one taking advantage of controlling light precisely in greenhouses,” van Iersel said. “We found we could reduce electricity costs for lighting by 30%, and given that, generally speaking, electricity cost for lighting is between 10 and 20% of operating costs for greenhouses, that can reduce operating costs by nearly half.”
Forecast with precision
The partners initially developed a system that responded to real-time levels of sunlight, but van Iersel refined the design with electrical engineers.
Associate Professor Rhuanito Ferrarezi uses a sensor to measure the rate of photosynthesis in begonia leaves.
The responsiveness built into the Candidus algorithm has a significant effect on growers’ return on investment. “You make a system that cuts the cost by 20% overall and that makes a critical financial difference,” van Iersel explained.
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Horticulture researcher Rhuanito Ferrarezi was hired as an associate professor of controlled environment agriculture at CAES in August 2021 to leverage his expertise in production to help strengthen research capacity in CEA. A main focus of his work involves improving irrigation, nutrition and cropping systems in CEA, focusing on vegetables and ornamentals.
Among the most challenging parts of the work is convincing growers who have operated in a certain way for decades that a new system can provide real value to them. “Many are reluctant to change things, but some growers love trying new ways,” van Iersel said. “When you see more people doing well from trying something out, then you tend to feel more comfortable.”
Managing hydroponic systems
Continued from page 17
“They are looking for ways to fine-tune production and controlled environment agriculture can help lead the way,” he said.
‘Like a blood test for a plant’ One of the innovations Ferrarezi is working on is related to sap analysis, which uses leaf or soil substrate sampling to determine the nutrient content in plant tissue.“Itis like a blood test for a plant,” he said. “We provide a snapshot of what is going on with the crop over a growing cycle. In a controlled environment, we have the ability to grow a crop quicker than out in the field. We can actually monitor the nutrient content inside a plant in real time and growers can either increase or decrease the fertilization based on those results.”
Predicting sunlight
Ferrarezi believes that industry interest in CEA will continue to increase.
The University of Georgia is leveraging faculty expertise and strengthening industry ties through a new Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture whose research and outreach will help sustainably feed a growing global population.
“We’re focused on control algorithms where we can now predict the amount of sunlight we will likely get for the rest of the day, which helps us make better decisions on how much light we want to provide,” he said. “We also developed algorithms that allow the lighting system to respond to changing electricity prices. You don’t have the same electricity price over the course of the day. I believe the latest estimate from the Department of Energy has the United States spending about a billion dollars a year on electricity to provide light for crops that are grown in controlled environment agriculture.”
DENNIS MCDANIEL
BY GARY ILLUSTRATIONGOETTLINGBYJAY B. BAUER
A four-wheeled, phenotyping robot that operates autonomously or under human control, Watson is taking shape in Changying “Charlie” Li’s lab at the Phenomics and Plant Robotics Center (PPRC) on the University of Georgia’s Athens campus in collaboration with researchers in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
Watson’s progress highlights UGA’s pioneering role in integrative precision agriculture, an approach that applies automation technology to farming. The PPRC advances this role by facilitating interdisciplinary, collaborative research at CAES, the College of Engineering and other UGA units.
A human can evaluate a couple hundred plots in a day, but one or two robots or UAVs could evaluate thousands in the same span.
“Watson can carry sensors and instruments to collect data in the field,” said Li, PPRC director and engineering professor. “We are using three RGB color cameras to collect color images of peanut plants. With those images, we can construct 3D models of the plants and measure morphologic traits such as canopy height, size and volume. The color images can also be used to detect leaf diseases. We plan to add additional sensors, such as a multispectral camera, to measure traits that cannot be measured by color images.”
ROBOCROPSForecast
innovations
“We want to develop algorithms and machine-learning techniques to teach robots how to measure disease symptoms to identify susceptibilities as well as hybrids with improved disease resistance,” said Nino Brown, assistant research scientist at CAES.
A key factor for peanut growers is seedling vigor, a genetically influenced function of seedling size after germination that reveals how quickly they develop into larger, more robust and resilient plants.
“If we can accurately measure seedling vigor among plants and hybrid populations, our cultivars or varieties that we release can have some of those high seedling vigor characteristics,” Brown explained.
Continued on page 22
Say hello to Watson.
Advancing better breeding Photographs snapped by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) help peanut breeders at the UGA Tifton campus measure characteristics of different hybrid peanut genotypes in the field — canopy volume, plant height and plant vigor — that can be seen easier from above than from the ground. But to study smaller details, higher resolution images are necessary, so they are collaborating with Li’s group to incorporate Watson into their phenotyping toolkit.
Data science, technology and A.I. coalesce in the field of plant robotics
The new process means breeders can have both high-oleic and normal-oleic breeding pipelines, said Brown. “That makes it a lot cheaper for us and provides a high throughput for developing high-oleic varieties.”
Likewise, when the field’s soil texture changes from clay to sand, the machine operator is notified and can change planting settings while in the field “to maximize the planter performance in each type of soil.”
Automation also enables the precise application of chemicals. Cameras mounted on the sprayer “detect and identify where the weeds are in between the rows, and where the plants are, and turn the nozzles only where they’re supposed to spray,” Virk said.
In addition, Brown and his colleagues are working out an automated process whereby seeds that will produce peanuts with a high oleic-acid content — which the confection industry prefers for their long shelf life — are identified and separated from those with normal oleic-acid content, used for peanut butter and similar products.
A versatile robot CAES agricultural engineer and Professor Glen Rains heads a research group modifying an off-the-shelf soil-sampling robot to perform farm work. The “Little Red Rover” employs removable attachments for planting seeds, scouting for pests, weed management and harvesting. A multipurpose robotic arm is mounted up front. Sensor data and artificial intelligence guide the rover’s activities. Intended for small- and mediumsize farms, the rover is designed to be economical, easy-to-use, scalable and rugged. “We’re looking at applications for peanuts and cotton and expect to expand into vegetables as well,” Rains said. “It’s essentially a utility tool like a tractor that could be used year-round, so it wouldn’t have to be sitting in a shed most of the time.”
Assistant Professor Simer Virk transfers GIS plotting information to a USB drive that will be uploaded to the precision planting system on the tractor before planting corn at UGA’s Iron Horse Farm.
Real-time feedback CAES Assistant Professor and UGA Cooperative Extension Precision Agriculture Specialist Simer Virk equips and tests different sensors on standard agricultural machinery that feed performance data to the machine’s in-cab display. For example, sensors mounted onboard a large planter ensure the desired number of seeds are planted to the prescribed depth and distance apart automatically. Other sensors measure properties such as soil moisture, temperature and organic matter. If the operator sees that the soil isn’t moist enough for the initial depth setting, “he can act on that information in real time and direct the machine to plant seeds a little deeper,” Virk said.
ANDREW DAVIS TUCKER
Forecast innovations 22 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences
Continued from page 21 “The more genotypes we can evaluate, the faster and cheaper we’re able to create genetic gain to make significantly improved new peanut varieties,” he added.
Variable-rate irrigation An innovation originally developed at CAES, variable rate irrigation (VRI) for centerpivot irrigation systems helps producers conserve water and improve efficiency by irrigating crops where and when needed with the exact amount of water required, according to University Professor George Vellidis, head of the Vellidis Research Group at “SandyCAES. soil retains less water than clay, for example, so sandy areas in a field require less water applied more frequently
“Being smart means management of the farm and plants will be done autonomously with robots using artificial intelligence, and the process will be self-controlled without human intervention,” he said. “Being precise means that through sensing and automation, crop management can be precisely controlled at the plot or plant level to minimize agricultural input while maintaining maximum output. This can reduce the usage of water, energy, carbon, pesticide and fertilizer to make agriculture more environmentally friendly.”
The future is smart Agriculture in the future will be smart, precise and more environmentally responsible, Li predicts.
23almanac 2022 than clay areas do,” he explained. This soil texture information, described by “prescription maps” of the field, is augmented by evapotranspiration data and daily, detailed meteorological forecasts to produce estimates of which specific areas of the field will need water at what intervals and how much to apply. This information is coded into the prescription map.
CAES Professor Glen Rains holds the control panel to the “Little Red Rover” on the right. The rover is a multipurpose robotic tool that can be used for planting, weed and pest management, and more.
Professor Changying “Charlie” Li tests “Watson,” a phenotyping robot that operates autonomously or under human control to collect data in the field.
ANTHONY BARKDOLL
The estimates are sent to an app on the producer’s smartphone or smart device, which transmits them to the large centerpivot irrigation systems retrofitted with a VRI controller and a GPS receiver. “The GPS tells you where you are in the field so it can translate that position to the map to see how much water should be applied in that location,” Vellidis said.
The robotic arm’s prototype camera is monitoring a small cotton plant in the photo. To the left is a tractor modified with robotic capabilities.
KATIE WALKER
setting the course
24 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences Forecast success
From designing more inclusive agricultural education to developing her brand, Kristen Dunning does it her way by maria M. lameiras
Photo by peter frey
25almanac 2022 S ince landing at the University of Georgia in 2018, Kristen Dunning has been building opportunities.
After graduating in May 2021, Dunning began working on a master’s degree in sustainable agriculture with a focus on social sustainability, designing a course preliminarily titled “Multicultural Perspectives in the Agricultural Industry.” Her advisor, Jennifer Jo Thompson, is an associate research scientist in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences whose work involves social sustainability, anthropology and culturally inclusive research.
“Dr. Thompson has been doing work on social science and diversity, equity and inclusion all along from her office in crop and soil sciences, doing work I wish I could have been involved in as an undergraduate,” Dunning said. “I worked on it with her, but she has always recognized that I was creating this class and I know she will have a hand in making sure it is taught correctly.”Whileshe will always maintain her fervor for a more socially just agriculture system, Dunning will change course this fall, enrolling in the entrepreneurship track in the graduate program at UGA’s Terry College of Business. Her goal is to advance Gently Soap, the company she started as an undergraduate producing botanically based skin-care products for sensitive skin using herbs she grew herself at student-run UGArden. She has been a finalist or won nearly every major studententrepreneurship competition on campus — including the UGA Entrepreneurship Program’s 2022 Collegiate Great Consumer Brands Competition, the inaugural UGA Venture Prize Competition in February, the 2020 UGA Entrepreneurship Idea Accelerator Program, and the 2020 FABricate entrepreneurship pitch contest sponsored by CAES in partnership with UGA Entreprenuership. FABricate has helped winners and finalists launch companies while at UGA and beyond since 2017.
“When I applied to graduate school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do — social justice work — but I did not know of anyone working on this subject,” Dunning said. Ultimately, she connected with Leo Lombardini, head of the Department of Horticulture, who was supportive of her efforts and who promised his help in finding funding for graduate school and with designing the course.
Lombardini introduced Dunning to Thompson, who forwarded Dunning’s statement of purpose to CAES Dean and Director Nick Place and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Josef Broder, who secured funding for Dunning’s program.
“As an undergraduate, I was always looking for a class that told the truth about what agriculture has been through as an industry and what minorities have been through by passing through this industry, but I found that people were scared to talk about it or that it was a taboo subject,” Dunning said. “We can’t address inequity without understanding where it started or where it stems from. As soon as you come into the college, you hear about diversity and inclusivity, so that should be reflected in the curriculum. This is how we create a more tolerant college environment.”
The proposed entry-level agriculture class draws on history and social factors that influence the field of agriculture and details a culturally complete history of American agriculture with the goal of supporting equity within the industry.
