Present title position: Professor in Agronomy

Role in Agron 114: Faculty Instructor

Hometown/State: Corning, Iowa

How did you become interested in Ag? I grew up on a crop-livestock farm north of Corning and my ancestral family members were farmers. I love the outdoors, growing plants and animals, the freedom to create and innovate, and to be your own boss. Raising food and protecting the natural resources that produce food are humanitarian activities. Thus, I always wanted to be in agriculture either as a farmer or someone directly involved in agriculture.

Your prior work experience: I worked on the family farm until age 21, then I entered graduate school. During my college years, I have worked as a janitor, dishwasher, painter, handyman, greenhouse worker and graduate teaching assistant.

Hobbies/Interest: All indoor and outdoor sports. Camping, fishing, hunting. Enjoy construction with wood. Poetry and music.

What do you think are some of the challenges in the future of agriculture? Creating and maintaining opportunities for individual entrepreneurship in agriculture production. One of the many strengths of American and Iowa farming has been the high level of individual entrepreneurship of farming operations. It has created many job and business opportunities for rural America and fostered a lot of fair trade competition and innovation in our agricultural activities. As farming operations consolidate into large holdings, we get closer to the historical situation that stimulated European migration to America: a few percent who own production and all the rest who economically are prevented from advancing from laborer to entrepreneur. I think our farm programs and social, political and economic thinking should be focused on maintaining more, but smaller farming entrepreneurships and maintaining the natural resources and sustainability of our agricultural production systems.

Why did you choose to be a part of the Agron 114 instructional staff? I like the subject matter of the course. The principles and information taught in the course provides a solid foundation to understand the management and problems facing sustainable agriculture activities throughout the world. I like undergraduate students in general and especially the freshman students taking the course. The course also allows us to develop new technologies to help students learn. Some ideas work well for students, others don't but it is very satisfying to me to search and implement ideas to improve student learning. I have been involved with this course for over 20 years. Some of my colleagues wonder how anyone can survive teaching the same course for this long. The fact is, this course has completely changed at least 3 times during the last 20 years because we are always innovating new ways to make the course better. The scale of these changes often take 5-7 years to make. We have completed a new level of computer integrated multimedia learning programs for students. I think the next big change will be integrating virtual reality learning tools for students; however, to do this in 10 years, we need to start working on it now. For me, teaching and helping students learn give me a sense of purpose and opportunity to contribute to society during a lifetime.