TODAY’S FARM
We need more pharm hands
n The number of rural pharmacists has dropped in recent years, but the demand for their services hasn’t; the director of a program at the UI College of Medicine hopes to change that
By JEANNINE OTTO, Shaw Media AgriNews | jotto@shawmedia.com
ROCKFORD — Whether it’s prescribing antibiotics for an infection, drugs to ease pain after surgical procedures, lifesaving insulin for diabetes, or being a health-care provider for a rural community, rural pharmacists have always filled a unique role in the medical community.
But with changes in health care, health insurance and health-care funding, the number of independent, rural pharmacies and rural pharmacists has dwindled in the past few decades. The need for their services, however, remains.
The Rural Pharmacy Education Program, known as RPHARM, at the University of Illinois College of Medicine — with campuses in Chicago, Peoria and Rockford — is part of the college’s rural health professions program. Those programs include RMED, the Rural Medicine Program, and RNURSE, the Rural Nursing Program.
The RPHARM program prepares students to practice pharmacy in a rural setting and educates students about the unique challenges of rural health care.
Students in the RPHARM program either come from a rural background or are interested in practicing in a rural community after graduation. The RPHARM program started in 2010 and the first class of rural pharmacists graduated in 2014.
Dr. Heidi Olson is a practicing pharmacist and the director of the RPHARM program. She talked to AgriNews about the RPHARM program and the challenges that rural pharmacy and rural pharmacists face ...
Q: Why did the RPHARM program start?
The university started the RPHARM program hoping to provide rural pharmacists to not only Illinois, but to rural areas across the U.S. One of the reasons for starting RPHARM, especially when we opened the Rockford campus, was to have people from rural parts of the state be in the RPHARM program on the Rockford campus and then hopefully return to their rural communities when they graduated.
Q: What sets the RPHARM program apart from the standard pharmacy school program?
It is an add-on to the regular pharmacy curriculum. We don’t re-teach them anything they are already learning in the core curriculum. They get a lot on public-health concepts and community health. We want them to realize that, yes, you are going to be seeing individual patients, but as a health-care professional in a rural community, you are responsible for the overall health of the whole community.
Q: We know about retail pharmacy, but what other kinds of pharmacy jobs are there for RPHARM graduates?
I help teach one of the first-year courses, and within the first couple of weeks of class we have a panel of pharmacists from different types of pharmacy who come in and talk about their journey, what their jobs entail, what they love about their jobs, things they wish they could change. Right away, our RPHARM students see that there are 80 or 90 different types of pharmacy they can go into after they graduate.
PHARMACY cont’d to page 18
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TODAY’S FARM
Q: Years ago, every small town had its own pharmacy. Those have mostly disappeared. So, when we say “rural pharmacist,” where are the RPHARM graduates working?
I keep track of what our graduates are doing and where they are practicing. About 40% of our graduates are practicing in a community pharmacy, like a Walgreen’s, Walmart, CVS, Target. That also includes small, independent pharmacies. Another 40% are practicing in hospitals, critical access hospitals. About 12% are working for the government, like the VA, Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Prisons. We do have a decent number of graduates from RPHARM who are working in long-term care pharmacy, the pharmacists who are responsible for taking care of residents in nursing homes.
Q: Do small town rural pharmacies even exist anymore?
One of the biggest reasons that independent pharmacies are closing is because they are just not getting repayment from insurance companies at the same rate as the chain pharmacies. They can’t keep the doors open. A lot of our rural independent pharmacists are older. They are at the point where they may barely be able to keep the doors open and they are at the point where they could retire. A lot of them are staying working way past retirement age because they know that, if they leave, there’s no one to replace them. A lot of times, when they decide they just can’t do this anymore, they close because there is not anyone to keep that pharmacy open. That is happening in rural communities across the United States. The amount of pharmacies closing in rural communities is increasing, when you compare to urban areas, where the amount of pharmacies is increasing.
Q: Is working in an independent rural pharmacy still an option?
We have graduates who are working in independent community pharmacies and they are happy as clams. If you are really passionate about working in community pharmacy, you make your choices knowing what you are going into.
Q: Where do you recruit students for RPHARM?
We do workshops in the local area with 4-H kids to get the career in front of them. I attend the state and national FFA conventions. The college has a high school pharmacy camp and virtual sessions. Once they get into undergraduate, we have a program called Summer Pharmacy Institute, which is a weeklong immersion
where they come to campus and they learn about different types of pharmacy and do lots of hands-on activities.
Q: What students would be interested in pharmacy as a career?
From a really young age, we say to children and young people “Oh, you could be a doctor,” or “You should be a nurse.” Pharmacist just isn’t one of those things that people are aware of. I tell them: “Hey, guess what, with all of that science and math that you are really good at and you really love, you could be a pharmacist.”
