Small Grains Molecular Geneticist and Department Head Dr. Gary Muehlbauer
Good day and welcome to the University of Minnesota CropCast. I'm your host Dave Nicolai, University Minnesota Extension Educator in field crops. I'm here along with our co host Doctor. Seth Nave. Seth is Extension Soybean Specialist with the University of Minnesota and we're really privileged Seth to have a really distinguished guest in our podcast booth today and that's Doctor.
Speaker 1:Gary Mollbauer. Gary is department head of the Agronomy and Plant Genetics here at University of Minnesota and welcome Gary.
Speaker 2:Thanks Dave, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1:So let's start out a little bit with your own background in terms of where you grew up and those common questions, where you went to school and how in the world did you end up here at the University of Minnesota. So let's let's start back at the beginning. I believe it's out in the state of Washington.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I grew up in Pullman, Washington and so I was kind of introduced to plant sciences and agronomy, through my dad who was a, USDA ARS, chickpea, lentil, and dry pea breeder for the USDA located in Pullman, Washington on the Washington State campus. And so I went to, Washington State, for my bachelor's degree, and I got my bachelor's degree in biology with an emphasis in genetics. And during that time, I worked on a barley breeding project, and so I got to know understand how how breeding programs worked, and I also worked in a molecular genetics project. And this is at the very early days of molecular genetics in plants, and so this is in the mid early to mid nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2:After I finished my bachelor's degree, I went to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and worked on a master's degree in plant breeding. And I worked primarily on soybean genetics, and it was at the very beginning of developing molecular genetic maps for soybean.
Speaker 1:So those yeah. It's quite like all in the family so to speak in terms of your in terms of your background but a lot of different places and a lot of different schools and so forth. What prompted you to get to stay in academic versus industry? You know, was was there some driving force here?
Speaker 2:So, you know, so when you grew up in Pullman, pretty much the entire town is dominated by the university. And when your dad is a kind of a faculty member at the university, the the all of my parents' friends were faculty members. Everyone that would come visit us at Thanksgiving or Christmas were my dad's graduate students who were also interested in becoming faculty members or working in science. And so when people had asked me even as young as in elementary school, what are you gonna do when you grow up? I was like, well, I think I'm gonna be a professor and work at a university because that was all I knew because that was the entire the town of Pullman is about 10,000 people total.
Speaker 2:So it's very much dominated by the university.
Speaker 1:So let's step back here at the you know, just prior to the University of Minnesota, maybe repeat it a little bit, but what was some of the context here to look at your various programs, graduate school and so forth, but where were you immediately prior to University of Minnesota?
Speaker 2:So I so after finishing my master's degree at Nebraska, I came to the University of Minnesota for my PhD and I worked on a project. I got my degree in plant plant breeding, and I worked on a maize bio biochemical genetics project, and I studied the regulation of the biosynthesis of lysine, methionine, and threonine. And after that, I went and did a postdoc at, UC Berkeley, on maize developmental genetics and primarily focused on leaf development. And then after that, particular three and a half year period, I was then hired back as an assistant professor here at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. The same department I got my PhD in.
Speaker 1:And so that you were in that position for a number of years and most recently you became department head. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct. Yes. So the interesting story is that about ten years ago, or actually it's twelve years ago now, I was recruited by the College of Biological Sciences to be a department head in the Department of Plant Biology. And after working there for six and a half years, I stepped down from that position thinking, okay. I'm gonna go back to my faculty position and and continue to just do research and teaching for the rest of my career.
Speaker 2:And then I was approached to be the department head in, agronomy and plant genetics in January of twenty twenty.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We call that poaching, not recruiting. You were poached out of our department, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think so. Yes.
Speaker 1:So you've been here since 2020 in this position, but you still have, in addition to the responsibilities from an administrative standpoint, you still have an interest in research and a lab and so forth. So I think that's where Seth and I wanted to talk to you a little bit more in detail here is about that research component of what you're doing presently and who's all in your lab and how things get done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when I was originally hired in 1997, so almost a little over twenty six years ago, my main sort of area of research was prescribed as working on fusarium head blight of wheat and barley. And so earlier in the nineties, there'd been major outbreaks of fusarium head blight in the Upper Midwest, and it's also a problem across the world. And I was asked to or I was the job description was written so that I would work on trying to develop various tools, and resistance in both wheat and barley to to combat this particular disease. It's a fungal pathogen that causes this disease called Fusarium graminarum, And during infection, it causes a it kill basically kills susceptible wheat spikes. It infects the spike.
