The Hurricane Helene resource page includes information to help our farm families throughout Florida recover from the hurricane. Information on waivers, state and federal funding, mental wellness and reporting agricultural loss visit Hurricane Helene Resource page.

We are looking forward to your attendance at the 83rd State Annual Meeting in Miramar Beach, FL, Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2024! Connect with old friends, make new ones, and enjoy the wonderful setting of the Sandestin Golf & Beach Resort. The state annual meeting is the pinnacle of Florida Farm Bureau’s grassroots advocacy. Volunteer members will be celebrated, and delegate members will discuss and set policy that will guide the organization for the next year.

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January FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

The future of Florida farming depends on turning data into decisions and getting you credit for environmental stewardship.

UF/IFAS will help you achieve the first part by developing agricultural applications for artificial intelligence (AI)—think smart sprayers, counting tree canopies through aerial imaging, and phone apps that detect disease invisible to the human eye.

The second is incentivizing you to continue or even increase the amount of public goods you deliver but for which you do not presently get paid—think wildlife habitat, water storage, and carbon sequestration. We call these ecosystems services (ES).

Neither you in the field nor us in the lab can get there alone. So I recently went looking for those with the highest stake in that future—the young.

I found them through you, the Florida Farm Bureau Federation, and FFBF’s Young Farmers & Ranchers (YF&R). Actually, our own young ag leader, Christopher Hodge, UF/IFAS assistant director of governmental affairs, found them.

When we spent a day at the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred, they not only showed interest in learning more about AI and ES, they wanted to know how to integrate them into Florida farming faster.

They challenged me with angles I hadn’t fully considered. Lake County Farm Bureau board member Ryan Atwood urged Extension to provide guidance for the software purchasing decisions farmers will have to make, similar to how those agents currently provide advice on pesticides.

Highlands County YF&R Vice Chair Mikayla Allison asked me how I was going to address incentivizing increased carbon sequestration on land where the soil has already reached a carbon saturation point. I have to confess, even as a soil scientist, that it had not been on my mind.

Former state YF&R leadership group member and Okeechobee County Farm Bureau vice president and dairyman Ben Butler urged me not to forget animal agriculture in developing AI technologies. He also asked that UF/IFAS to step up the integration of AI and ES by using technology to capture more nutrients before they leave the farm—and to show a public skeptical of agriculture’s environmental stewardship that farmers and scientists are hard at work on this.

UF/IFAS and FFBF will work together effectively toward this future together because we’ve already worked together effectively to develop the future leaders that were around the table that day in Lake Alfred.

Atwood is a double Gator, a former UF/IFAS Extension agent and a Wedgworth Leadership Institute graduate. Allison is a current student in the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences pursuing a master’s degree online in the evenings while she works during the day for an agricultural software company. Butler is a double Gator as well as a graduate of Wedgworth.

These young ag leaders urged UF/IFAS to get Florida farming to its future faster and to do it in discussion with them. I can’t guarantee how fast the transformation of Florida agriculture will occur, but UF/IFAS will continue to rely on the insights of these young ag leaders to get there.

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).

December FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

The October annual meeting fostered the continuing development of Maddie Dvorak and Bernie LeFils as Florida agriculture leaders. They brought talent to Orlando. The Florida Farm Bureau Federation (FFBF) gave them opportunity.

Maddie, a senior in the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), won the collegiate division of discussion meet at the FFBF convention. She stood out in a mock committee meeting with her passion for policy to address challenges like how best to connect with part-time farmers.

That is, people like Bernie, who has a small cow-calf operation with his father but earns most of his income as a CPA.

Bernie grew up hearing about Farm Bureau from his grandmother, a longtime state board member. He developed his public speaking skills at FFA competitions as he aspired to attend CALS.

When he got to Gainesville, he served as president of the UF chapter of the Collegiate Farm Bureau. He represented Florida as a national collegiate discussion meet finalist. He served in another FFBF-supported group, CALS ambassadors, and was executive vice president of Alpha Gamma Rho.

For years, Bernie has served the Farm Bureau on its Budget and Economic Advisory Council. He’s a regular at  Florida Farm Bureau Day in Tallahassee.

So he brought to Orlando years of experiences in CALS and FFBF that developed skills he’d deploy in the Young Farmers & Ranchers discussion meet, and we expect he’ll be very competitive in the national competition at the American Farm Bureau Federation meeting in Puerto Rico next month.

Like Bernie’s, Maddie’s journey has been influenced by FFBF and CALS. As a high schooler she participated in the CALS Florida Youth Institute. A highlight of her week was meeting FFBF COO Staci Sims, whom Maddie calls one of her role models. Another was the dawning realization that she wanted a career in public policy.

