New program upholds Ag sustainability
A program at USU is impacting not just students, but the whole western U.S., said Phil Rasmussen, program director of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and Plants, Soils and Climate professor.
Rasmussen said the SARE program, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and hosted by Utah State, is dedicated to developing better means of sustaining agriculture for today’s agricultural industry, but that’s not all.
It is also a way for students to gain real world experience in the ag business, take advantage of networking opportunities, and be exposed to some of the leading scientists in the field, he said.
Chod Stephens, a graduate student and SARE program participant, said, “It’s been a great resource for information. More than that, it’s been a great way to network with people who are leading the nation in sustainability.”
Stephens said Karl Kupers, a professor at Washington State University (WSU) and one of the field’s “greatest proponents,” is the most influential person he has met through SARE. He said he has been able to speak with Kupers at length and even share some of his ideas with him.
Stephens said he would not have met Kupers if it wasn’t for SARE,
because he is too notable a figure to be reached without some sort of
established connection.
Rasmussen said that Utah State was selected to be the program’s host university in the West because it “had the benefit of being involved in other committees for the future of agriculture.”
“That, and they felt we’d be fair,” he said.
Serving as the program’s host university “helps a relatively small university like Utah State get national attention,” Rasmussen said.
In fact, this year alone Utah State was granted $4.2 million to redistribute to farmers, ranchers, researchers, and extension educators throughout the West. Since Utah State was designated the SARE host university in 1994, USU has received over $55 million from the federal government to be redistributed in the same way.
“That is a huge number of contracts and grants to keep track of,” Rasmussen said, “so, we provide employment for several full-time staff members who monitor these federal funds and the way that they are spent.”
Rasmussen said students at USU benefit from the fact that it hosts the region’s SARE program.
“Clearly, the continued flow of nationally-known scientists, experts in sustainable agriculture, flowing through our Utah State office has been a positive experience
for students,” he said.
He also said students in general, not just those involved in SARE, can take advantage of seminars given on campus through the program.
“We have sustainable agriculture workers from across the region who will be visiting our offices. These include Dr. Jerry DeWitt, former director of the
Leopold Center for Sustainability at Iowa State University, Dr. Brian March, director of the University of California Shafter Research
Center and Dr. Dan Long, director of the ARS Dryland Research Team at Pendleton Oregon,” he said.
The program has also had a large impact on the western region of the United States as well. Presiding over 13 states, as well as the American protectorate islands of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Micronesia and American Samoa, the western SARE office has funded over 1,400 competitive research and extension grants since its creation, Rasmussen said.
In a survey recently conducted by WSU’s Center for Economics and Social Sciences, a reported 79 percent of producers say they improved their soil quality through SARE projects. Seventy-five percent say that SARE-funded educators led programs to share innovations in their areas. Sixty-four percent say that SARE projects helped them achieve higher sales, and 53 percent of producers began using a new production technique after reading a SARE publication.
Rasmussen said: “Our projects include everything from farmer-raised clams in Guam to reindeer raised for meat in Alaska to all the vegetables between artichokes to zucchini … The value of the agricultural products in the Western region would be equivalent to the third nation in the world, as far as agricultural production. All of these have ongoing research into growing them more sustainably.”
– robmjepson@gmail.com