Speaker 2:The fungus infects the infects the spike, kills the wheat spikes. And barley, it doesn't quite do that. What it does is it it produces this fungus or produces this toxin that makes the fungus more aggressive, and the malting and brewing industry has a zero tolerance for this particular toxin. And that tolerance is about one part per million, so it's very, very low. And if it doesn't meet that particular standard, the grain is sold on the feed market, which the growers get much less value for than on the malting and brewing market.
Speaker 3:It's things really it it's a good reminder for me about how the the world moves so quickly and we forget about, you know, things that I think are relatively recent. You know, we're talking about 25 ago. Jim Anderson was hired just a year or so after you as a as as one of the first departmental or college based weed breeders. And I think that was probably for the very same reasons that you're talking about. There was just that much investment in that time into Fusarium headbite.
Speaker 3:There were multiple positions deployed, basically, because that issue was so huge among among our producers out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's correct. There was lots of lots of losses in the wheat wheat and barley industry during that time, and the Cereal Disease Lab, which is run by USDA ARS, hired people to work on Fusarium Head Blight. They hired they had opened a position that I obtained. The USDA ARS position that had originally been a wheat breeding position was converted to a state position.
Speaker 2:There was another wheat position, a wheat geneticist position that was created by USDA. It it's currently in our department as well. And the most the primary focus for all these different positions was fusarium head blight.
Speaker 3:And, you licked it. We're done. No problems?
Speaker 2:No. It's still a it's still a it's still an issue. It's not as, big of a problem. The breeding has actually moved the the level of resistance up up higher. And with that coupled with various management practices, it actually protects the crop really well.
Speaker 2:The the one the one thing about dry summers that we've had more recently is that Fusarium head blight does not really become a problem in in dry weather.
Speaker 1:You know one of the things that I often think about in context of tools and tools in the toolbox. I think your lab and some of your work is helping to provide tools for not just University of Minnesota plant breeders but for other plant breeders in other areas. In some ways is it proper and okay to say that you are helping to provide some of the more sophisticated tools in terms of genetics that didn't exist before and you're looking at developing them and improving them and so forth. But spreading these tools out so that other people in other states, USDA can access the toolbox as well. Would that be a fair assumption?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've been involved in two large national projects over my career. One was focused on barley and one was the other one was focused on wheat and barley. And the the basic objectives for those two projects was to develop these sort of enabling tools for both wheat and barley breeding programs. And we developed a really sophisticated database that the wheat and barley breeders across the country use, houses all their data from any data they want to contribute to that database they can.
Speaker 2:It houses both genetic data as well as phenotype data. And we developed various mapping and breeding populations that can be exploited. And we also developed more genetic tools, mapping populations, genetic markers that have that have actually helped enable breeding programs to be more efficient and actually their selection is more effective. And then one last thing that we've developed is there's been a whole series of genome sequences that of of barley that and wheat that I've been involved in, and that actually really helps to enable the ability of breeders to move their material more quickly through their system.
Speaker 3:So I really wanna to have a chance to talk to you about your role as department head and a little bit more about our department here. But I do do know that you've worked on soybean too, so I think you better toot that horn a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yes. I've worked on soybean and primarily looking at shoot architecture and how it impacts canopy closure as well as how it impacts yield. And we've found some interesting results that I've just seen, and we've had some things that we published in the past where we've shown that canopy closure is related to the branch angle as well as to leaf shape, and also that the breeding over the past thirty to four fifty to sixty years has resulted in very unique shoot architectures that impact the the actual yield of of soybean.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I saw your postdoc give a short presentation last Friday. It was really, really interesting. This is something we've looked at a little bit in my lab at a at a little bit higher levels, and so I'm really, really excited about that work. I think it's I think farmers that have been around a long time have noticed that soybean architecture has changed a little bit over time.
Speaker 3:Certainly, more recently, there's been some big shifts in leaf shape just because it's tied to some genetics that they've been using deployed broadly. But, you know, even canopy architecture has changed pretty significantly if you look at the long view of things. So I think I think your folks are pretty well explaining how that happened. And I think the idea there probably is to go back and, you know, maybe try to unwind or change some things, and maybe there's some things that could be optimized. Maybe some of these some of the changes as architecture has happened, you know, in a positive way, but maybe there's some things that have been pulled through that may not be as positive, I assume.
