While attending the APRES 56th Annual Meeting in Oklahoma City, Farm Director KC Sheperd had the chance to visit with the Dean of the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources at OSU, Dr. Jayson Lusk, about updates on the OSU Campus. (Editor’s Note- What the heck is an APRES? It’s the American Peanut Research and Education Society. Click here for their website)
He said that the biggest news is that Ag Hall is gearing up to move into a new building at the end of this month. “We are really excited about that happening. We’ll start with our student-facing offices, then hopefully knock it out in the following two or three weeks. We will have a Grand Opening in October, so those who are on campus for the West Virginia football game, need to stop by the new Ag Hall and have some ice cream and look around.”
As far as other Campus improvements go, one major priority is focusing on the Agronomy Research Station to support OSU’s wheat breeding program and other agronomic research efforts.
He said, “We are in discussions with architects and construction folks to plan that facility and are hoping to be able to break ground this spring. As a team, we have gone out and visited other wheat breeding and greenhouse facilities to make sure we are on the forefront and state-of-the art so that we can really make those investments payoff for the farmers of Oklahoma.”
About the recently announced retirement plans of OSU’s Extension Grain Market Economist Dr. Kim Anderson, Lusk said, “I was on faculty with Dr. Anderson for a dozen years, and he has such a positive attitude and really cares about the students and the farmers.”
A unique habit of Dr. Anderson’s that Lusk commented on was that Anderson is one of the only professors Lusk knows who, twice in his career, took sabbaticals to work in an industry so he could learn more about it. On one such occasion, he was due to teach a sales class, so he took a semester off to work as a salesman at a John Deere dealership in Stillwater.
“That really tells you the sort of person he is,” Lusk said. “He wants to be an expert. He cares about the information that he’s delivering. He is unreplaceable, but we will backfill some of his capacity and bring some new folks in so we can make sure that we are providing market outlook information and good sales teaching to the next generation of students.”