The course will undergo institutional and University System of Georgia review and, if approved, will be taught for the first time in fall 2023. The funding Dunning received from CAES to support her graduate project gives her hope that change is possible.
While at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, she has become a student leader and researcher, started a successful personal care products business, and developed an idea to make the industry she loves more transparent in its history and more equitable in its future.
With guidance from Thompson and Lombardini and input from faculty at other institutions, Dunning has developed a course description and an in-depth syllabus, with a week-by-week lecture schedule on specific topics from Indigenous, minority and immigrant history in American agriculture to the contributions of these populations to the industry. As part of the course, guest lecturers from different underrepresented communities will provide insight on the unique challenges they have faced in agriculture.
“I want to work on Gently all day, every day,” she said in her small office at Studio 225, UGA’s Student Center for Entrepreneurship. It is there that she and three UGA student interns she employs receive shipments of soap, boxing each one by hand. “Everything still comes through me. I want to see every single thing to make sure it looks and smells right. I don’t want to just take a check. I want to build this so that I can look back and know I did it in a way I can be proud of.”
so fab Learn more about all the FABricate Entrepreneurial Initiative at uga.edu/students/caes. experientiallearning/fabricate.
Now Dunning has grown Gently from making soap in her kitchen to contracting with a third-party manufacturer in Montana that has meticulously reproduced her soap recipes and processing methods. She currently sells her soap online and with 22 independent retailers in four states.
Dunning will start selling Gently Soap on Amazon later this year and is in discussions with a major department store to distribute her soap. She is committed to creating and selling her other Gently Herbal Skincare products — including herbal whipped body butter and a scrub made with Jittery Joe’s coffee — with locally sourced ingredients at local Athens retailers.
“As a Black woman, I can’t speak on behalf of Asian farmers, LGBTQ+ farmers, immigrant farmers. We have to get them in “We can’t address inequity stemsorwhereunderstandingwithoutitstartedwhereitfrom.”
to share their own stories and personal reflections on the industry,” Dunning said. If the course is approved, Dunning hopes Thompson will teach it.
GEORGIA’S GOLDENEGG CAES’ new Poultry Science Building will give researchers and students a high-tech new roost BY MARIA M. LAMEIRAS
PHOTO BY DENNIS MCDANIEL
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“Our industry has improved because of research, teaching and Extension work done by UGA poultry scientists,” said Bruce, who earned her bachelor’s degree in poultry science in 2021. She plans to continue her family’s business on the same land where her great-grandfather built that first poultry house. “As the fourth generation to live on my family’s farm, I hope this new facility will bring developments that further strengthen Georgia’s poultry industry so that my great-grandchildren will also get to be a part of feeding the world one day.”
In 1958, a carpenter named LC Powers built himself and his wife, Ruby Nell, a broiler house on their family’s land in northeast Georgia.
Slated for completion in fall 2023, the build with us Support the Poultry Science building at poultrybuilding.caes.uga.edu
To learn more about the Poultry Science Building and ways to support the project, visit poultrybuilding.caes.uga.edu. GIFTS TO THE INCLUDE:PROJECT
On Nov. 15, 2021, the Powers’ greatgranddaughter, Kylie Bruce, a master’s degree student in the Department of Poultry Science at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, recounted her great-grandparents’ story at the groundbreaking for a new, technologically advanced Poultry Science Building on the Athens campus.
• A $3 million gift from the Luther and Susie Harrison Foundation to name the main lobby of the Poultry Science Building. This latest grant furthers prior FoundationandmadecommitmentsbytheLutherSusieHarrisonin appreciation for the CAES Department of Poultry Science, with the foundation having established the R. Harold Harrison Distinguished Professorship in 2017. The foundation was created in 1994 by R. Harold Harrison, founder of Harrison Poultry, Inc., in honor of his parents, to support education, faith and health initiatives in Georgia.
The chicken house could hold 10,000 chicks, but there was barely enough electricity to power a few light bulbs in the open-sided building. The feeders were built out of wood, and the chickens drank their water from an open trough.
FLAGSHIP
• A $1.1 million gift from Georgia-based Wayne Farms, a subsidiary of Continental Grain Company the seventhlargest integratedverticallypoultry producer in the U.S.
“There are a number of partner opportunities available that will create the gathering areas, hands-on teaching labs and research space necessary to train the next generations of poultry science leaders,” Parsons said. “Naming opportunities start at $25,000 and will help us transform the future of the poultry industry.”
27almanac 2022 Forecast growth
• A $1 million gift from the R. Harold and Patsy FoundationHarrison which was the first seven-figure commitment to the building campaign. This gift was part of a $3.6 million total commitment which also established a distinguished professorship/chair for the head of the poultry science department.
Lead gifts from Southeastern Minerals, led by President and Chairman Alex Poitevint II, a UGA alumnus and member of the Poultry Science Building Committee, kicked off the private campaign. Combined with robust support from industry, alumni and other donors, the campaign has raised approximately $9 million toward the goal of $27 million in private funding for the project, said Mary Ann Parsons, senior director of development for CAES.
Funded through a public-private partnership, the Poultry Science Building campaign has received $27.1 million in funding from the state of Georgia for planning, construction and equipment.
$54.1 million Poultry Science Building will be a centerpiece of the university’s recruitment effort for new talent in poultry science. In addition to classroom and research facilities, new state-of-theart learning labs will bolster traditional classroom instruction with production courses, demonstration spaces and fieldlearning programs.
‘Agriculture is everywhere’ Agriculture has an enormous effect on how our modern global society functions. The University of Georgia’s “Effects of Global Agriculture on World Culture” course is a way of introducing university students to the role that agriculture plays in our daily lives today and throughout human history.
Deductive reasoning takes flight The bird is the model species for the “Reproductive Endocrinology” course offered by UGA’s Department of Poultry Science, and the curriculum touches on subjects ranging from follicular development to embryology.
“Not so long ago, there was only one job: hunter-gatherer,” he said. “It’s when we looked into creating a surplus of food for others that it all changed.”
This is the case with avian biology major Grant Bennett, but his place may differ from the average 21-year-old.
Grade A Faculty crack open BycoursescompellingpoultrysciencetheofthroughEricButterman
Bennett found his place working under the supervision of Assistant Professor Laura Ellestad in her lab at the University of Georgia Department of Poultry Science, studying how the tissue surrounding egg yolks helps regulate chick growth during embryonic development.
credits his experiences a the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and in the lab with broadening his research
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By the third year of college, many students have found their place on campus, establishing a solid roster of friends and activities.
Forecast future leaders youngIncubatingtalent
Guest lecturers are a highlight, giving students a chance to learn from producers of varying experience and perspectives. The class was developed about a decade ago by former poultry science colleague Robert Beckstead. Kiepper guest lectured for Beckstead’s course and began teaching it in fall 2016. He hopes students come away with an understanding that they have choices for careers outside of agriculture because of agriculture.
“I start with early history and go forward to the agriculture revolution 10,000 years ago — and all the way to today,” said Brian Kiepper, associate professor in the CAES Department of Poultry Science. “I explain to students across campus how agriculture plays a role in everyone’s life and how it allows us to do what we want, instead of spending every day finding our food.”
Third-year UGA student Grant Bennett found his flock in poultry science PHOTO BY DENNIS MCDANIEL
Although the class focuses primarily on poultry, it also covers cows and even makes some time for humans, said Adam Davis, associate professor at CAES. “It’s a chance to understand scientific cause and effects, and what the course brings up often takes students by surprise,” he said. “When they hear what putting off having children until after age 30 can do to the chances for pregnancy, you can see many are surprised by the statistics. They are even more amazed to learn that advanced assisted reproductive
Kiepper puts students into member group discussions partly to push them to explore their own lives as it relates to agriculture and also to spark what interests them about the topic.
BY ERIC BUTTERMAN
“We’re looking at the yolk sac tissue in the egg as embryonic development occurs and what factors are produced there that might serve to support growth during embryogenesis before the organs that produce hormones really develop,” Bennett said. This research involves collecting tissue samples from embryos and examining gene expression for hormones, like insulin growth factor, and their receptors. “It’s a great experience, and it’s really interesting how the results have so far insinuated that the yolk sac tissue is playing a role in regulating growth. Now I’m looking at how this might affect the birds after hatch,” he said. The hope is that the results could possibly help birds grow after emerging from theBennettegg.
Changing the course of future careers
Ellestad was so impressed with Bennett’s enthusiasm and curiosity as a student in her “Avian Surgical Techniques” class that she recruited him as a teaching assistant for the course.“Being excited about what you are doing is important. Research can be hard and frustrating, so having that natural inquisitiveness and passion for understanding things, as well as being personable and interacting well with people of all different levels — peers, faculty, graduate students — is important to me,” Ellestad said. technologies cannot simply negate these age-related deficits.”
Grant Bennett examines an egg yolk under a microscope as Assistant Professor Laura Ellestad looks on.
DENNIS MCDANIEL
The challenging nature and format of the class makes it good preparation for future standardized tests students may take, such as the MCATs, Davis said. “We work on our deductive reasoning and analytical skills,” he said, “About 80% of students are pre-vet or premed, and the kind of deeper thinking we do here can help them in the future when it comes to diagnosing a patient. We’re going past just learning facts to true application.”
Poultry scientist Andrew Benson is out to make his students chicken experts. An assistant professor in the Department of Poultry Science, Benson now teaches “Introduction to Poultry Science,” the same course that convinced him to become a poultry science major at CAES more than 20 years ago. “This is truly a cornerstone course,” said Benson, who earned his doctorate from CAES in 2006. “Poultry is a $47 billion industry in Georgia and they need all the great talent they can get. You also get as much hands-on activity here as in any course at the freshman-sophomore level. You can take that to any career, but this is our chance to introduce them to our state’s largest agriculturalConductingindustry.”twoscientific projects in the laboratory portion of the class — one in nutrition and one in endocrinology — students author a scientific report for each experimental trial. By having students analyze documentaries and articles about poultry production, Benson aims to immerse them in the intricacies of the science, strengthening their knowledge in performing experiments and collating data. From embryology to processing, the class covers the spectrum of poultry science topics. “It is a privilege to help students understand the industry and the evidence-based practices that go into making it a success,” Benson said. “It’s multilayered, it’s fascinating and it’s a necessity.”
29almanac 2022 skills, such as learning new lab assays, along with improving his presentation skills. “I want to get my Ph.D. and teach. This has been a huge help in improving how I share research with others,” he said. Bennett is equally active outside Ellestad’s lab. He has served as the historian, treasurer and vice president of the Poultry Science Club at CAES, sharing his enthusiasm about poultry science and the poultry industry.
“This is an opportunityexcitingforour students and another example of great collaboration between Georgia’s two land-grant universities.”
T
Rising Scholars receive a $1,500 stipend at the end of each month in addition to a housing and meal allowance. Through an application and interview process, selected interns demonstrated a focus in agricultural or environmental sciences, interest in conducting and communicating scientific research, availability for the full program, intention to attend graduate school, and a minimum 3.0 FVSU grade point average.
– Olufunke A. Fontenot, FVSU provost
The Rising Scholars Internship is an opportunity for students from FVSU to conduct research with CAES scientists and reside on the UGA campus in Athens during the summer.
he University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences has launched a new internship program with Fort Valley State University (FVSU).
The paid nine-week program is intended for students who have an interest in research and are planning to attend graduate school in agriculture and related sciences. Participants conduct supervised research on agricultural and environmental sciences before preparing and presenting their findings in a professional setting.