Speaker 3:So that's it's really cool work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we the it's what's inter what I find interesting of my what my current postdoc has work has worked on is is that the actual shoot architecture is not what we would predict for the most productive soybean. So it's almost the opposite of what we would predict for the most productive soybean. So it'd be interesting to actually design soybean plants that look like the most optimal architecture and then see how they perform in the field.
Speaker 3:Or is our theory just wrong that that other archetype or other ideotype is the right way? I think there's this idea that we need to make soybean look like corn, or that we need to have this light interception for some reason deeper into the canopy. But there's probably reasons why that those different kind of shoot architectures probably came forward. They brought yield with them somehow. So there's probably other advantages.
Speaker 3:And I it's interesting. We we talk a lot about soybean and the under the lower levels in the canopy not really contributing much to yield. And it's probably there's probably something to it there that we need that that that canopy's developed a little bit differently to expose leaves at different times for different reasons. So good good work, Gary. I'm I'm excited about future publications from that.
Speaker 3:Anything else on your lab? Or you should tell us a little bit about your lab, that you're not just a department head, that you have an active lab. So how many how many folks do you have and shared folks?
Speaker 2:So so my lab, for many years, was actually quite large. It was around five postdocs and five graduate students. But over the years, the admin administrative, responsibilities have kind of piled up. And so my lab is smaller now, but it's still actually a pretty functional and and robust lab. And so we have I have three postdocs right now, a technician a full time technician and a, part time technician.
Speaker 2:And I'm looking to hire one to two graduate students this round of recruitment. So hopefully, my lab will be up to six or seven people by the the fall.
Speaker 3:That's pretty good for a part timer. I don't know. What do you have? A 20% appointment or something like that for research or?
Speaker 2:I have a 0% appointment for research.
Speaker 3:Okay, then you're overachieving.
Speaker 1:But you know, I think also I've noticed something here on St. Paul campus. We have these large poles over on one side of the campus and I believe you had something to do with that or one of your graduate students because it involves another crop that we haven't talked about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's Hop, Dave. And so the the interesting story is that my current postdoc, Josh Havel, that works on the Hop project, he has he came to me over a period of about seven or eight years, three different times, asking me for a position in my lab. Once when he was an undergraduate, and it didn't really work out at that point. Once when he wanted to go to grad school, and I didn't have a wanted to go to graduate.
Speaker 2:He wanted to be do a graduate program on my lab, and it didn't that also didn't work out. And then the third time he came, he wanted to do a PhD in my lab. And he actually had identified where the funding source had come from to support him and had it all mapped out. And so and then he's really worked hard at attracting funds for this particular project, and we eventually got funds to build the hop yard. And it's about an acre, and it holds and it allows us to grow about 500 plants or so.
Speaker 2:And we're using it, at least initially, to identify particular lines that will confer resistance to powdery mildew, which is a major problem for hop growers in in the Upper Midwest, in the primary growing regions, which is the Pacific Northwest and and around the world. So we house the probably the largest live collection of diverse wild hops in the world that here at the University of Minnesota. So we're using that those wild individuals that have been collected all over North America as well as Eurasia to try to identify interesting variation for powdery mildew resistance as well as other traits of interest to breeders.
Speaker 3:Obviously, there's a lot of economic impact from from this. And it's interesting that, you know, we've we always talk about new crops or third crops for Minnesota system, and so there's a lot of effort put into those things. And then somehow you kinda tripped across this the hop thing. And I I think it's just fantastic because I think we've, you know, we've lost some of the diversity in in terms of our we've certainly lost a lot of diversity in terms of our breeding and research efforts over the past fifty or one hundred years, of course, because we have a narrower cropping base around Minnesota. And so there's a lot of people focused on corn and soybeans and small grains.
Speaker 3:But the other nice part about something like hops is that it actually is interesting for folks that might be potential students or graduate students. So there's an opportunity to do something that is both has a real impact on the economy of Minnesota, but then there's also the idea that it provides something for students to study, and it's a draw for students to bring them in either as undergraduates or graduate students.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So hop is a very kind of a difficult crop to work with. It's a perennial for one, and so and it's also dioecious, meaning that there's there's male and female plants. And so and it primarily so only can outcross to make seed. And so it can be quite challenging to to actually work with a crop like that.
Speaker 2:And the fact that it takes up so much space for so few plants is also a challenge. So it's so when I think about doing genetics, I think about corn or or barley or wheat where you can just grow lots and lots of plants. And corn is a big plant, but but you can still grow a lot of plants annually on in multiple different locations to test various ideas and and do experiments. But in hops, we have this one fixed site, and so it limits our ability. But on the other hand, it provides the challenge to our graduate students and postdocs to think more creatively about what can be done on a small set of plants in a small area.
