Guest Column: How Can UF/IFAS Help Your Business?

Carlos Messina, Ph.D. (left), J. Scott Angle, Ph.D. (middle), and Christopher Gunter, Ph.D. (right) attend a ribbon cutting for an AI Lab. | Image Courtesy of UF/IFAS

How has UF/IFAS helped your business? I’m eager to hear it and hope you’ll let me know. But for the next three months I’m even more eager for you to tell your state representatives.

The Legislature starts its session next month, and it will be voting on funding for UF/IFAS science. I have been meeting with legislators for months already to get them to yes on these votes.

A constituent (you) can often get greater traction than a university administrator can. I hope I can count on you to help us help you.

Our legislative budget requests can help the green industry in numerous ways:

• Crop Transformation Center, $5 million: Invest in using biotech tools to rapidly develop new cultivars. While the center’s early work focuses on citrus, we will expand to many more crops. The CTC’s recent hire of ornamental plant breeder Alfred Huo from our Mid-Florida Research and Education Center adds massive expertise in breeding for green industry needs.
• Artificial intelligence, $4.5 million: Fund faculty, staff, and administrative positions for the UF/IFAS Center for Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture focused on design, construction, evaluation and demonstration of AI-based technologies.
• Workload, $6.5 million: Industry needs are increasing and more complex, so we need to invest more in the research and Extension personnel to meet those needs.
• Extension expansion, $5 million: For state or regional Extension agents devoted to profitability, workforce development and environmental resilience.
• Equipment modernization, $8 million: Advanced irrigation, potting equipment and more technology will keep the science you rely on up to date.
• Nutrient management, $6 million: Although not focused on ornamentals, we need to finish food crop projects and then keep extending the work so we can update fertilizer rate recommendations for ornamentals, some of which are decades old.

Plants and politics are in season year-round, and not just in Tallahassee. The state is a checkerboard of regulations on irrigation, fertilization and land use made by local officials.

We believe at UF/IFAS that these regulations should be evidence-based and rely on solid science. Just like there’s always a new challenge for science to solve in the greenhouse, so is there an endless array of public policy questions whose answers can be informed by science.

We need to marshal ever greater scientific forces to keep up with these challenges and questions. That’s why we’re seeking more funding and hope you’ll support us.

Please email me about how science helps your business – and while you’re at it, please email your elected officials, too.

J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).