As Maddie said at the time, “Their (farmers’) job is to produce food. My job is to protect their jobs.” Based on her standout participation at FYI, we sent her to Iowa for the Global Youth Institute held in conjunction with the World Food Prize. In March, FFBF will send her to Jacksonville to compete in the American Farm Bureau’s national collegiate discussion meet.

Like Bernie did when he graduated in 2011, Maddie will earn a degree from our Food and Resource Economics Department. Maddie chose the major because she was told economics is the world’s common language for business and policy, and if she wanted a seat at the table she needed to have something to say and a way to say it.

Bernie speaks that language in advisory council to help FFBF define its positions on estate taxes, changes to the IRS code and tangible property taxes.

Bernie’s been on both our stages, yours in October to collect his winner’s plaque and ours in 2018 with his wife Avery as the CALS Alumni and Friends Horizon Award winners for their outstanding contributions and potential as leaders in the agricultural, natural resource, life science and related industries and professions.

UF/IFAS values FFBF as a partner in providing the places, competitions and mentors for Bernie and Maddie to develop into leaders.

The years our organizations have spent providing Maddie and Bernie with opportunity can yield decades of advocacy for Florida agriculture. Their work in committee rooms can’t help but make the future brighter for those working on farms, in groves and on ranches.

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).

November 2022 eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

In the near future, a new UF/IFAS hub dedicated to revolutionizing agriculture will help you make a leap forward in farming.

A center for applied artificial intelligence in agriculture will be that hub. Last month we announced our plan for a 19,000-square-foot facility anchored by a workshop for developing precision ag machine prototypes.

GCREC Director Jack Rechcigl and Associate Director Nathan Boyd have been talking this up for some time. They invited me to GCREC about a year ago to present their vision to me and to a council of stakeholders. The council unanimously supported the project, and several members individually urged us to move on this immediately.

Plans call for research and office space as well and areas designed to encourage conversations to build teams for AI research and Extension. That’s important, because while the center will be based at the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Balm, it will develop technologies for the entire state, from the Everglades Agricultural Area to the Panhandle to the Tri-County Agricultural Area.

Hillsborough County has already made a $1.5 million commitment to the center. Our advancement team is seeking private support. We’re requesting funding from the legislature in 2023.

The center will be our most important facilities investment in a generation. We’ll need support from Tallahassee and possibly Washington. You can help by supporting our legislative budget request. I hope it will be top of mind for those of you who participate in Florida Farm Bureau Day and the Taste of Florida Agriculture Reception at the Capitol on March 8.

A center will add momentum to a movement. It will be a declaration that Florida’s farmers and agricultural scientists are the vanguard of feeding the world in a more sustainable way. It will be the epicenter of accelerated evolution of agriculture from human-labor-intensive to technology-driven.

We need to do this now. Global spending on smart technologies such as AI and machine learning directed toward agriculture is projected to triple in the next three years. There is enormous interest in scientific advance, giving us the opportunity to employ the land-grant university-industry-government partnership model to make major global impacts.

Help us imagine a future for agriculture that the center will help create, one where technology again keeps Florida globally competitive, producing our own food, employing Floridians, contributing to the local economy, and making Florida the leader in feeding the world.

There have been few moments in the history of UF/IFAS when the way to create the future is so visible and reachable. We have the experts to do it. The center will help unleash their talent and imagination.

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).

October 2022 eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

President Jeb Smith came to carry out a professional duty, but make no mistake, for him UF/IFAS is personal.

As the head of the organization that we honored as our UF/IFAS Champion, Smith spoke from both the lectern and the big screen at our recent Dinner of Distinction to honor our supporters. And he reflected on and off stage about the many ways UF/IFAS had touched his family.

Smith reminisced about an entomology professor named Freddie Johnson giving him one of his first jobs. He credited the UF/IFAS Food and Resource Economics Department with educating both his father and his grandfather. He visited with his daughter at the event when she was not busy serving as an ambassador for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, where she’s a senior.

And he shared that as a senior in high school he attended what was then called 4-H Congress on campus in Gainesville where he met his future wife Wendy.

There are UF/IFAS echoes as he makes his way around his home community of Hastings. When a job applicant listed the Greenman Scholarship on her resume, Smith told her how the man for which the scholarship is named used to smoke cigars while delivering economics lectures. And when he ran into a city commissioner named French, Smith told him his father. Byron French had been a UF/IFAS professor, and he was a good friend who loaned power tools to Smith and his wife Wendy as they remodeled their home.

Smith is off to a great start as chief steward of one of the best Farm Bureau-land-grant university relationships in the nation. “Producers need objective information to be able to make good decisions, and IFAS provides that,” Smith said in the video.