Speaker 3:Well, and it has real I mean, we're we're talking beer here, so there's a real there's a real outcome to it. There's a real application for that that I think a lot of a lot of students can appreciate.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So when when I when I start building this, Kevin Smith, who's the barley breeder in our department, said to me, said, this is this is gonna be great because we're eventually gonna have beer made by the University of Minnesota sold at the football games, and this is where we're gonna get the hops to do
Speaker 3:it. Beautiful. Anyways. And we can make we can sell some of Rex's corn there, sweet corn as So we're in good shape.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about the department here in terms of size and who are the people that come to school here at the University of Minnesota? We have undergraduates and graduates. How do you keep that balance and know who's here?
Speaker 2:So we have so there's 23 faculty and so most of the faculty are here on Saint Paul campus. We also have faculty members at Waseca and Lamberton and and Crookston at the research and outreach centers around the state. And the faculty, they work on a variety of different things from agronomy, plant physiology, genetics, breeding, genomics. There's a bunch of faculty in the department that are working on a whole suite of crops called forever green crops to try to uncover the ground, with either cover the ground in in the sort of the off season for for the corn and soybean production. And so this would be, like, winter annuals as well as perennial crops.
Speaker 2:The undergrads that come to this university are both rural and and urban as well as suburban kids, and we get kids from all across the the state. Our graduate students are they can they can come from anywhere. They're primarily domestic students, but we do have some international students in the program as well. And they and they and all three of those sorts of students, undergrads or or two, undergrads and graduate students are all engaged in research if if they undergrads if they so choose, but graduate students are involved in various research projects in all the different crops that are grown in the state of Minnesota.
Speaker 3:So we don't have an agronomy major anymore. So what what would you say to a student that might have an have a historic have a background in agriculture, but doesn't see agronomy listed in the in the course cattle in the in the the in the in the catalog.
Speaker 2:So we have a major that's called plant sciences, which has an agronomy track in that particular major. And so coming to the University of Minnesota, you can get an you can get the sort of agronomy training that it might not show up on your on your diploma or your the documents when you when you when you graduate, but it's but you are gonna learn about agronomy here. We we have so the Saint Paul campus is a very small campus. It's located, you know, away from the Minneapolis campus. It's a very small town sort of feel feel feel.
Speaker 2:There's there we have field sites on campus. We have greenhouses on campus, and so these are all state of the art field and greenhouse spaces that our undergraduates and graduate students and people that do research on the campus can engage in research. Undergrad students that that do come here can obtain funding to do their own research. They can work with the best sort of best faculty and scientists that work on plants in the world. And we have about 80 scientists that work on or faculty members that work on plants, and this this encompass more than just the agronomy and plant genetics department.
Speaker 2:It's horticulture, plant pathology, plant microbial biology, evolution ecology behavior. They all have people that work on plants. We have pretty much you can gain access to pretty much anything that you might wanna work on with regards to plants and agronomy. We have a dorm that's on campus. We have the Greek system that's across the street.
Speaker 2:You you have their small class sizes. There's a lot of advantages to the Saint Paul campus for undergraduate students as well as graduate students.
Speaker 3:I think it's it's worth restating this point that I think a lot of people think of the U of M as this giant entity in, you know, in Minneapolis. But I think restating what you just said about what we have in terms of size of at Saint Paul, We're talking about ratios of students to faculty that are really pretty impressive in terms of the number of faculty that students have access to. And those faculty are really interested in engaging undergraduate students too in research and looking for students to work on research projects. I know I am in my lab. So and it's the full breadth of all types of plant sciences, from really highly applied stuff that I do to to more basic work on the other side.
Speaker 3:So it it almost is is a complete reversal of what people might have in their mind's eye in terms of sending their kid off the University of Minnesota. I think we offer them something very, very different that's a lot more like what you might consider, like, even the liberal arts education in one of these small small town universities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so even in as as Seth said, even in my lab, we hire anywhere between two to four undergraduates every year. And they work in the summer. They work directly with graduate students and postdocs on projects. They they can get their name on papers that are published.
Speaker 2:They're they're in they're integral in the actual activities of my lab and as well as almost all labs in in the department have undergraduates working with them. It's, a really unique situation in terms of being able to interact with faculty, that are experts in their field as well as working with undergraduates and or working with graduate students and and postdocs that these undergrad these undergrads have these opportunities that it's really unique in the state of Minnesota to have these sorts of opportunities.
