Hello, CALS,
I hope you had a great weekend as we slide toward July 4 and what always feels like the heart of summer! Many of us are not only working through the summer, but also taking this week to enjoy family and friends and some well-earned vacation! Enjoy.
Even though the flooding in northwest and western Iowa has left the news as an urgent story, the recovery is long and difficult. Let’s please keep those families and communities in mind.
Another big, ongoing story and challenge with a northwest Iowa footprint is highly pathogenic avian influenza in poultry and turkey flocks and dairy herds. The Avian Influenza webpage on the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship's website provides an efficient way to stay updated.
On our “place” in science - science and technology are keys to a sustainable and vibrant future. If science is truly global, then science anywhere is a good thing. But the competitive spirit in people is always at work and rivalries between nations can be, too. On a per capita basis, only a few nations produce more scientific publications than the U.S. But things are changing. For example, consider a recent article in The Economist (June 15, 2024, pp. 67-70), Science in China - Soaring Dragons. This article shows that, for many scientific disciplines, including agriculture, China has eclipsed the U.S. in global high-impact papers (see graph below, others in the article). That is not necessarily the same as in applied science or practice. The evidence with regard to national funding for agricultural research is similarly of interest.
Have a good week! My best - Dan
Scenes from CALS
Greatest thanks to all the advisors and CALS Student Services staff who helped our incoming students and families through orientation last month. It’s a huge effort and takes lots of enthusiasm, patience and knowledge of CALS and Iowa State from end to end. Consistently, our students and parents report that the CALS advisors do an absolutely outstanding and extraordinary job! This work sets the stage for the students' next four years – it establishes the sense of care and concern, and the sense of community and family that we value so much in CALS and makes us who we are. Please reach out and thank the advisors you know!
If you have a chance, wander over to the fourth floor of the Student Innovation Center and see the amazing artwork being installed inside and outside the two CALS Collaborative Learning Labs via a gift from Farm Credit Services of America to inspire students from every discipline at Iowa State about agriculture. This installation is the result of more than three years of work, starting with a CALS committee led by Steve Mickelson, and then led by Carmen Bain. It included a design charrette that brought CALS and College of Design (CoD) students together to brainstorm designs for the spaces, followed by multiple further planning and design efforts, the selection of former CoD professor Reinaldo Corrrea-Diaz as the artist, and further work by a student, faculty and staff planning team (Carmen Bain, Jenna Errthum, Dior Kelly, Wendy Kisch, Claire Kruesel, Jennifer Schieltz, Catherine Swoboda, Sarah Wehner). A celebration for this installation will happen in the fall, and we hope this will become a go-to place to show off and start conversations about CALS! Check it out!