The Farm Bureau, in turn, supports us in Tallahassee and elsewhere. They champion our students, our research initiatives and our Extension service.

And you’ve been doing it a lot longer than I’ve been in Florida. In fact, your parents and grandparents have been doing it since before I was born.

I’m proud that after all these years we’ve found a new way to thank Smith and all of you for the decades of support.

We won’t stop thanking you in so many other ways—recognizing members as agriculturalists of the year, hosting a Farm Bureau appreciation dinner, day-to-day notes via email and text, or old-fashioned handshakes and face-to-face expressions of gratitude.

The Dinner of Distinction brought together hundreds of students, staff, donors, alumni, and partners together for an evening to celebrate the professional partnership that keeps Florida agriculture so strong.

Smith’s history reminds us, though, that a professional alliance between two organizations is built on personal friendships among the people doing the work.

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).

September FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

It was a big day in August 2021 at the Hawthorne Creek Creamery. For the first time, Kevin Lussier loaded a truck with Gouda and shipped it off to a major supermarket chain.

The people who mattered most were there. They included his wife and business partner, Shelby. There was his dad Matt, who had Kevin working cows from the time he was 9. And there was the friend, mentor, scientist and problem solver to whom he’s so often turned to help keep Alachua County’s last private commercial dairy afloat: UF/IFAS Extension agent Cindy Sanders.

Lussier has asked Sanders for help navigating the complex food safety rules he needs to follow to be a cheese maker. He asked her to help him demonstrate for county regulators that he was taking proper steps to protect the creek from which his business draws its name. He asked her about how to kill weeds and how long after spraying he should wait to harvest hay.

Usually, he just called her. Other times, she’d ride shotgun in Lussier’s 22-year-old Chevy Silverado, cruising a pasture and answering his questions about what forages to plant and when, where and how to seed the fields.

So it was meaningful to both of them that Sanders could be there for such an important moment. But it was a moment. As soon as the truck pulled away, Sanders returned to the primary purpose of her visit—to help Lussier become a better farmer and better leader.

This time she asked the questions: How do you market the cheeses? Will you expand into ice cream? How has your involvement in Farm Bureau helped you get started as dairy farmer?

The questions were designed not only to elicit his competency as a farmer, but to hone his ability as a leader to articulate what he does, and what Florida agriculture is all about, to a visitor. Sanders was there as a mock judge for the Florida Farm Bureau’s Achievement in Agriculture competition, which recognizes the state’s top young farmer for excelling as producer and leader.

Sanders and Lussier also have a record of working together as agriculture ambassadors. Lussier is the state and the Alachua County Young Farmers & Ranchers president. Sanders chairs the Alachua County Farm Bureau Women’s Committee.

They serve together on the county Farm Bureau board. Three years ago, dissatisfied with Farm-City Week programming, they helped organize an agriculture day at the Cade Museum in downtown Gainesville. Their plan was to show off local food to 200 non-farmers. More than 1,500 people showed up.

Lussier credits his father with helping him get started by sharing his land, barn and herd.

Lussier inherited from his dad another key element of the operation—the expertise of Sanders. From the time she became a county agent 21 years ago—when Lussier was 6 years old—Lussier’s father was calling her about forages and asking her to drive the pastures with him.

When it came time for Lussier to go into business, he had so much more information, thanks to the Internet, than his father ever did. That was a curse as much as a blessing, though. He needed information he could trust. Sanders had already established that trust through what at the time was 15 years of calls, emails, referrals and farm visits.

Sanders and Lussier got to visit with each other at the Florida Farm Bureau annual meeting in Orlando last October. She was in Orlando to see Lussier honored for winning the Achievement in Agriculture competition she had prepped him for.

Just like that day at the dairy when they celebrated the cheese shipment, Sanders had another reason to be there. On the strength of a nomination from the Alachua County Farm Bureau board, Sanders was honored as the Florida Farm Bureau Extension Professional of the Year.

They sat together at their respective ceremonies. Lussier’s parents were there, as was Shelby, who shared the honor with him. As the state winners, Kevin and Shelby got $500 and the keys to a new Ford F150.

Sanders hasn’t been a passenger in the new truck yet. It’s Lussier’s going-into-town-vehicle, and Sanders always comes to him. She’s just fine with riding shotgun in the Silverado.

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).

September FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

Matt and Kayla Gonzales are first generation ranchers with a dream to leave a legacy for their children. The two got their first taste of agriculture when they joined FFA in high school, which is also how they met. As their love for agriculture (and each other) grew, they  decided to attend Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Ga. Matt received his bachelor of science in diversified agriculture. After finishing her associates in animal science at ABAC, Kayla received her bachelor of science in animal science with a focus on animal food production from the University of Florida. Kayla plans to finish her masters in agronomy in the spring of 2023.