Speaker 1:You know what?
Speaker 3:I don't think there's any question, but that our you know, that we're really preparing we're doing an excellent job of preparing students for for master's and PhDs to go on to graduate school. But I think the other part that maybe people forgetting is the good job that we do as students for an undergraduate degree is kind of a terminal degree too, right? So we've got a number of large food and ag companies in the Twin Cities, and they are interested in the students that come out of our college and our department here because the background with some agriculture, but also those other skills that they gain here. So I think it's important to remind folks that, you know, that it's okay to come here as a bachelor's just for students that have no interest in going on for a master's or PhD.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well said. So I I would say that all of our undergraduates that are that are they're in the agronomy track, and all the under most for the most part, all of our undergraduates, they all get positions, all get jobs directly out of their degree if they if they choose not to go to graduate school or some other professional school.
Speaker 1:You know, we have what I like to call options because even if you are not in a plant science but if you're in a different major discipline with ag education, horticulture, etc. You can take classes back and forth within the plant science or the agronomy track. And so we have a lot of that that goes back and forth. So if you come to school here it's a situation where if you don't have an immediate decision being made you might have that option to go one way or the other. Maybe it's an industry, know, maybe it is pursuing a graduate program.
Speaker 1:Speak a little bit about the graduate program though we a lot about the undergrad but certainly, you know, people have an opportunity to do that. They may transfer in. You know, how do you obtain or find graduate students in this thing? Do they just send a letter in or they show up at the door?
Speaker 2:So we we we co manage a grad program with the Department of Horticultural Sciences. It's called the applied plant science grad program. And, yeah, we we do some recruiting, but it's really not we don't really do that much recruiting. The students for the most part, students that are interested in graduate school learn about the types of graduate schools they might go to, from their adviser when they're undergraduates. They might be working in a research lab as an undergrad, and and that particular adviser would the graduate students and postdocs in that lab will will point out the various universities that they might go to.
Speaker 2:There's an application process. Applications are due usually in the first week December. We then go through a process of determining what students we'd like to interview. We bring them onto campus for a couple of days, and we have we we talk with them. They talk with us and determine whether the how the fit is how what the fit is like, and then we determine whether or not we'd like to admit that particular student.
Speaker 2:The one the one thing that I don't think most people understand is that when you go to graduate school, at least in our program and other sort of allied more science programs, is that students get paid to come to to school. And so they get a stipend. Right now, the stipend is about $30,000 a year. They also get their tuition paid for, which is another 15 to $17,000, and they also get health insurance. And so the total amount that a faculty member will pay for a student right now is about 52 ish thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 2:And in our program, students finish in about three and a half to four years, and so that would finish a PhD in three and a half to four years. And so during that entire time, they're getting paid, they're getting their tuition paid for, and they're getting health insurance. And so although $30,000 isn't enough to make you rich, it's enough to to to keep you have housing and to buy food and to take care of yourself while you're pursuing a degree and you're getting everything paid for.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's that's different than in some of the other disciplines around around the university. Certainly there's other, you know, there's other opportunities for teaching, of course, in both in this college and elsewhere. But in a lot of cases, the students are really having to come and pay their own way in a really big way. So this is we really offer something here in the agricultural side to students.
Speaker 3:It's a little bit unique I think.
Speaker 2:Yes, would agree.
Speaker 1:You know, can you talk a little bit about the faculty here? What are some of the faculty that if you're an undergrad that you might interface with as well as graduate students and there's really some outstanding faculty here you know most recently that have been awarded for their good work not only in a research standpoint but also in an academic standpoint.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we've so there's there's several faculty that have that have obtained and received quite impressive awards more recently. And so Candy Hirsch, she's a professor in our department. She works on maize genomics. She we received the presidential McKnight professorship, which is a quite high honor at the university.
Speaker 2:Kevin Smith received he's a fellow he's now currently a fellow of the Crop Science Society of America, and those fellows only given out the point 3% of the total number of people that are in the Crop Science Society. And then Bob Stupar has recently won the Richard Bernard Mid Career Soybean Community Award as well. And so we have really top notch faculty who are doing really, really great work. In terms of, teaching, we've hired a, a teaching assistant professor, Katie Guthrie, who, undergraduate students would have the opportunity to to, to interact with on a reasonable number of classes. We have other faculty that so, like, Aaron Lorenz, who's a soybean breeder.
