November 2025
By Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP
UF/IFAS is sunsetting its Department of Environmental Horticulture. What’s important to know is what’s NOT happening.
No programs get cut, including the many that are focused on ornamental plants. No one gets laid off. No one stops preparing students for future careers in the industry.
In fact, no one’s phone number, email address or office location even changes. You’ll call or email the same people you’ve always communicated with, including our newest hires serving the industry, Dr. Jeb Fields (nursery crop management), Dr. Yuyao Kong (controlled environment production) and Dr. Uttara Samarkoon (controlled environment agriculture).
It is not a mission change or a budget cut.
The faculty and staff you know and trust will continue to focus on your needs. You’ll call the same people you’ve always called when you need help. The only thing that will change is each faculty member’s academic home.
This administrative evolution will better serve the interests of Florida Farm Bureau Federation producers in key ways.
Fostering collaboration. Your solutions have never come just from one department. Scientists from Horticultural Sciences, Plant Pathology, Agronomy and the School of Forest, Fisheries, & Geomatics Sciences (SFFGS) have long worked on green industry challenges.
Now, your faculty partners will choose other departments as their academic home. It essentially embeds them with teams whose expertise aligns with theirs. One could argue for example, that an Environmental Horticulture faculty member who works on trees will find different opportunities to collaborate with other tree experts in SFFGS than he or she would have in their present department, where most colleagues focus on flowers, landscape, nursery plants or turf.
Enhancing support. The change has the potential to increase the capacity of horticulture faculty with better structure and support to connect with colleagues across multiple disciplines. For example, someone who “moves” (and brings all foundation funding and students with them) to Horticultural Sciences has more than 50 new department colleagues who can help them solve horticultural plant and production problems.
Migrating staff will also fold into new departments to scale their efforts in support of faculty so the experts can spend less time on back-office functions and more on teaching, research and Extension.
Finding funding paths. Joining a team in other departments may connect the faculty to many more funding opportunities than those that are focused exclusively on ornamentals.
Attracting more students. Distributing environmental horticulture classes throughout the course catalog of another department may offer a gateway for students who may not otherwise have found them, potentially sparking more passion for the industry.
We will be able to share new department homes for faculty in early 2026. Wherever they land, they’ll have the same focus on providing the science that supports a green Florida.
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).