After graduation, the couple moved back to Florida to pursue agricultural careers. Kayla is the office and data manager at Fenco Farms and Matt is the beef division manager at Sparr. In addition to their full time jobs, the Gonzales’ started an agricultural consulting service in 2021 and beef cattle herd of their own in 2018.

Kayla and Matt first learned about Farm Bureau through their district field representative and were founding members of the Levy and Gilchrist County Young Farmers & Ranchers groups. They enjoy participating in activities like Ag in the Classroom and the peanut and blueberry festivals held in Levy County each year.

“Farm Bureau provides really great opportunities to learn about different commodities and meet new people,” said Matt. “These connections have offered us the opportunity to expand our network and knowledge of agriculture.”

As first generation college graduates and agriculturalists, Matt and Kayla’s dream is to leave a legacy for their ten month old son, John David.

“When they announced the theme I thought that was a really cool theme because it really does resonate with us,” said Kayla. “We have to be resilient because there are a lot of obstacles, trials and tribulations that come our way. Being rooted in resilience gives us the strength to continue to put our efforts to being successful in our farming and ranching operations.”

August FloridAgriculture eNewseltter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

It was a big day in August 2021 at the Hawthorne Creek Creamery. For the first time, Kevin Lussier loaded a truck with Gouda and shipped it off to a major supermarket chain.

The people who mattered most were there. They included his wife and business partner, Shelby. There was his dad Matt, who had Kevin working cows from the time he was 9. And there was the friend, mentor, scientist and problem solver to whom he’s so often turned to help keep Alachua County’s last private commercial dairy afloat: UF/IFAS Extension agent Cindy Sanders.

Lussier has asked Sanders for help navigating the complex food safety rules he needs to follow to be a cheese maker. He asked her to help him demonstrate for county regulators that he was taking proper steps to protect the creek from which his business draws its name. He asked her about how to kill weeds and how long after spraying he should wait to harvest hay.

Usually, he just called her. Other times, she’d ride shotgun in Lussier’s 22-year-old Chevy Silverado, cruising a pasture and answering his questions about what forages to plant and when, where and how to seed the fields.

So it was meaningful to both of them that Sanders could be there for such an important moment. But it was a moment. As soon as the truck pulled away, Sanders returned to the primary purpose of her visit—to help Lussier become a better farmer and better leader.

This time she asked the questions: How do you market the cheeses? Will you expand into ice cream? How has your involvement in Farm Bureau helped you get started as dairy farmer?

The questions were designed not only to elicit his competency as a farmer, but to hone his ability as a leader to articulate what he does, and what Florida agriculture is all about, to a visitor. Sanders was there as a mock judge for the Florida Farm Bureau’s Achievement in Agriculture competition, which recognizes the state’s top young farmer for excelling as producer and leader.

Sanders and Lussier also have a record of working together as agriculture ambassadors. Lussier is the state and the Alachua County Young Farmers & Ranchers president. Sanders chairs the Alachua County Farm Bureau Women’s Committee.

They serve together on the county Farm Bureau board. Three years ago, dissatisfied with Farm-City Week programming, they helped organize an agriculture day at the Cade Museum in downtown Gainesville. Their plan was to show off local food to 200 non-farmers. More than 1,500 people showed up.

Lussier credits his father with helping him get started by sharing his land, barn and herd.

Lussier inherited from his dad another key element of the operation—the expertise of Sanders. From the time she became a county agent 21 years ago—when Lussier was 6 years old—Lussier’s father was calling her about forages and asking her to drive the pastures with him.

When it came time for Lussier to go into business, he had so much more information, thanks to the Internet, than his father ever did. That was a curse as much as a blessing, though. He needed information he could trust. Sanders had already established that trust through what at the time was 15 years of calls, emails, referrals and farm visits.

Sanders and Lussier got to visit with each other at the Florida Farm Bureau annual meeting in Orlando last October. She was in Orlando to see Lussier honored for winning the Achievement in Agriculture competition she had prepped him for.

Just like that day at the dairy when they celebrated the cheese shipment, Sanders had another reason to be there. On the strength of a nomination from the Alachua County Farm Bureau board, Sanders was honored as the Florida Farm Bureau Extension Professional of the Year.

They sat together at their respective ceremonies. Lussier’s parents were there, as was Shelby, who shared the honor with him. As the state winners, Kevin and Shelby got $500 and the keys to a new Ford F150.

Sanders hasn’t been a passenger in the new truck yet. It’s Lussier’s going-into-town-vehicle, and Sanders always comes to him. She’s just fine with riding shotgun in the Silverado.

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).

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