August 2025
By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP
UF/IFAS exists to meet your needs. To find out what those needs are, we listen.
We have thousands of conversations a year – farmer and county agent, student and professor, producer and researcher, President Smith and me.
Now we’re seeking a stakeholder-to-scientist conversation that turns listening into research. We’re scientifically soliciting your input through surveys, focus groups, and artificial intelligence-driven analysis of what you’re asking online.
Through what we call Optimizing IFAS, we’re after the big picture, how you perceive UF/IFAS, what you most need from us. When we understand those perceptions and needs, we can more fully align our work to meet them.
UF/IFAS has some of the nation’s best scientific listeners in Ricky Telg and the research and Extension lab he leads, the UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education. The PIE Center’s past work includes quantifying and ranking the issues Floridians care most about, measuring the effectiveness of vegetable farmers’ social media practices, and studying consumers’ changing purchasing patterns.
The PIE Center has launched Optimizing IFAS, a two-year scientific effort to weave thousands of strands of individual opinions, perceptions, recommendations and requests into a fabric of wisdom that can guide us to doing a better job meeting the needs of Floridians, including the specific needs of the Florida cattle industry.
The data will be distilled into forms such as a dashboard of dials and graphs that depict what concerns and perceptions are trending among respondents. It might rank the top needs of the industry, for example. We’re even talking about developing a public value index similar to a consumer confidence index in the way it would function as a report card with a grade that tells us how you think we’re doing.
Optimizing IFAS is about more than taking in a specific request to identify what weed you have in your pasture. This is an opportunity to work together to determine future work and expertise at UF/IFAS and what you want for the future of Florida.
We can’t listen if you don’t speak. So when President Smith or your field representative sends out a request to answer an Optimizing IFAS survey or participate in a focus group, please consider joining this effort. The more input we get, the deeper our understanding will be of the industry’s perspective as a whole.
We’re going to be asking everyone, not just Farm Bureau members. Not only will we be asking ranchers and landscapers, we’ll be asking the general public, including those who don’t know a cow from a sow and don’t think much about where their food comes from.
Telg and his researchers, who include Lauri Baker of our Department of Agricultural Education and Communication and Erica Odera of the PIE Center, will be looking for you.
If you can’t wait for them to find you, please reach out to them at [email protected]. You can also visit the Optimizing IFAS website.
Telg plans to be at the annual meeting in Daytona Beach next month. Please say hi and ask him about the project.
We’ll still be listening to your present-day concerns during farm visits, at the conventions and at our leadership team’s quarterly check-ins with Farm Bureau leadership. We’ll hear from you at field days, bull sales and short courses.
Optimizing IFAS will help us chart a course for a future in which your land-grant university works on what matters most. Let’s chart that course together.
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).