Eyes on the Ball

Twelve years ago, Steve Lommel planted an idea that yielded the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative. Though he will step away from a 37-year career at NC State University on Nov. 1, he remains committed to the initiative’s promise of bold agricultural innovation.

Lommel will complete his service as the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ associate dean for research, but he’s agreed to serve on the N.C. PSI’s external advisory board.

As N.C. PSI Executive Director Adrian Percy notes, “Steve has not only been an incredible supporter from the start but also a chief architect of the initiative. As a member of the advisory board, he’ll continue to challenge us and ensure that we stay true to the original mission and intent.

“His incredible knowledge of not only CALS but the entire university will help us navigate the complexities of successfully functioning as an interdisciplinary unit on campus.” 

 Lommel views the role as a chance to stay intellectually stimulated.

“I’m passionate about it,” he says. “I’m ready to retire, but I love NC State, and I’m a little afraid of going from 10 to zero. I don’t want to completely walk away.”
 

The Hallmark of a Long, Successful Career

Through the advisory board, Lommel will retain his association with what he considers the crowning achievement of a career marked by scientific firsts and visionary leadership.

As a plant virologist, Lommel shed significant light on the molecular-level machinations that take place when viruses infect plants and the role that RNA interactions can play in turning genes on and off. 

He also co-founded a company that pioneered ways to use plant RNA viruses to deliver cancer-fighting particles into human cells and took on key administrative roles at the college and university levels.

The idea was to build a building … to assemble the best people anywhere to target agricultural problems at the convergence of engineering and biology and science and big data analytics.

Just four years after joining NC State’s plant pathology faculty in 1988, Lommel was tapped as assistant director of the N.C. Agricultural Research Service in CALS. In 2001, he stepped up to university administration, serving as assistant vice chancellor for research, then associate vice chancellor, before returning to CALS in 2013.

Along the way, Lommel built a reputation as a national leader among leaders of university agricultural research. Most notably, he served as AgInnovation chair for the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.

At NC State, the Plant Sciences Building and the N.C. PSI serve as lasting reminders of Lommel’s influence. As a candidate for the associate dean position, he pushed the idea of creating a campus building to serve as a hub for interdisciplinary plant sciences discovery.

“The idea was to build a building that would serve as a crucible or a mosh pit — whatever you want to call it — to assemble the best people anywhere to target agricultural problems at the convergence of engineering and biology and science and big data analytics,” Lommel recalls. “We had all the pieces, but we weren’t putting together the right combinations. We were in traditional silos of departments and colleges.”

For this to be successful in North Carolina, we had to make it very delivery-oriented and raise the boat of all people in the food and agriculture industry.

Lommel’s ideas were shared and championed by then-CALS Dean Richard Linton, and the two worked tirelessly to build buy-in from the agricultural community, private donors and the state legislature.

“Rich deserves the lion’s share of credit, because he rallied the people to go after the money to make it happen,” Lommel says. “But I feel good that I helped build a vision of interdisciplinarity to solve agricultural problems and developed it in a way that works at NC State.”

While other universities were building interdisciplinary plant sciences programs around what Lommel calls “very high, hypothesis-driven science,” NC State’s would focus on problem-solving and delivering solutions to North Carolina.

“Those of us in college administration and our key advisers realized that for this to be successful in North Carolina, we had to make it very delivery-oriented and raise the boat of all people in the food and agriculture industry,” Lommel recalls.

‘Beyond My Expectations’

Refined with ideas and financial support from the agricultural community and the state legislature, the N.C. PSI took on a tangible form in 2021-22. That’s when the first platform leaders were named, Percy took the helm and the 185,000-square-foot state-of-the-art Plant Sciences Building opened on Centennial Campus.

Today, the building is a beehive of cross-disciplinary pollination, drawing collaborators from other universities, private companies and government agencies from around the world.

Lommel calls the building “hyper successful.” ”It is hitting on all cylinders, with events taking place every day and sometimes in the evenings.”

I think the state is going to see a lot of economic development (from) intellectual property that comes out of the PSI and the jobs and startups that stay in the area.

He also sees the N.C. PSI’s efforts to spark entrepreneurship in agricultural technology as a bright spot. Percy “was the right person to bring in, given his corporate background in entrepreneurial acquisition,” Lommel says.

“It’ll take time to accurately judge success in filling the pipeline,” he adds. “But at the end of the day, I think the state is going to see a lot of economic development (from) intellectual property that comes out of the PSI and the jobs and startups that stay in the area.”

Lommel is similarly pleased — “beyond tickled” is how he puts it — with how the N.C. PSI has gotten researchers without agricultural backgrounds out of their labs and onto farms and into related businesses throughout the state.

“I think these extension and engagement activities have really energized and activated engineers to work on our problems,” he says. “I want to see that continue to grow.”

Going forward, Lommel says he wants to see “more deliverables” like BeanPACK, a free, online tool to optimize farm management practices. Drawing upon thousands of data points gathered from more than five years of research, BeanPACK helps farmers make site-specific decisions about planting dates and maturity groups.

He also hopes for faster plant variety development, more startup companies spinning out of N.C. PSI research and deeper, side-by-side industry, government and university collaboration.

“We have the best company engagement of any land-grant university in the country, and I am impressed by how the companies have been contributing and having a presence,” he says. “Researchers from industry and government agencies can bring different kinds of resources, different missions and different talent,” he says. “The more diversity of thought that you have, the better the results are going to be.”

Toward a Promising Agricultural Future

When it comes to achieving transformative agricultural change, Lommel sees such partnerships, along with interdisciplinarity, as key.

He’s especially optimistic about integrating discoveries from multiple fields — from genetics and soil science to data analytics, quantum computing and engineering — to create what he calls “customizable farms.”

On such farms, producers would change up their management practices, depending on what’s needed for a particular location.

“Land that’s marginal — it might only be a quarter acre in a 40-acre field — could be managed in ways that optimize production,” he explains. “The equipment can become much smaller, and it can become robotic. You don’t need to have these straight rows that are a mile-long and the equipment that demands.”

It’s a moonshot, but all the science and technologies are there. It’s just a matter of integrating them.

At the same time, farmers could use custom genetics to suit variations in soil types, microbes and other conditions that occur across their fields.

“Instead of having one variety or genotype applied across a field, you can use different ones in different parts of the field to maximize yield,” he adds.

The concept may sound futuristic, but Lommel thinks it’s achievable now.

“It’s a moonshot, but all the science and technologies are there. It’s just a matter of integrating them.”

The world, he adds, is being changed by bold, big discoveries, and they’re needed in agriculture, too. “We need to continue to push additional new collaborations and new concepts and new ideas revolving around agriculture and plant sciences under the management scheme of the PSI.

“I don’t think we want to take our eye off the ball of what our promise was to the state — and that is to improve agriculture and the agricultural community in North Carolina.”

This post was originally published in Plant Sciences Initiative.