Charting a Future: Interdisciplinary Research Across N.C. Commodities
A daylong workshop on June 17, 2024, brought leaders from over 25 of the state’s agricultural and commodity groups together to share insights into the biggest challenges affecting producers and to identify priority areas for future North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative research. The event marked the first step in a process aimed at kickstarting a new round of research projects to solve problems that resonate across multiple commodities.
Setting the Stage: The Interdisciplinary Research Process
Stakeholders are the common denominator when it comes to the diverse interdisciplinary research taking place under the N.C. PSI umbrella.
To set the stage for the workshop, Director of Strategic Engagement Celeste Brogdon presenting this video explaining the N.C. PSI’s approach to interdisciplinary research.
Stakeholders Share Big Issues
Workshop participants represented the broad range of North Carolina’s crop and livestock industries — from soybean and sweetpotato farmers to pork and cattle producers to those involved in beekeeping and Christmas tree production. Leaders from the Golden LEAF Foundation, the North Carolina Farm Bureau and the North Carolina Grange also attended.
Before the event, participants were invited to identify top challenges facing the growers they represented. The words that appear largest in the word cloud are the ones that showed upmost frequently in participants’ responses.
Finding Common Ground
N.C. Chamber General Counsel and Legal Institute President Ray Starling facilitated the workshop. Starling is also an experienced facilitator and executive advisor for Aimpoint Research. Starling led participants in finding common ground.
Participants broke into small groups to reflect on growers’ challenges and discuss top ideas for N.C. PSI research to address them. Then they switched groups to poke, prod and refine ideas generated in the first round of discussion. In a third round, group representatives presented the refined ideas to a panel with N.C. PSI Executive Director Adrian Percy, Director of the U.S. Soybean Research Collaborative Katherine Drake Stowe and N.C. Farm Bureau President Shawn Harding.
Throughout the discussions, freelance graphic artist Rio Holaday sketched out the shared ideas and identified connections among them.
From Ideas to Action
Behind the scenes, moderators with the N.C. PSI assembled a list of seven ideas that could be good candidates for future research:
Participants then voted on the ideas, with early detection of pests and pathogens, automation for labor efficiency and production for human and animal health/differentiated value emerging as top vote-getters. University faculty members, industry partners and other stakeholders who participate in a September Connecting2Grow workshop will begin forming research teams to deliver solutions.
Today is about a dialogue, but that engagement doesn’t have to stop today.
Dean Garey Fox
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences North Carolina State University
Acknowledgments
N.C. PSI Platform Director for Extension Outreach and Engagement Rachel Vann organized the event with the support of Interdisciplinary Project Launch Director Lauren Maynard and Celeste Brogdon.
