Message from the Dean - August 5, 2024

Hello, CALS,

Greetings from Colorado (see pic below), where I am attending an agriculture think tank and learning many perspectives from a broad range of interests. Academia is the least represented group here, so it's a great chance to hear from a diversity of sectors from across the United States' broad range of ag and natural resource interests.  

We're closing in now on the start of the semester (notwithstanding the Iowa State Fair in the meantime and the Farm Progress Show). I hope everyone's ready for the influx of energetic and future-bound students who are our raison d'etre (reason to be). Please watch for communications from the Provost Office, our Office of Academic Innovation, and outreach from individual students needing something extra.

Last week I attended with Ruth MacDonald (as CALS interim associate dean for research and discovery) the annual summer VPR research retreat. And we welcomed our new provost, Jason Keith, to Iowa State!

Send me some photos of your summer work (and a caption to go with them), and I'll get those into upcoming Monday newsletters.

Have a great week. - Dan

Scenes from CALS

A beautiful view near sunset, looking southwest from the old McCoy Ranch near Bond, Colorado, in the shadow of Yarmony Mountain. It looks like a pristine landscape of mostly wilderness around both sides of the Colorado River. However, there is much more to think about on this. The mountain is named for a Ute Indian chief with an interesting history of interactions with settlers. The landscape is filling up with pinyon-juniper vegetation, which is classified as a native invasive plant community. Those plants represent a significant wildfire risk and shade out sage and grasses that would otherwise fill this niche and provide better cattle grazing than the current pair per 40 acres. But the cause of this native invasion is likely settler-based land use, including cattle grazing and fire suppression, resulting in a reduction of grasses and the fine fuels that facilitated low-intensity fire that kept out a wholesale takeover of pinyon-juniper. Now, there is a lack of good grazing vegetation and only high-intensity fire fuels. So much to think about. There is a lot of stress about wolves and mountain lions, too, and the policy initiatives and implications of all this.  

View of a mountain range in the distance beneath a partly cloudy sky.