March 2025 FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

How has UF/IFAS helped your business? I’m eager to hear it and hope you’ll let me know. But for the next three months I’m even more eager for you to tell your state representatives.

The Legislature starts its session in March, and it will be voting on funding for UF/IFAS science. I have been meeting with legislators for months already to get them to yes on these votes.

A constituent (you) can often get greater traction than a university administrator can. I hope I can count on you to help us help you.

Please join President Smith, your leadership team, and me in Tallahassee on March 18 at the Legislative Briefing Breakfast. President Smith has granted me the opportunity to personally thank you at the breakfast for the day you’ll spend meeting with legislators and staff.

Our legislative budget requests can help Florida agriculture in numerous ways:

• Extension expansion, $5 million: For state or regional Extension agents devoted to farm profitability, workforce development and environmental resilience.
• Workload, $6.5 million: Agriculture’s needs are increasing and more complex, so we need to invest more in the research and Extension personnel to meet those needs.
• Florida 4-H Camp Cherry Lake, $5.6 million: Address current and future workforce needs by providing year-round science, agriculture, and technology workforce programs for 6,000 youth at camp with improvements, that will support this goal.
• Artificial intelligence, $4.5 million: Fund faculty, staff, and administrative positions for the UF/IFAS Center for Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture focused on design, construction, evaluation and demonstration of AI-based technologies that we can bring to your farm faster.
• Nutrient management, $6 million: We need to finish food crop projects so that the most up-to-date science informs fertilizer rate recommendations to keep you profitable.
• Crop Transformation Center, $5 million: Invest in using biotech tools to rapidly develop new cultivars. While the center’s early work focuses on citrus, we will expand the expedited processes to many more crops.

Crops and politics are in season year-round, and not just in Tallahassee. The state is a checkerboard of regulations on irrigation, fertilization and land use made by local officials.

We believe at UF/IFAS that these regulations should be evidence-based and rely on solid science. Just like there’s always a new challenge for science to solve in the greenhouse, so is there an endless array of public policy questions whose answers can be informed by science.

We need to marshal ever greater scientific forces to keep up with these challenges and questions.

If you have a story about how UF/IFAS has helped your farm, please email me about it so I can share it when I’m in Tallahassee. And while you’re at it, please email that story to your elected officials, too.

J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).