30 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences Forecast opportunities
“We are pleased to partner with Fort Valley State University in hosting the Rising Scholars Program,” said Josef Broder, CAES associate dean for academic affairs. “We are grateful to FVSU for establishing this program to give exceptional students an opportunity to conduct research with our faculty, share their research experiences, and prepare for graduate school in agriculture and related sciences.”
“This is an exciting opportunity for our students and another example of great collaboration between Georgia’s two land-grant universities,” said Olufunke A. Fontenot, FVSU provost and vice president for academic affairs. “FVSU’s focus is on providing our students with an exceptional student experience and high impact practices that better prepare them for work and graduate school. We thank CAES for extending this opportunity to our students.”
The inaugural Rising Scholars cohort, listed by name, major and year, includes: Anaya Arnold, plant science biotechnology, sophomore April Bramble, plant science, senior Na’Kiyah Conner, psychology, sophomore Curvieon Ezell, plant science biotechnology, junior Nadia Ford, animal science, junior Ternya Gibson, plant science biotechnology, sophomore Sydney Lawrence, plant science biotechnology, senior Nallely Mendez, animal science, junior Yuri Smith, animal science, junior Carrienton Stevenson, agriculture engineering technology, senior Dakota Walker, plant science biotechnology, sophomore
The first cohort of Rising Scholars interns at CAES includes FVSU students (back row, left to right) Nallely Mendez, Nadia Ford, Curvieon Ezell, April Bramble, Carrienton Stevenson, (front row, left to right) Yuri Smith, Na’Kiyah Conner, Anaya Arnold and Dakota Walker. Not pictured: Ternya Gibson and Sydney Lawrence.
Rise and Research Rising Scholars Internship opens up ValleyopportunitiesresearchforFortstudents by jordan powers • Photo by Caroliine Hinton
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When Cassandra and Gary Wiseman bought 185 acres of land in rural Jackson County, Georgia, they envisioned preserving the land through sustainable forestry stewardship. Over the next decade, they recognized the abundance of naturally growing muscadine vines throughout the property. This bounty ultimately sparked the dream of operating a vineyard and winery on the property.
After learning as much as they could about viticulture, the business of operating a vineyard, the particulars of their forested land and the local climate, they celebrated their first harvest in 2021. They produced 1,200 pounds of ‘Villard Blanc’ and ‘Carlos’ grapes and went on to win a bronze medal at the 2022 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition in the White Native American/Hybrid category.“Ifitweren’t for UGA we wouldn’t be opening this business,” Cassandra Wiseman said. “UGA’s support has given us the confidence to invest in this business, and we are excited to expand our vineyards with the addition of ‘Lomanto’, ‘Norton’, ‘Lenoir’ and ‘Chardonel’ vines this year.” That's because the owners of Blue Cielo Farms — Jackson County’s first farm winery — worked directly with Greg Pittman, the Jackson County Agriculture and Natural Resources agent for University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. Pittman and a UGA viticulturist came onsite and coached the fledgling winery owners in selecting the right kind of grapes to grow and consulted on the design of the vineyard’s rows and trellises.
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implement expertise Muscadines are native to North America and are used to make many of Georgia’s wines.
The Georgia wine industry may still be underappreciated by wine enthusiasts, Brannen said. “Folks have a misperception that, if it’s Georgia wine, it’s going to be bad,” said Brannen, who conducts research and technology transfer for many fruits, including grapes and muscadines. “But our wines are every bit as beautiful as the ones in California.”
“our wines are every bit as beautiful as the ones in california,” said phillip brannen.
CHRIS GREER
Georgia's hot, humid climate poses a challenge for growers, who must carefully select varieties for disease resistance, such as ‘Carlos’ and ‘Noble’ cultivars. Opposite page: Satsumas grow in an orchard in Berrien County, Georgia.
In south Georgia, vineyards are devoted almost exclusively to native muscadines, with a smattering of hybrids, Brannen said. South Georgia vineyard owners are getting creative about the wines they produce, including new products such as muscadine brandies.
The region’s clay soil and plentiful rainfall make growing grapes challenging, but the higher elevations and cooler winter temperature in comparison to other parts of Georgia are an advantage — those factors kill both fungi and bacteria that damage vines, said Nathan Eason, UGA Extension agent for White County, which is home to five vineyards and six wineries. Like other Extension agents, Eason teaches vineyard owners how to prune, manage shoots and develop a management technique for canopies. Ranging from as small as an acre to larger than 40 acres, most of the vineyards have been planted since the early 2000s, and the industry in northeastern Georgia continues to grow, Eason said. “Our climate is a challenge for growing grapes,” Brannen said. For most of the grapes, diseases are one of the primary challenges given that Georgia is wet, humid and hot, “generally a perfect environment” for airborne fungi spread by insects. Heavy rainfall and cloud cover contribute to a wider range of airborne fungal diseases compared with conditions in California and Europe, said Clark MacAllister, UGA Extension agent in Lumpkin and Dawson counties. “The fungal diseases are mostly spread through microscopic spores by the wind,” he said.
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The northeast Georgia mountains are home to the state’s most developed grape-growing region. In fact, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau designated the region as an American Viticultural Area in 2018, dubbing it the “Dahlonega Plateau.”
In the emerging grape-growing region west of Atlanta, growers primarily plant French-American hybrid grapes and ‘Norton’ grapes, a native species that is Pierce’s disease-resistant. And because the Georgia wine industry is in its infancy, much of the Georgia-specific research happening is focused on how to best grow vines here to maximize a vineyard owner’s chances of success. “Research comes from your Extension specialists and is specific to which grape you are growing,” said Paula Burke, UGA Extension agent for Carroll County. Ten years ago, the county perched on the Alabama border was home to just one vineyard. Now, there are at least seven in the region.
Of particular concern is Pierce’s disease, a deadly bacterial infection that kills grapevines from California to Florida, including Georgia, where it thrives in the subtropical climate. Much of the decision on which grapes to grow in Georgia is based on determining the most Pierce’s disease-resistant vines. UGA Extension agents work directly with vineyard growers to help their businesses succeed.
The owners attended various workshops offered through the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, including how to put together a spray program to keep pests at bay. They were also connected with UGA’s Small Business Development Center, a unit of UGA Public Service and Outreach, where business consultant David Stob helped them develop a sound business plan. And all of those services came without cost. “UGA has made our dreams possible,” Wiseman said. Blue Cielo Farms Vineyard and Winery is scheduled to open to the public for wine tastings and events in late 2022. Georgia is now home to more than 100 farm wineries and vineyards and UGA Extension agents work with nearly all of them, said Phillip Brannen, UGA fruit disease Extension specialist and plant pathologist. The state’s wine industry is continuing to grow, not just in the north Georgia Mountains, but also west of Atlanta and in south Georgia, he said. The differences in the regions are reflected by geography and grapes.
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Consumasatsuma SARAH SWAIN FOR BUGWOOD.ORG
Georgia’s newest cashcrop is among the sweetestLikemanysouth Georgians, Wayne Hanna’s yard includes a citrus tree. For years, he’s picked fruit from it for breakfast or an afternoon snack, but the convenience of homegrown fruit carries with it a drawback. Usually a whole bunch of them. Seeds. When Hanna, a legend in the plant breeding world, joined the faculty at the University of Georgia Tifton campus in 2002, he asked the assistant dean if he could work on developing a cold-tolerant citrus tree that produced seedless fruit. Given the go-ahead, Hanna pursued this goal for nearly a decade and a half. Then, in 2016, he released not one, but three, new seedless citrus trees. All of the cultivars carry the Frost name to identify them as UGAThereproducts.isatangerine (‘Sweet Frost’), a lemon (‘Grand Frost’), and a grapefruit (‘Pink Frost’). In early 2021, the trio became a quartet with the addition of a navel orange (‘Southern Frost’). The case for satsumas Satsumas, which are smaller than navel oranges, possess traits that make them good candidates for success in Georgia. Most importantly, they’re cold tolerant to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, colder weather makes the fruit even sweeter. On the downside, hard freezes can kill them just like any other citrus trees. That’s what happened when satsumas were first introduced to Georgia in the 1950s. Seventy years later, with advances in agricultural science, many from UGA, Georgians were ready to try again. In 2013, there were about 4,500 commercial citrus trees in the state. Now there are more than 390,000 covering about 2,700 acres in 45 Georgia counties. Satsumas make up around 85% of that.
– Eric Rangus, Georgia Magazine, Winter 2021
Joined by his parents, the Muhaimins started growing hibiscus in several Georgia cities — including Vidalia, Atlanta, Fayetteville, Sylvester and Riceboro — before partnering with George High at Cedar Seeder Farm in Snellville, Georgia, who taught them regenerative methods of growing hibiscus, and Grant Carter of Carter’s Farm in Enigma, Georgia, who helped them expand the acreage and yield of their crops.
In 2020, while seeking a university partner to help him develop mechanized harvesting and processing tools for hibiscus — a labor-intensive practice traditionally done by hand — Muhaimin met Chris Rhodes, director of industry partnerships at UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Rhodes made the connection between the businessman and researchers Anand Mohan and Govindaraj Dev Kumar in the Department of Food Science and Technology, who were interested in studying the potential health benefits of hibiscus.
“We used a pathogenic strain of E. coli that has been associated with lettuce outbreaks and tested whether these extracts could reduce the bacteria’s ability to grow,” Dev Kumar said. One of the four extracts demonstrated a significant impact on the growth rate of the bacterial strain in lab studies, a finding that could lead to naturally derived additives made from hibiscus that could inhibit the growth of microorganisms as an ingredient in other food products.
In 2016, the Muhaimins established Pride Road, an agribusiness that grows, harvests and processes Georgiagrown hibiscus into products including jellies, chutneys, dry herbal teas, and bottled teas and sodas sold through farmers markets and small businesses throughout the state.
“I have heard of its potential antimicrobial activity and I was always interested in testing it out,” said Dev Kumar, who used leaves and calyxes from Pride Road’s hibiscus plants to create four different extracts he tested for effectiveness against E. coli bacteria.
“These are preliminary results that show certain formulations of the hibiscus extract prevent E. coli from growing really quickly in a medium where bacteria grows really well,” Dev Kumar said. “For us, that shows that there might be some potential to explore this further.”
Budding entrepreneurs
Amid their loss, YaSin Muhaimin and his wife, Elaine Muhaimin, moved to Zachary, Louisiana, on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, and started a small poultry operation.
The entrepreneurial aspect of the business appealed to Najeeb Muhaimin, who had moved to Georgia after Hurricane Katrina.
Mohan likens the interest in hibiscus products to other “superfood” trends over the past several years. “Is this the next chia seed? I feel like they might be on the front edge of something here,” he said.
aSin Muhaimin’s family had worked in agriculture for three generations. But neither he nor his son Najeeb Muhaimin had been farmers before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, wiping out everything the family owned.
It was while working in information technology for the American Cancer Society in 2007 that Najeeb Muhaimin met his wife, Millie Muhaimin. They were married in 2010 and soon began discussing starting a business growing and producing hibiscus products, like his father had in Louisiana.
The couple began growing Hibiscus sabdariffa, commonly known as roselle, on the poultry farm through a partnership with Louisiana State University and Southern University and A&M College, producing teas, jellies and chutneys to sell locally.
Y
“It is a vertical process where we grow, harvest, process and bottle everything ourselves. It’s not just about the farm,” said Muhaimin, who is also a member of the Georgia National Guard. “It is on a small scale, but we see it as an opportunity and a challenge.”
