What’s Ahead for the N.C. PSI in 2025

As the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative enters its fourth year in the Plant Sciences Building, Executive Director Adrian Percy sees it growing beyond its startup phase into a stage of steady and continuous improvement that benefits farmers, consumers and the environment.

In a recent interview, Percy shared his thoughts on what’s ahead for the initiative in 2025.

In coming weeks you’ll be reviewing progress toward 2023-25 goals and developing a new PSI strategic plan with the N.C. PSI leadership team. What are your top-of-mind priorities right now?

People may be surprised that we’re even thinking about a new strategic plan. The North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative is only three years old, if you consider us to have started roughly when we moved into the building. When we created the initial strategic plan we thought of the initiative as a startup, and with any startup you will see things as you move along that you’ve not anticipated. So we left ourselves a lot of flexibility.

Now that we’re three years in and have established many elements of what the Plant Sciences Initiative is all about, we want to set the priorities for the next few years as we move from startup stage into a more stable environment.

In terms of priorities for the coming year, first and foremost, we are an interdisciplinary research hub, and we have to make sure we continue to support our faculty — to help them come together around large challenges in agriculture and address those challenges through interdisciplinary science. That’s the first priority of the initiative, and it will always be that.

Beyond that, we want to continue our role in helping students become workforce ready. We want to continue to expose young people to the possibilities of plant sciences, bringing them into the building, letting them interact with our faculty and letting them do some basic science experiments to give them a picture of what agriculture really is all about in today’s modern environment.

We also want to make sure that we are working to meet the needs of those we are here to serve. And that’s something that we really focused on in 2024, but we want to take that forward to 2025. We do that by listening, by understanding what the needs of those people are — whether they’re growers or other folks across the agrifood chain — and then trying to help our faculty address those needs through science and, at the same time, develop students prepared to address them.

When you consider the breadth of N.C. PSI research, is there anything that particularly excites you?

Our researchers certainly have a lot going on. Some of it is nowhere near completion, but some will have an impact on the farm in 2025. In 2024, we had several teams that came together around the topic of automation during harvest in agriculture, and we’ve managed to provide seed funding to a team that’s working on apples and apple production. And there are other teams working on strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes and sweetpotatoes that we’d like to help move forward.

In terms of things which are hitting the ground, we released a decision support tool called BeanPACK, which is going to help soybean growers plant and manage their crop more efficiently. We’re also working on a tool to speed up the process of identifying nematodes, which will allow growers to address that issue quicker.
Another thing that has been exciting has been connecting with the agricultural research stations across the state. We have been working on a drone software package, which basically will allow researchers, particularly those involved in plant breeding, to use drone visualization for improved variety selection.

How will the PSI be bringing these and other new technologies to growers in 2025?

We are fortunate to have a robust Cooperative Extension system in North Carolina, and we have a network of Extension agents who play an important role in getting technology out to the field. The network has been expanded over the past couple of years, and we hope to expand even more in 2025 by training and collaborating with more Extension agents.

But these agents do more than introduce growers to the new technology. Throughout the development process, they are actively engaged in collecting data and providing feedback to ensure that the end user can readily adopt the technology to meet high priority needs.

Will there be anything new with the N.C. PSI’s education and workforce development programs?

One of the original and continuing goals of the PSI is to work very closely with industry and to help nurture and develop our students to be work ready. And so internships and externships with industry companies are super important.

We are very lucky to be on the edge of Research Triangle Park, which has over 200 agricultural research companies now. We want to partner with them not just in research but also in developing students who will excel in the workforce.

We’ve also started some student competitions due to some generous support from various donors. These competitions have allowed us to challenge students to think of commercial ideas and entrepreneurial ideas that they want to take forward to the market. We are providing them with some funding for them to take those ideas forward, but even more important than that is the mentorship they will receive from our commercialization advisory council.

Is there anything else on the horizon for the PSI’s commercialization and entrepreneurship programs?

2024 was the kickoff of our Seed2Grow startup company program, and we’re really encouraged by the progress we’ve made. We now have several startup companies that are resident in the Plant Sciences Building that are really making strides forward toward additional investment and who are hiring employees as they commercialize agricultural technology.

For instance, Hoofprint Biome is working on a solution to the important climate change challenge related to methane, and it now has 14 employees. That’s great because it’s economic development for the state and it’s training.

Again, being on the doorstep of RTP, we have so many people who are willing to donate their time and energy, who have extensive experience in agricultural research and in commercialization of agricultural technology, and who are giving their time up and supporting this whole effort.

In addition, we have now 11 companies that are members of our Innovation Hub, and we hope to build on that and to create a rich environment where industry and academics can work together here in the building.

You mentioned 2024’s efforts to actively engage and listen to those who could benefit from PSI research. How will their feedback affect what the PSI does in 2025?

What we heard from the 30 or so commodity groups that we assembled for a productive brainstorming session was that there were important issues that growers face that we could potentially help with. The biggest one that we heard repeatedly across virtually every crop in North Carolina is labor issues. And given that we have a collection of scientists working on robotics and data science and automation, we can address some of the labor issues that producers are facing.

There are other areas we are addressing as well, in terms of issues with specific crops and with issues that cut across crops. We have now got active research projects trying to help.

Responding to and even anticipating needs of those we serve has been integral to the PSI from the start, and that will continue to be true in 2025 and beyond.