- Author: Wendy Powers
I've seen rain! In fact, I saw a horrendous downpour. I flew to Nebraska Monday morning to participate in the Multistate S1032 project. While I have been a member of this group my entire academic career, I now have the pleasure of serving as a co-administrative adviser with Ron Lacewell from Texas A&M University. We started the meeting with a tour of the University of Nebraska Agriculture Research and Development Center in Ithaca, NE. This is comparable to a UC ANR REC. Galen Erickson a professor in Animal Science and someone I've known since he was a graduate student at UNL, met with us and talked about the environmental management work underway at the feedlot as well as some of the methane emissions research they are conducting using the LI-COR instrument. Bryan Woodbury from the Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, NE talked about the manure storage seepage work he is doing under a Phase I SBIR grant. It was nice to spend some time immersed in my technical area – manure, that is.
Today my graduate student presented her M.S. thesis work to the group. Brooke's project was directly tied to the causal loop diagram that is the foundation of the S1032 project. She met with the group in 2015 and talked about her thesis plans so it was nice to see it come full circle with the presentation of her findings. Equally nice was the interest in her work and building off her model to answer more questions and expand the coding of the causal loop diagram. Brooke had to leave the meeting early to fly to an interview but I bet she was more confident about her interview seminar having just made a strong presentation to the S1032 membership and observing the interest in her work – always a good motivator.
Tomorrow the meeting wraps up with plans to rewrite a new 5-year project. From Nebraska I'm heading to Michigan for the long weekend and will actually meet back up with Brooke Wednesday night in Minneapolis for the flight to Lansing – pure coincidence. On Friday I'm having lunch with what remains of my lab group and we will all get to hear how Brooke's interview went and what plans the others might have in store. Between now and then I need to get started reviewing merit and promotion packages as well as catching up on ‘to-do' list items. Full engagement in the S1032 meetings has set me back a bit but it's been well worth it; downpour and all. I'm grateful my position allows me an opportunity to stay engaged with this project, even if my role is quite different from what it has been.