On the cusp “Hibiscus is not a very big crop yet here in the U.S. The market is growing now, but 90% of the hibiscus currently used in the U.S. is imported, dried hibiscus,” said Mohan, who specializes in new food product development and food ingredient technology. “Hibiscus tea is considered very healthful and is something people in many parts of the world consume. Our scientists are working with Pride Road’s hibiscus to really look at what the nutritional or health value might be. We’re working to get better information about the real value of the crop from a nutritional standpoint.”
Dev Kumar said he was aware of previous studies that indicated hibiscus has a variety of health benefits, from aiding in weight loss and improving heart and liver health to fighting cancer and bacteria.
After PridemetGeorgiaKatrina,HurricaneNajeebMuhaiminrelocatedtowherehehiswife,MillieMuhaimin.In2016,theystartedRoadtogrow Hibiscus sabdariffa for use in products.food
Flower to bottle In 2019, the couple purchased a processing facility in Lithonia, Georgia, where they are able to take their hibiscus from raw material to finished product.
“My sister had moved to Georgia before Hurricane Katrina and my brother moved after. Given the challenges I was faced with in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I decided to move to Georgia,” Najeeb Muhaimin said. “So I drove out in my Chevy Camaro with everything I owned in it. And I still had room to fit three more people.”
This year, they entered two products in the Flavor of Georgia contest: hibiscus peach chutney and hibiscus habanero jelly. Their hibiscus peach chutney was the winner of the condiments and salsas category of the 2022 competition.
Pride Road worked with the University of Georgia’s Food Product Innovation and Commercialization Center (FoodPIC) to develop their variety of hibiscus products, and in 2018 their hibiscus jelly was a finalist in the jams and jellies category at the Flavor of Georgia food products competition. (See related story on page 8.)
BLooming with PRide Local agribusiness partners with CAES to examine the health benefits of hibiscus by maria M. lameiras • illustration by megan mccoyimplement flower power
CAES doctoral student works to revolutionize the seaweed industry By Emily Davenport SELT MARINE GROUP ALGA PLUS OCEAN RAINFOREST
Fortner helped facilitate communication with and about the grant recipients through press releases and social media posts.
SEAWEED AMBASSADOR
“I had the privilege of establishing the Seaweed Ambassadors Program, a group of people seeking to share evidence-based information about seaweed while using accessible language within their existing networks. I built a framework for and coordinated the activities of the first and second cohort of Seaweed Ambassadors,” Fortner said. “I used the skills learned in my communication, leadership and education classes to tailor messages to the ambassadors, create orientation materials and activities for them, and evaluate the success and engagement of our meetings.”
“Just like crops on land, seaweed has seasons. There are times of year when people who harvest wild seaweed are allowed to access the wild seaweed populations and collect them, while they have to leave them to optimize growth during other parts of the year,” said Fortner.
SAMSSAMS
POWERFUL POTENTIAL
Despite the challenges, researchers and industries are working to tap into the full promise of seaweed. Seaweed is already being used by startup companies as a replacement for plastic packaging, and innovations in bioprocessing are being developed to extract high-value compounds from seaweed.
Fortner recently completed an eight-week international internship both in Paris and on France’s Brittany Coast, where she worked as a science communicator with the Safe Seaweed Coalition, a global partnership established in 2021 to support a safe and sustainable seaweed industry. The internship fulfilled the requirements of Fortner’s international agriculture certificate in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
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“Understanding how to do this while not disturbing ocean ecosystems, using too much energy or introducing invasive species and disease may be a challenge.”
There are big plans for the future of seaweed as researchers continue to unlock its full potential.
While it may not be typically associated with agriculture, seaweed has made important contributions to the agricultural field for hundreds of years. Long ago, farmers took seaweed that washed up on the beaches and put it onto their fields as a form of fertilizer. Fast forward a few decades and this idea has transformed into applying seaweed extracts in the form of biostimulants on a variety of crops to enhance the plants’ nutrient uptake and droughtSeaweedtolerance.hasmyriad human uses as well. Seaweed as a food product is one of the fastest growing sectors, currently valued at $9 billion annually. Of course, if you’ve ever had sushi, you are well acquainted with seaweed.Andseaweed-based snacks are becoming more mainstream on grocery store shelves. There’s even a species of seaweed known as “sea truffle” because its flavor resembles that of truffles found on land. Seaweed has also long been used as a thickening agent in foods and is featured prominently in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and vitamin supplements.
When you hear the word agriculture, seaweed might not be the first thing that comes to mind.
But Allison Fortner, a University of Georgia doctoral student pursuing a degree in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication, is doing her part to help raise the profile of this important marine species.
Another goal of the coalition is to improve awareness of the applications and environmental significance of seaweed among global audiences. Fortner coordinated the group’s Seaweed Ambassadors, seaweed enthusiasts who want to be involved in the coalition’s advocacy efforts.
As the seaweed industry continues to expand worldwide, the coalition works to ensure safety for workers, consumers and the environment. One way they do that is by awarding targeted small grants twice a year to accelerate safety in the seaweed sector.
“We are still very much in the ‘huntergatherer’ stage of seaweed outside of Asia. While a select few species of algae have been domesticated and cultivated for commercial use, there is more work to be done to determine the best species that will serve specific needs and how best to grow those species,” said Fortner.
Fortner, who earned her bachelor’s degree in agricultural communication in 2016, followed by a master’s degree in agricultural and environmental education in 2021, put the communication skills she gained at CAES to the test, building out effective strategic communications for the coalition.
At the conclusion of her internship, Fortner continued working with the organization as a Seaweed Ambassador herself, joining 21 other ambassadors around the world, sharing information about the full potential of seaweed.
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Allison Fortner holds up a large piece of the seaweed Saccharina latissima in Plougeurneau, France. Her international internship with the Safe Seaweed Coalition focused on communicating the importance of seaweed for commercial use. A myriad of seaweed species, including Saccharina latissima, can be harvested in shallow coastal waters, offshore by boat or even grown in a laboratory setting. potential
A MULTI-USE PRODUCT But what is the full potential of seaweed? Seaweed, also referred to as macroalgae, is an incredible marine organism. Alongside microscopic algae, it is responsible for around half of the photosynthesis on our planet — which means it provides about half of the oxygen that we breathe, no matter where we live on Earth.
Fortunately, some species of seaweed grow incredibly fast — giant kelp for example can grow up to 24 inches per day in ideal conditions.
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“As forwasbackground,agriculturecomewhosomeonedoesnotfromaniteye-openingme.”
“This farming operation made a lasting impact on my vision of agriculture. I believe that urban farming methods like this operation are going to be essential to feeding and sustaining our world’s ever-growing population,” said Bailey Rayfield, a junior studying agriscience and environmental systems. “As a young person who has grown up in rural, agriculturebased communities, this farming enterprise exemplified how we can maximize land use and facilities that are located in more urban areas.”AtThrush Ag Aviation in Albany, the CAES agritourists experienced the manufacturing side of the industry while observing the assembly of crop-dusting planes. At Lewis Taylor Farms in Tifton and A&M Farms in Lyons, the group learned about increasing efficiency in the packing sheds. Each time the voyagers climbed back on the bus for the next leg, they shared the impact of what they witnessed and drew connections to what they had learned in their classrooms on campus. And the wheels kept rolling, bringing new perspectives and inspiration to the bright minds who will soon lead the state’s largest industry.
R ed barns, green pastures and the sound of roosters crowing at the crack of dawn. These are the images that leap to mind when agriculture comes up, but ask the students who climbed aboard the charter bus for the 2022 Spring Break Tour through Georgia Agriculture, and what they say will broaden your perspective.
Each year, students in the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences explore the state’s largest industry in a way that many will never experience.
“As someone who does not come from an agriculture background, it was eye-opening for me,” Siara Zedonek, a senior biological science major, said of the trip. “I was able to encounter new things I’ve never been exposed to. I had wonderful instructors to help me understand unfamiliar terms and answer questions and had conversations that led me to want to learn more about agriculture in general. Visiting the different farms and businesses inspired me to be more aware and familiarize myself with the world of agriculture.”
One of the first stops on the week-long odyssey through Georgia agriculture was a tour at Mercier Orchards in Blairsville. As orchard manager David Lillard discussed the intricacies of helping operate a family-run business, students learned the value of diversification and innovation in agriculture through the story of how the business has expanded from a simple apple orchard to a thriving agritourism destination. Among the enterprises they’ve developed are a small market selling local and Georgia-grown goods, a bakery, a café, a candy kitchen and a winery offering wines and hard cider grown, pressed, fermented and bottled on site.
“The largest takeaway from Mercier was the
Starting in the northern hills and trailing through the Piedmont region all the way to the sandy Coastal Plain, students tour a diverse range of agricultural operations and organizations and meet the people behind the scenes. This year, 13 students visited 24 different farms and organizations, getting an intimate look at all aspects of the industry, from research and engineering to marketing and education.
journeygeorgia CAES students embark on whirlwind agriculture and industry tour by caroline hinton illustration by sarah neuberger
importance of the ability to diversify your company,” said Sage Barlow, a sophomore poultry science major. “By diversifying the business, Mercier is now a third-generation farm and has fifth-generation families working for them. The decision to go from strictly apples to other products allows the company to stay open all year long.”
Throughout the week, students experienced innovation in agricultural technology, research and practices firsthand. A visit to the Agricultural Technology Research Program (ATRP) at Georgia Tech highlighted the collaborative work between UGA and its sister institution on poultry processing advancements such as virtual reality technology, which is poised to change the landscape of poultry processing and address labor challenges within the industry.
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In Peachtree City, a visit to Alō Farms opened their eyes to the possibilities of urban agriculture as they learned about aquaponics use in food production systems for leafy greens and toured the 20,000-square-foot controlled environment facility, where they harvest 4,320 heads of lettuce, 1,200 heads of curly kale, 75 pounds of arugula, 50 pounds of basil and up to 300 pounds of microgreens each week.
– Siara Zedonek, seniorsciencebiologicalmajor
In her position, McNally initiates and coordinates education and equal opportunity activities at the consortium and nationally with partner associations and other NCCRs — for example, #NCCRWomen showcases women in Swiss research in short, one-minute videos.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in genetics and applied biotechnology at UGA, she completed a certificate in international agriculture at CAES, spending a semester studying grapevine breeding in Udine, Italy.
The experience inspired her to pursue her graduate education abroad and she was accepted to the University of Zürich’s Fast Track Program, which combines master’s and doctoral degrees into one salaried position, allowing her to earn both degrees over five years. “Without the program, I would likely not have come, as I could not have afforded to study in Switzerland for a year without income to obtain the required master’s degree before starting a doctorate,” McNally said.
“As Switzerland is densely multicultural — it has four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh, all spoken in different regions — it can be very challenging to coordinate national programs and campaigns,” she said. “This challenge, however, provides one of the greatest satisfactions of my job.”
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Before joining USDA-FAS in 2017, Gross returned to D.C. to work for EcoAgriculture Partners, a nonprofit organization supporting integrated landscape management approaches worldwide. “I worked with partners across all types of agricultural value chains including farmers, processors, traders and retailers on big sustainability issues like agriculture-led deforestation,” he explained. “I learned that through strong publicprivate partnerships we could better shape agriculture and food systems to serve people, food and nature.”
