Department Head Dr. Linda Prokopy has been busy this month!
June 1-3, she and other HLA faculty, staff and graduate students (Camila Ulloa Gómez, Steve Hallett, Liz Maynard, Michael O’Donnell, Katherine Pivaral, Aaron Thompson, Ariana Torres, Emily Usher) traveled to Davenport, Iowa for the annual meeting of the Diverse Corn Belt project. Members of this $10 million USDA-NIFA funded project will be busy this summer conducting focus groups with farmers, planning field work, developing learning modules, and designing surveys. You can learn more at: diversecornbelt.org.
On June 8, she traveled down to the SW Purdue Ag Center and visited with Dr. Wenjing Guan.
Last week she traveled to San Luis Obispo, California as a participant in the Food Systems Leadership Institute. While there, she got to tour produce farms in the Salinas Valley and wineries closer to San Luis Obispo (it’s a hard life!). Seeing the massive scale of California production underscores the challenges of specialty crop production in the Midwest. But learning about all the challenges facing California, not least of which is a shortage of fresh water, she is more committed than ever to supporting horticultural producers here in Indiana.
