AgEmerge Podcast 093 with Jerry Hatfield

Welcome Jerry Hatfield. Jerry is the retired Director of the USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames, Iowa and his bio illustrates his passion and knowledge for helping growers improve their agronomic systems. Much of Jerry’s focus has been on the evaluation of farming systems and their response to water and nitrogen interactions across soils and remote sensing methods to quantify field variation. A platform for his research utilizes the genetics by environment by management concept as a framework to work with producers to demonstrate how they can increase their production efficiency, increase soil health, and develop resilience to weather and climate variation as the foundation for food security. Today he and Monte dive in to those topics and many more.

Jerry worked in California at the University of California-Davis from 1975-1983 as a biometeorologist working a range of different crops, joined USDA-ARS in 1983 at the Plant Stress and Water Conservation Unit in Lubbock, TX until his transfer to Ames in 1989 to develop the research program of the National Soil Tilth Laboratory (renamed the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in 2009). His research focused on the interactions among the components of the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and their linkage to air, water, and soil quality. His focus has been on the evaluation of farming systems and their response to water and nitrogen interactions across soils and remote sensing methods to quantify field variation. A platform for his research utilizes the genetics x environment x management concept as a framework to work with producers to demonstrate how they can increase their production efficiency, increase soil health, and develop resilience to weather and climate variation as the foundation for food security. His outreach efforts have included participation in the National Climate Assessment as the Lead Author for agriculture for the US and on the IPCC effort on greenhouse gases and climate change. Dr. Hatfield is an accomplished author with 508 refereed publications and 18 monographs and serves as the Editor for Agroecosystems, Geosciences and Environment and Technical Editor for Agriculture and Environmental Letters and ranks in the top 2% of researchers in the world. He edited several volumes including Crop Adaptation to Climate Change and Food Security and Climate Change. His numerous awards include being inducted into the USDA-ARS Hall of Fame for his research impact the Hugh Hammond Bennett award and the Soil Science Society of America Distinguished Service Award in 2022 along with being a Fellow in the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America and serving as President of the American Society of Agronomy in 2007. He received his PhD from Iowa State University in 1975 in the area of agricultural climatology, MS in agronomy from the University of Kentucky in 1972, and a BS in agronomy from Kansas State University in 1971.
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View a sample of Jerry's work: https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/ames/nlae/people/jerry-hatfield/