Compiled by Maria M. Lameiras
Berlin, GErmany Kira Cohen-Milo Searching for a healthier, sustainable familylife-work balance, Kira Cohen-Milo and her husband, musician Haggai Cohen-Milo, moved from New York to Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Fortunately, the New York-based nonprofit organization Kira Cohen-Milo works for — GrowNYC — was happy to have her continue her work as program manager for Green Beetz, a program that empowers elementary and middle school students to navigate the
“As countries adopt these standards, they not only improve the safety of their food products domestically, they become better trading partners with the U.S,” Gross said. Through the certificate in international agriculture program in the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the environmental economics and management major traveled to Ecuador to live and work alongside farmers in the tropical cloud forest. “The program expanded my view of sustainable development challenges we face,” he said. After working with The Nature Conservancy in Washington, D.C., for several years, Gross earned a master’s degree in natural resources from the University of Vermont. He pursued his advanced degree because he “wanted to research the ways in which we could better support integrated landscape management — where improved agricultural production, environmental conservation and farmer livelihoods could be in sync, not trade-offs.”
Kaitlin McNally Kaitlin McNally is a member of the research management team for the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland.
Zurich, Switzerland
Washington, D.C. Lee Gross
An international program specialist at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS), Lee Gross supports countries in strengthening their regulatory systems according to international science-based standards.
GettersGlobe
CAES alumni map out their futures in careers around the world
Seoul, South Korea Jongyun Kim Jongyun Kim has the “wonderful luck” of working as an associate professor and researcher in the Department of Plant Biotechnology at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Now he shares his expertise with students who are seeking their path in the agriculture industry. Kim’s own academic path brought him to UGA, where he earned his doctorate in horticulture in 2011 under the advisement of renowned controlled environment researcher Marc van Iersel. After graduation, Kim worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland conducting multi-university research funded by the USDA’s Specialty Crop Research Initiative helping sensor companies to modern food system and to make healthy and sustainable food choices. She joined the organization after earning a master’s degree in nutrition and public health from Teachers College, Columbia University to complement her 2006 degree in biological science with a minor in horticulture from CAES. Now Cohen-Milo creates a classroom curriculum focused on teaching tweens the modern food system, nutrition and sustainability. “I found my place within CAES after my year abroad,” she said. “Most of my classes were in the Department of Horticulture and I loved it. I had found my place.”
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Cohen-Milo learned the importance of finding the people and places that “click” for you. “It’s vital to have this connection and a sense of place and self for everything that you do in life. So seek it out, seek out the place where you feel that you fit but are also pushed to thrive and grow,” she said. develop more efficient and effective irrigation management systems. Since then he has worked to develop sensor-based automated irrigation systems for horticultural production. In 2013, he returned to Korea as an assistant professor at Pai Chai University in Daejeon. In 2015, he joined Korea University, where he teaches and develops controlled environment horticultural crop production technology. “It is pretty wonderful luck to work where I spent most of my twenties, educating my junior students,” Kim said. passport to profiles Discover more Globe Getters at caes.uga.edu.cultivate.
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Building community
Stories by Anna Bentley
Takiyah Ball is a food safety microbiologist at Sargento Foods, but she doesn’t work in a lab. And though Sargento is known for its premium natural cheese products, Sargento is not a cheesemaker. The family-owned company, founded in 1953, was the first American company to successfully introduce packaged shredded and sliced natural cheese.“Cheesemaking is a very developed and lucrative field in the state of Wisconsin where Sargento is located. As with any food manufacturing process, be it producing or converting, there’s always risk,” said Ball, who earned bachelor’s degrees in microbiology and cellular biology from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in animal science from UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in comparative biomedical science. “Part of my job is to monitor those risks nationally and internationally to see if there’s anything on the horizon — what’s emerging. I analyze and hypothesize different scenarios to determine possible outcomes if we were to be impacted in the foodBallsupply.”isalso tasked with building relationships with external stakeholders to help Sargento stay ahead of certain risks and find ways to minimize them efficiently.
at Work
From
hospitals in rural Georgia to global corporate offices, CAES alumni excel in their fields
But Ball is most passionate about a role at Sargento that falls outside her job description. She and a group of coworkers developed a diversity, inclusion and belonging initiative at Sargento to start conversations about the importance of diversity for both cultural and business growth and to drive retention by helping employees feel included and accepted.
“We realized that there was a true need for a DEI initiative, and I’m proud that our work is helping Sargento live up to its philosophy of treating people like family.”
Because of her group’s work, the company now has a diversity, equity and inclusion senior director and an associate partner — positions that may not have existed otherwise.Eventually, Ball hopes the program incorporates a mentorship or an ally program to pair individual contributors with senior leaders within the company. “Because if you don’t have that,” she said, “the road to success becomes a lot more difficult without a champion.”
TAKIYAH BALL
American Tank Maintenance has been named to the Bulldog 100 — an annual list of the 100 fastest-growing organizations owned or operated by UGA alumni — for four consecutive years. Lewis attributes the company’s success to its client focus:
“One of the things I like the most is not only the variety of the things that we do in the subjects that we teach, but also the fact that what we teach helps people do their jobs better so they can have a better life and a better lifestyle,” he said. “Knowing that people are able to provide better for their families because they’ve taken our training — that they know more, they’re more efficient and they’re more productive — that means a lot to me.”
The academy’s training programs are tailored to the
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Specifically, Miller oversees Yanmar’s Global Academy and a training center that handles training needs across eight functional areas — service, sales, parts, dealership management, systems, finance, employee training and customer/partner training.
implement career growth
Lewis’ introduction to water tank maintenance came in 1999 when he joined Utility Service Company in an executive sales role. He helped grow the company to a national level before it was acquired by Suez WaterAfterTechnologies.afewyearsof former clients asking Lewis when he would be back in business, American Tank Maintenance was born.
Miller, current CAES Alumni Board president, has had a well-rounded career in the agriculture equipment industry since graduating in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural mechanization technology. After working in training roles for industry bighitters like Kubota, Komatsu and AGCO, he joined Yanmar America to lead the learning and development program for the Japanese heavy machinery company in North America and around the world.
Towering success If you’ve ever spotted the rounded silhouette of a water tank rising just above the tree line, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of Mike Lewis’ work. As founder and a principal of American Tank Maintenance, Lewis and his team maintains and services more than 1,000 municipal water tanks across seven Southeastern states, helping to keep essential water services running smoothly behind the scenes.“Those big water tanks — we take care of them,” said Lewis, a 1986 agricultural economics graduate from CAES. Lewis’ team inspects each water tank every year, washing and cleaning the tanks every two years. They also paint the tanks inside and out and make any needed repairs. “We’re fully accountable and responsible for anything that happens to that asset from that point forward,” he said.
Miller’s gratitude for his experiences at CAES motivates him to be involved with the CAES Alumni Board.“Ihave a deep appreciation for being at the college and being part of the University of Georgia,” he said. “The college supported me in order to graduate, so I want to give back to that.”
“Doing what we say we’re going to do when we say we’re going to do it, how we say we’re going to do it. That’s what builds our reputation and allows us to grow our business.”
Serving with gratitude
MIKE LEWIS TIM MILLER Mike Lewis and his wife, Jennifer Griffin Lewis, pose for a photo at the UGA Alumni Association's Bulldog 100 celebration.
end user — internal or external — and are offered in multiple formats to boost effectiveness and accessibility.
Though his career has spanned agriculture and construction, Miller sees himself as being in a different field altogether — adult education.
“I enjoy the hands-on, everyday functions of our business,” Lewis said. “At the end of the day, we know we’ve helped make the drinking water supply system better.”
Tim Miller understands the impact that education can have on a person's life. He experienced it firsthand at CAES, with professors who tailored their instruction so he could best learn.
Ashlee Nicole Tillery now serves a small community much like the one she grew up in.
“That is a really fun and unique aspect of practicing as a small-town OB-GYN. Caring for cross-sectional age ranges (within families) is something you do not often get with other specialties and is something I especially enjoy.”
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Tillery and her husband, Georgia state Sen. Blake Tillery, welcomed their first child in 2021, an experience she said has given her deeper insights into her patient population.
An important component of Wang’s own success has been mentorship and guidance.
In her practice, Tillery cares for patients from young girls through postmenopausal women. She strives to provide compassionate, comprehensive, evidence-based care to every patient she sees, aiming to be the kind of physician she would want her own family to see.
Guiding growth
Now, Wang hopes to provide the same formative guidance — and learn something herself — through multiple mentorship programs, including Coca-Cola’s KO-GEN Inclusion Group, Coca-Cola Women in STEM, Cornell’s Alumni Admissions Ambassador Program and the UGA Mentor Program.
Delivering opportunity
ASHLEE NICOLE TILLERY AMY WANG implement career growth
“That little change has really, significantly changed my life,” she said. “To be there as a small part for somebody else like that is extremely meaningful.”
In honor of the opportunities attending UGA — and CAES specifically — afforded her, Tillery created the Tillery Family Award Endowment in 2020. A “labor of love,” the fund awards the top Morehead Honors College graduate from CAES with a $1,000 exit award upon graduation.
“I was fortunate to have a well-rounded collegiate career,” she said. “CAES always felt like home to me.” professional pride Share your career news at get-involved/contact-us.caes.uga.edu/alumni/
“One of the things I really like that I do every day is looking at how the organization is changing and how the world is changing, and seeing my fingerprints in those changes,” said Wang, who earned a master’s degree in food science from CAES in 1995.
“The goal has always been to serve a rural community. There is a big recruitment issue getting physicians, specifically OB-GYNs, to serve smaller communities outside of the metro areas of Georgia,” said Tillery, a 2013 biological science graduate from CAES. “I have been uniquely positioned, even so young in my career, to be able to care for many women because the need is so great in rural, smaller communities.”
She’s launched new products and helped scale international brands, including Powerade, Dasani and energy drink brands, as well as the Freestyle system. Now, as global director, she plays a role in shaping the Coca-Cola Company itself.
As a member of the labor and delivery team at Memorial Health Meadows Hospital in Vidalia, Georgia, obstetrician-gynecologist
It’s high-level synthesis with a pretty simple goal: to make sure people have what they need to be successful.
“That’s always for me a nice passion area, as well as a meaningful and purposeful way of spending your day.”
A career counselor at Cornell University, Wang’s undergraduate alma mater, steered her away from chemical engineering and into food science — a suggestion that changed the direction of Wang’s life in many meaningful ways, she said.
Wang’s role at Coca-Cola is as a connector — connecting people with the tools, training or information they need to do their jobs more effectively; connecting with external partners to make sure Coca-Cola is maximizing the latest frameworks, models and technology; and connecting her everyday observations to roadmaps for improved processes across the organization.
In Amy Wang’s nearly 25 years with the Coca-Cola Company, she’s helped create, measure and refine how people respond to the look, feel, taste and experience of drinking Coca-Cola branded products.
Working in a rural community means Tillery, the first physician in her family, often treats generations of women from the same family.
propagate
Anderson cultivates an inclusive mindset in agriculture by maria
Jesse Walker 48 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences
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PRopagate inclusion Changeagent
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Rebuilding academic culture from within At CAES and throughout UGA, Anderson designs and teaches leadership development courses for students, faculty and staff that incorporate inclusive practices.
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“We were students from a world-renowned urban agriculture program who had scholarships to attend land-grant institutions all across the country to study agriculture, and many were leaving these programs because they didn’t feel inclusive,” said Anderson, who graduated from at the University of Illinois, the land-grant institution in the state. “I became an advocate for diversity not as an initiative, but diversity as a way of life.”
Carving out space
“Through leadership education, I’m able to work with people before they get into a leadership role and we can discuss how they plan to create these places that are equitable and inclusive, that really define diversity in many different ways and are not limited to the traditional areas of race and religion and gender,” Anderson said. “Diversity, equity and inclusion is not a conversation by itself. It is an experience that is supported by conversation.”
