Guest Column: Feeling the Power of the Land Grant Mission

It was supposed to be a stakeholder meeting at the UF/IFAS Tropical Research and Education Center (TREC). It turned out to be more like an FNGLA Miami-Dade Chapter gathering.

Green industry leaders have played a key role in bringing UF Interim President Don Landry up to speed on Florida agriculture and UF/IFAS’s role in supporting it.

Any time we can get with President Landry is valuable time. So when he agreed to spend a few hours with UF/IFAS while he was in the Miami area in early March, we bolted for TREC.

There he experienced a great deal. It kicked off with a presentation from TREC Director Gilly Evans that included the economic impact of the nursery business in Miami-Dade County and the enormously diverse selection of ornamentals grown there.

He met with faculty, and his background as a physician and scientist led to a robust conversation with our researchers in which Landry and a faculty member swapped phrases like “post-transcriptional gene silencing” and “somatic instability.” Landry saw the UF First Flush Trial Garden, a public garden offering firsthand data on new plant varieties to Florida's nursery stakeholders and home gardeners.

Then, we brought him into a roundtable discussion with the TREC Advisory Board. Of the 15 or so members present, seemingly all but two or three had an FNGLA affiliation. The group included your 2025-26 President, Marcella Lucio-Chinchilla; and your Secretary-Treasurer, Jeff DeMott. Then there were members and industry stalwarts such as Bill Brendle, Kim Hosang, Mike Merida, Barney Rutzke, Mary and Al Schneider, and Erik Tietig. And Miami-Dade Chapter Past President Jorge Abreu from FDACS helped coordinate the stakeholder session, along with TREC Advisory Chair Lydia Borgatta.

Member after member testified that UF/IFAS consistently solved problems for the industry. They talked excitedly about the potential for Breeding Insight, the program USDA recently transferred from Cornell to UF, to accelerate breeding solutions for the green industry. They even made an argument that excellence in agriculture should be considered a category of merit in increasingly competitive UF admissions.

I consider this visit to be a huge success. I did much of the talking to President Landry on the way down about what he was about to see. He talked most of the way back about what he had seen and the ideas he’d been exposed to.

And he got a demonstration of how connected we are to stakeholders, growers, and alumni (several of the FNGLAers boasted of having a UF degree; one proudly identified himself as a double Gator; yet others apologized for having received their education elsewhere!).

President Landry already speaks with near fluency about the land-grant mission. With the help of FNGLA, we gave him an afternoon in which he could see, taste (finger limes, mango juice) and smell (herbs in Dr. Xiaoying Li’s Food is Medicine garden) that mission.

But the capper was the FNGLA/stakeholder meeting. I believe it was there that he could feel the power of the land-grant mission.

My thanks to such great industry partners. The president was the prompt. But it is gratifying to hear the testimony of our impact under any circumstances. It inspires us to continue serving you.

 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).