Speaker 2:He teaches a breeding class to our undergraduates. So there's a variety of different people that teach undergraduate courses. At the graduate level, Rex Bernardo teaches a plant breeding class that the thing that's unique about this class is that he wrote a textbook for the class, and that textbook is used around the world by almost anyone that teaches a similar class is using Rex's Rex's textbook. And so his textbook is written in a very clear manner at a very and it it's at a very high level as well.
Speaker 3:And Rex is, teaching, a more creative course that kinda follows my theme on the hops and bringing in students. So maybe you can tell tell us about this one and Peter's Peter's course as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, one of the one of the goals of the department is to try to increase the number of undergraduate students that we're teaching. And, so one of the ways of doing that is to create courses that are somewhat unique. It will attract students from not just our program, but from across the university. And so there have been two classes that have been designed, over the past several years.
Speaker 2:One of them is, a class that Peter Morell Peter Morell and Mary Bracki designed, and it's called Science of Cannabis. And so they talk about the sociology around cannabis and how it impacts society. They don't teach about how to grow cannabis because we're not allowed to do that at the university, but they they teach about various aspects of cannabis, medical uses of cannabis, and and that sort of those sorts of topics. And the other class that has been developed is one by Rex Bernardo. This is a freshman seminar, and so freshman seminars are an attempt by the university to have really small courses for for for freshmen when they're entering the university to interact directly with faculty.
Speaker 2:And so these courses are they're tapped out at twenty twenty students per class, and this class is that Rex is teaching is called coffee from the ground up. And so he teaches where coffee is from, what the flavors are, how to actually make the perfect cup of coffee, what are the different different aspect things that go into the sort of supply chain of coffee. And so it's a quite quite the class is quite popular, and Rex plans to teach it again this coming fall.
Speaker 3:So we always one of the things that we always ask faculty when they come here is what's exciting in their lab or their research. And and in your case, also, you could include your department and the university. So what's what's kind of exciting you these days? And, you know, both maybe makes you anxious, but or or all also just very positively excited about the future. What's what's what's kinda got you going these days?
Speaker 2:So at the at the college, the college has been working on this realignment of for at least three years now with the idea being that we need to become a little bit more collaborative across the college with regards to our undergraduate programs and to develop more tighter research collaborations as well. And so there's a move to to actually realign departments so that we can be more effective in our delivery of research, teaching, and extension across the state. So that's one thing. The other thing is, you know, we had a we had a retreat recently in the department where we talked about undergraduate education, and it's quite exciting to see the energy in that room towards developing a stronger program in in the plant sciences and, in particular, agronomy to attract students from across the state. We've also one of the things that's more more sort of infrastructure like is that we've renovated many different rooms in the in the build in Hayes Hall for those Hayes And Borlaug, for those of you that actually went to campus, these are where this is where the I went to the University of Minnesota in on the Saint Paul campus.
Speaker 2:Hayes And Borlaug Hall are the primary buildings that the department is located in, and we've renovated our seminar rooms, our conference rooms. The entrance to Borlaug Hall has been we've got some nice chairs there now, as well as we've renovated the kitchen and the main office. And so the the building looks much more spiffed up, and so when if you're come if you come by in the Saint Paul campus, you should walk through Borlaug And Hays Hall, and you'll see that there's actually been quite a few changes. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Any last words?
Speaker 2:I think the, you know, the the department and I think the college are are headed in the right direction. I think that, you know, as as we move forward, I I'm I'm hopeful that we'll start to develop these programs that will attract kids from across the state, outstate, urban, as well as suburban to our undergrad programs. And our graduate program is is quite strong in terms of we get some of the best students in the country that come here, and we have top top notch faculty that are, mentoring those students. And so they can go off and, be faculty or work at various companies around the country. So I think we're in a we're in good shape and I'm look I'm looking forward to the future.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much, Gary. We appreciate you taking the time to stop by and visit us at the University of Minnesota CropCast program. This is a good opportunity to get the overview here and in terms of what's going on in the department and what the future may hold. We have an opportunity to talk to many of the faculty and we will in the future going with this. So again thanks Gary and Gary is the department head of Agronomy and Plant Genetics.
Speaker 1:I should also mention you also have another honor of distinguished McKnight University professor. So congratulations on that as well with it here in the University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy. Seth, any last words from you?
Speaker 3:None from me.
Speaker 1:Alright, thank you again for listening to the episode here of University of Minnesota CropCast and we'll look forward to visiting with you next time.