Becoming an advocate Anderson became focused on advocating for himself and establishing connections with faculty and administrators who would help him realize his academic and professional goals within agriculture.
Planting the seed Anderson was introduced to agriculture when he attended the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, a small magnet school in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago. Living in the inner city, Anderson’s parents thought it was the safest environment for him.
Breaking through barriers
J ames Anderson appreciates the importance of diversity recruitment efforts at universities, but he explains that supporting diverse populations cannot stop with a college acceptance letter.
“It is a comprehensive school — students could study food science, animal science, agriculture and biotechnology, horticulture — and so we began to get a sense that agriculture is very broad and that there are all of these wonderful things we could do,” Anderson said.
“One of the things that we run into with diversity initiatives is that there’s this recruitment of diversity but then the organization doesn’t know how to accept the difference,” said Anderson, graduate coordinator in the University of Georgia Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication Since joining the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in 2017, Anderson has provided leadership and mentorship training at the institutional level, built on the framework of transformative mentoring — developing relationships between the mentor and mentee via conversations about identity, goals, values and perspective.
For Anderson and many of his schoolmates from high school, the transition to college brought the reality of often being the only person of color in their academic programs.
Through these early experiences, Anderson developed an appreciation for how sharing his own story and the stories of others’ journeys could help foster an inclusive mindset.
With the goal of introducing students to different cultures, Anderson developed a faculty-led study abroad program to Morocco, the only study abroad at UGA that focuses on the northern African kingdom. Held for the first time this year, the program provides an introduction to various facets of Moroccan agriculture, economic development and sustainability.
“I am not making it an intervention, but a worldview. We need to find the best of many different types of people so that we can come together as a team and address the issues that we need to address,” he said. “Do I feel more comfortable with people like me? Yes, but that’s not always going to be the solution to the wicked problems that we are facing today.”
“I felt a connection to UGA as an institution that, at all levels, was saying that we are ready to be trailblazers and we believe that the way to do this is to acknowledge our downfalls and the lack of diversity that exists, then identify ways to actually address that.”
“Your network will determine how long you stay in that field. When there isn’t identity representation — where you can see others who have succeeded and who look like you — then you can become skeptical about whether you will be accepted and fit in,” he said.
In choosing to work at UGA, Anderson recognized that the university was creating tangible diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. He explained that some institutions don’t go beyond speech with actions to meet defined targets.
“I became an advocate for diversity not as an initiative, but diversity as a way of life, and that is what we need in order to address the issues that we’re trying to address in agriculture,” Anderson said. “If we’re homogeneous, then we miss some of the potential solutions that are out there … Individuals from different backgrounds with different worldviews can bring a solution that you’ve been seeking for years.”
50 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences From the stock trailer to the consumer’s plate, students at the UGA Meat Science Technology Center learn by doing BUILDING CHOPS By Becky Mills • Photos by Dennis McDaniel 1 432 5
Junior Emily Brock became interested in the meat processing side of animal science when she took a livestock evaluation class with meat scientist and Professor Dean Pringle and has worked in the meat lab for more than a year.
“It will really help in vet school,” he said. “Crowe is the best boss and the best teacher anybody could ask for.”
In academia, “experiential learning” has become a buzzword, but the concept has been around a lot longer than the catchphrase.
The Monticello, Florida, native says animal science, and particularly meat science, is a way to combine her two main interests — animal nutrition and human health and nutrition. “With both animals and humans, health starts with nutrition,” she said. In addition to providing the ultimate hands-on experience, MSTC prepares students for an “on-fire” job market. “It is an area and career field where there are a lot of jobs available and they are well-paying jobs,” Stelzleni said, adding that graduates are in demand in the industry whether they earn an undergraduate degree or choose to pursue graduate school.
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In simplest terms, it means hands-on learning, and the faculty and staff at the University of Georgia Meat Science Technology Center (MSTC) are masters of the craft.
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MEAT DEETS The UGA MSTC Store is open on Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 425 River Road, Athens, Georgia. Visit edu/adsmeatstore.site.caes.uga.
“It is a rapidly changing field and we are constantly focused on new technology and new products.” he added. “We want to make sure meat is high quality and affordable and we want to bring consumers back to the industry.”
Fields, who graduated in May, was recently accepted to the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and credits the CAES professors and mentors he has gained throughout his college experience. He is especially grateful for the up-close look he’s gotten at animal anatomy through harvesting and processing working with longtime MSTC Coordinator Ryan Crowe and meat science and muscle biology Professor Alexander Stelzleni.
Crowe, who has managed the MSTC for more than 20 years, shares his know-how with 10 to 15 student workers a semester.
The Millen, Georgia, native said his experiences have better equipped him to be a cattle producer and consumer. “I’ve been able to see the difference between grass-fed and conventionally finished beef firsthand.”
4. Honing steel is used to keep blades sharp during processing.
5. Boning knife is housed in a metal scabbard.
Dawson Fields fully embraced the concept as an animal science major in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Department of Animal and Dairy Science, from his job at the UGA Meat Science Technology Center Store to his role as a member of the UGA Dairy Judging Team.
“I’ve done everything from getting the cattle and hogs off the trailer to humane harvesting to processing the retail products,” said Fields. “I’ve been here two years and loved every minute.”
“Over the summer we processed hogs. I worked on the harvest floor through processing sausage. With cattle, I can break down a whole hindquarter. It is absolutely a valuable experience,” Brock said. “I plan to stay on until graduation.”
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In addition to training the next generation of leaders in meat science, the MSTC served a critical role in the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. When grocery store meat cases were empty, Crowe and the students made sure people could still buy meat while staying safe through the MSTC store.Open to the public from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. every Friday during the academic year, the meat store kept operating to make lambbeef,inspectedofDepartmentU.S.Agriculture-porkandavailable to the community, while continuing to train student workers.
— from highly coveted lamb that is only available in small quantities twice per year to smoked and summer sausages and a rotating variety of beef and pork, from steaks and chops to specialty cuts like beef picanha. Customers can also order a half or whole side of meat by contacting Crowe. Students get experience answering questions, keeping the cases stocked and running the cash register. While meat lab workers also gain experience through providing custom harvesting and processing services to local producers, all of the meat sold through the store is harvested from UGA’s teaching and research herds.
“With the UGA meat we have control of it from the time it comes in the door until it is sold,” said Stelzleni. “It is a closed system. We know where the animals are and their health systems. Safety is our utmost concern.”
“Working at the meat lab has been one of my best experiences at UGA.” – Dawson Fields
“People would email their meat orders. We put together their orders and had two pick-up days a week. Customers would stand at the door and we’d hand it out to them. We did it for three months until we ran out of product,” Crowe said. “It took a lot of time, but we just did it.” Well before and more so after the pandemic, the meat store has a devoted following both on and off-campus. The store’s famous bacon — from hogs raised at the UGA swine unit — is the biggest seller, and the store’s breakfast sausage is featured at popular local restaurant Mama’s Boy. Long lines are common.
52 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences PRopagate skill Continued from page 51 With his sights set on a career as a food animal veterinarian, Fields feels well prepared, and grateful, for what he’s learned at the MSTC. “Working at the meat lab has been one of my best experiences at UGA,” he added.
MSTC supervisor Ryan Crowe inspects slabs of pork belly during a smoke cycle. The smokehouse uses hardwood chips to impart rich flavor to the meat without fully cooking it. This smoking chamber is also capable of performing cooking cycles that do not utilize smoke to prepare readyto-eat foods like snack sticks and summer sausage. Later in 2022, the MSTC will add a second, identical smoking chamber to enable MSTC researchers to conduct trials and to help processors to keep up with demand for smoked products, including the MSTC store’s coveted bacon.
“Sometimes it looks like Black Friday. We’ll have 30 people lined up waiting when we open, especially on a bacon or lamb week,” said Crowe. “We haven’t been able to keep up with the demand for bacon since COVID hit. We can have 500 pounds of bacon and it’s gone in a few hours.” Located in a cozy corner of the Edgar L. Rhodes Center for Animal and Dairy Science on UGA’s Athens campus, the meat store resembles a specialty butcher shop, with tall freezer and refrigerator cases displaying the week’s offerings
Aerial view of the UGArden on South Milledge Avenue as UGA and AmeriCorps VISTA students harvest vegetables in June 2021.
53almanac 2022 PRopagate community Growing Places UGArden provides fresh produce to underserved Athens-area families
By Maria M. Lameiras by Andrew Davis Tucker
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A transfer to UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from Gordon State University, Biang earned her bachelor’s degree in horticulture in 2009 but wasn’t much interested in pursuing her graduate degree or specializing in vegetables. She took a year to think about her next steps, helping to test ornamentals for their hardiness to the region’s high heat and humidity at the Trial Gardens at UGA. Serendipity intervened to bring her to her current role.
T he gardens
Now, as a doctoral student and long-time manager of UGArden, University of Georgia’s student-run farm, Biang is rooted and flourishing, an integral part of creating and sustaining an operation that has put food on the plates of thousands of underserved individuals and families in the greater Athens area.
JoHannah Biang imagined creating when she was an undergraduate student were filled with ornamental flowers and trees, lush and beautiful, nourishing to the soul.
At the same time, he was working to start what would become UGArden, a smallscale farming operation that would provide students with hands-on learning in organic gardening principles. Biang applied to the master’s degree program in horticulture, thinking she would apply the degree in public gardening or as a UGA Cooperative Extension agent in the future. When she began working with Berle, his interests influenced her master’s degree project, which focused on developing green walls — vertical systems that allow plants to grow on a wall as a more efficient use of space in urban gardens. Watching UGArden develop and become a place where students from all over the university came to volunteer and learn organic gardening — getting the chance to operate tractors, tillers and other agricultural equipment — turned out to Help need.withandcontinueUGArdentogrowshareproducepeoplein
Support UGA’s UGArdenSupport.atcommunitystudentfarmtinyurl.com/
“It is not at all what I had in mind, but it’s better than I could have imagined,” Biang said while seated outside of the UGArden offices on Milledge Avenue, rain pattering on the metal roof and soaking the still-bare, late-winter plots at the farm.
In 2010, horticulture Professor David Berle was looking for a graduate student to help establish his work supporting urban community gardens in the Athens-Clarke County area.
DOROTHY KOZLOWSKI
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In 2020, Campus Kitchen relocated many of its operations to UGArden, using surplus military shipping containers repurposed for use as food storage units to hold produce grown at the farm. “What we do at UGArden isn’t necessarily novel, but what we do here with Campus Kitchen is unique because such a large part is service and helping the Athens community,” Biang said. “We’re going on passion and drive, taking food that would otherwise be wasted from grocery stores and farms and making it useful. One of the best things we’ve done has been bringing Campus Kitchen out here to UGArden,” Bisceglia added.
be both fun and inspiring for Biang, who earned her master’s degree in 2012. “What students are getting out of UGArden is more than learning how to grow vegetables. Even when I was scared to do things, David Berle was such a good teacher that he gave me the confidence to do it. I want to do that same thing for other students,” said Biang, who is now a doctoral student in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Since Berle stepped down as UGArden director in 2021, Biang has taken on many of the directorial duties at the farm, working with faculty and students on research projects, planning the crops to be planted each year and working with garden partners.
“I am a true believer in the work of service-learning, which allows the community to benefit from UGA resources and allows students to have a real-world application of what they are learning in the classroom,” Bisceglia said.
One partnership that has grown with UGArden and its mission is Campus Kitchen at UGA, a student-run initiative established in 2010 to develop sustainable solutions to local hunger and community food waste.
