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Initiatives

We’re taking the initiative to turn priorities into action — and challenges into opportunities.

Our Ideas Work

Setting priorities is easy. Living them takes focus. It takes effort. It takes initiative.

At the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, we’re taking the initiative to turn global challenges into opportunities: opportunities to feed the world, to build new economic sectors for North Carolina and to shape a new generation of agriculture and life sciences leaders.

Through initiatives that give life to our values, we’re bringing researchers, agriculture leaders and citizens together, giving them the resources they need and sharing their results.

Our Access Initiative helps N.C. students find paths to CALS.

44% of all applicants were accepted to NC State in 2016
40% were from rural North Carolina.

Maximizing Human Potential

Many hands hold the future of agriculture. Revolutionary ideas may begin with our faculty and students, but they can only have an impact if they reach the farmers, industry partners, policymakers, and untold others who have a stake in agriculture and life sciences.

Growing Economies

In agriculture, North Carolina does it all: We farm the full array of field crops. We labor over livestock of every variety. We work in a wide range of climates.

There’s no other region in the world that has the assets, the agricultural diversity, and the world-renowned experts to drive discovery and delivery of new solutions for plant- and animal-based agriculture and in food science and manufacturing.

Our Goal: Expand the impact of agriculture and agribusiness in North Carolina by 22 percent between now and 2025.

Bringing Bright Minds Together

Collaborative Systems Initiative

We are bulldozing academic boundaries to take on the grand challenges of agriculture. By re-aligning 20-plus centers and departments into four collaborative research and education systems, we are freeing our faculty experts to work more closely together and find powerful solutions to pressing problems.

Five NC State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences researchers examine a small dogwood plant in a pot in a laboratory setting.