Opposite page, clockwise from left: UGArden Manager JoHannah Biang; Assistant Farm Manager Sarah Rucker washes lettuce harvested at UGArden; peppers harvested at UGArden. At left, aerial view of UGA and AmeriCorps VISTA students harvesting vegetables at UGArden; (below) Campus Kitchen Coordinator Andie Bisceglia
“What students are getting out of UGArden is more than learning how to vegetables.”grow – JoHannah Biang
During the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in 2020, Biang martialed a skeleton crew of staff and AmeriCorps VISTA workers to keep hundreds of pounds of fresh produce flowing from UGArden to Campus Kitchen, which provides weekly prepared meals and groceries to more than 250 Athens families.
ANDREW DAVIS TUCKER SHANNAH MONTGOMERY
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A transplant to Georgia from Connecticut, Bisceglia’s background is in environmental studies and education. She joined Campus Kitchen at UGA in 2020, two years after earning her master’s degree in crop and soil sciences at CAES.
Another academic disciple of Berle, Campus Kitchen Coordinator Andie Bisceglia works closely with Biang to plan crops grown at UGArden to support Campus Kitchen, which is run by the UGA Office of Service Learning, a unit of UGA Public Service and Outreach.
PRopagate accessibility FARM BRAVE theof
Farm Again helps veterans reconnect with the land
BY CARLISA JOHNSON PHOTOS BY JESSE WALKER
For many veterans, returning to civilian life is a stark shift from their fast-paced and service-based military life. When you combine this with the more than 4.7 million veterans who have service-based disabilities, the challenges of re-entry compound. The University of Georgia is working to assist Georgia’s veterans with this transition through its dynamic farming program, Farm Again.
“The program does more than you expect it to because it provides more than just equipment,” said Iteago Felton, owner of 3T Farms and Farm Again participant whose military career spans 32 years of Army service. “It gives us the knowledge, a new community of farmers and veterans, and a sense of pride because you know you are of service to your community again.”
Farm Again offers classes covering a wide range of topics including business planning and farming 101, which breaks down the basics for those who are new to the world of agriculture. Rebecca Brightwell, AgrAbility and Farm Again co-director and associate director of UGA’s Institute on Human Development and Disability, said the program highlights the importance of supporting local farmers.
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Livestock on 3T Farms in Lincolnton, Georgia, includes goats, ducks, chickens, turkeys and pigs. Below, farmer Iteago Felton (center), his wife, Antheena (right), and their daughter, Anteaona (left), feed fowl together on the farm.
“It’s about understanding how important our local farmers are and giving them the support and access they need,” said Brightwell. “Farm culture is so different from a regular work life. It’s as much a part of their livelihood as it is a part of who they are, so whatever we can do to continue moving a farmer’s life forward beyond disability is important.”
Since 2019, Felton has been working with Farm Again to further his new life in the agricultural business. With a bustling 25acre livestock farm full of pigs, chickens, goats and turkeys in Lincolnton, Georgia, he says the knowledge he has gained from the program is priceless.
Exemplified by the nearly 50 veterans and more than 1,500 farm families who have benefited from Farm Again and Georgia’s AgrAbility program, innovation and education have made farming more accessible to all.
– Iteago Felton, owner of 3T Farms
“On my farm, it can be just me and the livestock. I can find peace just listeningto the calmness of nature around me or by just seeing the fruits of my labor, day after day.”
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“It’s enabled me to get to levels that it probably would have taken me 10 years to get to alone,” he said. Ultimately, while the program does not directly provide funding to farmers, it offers the necessary insights that enable lifelong farmers, veterans and those entering the industry for the first time to apply for critical grants while offering innovative ways to learn about the industry and what it truly takes to sustain a career as a producer.
Both Felton and Brightwell believe military life prepares veterans for a life in agriculture. The long hours and laborious work, the need for adaptability and the ability to be of service to the world are just a few of the shared characteristics of military service and farming. As an added benefit, farming is a good fit for some veterans because it has the power to heal. For farmers like Felton who experience PTSD and anxiety, farming can serve to heal by providing a way of reconnecting with nature. “On my farm, it can be just me and the livestock. I can find peace just listening to the calmness of nature around me or by just seeing the fruits of my labor, day after day,” said Felton.
“We are offering veterans and these farmers a sense of accomplishment and well-being and the ability to still do field work,” said Glen Rains, UGA professor and Georgia AgrAbility and Farm Again co-director. “When you get to see the results of your hard work, it just means so much.”
“One of the highlights of our work was one of the first times we ever put a lift on a tractor,” said Brightwell. “It’s moments like this that remind farmers that farm life is not over, it’s just a little different now.”
estate
Generosity has the power to change lives.
The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences offers transformational experiences to our students, invaluable expertise to Georgia’s agricultural producers and citizens, and trailblazing research to protect the health of people, animals and the environment. Every gift has an impact at CAES. Scan the QR code to put your gift to work immediately by giving online or to learn more about the many ways your generosity makes a difference. Contact the CAES Office of Development and Alumni Relations to discuss the many options for gift giving, including stock matching gifts, gifts, gifts kind and more at 706-542-3390 or
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Preserve
62 uga college of agricultural and environmental sciences PReserve natural resources
Backed by a Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration (SOAR) grant from The Nature Conservancy, Shell to Shore is dedicated to helping restore Georgia’s oyster industry.
By Eric Butterman Infographic by Kelsey Brioch, UGA Carl Vinson Institute of Government UGA alumni Andrew Malec (left) and Zack Brendel, co-founders of Athens-based Character Built Construction, at their studio. Oyster Farming 101
University of Georgia alumnus Zachary Brendel gives new life to discarded things
“Builders don’t realize that the materials they throw away can sometimes be even more valuable than the materials they want to use,” said Brendel, who is now part of another effort to reuse and revitalize material that would otherwise be lost. Through Athensbased nonprofit Shell to Shore, oyster shells collected from a variety of Athens-area restaurants aren’t thrown away but returned to the sea for new oysters to grow on them again.
You can see it throughout the streets of downtown Athens — from an old tire store that glows with reimagined life as Creature Comforts brewery or an audio recording school operating at full tilt within a converted shoe store. Both are revitalization projects completed by Athens-based Character Built Construction, which was co-founded by Brendel, who earned a degree in environmental economics and management from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in 2003.
ANDREW DAVIS TUCKER
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Shell to Shore dries and transports empty oyster shells from landlocked restaurants to the coast in support of UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant’s communitybased oyster restoration project.
“There are people who talk about doing these kinds of things, but he just does them,” said Revell, now a legal fellow with UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, a unit of UGA Public Service and Outreach. “Following through is Zack 101. He can’t stand waste when something can be done about it. He’s like a human incubator for ideas. I remember him collecting old farmhouse doors and repurposing them for the fun of it. The guy just has know-how and he’s all about being involved.”Revell,a minority partner in Seabear Oyster Bar, where Brendel’s brother, 2008 UGA graduate Noah Brendel, is also a partner, enjoys being one of the prime shell suppliers for Shell to Shore. “It’s a lot of work but it’s also a lot of fun,” he said.
BULLDOG AT HEART Brendel credits CAES with encouraging open-mindedness and strengthening his business sense.
“Once or twice a year we drive down the coast with the shells but, until then, they stay at our place — we’re not short on shells!” Brendel laughed. “They eventually go to Darien, Georgia, to Sapelo Island. It’s rewarding to be a part of attracting a whole ecosystem that helps stabilize the shoreline better than rocks ever could.”
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Shell to Shore team member Hunt Revell, a 2006 interdisciplinary studies graduate from UGA, said Brendel is always getting in on the act when it comes to reusing.
Brendel also credits his passion for restoration to something else you can’t necessarily teach: stubbornness.
“I just have a stubbornness and an intuition that says something doesn’t have to be done one way,” he said. “You can think about the environment around you. You can be creative. That’s whether you’re talking about construction or agriculture or so many things. Let’s find a solution, and hopefully get people excited about it.”
INLAND OYSTERS Before making the journey back to the coast, the oyster shells have to be stored somewhere to dry. Brendel and his wife offered the perfect place — their farm.
“Dr. (Michael) Wetzstein had a microeonomic theory class that really impacted me,” he said. “Taking management classes helped me think about ways to help — but in a way that wouldn’t kill anyone’s wallet. I was looking for that personal touch from college and I found it here. Now I am building a business plan for a sustainable farm in Athens that I once couldn’t have imagined. What I learned allowed me to see solutions.”
A math teacher and a gym coach take long steps down to the sandy ground from the bottom stairs of two yellow school buses with “Bremen City Schools” printed on the side. It is still early March, but the air is already warm and sticky; a gentle breeze stirs the Spanish moss that droops from live oak trees above their heads. An instant later, 64 middle-school students pile out of the buses and take in their surroundings at Burton 4-H Center on Tybee Island.
The exuberant students and their chaperones from the western suburbs of Atlanta inhale the mingled scent of salt and fresh water from the marsh around them, prepared for a three-day adventure with the Georgia 4-H Environmental Education program on Georgia’s coast. Each young person who participates in a field study at Burton 4-H Center learns the Story and photos by Josie Smith Cupid the diamondback terrapin gets a gentle pat from a student while being cradled by an environmental educator at Burton 4-H Center.
Wonderlandnarrative NATURAL
To the south, a winding dock sprawls across the brackish marsh and the sun sparkles on the water as it stretches towards the horizon. To the east, the trees at the edge of the barrier island open up to the Atlantic Ocean. At the north end of the center, special habitats provide a home to native animal species.
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(Above left) Students get a closer look at animal species that live in the coastal waters on Tybee Island; (above) a student uses the mineral-rich mud in the salt marsh for an impromptu facial.
preserve wonder
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In the salt marsh, two tiny crabs scurry over the toes of a seventh grader whose eyes widen with awe at the up-close encounter with marine life. Everyone jumps up and down in unison to feel the vibrations that are created in the spongy ground beneath them — a mix of water, sediment and vegetation that supports hundreds of plant and animal species. Teachers and students alike gain an appreciation for the ecosystems that make the coast unique, and they leave with an understanding of what they can do to protect these fragile systems.
The Georgia 4-H Environmental Education program extends a world-class learning experience to more than 42,000 students every year. Six 4-H centers spread from the mountains to the sea offer both residential and day-learning opportunities for youth from public, private and home-based schools throughout the academic year. Experienced environmental education instructors at each of the centers enthusiastically provide a comprehensive view of the history and habitats of the area, using the outdoors as a living laboratory.
Georgia 4-H’s Environmental Education program builds deep connections between students and nature of coastal ecology — and each student becomes part of the center’s own narrative.
Georgia 4-H seeks to inspire and provide opportunities for each child who participates in 4-H programming. The 4-H Environmental Education program affords that chance to thousands of additional students who visit 4-H centers each year. As the school buses rolled through the gates of Burton, headed back to Bremen, each person on board left with a deeper connection to the Earth and the ecosystems that share it.
The math teacher, the gym coach and five other educators from Bremen Middle School chat with their students as the sun sinks below the tree line. “Yes, we do have to go back to school tomorrow,” they assure their charges, who yearn to make the experience last as long as possible.
More than 1 million students have taken part in the Georgia 4-H Environmental Education program since it was founded in 1979. The instructive possibilities across the six centers follow a naturefocused curriculum that includes team building, outdoor skills, ecology and living history. An essential partnership with education leadership in Georgia and surrounding states enables children to gain understanding of the natural world around them in ways that are not possible inside classroom walls but are aligned with current state educational standards.
Leaders at Burton 4-H Center hold up signs so the seventh graders can find their assigned crews — each student is either a sea turtle, a manatee, a raccoon, an osprey or an alligator for the next three days. These native species, plus dozens more, will be covered in the “Coastal Critters” class that each crew will take part in during their stay. Many species live on-site and are cared for by specially trained staff with a deep respect for local wildlife. Each group will rotate through several life-science classes including “Salt Marsh Ecology,” “Beach Ecology” and “Shark Dissection.”
As twilight approaches on the Bremen school’s second night on Tybee Island, the manatee crew has finished with kitchen patrol duties while the ospreys play beach volleyball in the common area — at least half of them wearing light-up squid hats purchased from the center’s gift shop. Close by, three students sit on the bleachers excitedly discussing the dolphin they spotted from the beach earlier that afternoon, sharing thoughts about future careers in coastal preservation.
CapturingCarbon
As climate issues demand an increasing portion of public attention — from weather extremes to controversies over the impact of conventional agriculture on the environment — understanding environmental issues becomes more important for every resident of our struggling planet.
Land management practices for different types of agricultural land use — row crops, pastureland, etc. — can be an effective way to influence the carbon organic matter content of the soil, he said.
Primary among these efforts is providing research-based information and education to producers and individuals so they can thoughtfully consider their own actions and the impact they can have locally, regionally, nationally and globally.
Aaron Thompson, professor of environmental soil chemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, is participating in international working groups using large datasets of soil properties to understand what governs the amount of organic matter in the soil and how that might change as a function of land management.
Disciplines throughout the University of Georgia are involved in research to mitigate the effects of climate change, and experts in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences are focused on helping people understand and address these challenges in ways that will both benefit the environment and ensure financial sustainability for those in industry.
“The term carbon sequestration may be misunderstood or thought of as a way to trap carbon in the soil that then is not going to leave the soil. There is an element of that, but how long organic matter exists in the soil varies. There are portions of carbon that stay longer, and a lot of my work focuses at a very molecular scale on understanding what the things are that cause carbon to stay there for a long time,” Thompson said.
Agricultural land management practices enrich the soil and clear the air by maria M. lameiras • Photo by chris greer
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Continued on page 68 preserve soil health
One of the most studied solutions to address agriculture’s carbon impact is the use of cover crops.
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DENNIS MCDANIEL
The Drawdown Georgia project is a multiinstitution, multidisciplinary effort to accelerate progress toward net zero greenhouse gas emissions in the state The group was inspired by Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization “that seeks to help the world reach ‘drawdown’ — the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline.”
During the second phase of Drawdown Georgia, working groups oriented by sector — including electricity, transportation, forestry, and food and agriculture — are gathering the information needed to demonstrate the baseline of carbon emissions in each county in Georgia.
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Continued from page 67 At CAES Research and Education Centers and Agricultural Experiment Stations, scientists are studying the impact of various cover crops and conservation tillage practices — such as strip tillage and no-till systems — on hundreds of acres around the state.
The primary purpose of a cover crop is to enhance the life and the function of the soil, replacing nutrients depleted by crops, preventing erosion and keeping rainfall or other water running through the soil from leaching residual nitrogen into waterways, said Miguel Cabrera, the Georgia Power Professor in Environmental Remediation and Soil Chemistry.
– Pam Knox, agricultural climatologist
Cover cropping is slowly gaining traction in Georgia, said Cabrera, and the outreach of research-based information through UGA Cooperative Extension programs is key to more widespread adoption. But producers using cover crops can have difficulty estimating the amount of nitrogen released into the soil and how much of the cover crop remains in the soil and eventually forms carbon.
Over the past six years, Cabrera has been a part of a team that has developed mobile and website applications that allow growers to enter specific data about their cover crops — including the type, when it is terminated and the type of cash crop being planted over the cover — combining it with environmental data from UGA weather stations to estimate how the cover crop decomposes and how that impacts the soil.
Throughout the first phase of the project, which concluded in May 2020, experts with Drawdown Georgia worked to identify the most meaningful solutions for the state, selecting the least expensive and most readily available technologies to reduce carbon emissions. The researchers prioritized methods that would offer beyond-carbon impacts such as job growth, improved air and water quality, and better health equity.
“There are a lot of opportunities here. Farmers are looking at ways to incorporate solar (energy production) into farm production to save money. Farmers using cover crops are putting less fertilizer on the ground, using less irrigation and saving on fuel. A lot of the changes that are really going to be necessary to make can economically benefit the farmers,” she said. “When we talk about agricultural practices to address climate change, we have to recognize that farmers are running a business and they have to be able to survive. There has to be a partnership and we have to make sure producers are right there in the conversation.”
“Farmers using cover crops are putting less fertilizer on the ground, using less irrigation and saving on fuel. A lot of the changes that are really going to be necessary to make can economically benefit the farmers.”
“We are working on a model that estimates the amount of nitrogen that the cover crop releases, but also how much cover crop biomass, which is equivalent to how much carbon is left in the soil,” he said.
Pam Knox, an agricultural climatologist in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences who produces UGA’s daily climate blog, is encouraged by the “huge initiative” in Extension to talk about the impacts of climate change, including the National Extension Climate Initiative and a focus on climate mitigation and resiliency through the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
— Maria M. Lameiras
Drummond is gathering the baseline data for 2020 emissions and developing the methodology for year-by-year emissions tracking, while Mullen focuses on the state’s composting capacity, one of the solutions put forward in phase one. On campus, Mullen and his team are completing a cost-comparison analysis for the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel, contrasting current costs for petroleum-based food service items with the cost of switching to compostable products. Statewide, the team is mapping compost facilities and wastewater treatment facilities to determine waste stream content and volume.
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Encouraging institutional change The team is also performing lifecycle analysis comparing the carbon emissions for current non-compostable food waste streams to potential compostable food waste streams, including all factors from packaging to transportation and other costs. Funding for the project has been provided by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation.
Jeff Mullen, (pictured at left) an environmental economist in the CAES Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, is working with William Drummond, associate director of the Georgia Tech Center for Geographic Information Systems, to analyze data on emissions and food waste for Georgia’s food and agriculture sector.
Crunchingsite.extension.uga.edu/climate.thenumbers
Agricultural climatologist Pam Knox monitors the effects of climate change on agriculture throughout the U.S. in a daily climate blog at
“We know forages are great for carbon sequestration, but now we want to draw that picture more clearly.”
Tucker, an associate professor in the Department of Animal and Dairy Science in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, is working on grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) Alfalfa and Forage Research Program to develop best management practices to restore grasslands and sustainably increase alfalfa production in the Southeast.
“We know forages are great for carbon sequestration, but now we want to draw that picture more clearly. Especially with the carbon emission discussions that are going on and the carbon credits movement, we don’t have any way to actually quantify a lot of this information,” she added. “Animal livestock forage areas are where you’re seeing your greatest carbon effects in the ground — because they’re not reserving those areas just for crops. They’re utilizing that animal for the benefit of the system. The industry is very interested in seeing the results of this.”
Forages as a carbon sink The new focus on carbon capture and the environment is bringing validation to age-old agricultural practices, including the incorporation of livestock into growing systems to improve soil fertility and productivity.
“Livestock systems are contributing to carbon sequestration, probably as much as if not more than the concern with greenhouse gas emissions. Much of it is looked at from a negative perspective, but there are things being done within the animal production industry that are offsetting a lot of these concerns that have been advertised as harmful to the environment,” Tucker said.
Alfalfa in the Deep South Alfalfa is the third-highest crop in economic return in the United States, and it once was a dominant forage in Georgia. However, difficulty growing the highly desirable forage crop in Georgia’s challenging climate combined with cheap nitrogen prices led to a decline in alfalfa production in the state after its peak in the 1960s. In recent years, Tucker’s program has been awarded multiple USDA-NIFA Alfalfa Forage and Research Program grants focused on increased use of alfalfa in the South. The latest awards support a five-year project to measure how much carbon is being sequestered in these alfalfa systems and how it influences nutrient cycling in the soil and in the animals grazing on it.
“There are many positive benefits for increased alfalfa production, and they’re all very much linked to improved land and animal performance and sustainability of grazing systems,” said Tucker, who runs the Better Grazing Program on the UGA Tifton campus. Using alfalfa varieties bred for resistance to disease, drought and pests, UGA Tifton has established alfalfabermudagrass study fields to determine how the mixed forage influences animal performance, stand performance and soil quality depending on harvesting methods.
University of Georgia grazing specialist Jennifer Tucker is doing her part to restore alfalfa production to the state for the benefit of producers and the land.
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Photo by Katie Walker preserve grasslands
in grazesGood
Jennifer Tucker believed grasslands could be restored with alfalfa. So she did it. by maria M. lameiras
A self-proclaimed “forage fanatic,” Jennifer Tucker stands in a test field of alfalfa on the UGA Tifton campus. Many farmers doubted alfalfa could flourish in south Georgia.
Innovation in postharvest technology Advances in food packaging, handling and tracking technologies — such as special plastic films that slow down produce respiration rates, affordable cooling technologies and quality control technologies — show promise in reducing food loss.
“There’s only so much this Earth can produce. That’s where we come in. We can help alleviate the food insecurity issues on the other end without putting more pressure on our environmental systems,” said Deltsidis.
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“The quality of every fruit and vegetable is best right at harvest and then it goes down. You cannot make a bad apple a good apple, but we can at least do things to slow down the decline of quality over time,” he said.
Besides the obvious issues of food scarcity and food insecurity, food waste also has an environmental impact through greenhouse gas emissions.
The most important factor in maintaining the quality of harvested produce is temperature. “We have technologies such as controlled and modified atmosphere, where you take out the oxygen and increase the CO2 of the storage environment. By slowing down the metabolic processes of the plant, produce can last longer,” he said. “When you combine this with low temperature storage and appropriate packaging, you have a lower percentage of losses.”
by maria M. lameiras • Photo by Katie Walker UGA researchers innovate methods to fight food waste from farm to table preserve quality
Angelos Deltsidis, assistant professor in postharvest physiology in the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, investigates how preharvest factors and postharvest treatments affect the quality of fresh produce. He hopes to use this information to develop methods of preserving produce quality as it travels from the field to the kitchen.
Assistant Professor Angelos Deltsidis moves onions into a toaddsremoveschamber,atmospherecontrolledcoldwhichoxygenandcarbondioxideextendshelf-life.
“There’s education to do at each level, but it seems like better knowledge at the consumer level could have a lot of impact on all the other ones,” Deltsidis said.
Using public education to reduce carbon emissions
“If our global food waste was a country, it would be the third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, right after China and the United States, which is crazy,” Deltsidis said. By making small changes in how we choose, purchase and consume food, each person can make a difference.
Stayin’Fresh
“The quality of produce deteriorates from the moment of harvest all the way to the time you eat it in your home,” said Deltsidis, pointing out that consumers in developed countries waste almost as much food per year — 222 million tons — as the entire net food production of subSaharan Africa (230 million tons).
A gricultural producers around the world are constantly faced with the risk of losing their crops to disease, weather and pests, but even more losses occur after crops are harvested.
Nearly a third of all the food produced worldwide — approximately 1.3 billion tons — is lost to food waste each year.
The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is among the most venerable colleges of agriculture in the country, providing leading-edge science education and research opportunities to students on three campuses. With initiatives around the globe, our groundbreaking research and Extension efforts make a meaningful difference everywhere CAES has a presence. From the clothes we wear, to the food we eat, to the water we drink, CAES is doing the work that is needed now to create a more sustainable future for generations to come. caes.uga.edu
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