That’s a viable option if you want to be in health care, but you don’t want to be a doctor or a nurse. It’s something that, if you want to serve your community, you can come back and serve your community as a pharmacist. I like to say that if you can handle the coursework, there is a type of pharmacy that you are going to find that is right for you, whether that is research or community pharmacy or you want to work in an emergency room or oncology or pediatrics. There is a pharmacy practice area that is going to fit you really well. You just have to have the patience to figure out what that is going to be.
Q: How has enrollment been in the pharmacy programs in general and the RPHARM program, in particular?
For pharmacy in general, enrollment is down significantly. Many, many pharmacy schools are not able to fill their classes because the class size is getting smaller. Our standard class size used to be 40 students. So, it wasn’t a stretch to find students in that group who were interested in RPHARM. Our RPHARM enrollment has decreased as our class size has gone down. I don’t know if that is because we are missing those rural communities and telling the youth in rural communities that pharmacy is an option and that there are pharmacy schools you can go to that don’t require you to live in an urban area.
Q: Does a student have to have four years of college to be a pharmacist or to enter pharmacy school?
Typically, pharmacy students need at least two years of college before they can get into pharmacy school. They don’t have to have a bachelor’s degree. Some do, but it’s not a requirement. Pharmacy school is four years. Ideally, students join the RPHARM program during their first year of pharmacy school because the RPHARM program is a four-year curriculum. We do set it up so that if someone decides this is what I want to do, toward the end of their first year or the beginning of their second year, they can join RPHARM and we can get them caught up.
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TODAY’S FARM
Farming isn’t always down to earth
Farmers could benefit from data that NASA’s eyes in the sky collects
By HANNAH SPANGLER FarmWeek
The ag community working with NASA might seem like science fiction, but it’s not — it’s just science, and a new program aims to show the public that the agency isn’t just putting down roots in space, but on Earth too.
During the inaugural NASA Acres Symposium at the University of Illinois in April, farmers, researchers and other stakeholders learned more about the program.
“When you think about NASA, you think about launching rockets or launching satellites, but one of the biggest NASA programs is Earth Science,” said Kaiyu Guan, founder of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at U of I.
In March 2023, NASA Acres was established to bridge the gap between space and farms. The pro-
gram aims to strengthen U.S. agriculture by answering some of the most pressing challenges facing the industry.
NASA Acres works with agriculturalists throughout the U.S. to see how NASA’s resources can be used to help farmers.
Guan, who is also the chief scientist for NASA Acres, said that date from the satellite Earth Observation can be used to track and predict the impacts of weather and climate, pest damage and soil tillage.
NASA satellite data can also be used to monitor nutrient loss and deficiencies and help farmers understand the impacts of practices such as planting cover crops.
“We’ve been extensively working on crop nitrogen concentration,” Guan told FarmWeek. “We’ve started to have confidence that we can sense how much nitrogen has been absorbed by crops.”
Guan said that by integrating all available data, farmers can determine optimal management practices for rotation patterns, cover crop adoption and tillage methods. “This can help the whole system reduce nitrogen loss,” he said.
Alyssa Whitcraft, NASA Acres executive director and associate research professor at the University of Maryland, said although NASA has been involved with agriculture since the 1970s, there has been a
Do I Smell a Problem?
disconnect between the data and the farmer.
But throughout the past decade, Whitcraft said NASA has focused more on connecting with farmers to find the data that helps them.
Whitcraft said one of the main objectives of the program is to ensure NASA Acres’ data can be integrated into some of the tools farmers already use.
More than 30 agriculture and research groups, including Illinois Farm Bureau and U of I, are helping the program achieve this goal.
“Whether farmers use a preferred system for visualization when they’re inside their combine or their sprayer, we would like our data and our tools to enrich that,” Whitcraft said.
The next step is to inform farmers that they can access findings, data and tools and continue to provide their input through NASAacres.org.
“We know that success is predicated on farmer involvement,” Whitcraft said. “Our mission, paid for by public dollars, is to support farmers in having a productive, sustainable and resilient system to support their rural communities for decades and generations to come.”
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association.
For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
TODAY’S FARM
The forecast for AI? Still a little cloudy
Tech can help growers, but they shouldn’t bet the farm on it just yet
By RHIANNON BRANCH FarmWeek
Thanks to platforms such as ChatGPT, farmers have access to artificial intelligence (AI) at their fingertips. While there are advantages to this new technology, it could pay off to tap into a more reliable source when it comes to factors that influence important management decisions.
Take the weather for example. It plays a role in numerous aspects of the farm, including planting dates, pest management and even marketing plans. Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford told FarmWeek while AI is helping scientists become more efficient in analyzing climate data, it isn’t as simple as a farmer asking ChatGPT when to plant.
AI cont’d to page 21
TODAY’S FARM
“You can do that. It’ll give you an answer. And it thinks the answer is right,” Ford said. “But it probably won’t be.”
University of Illinois Extension recently hosted workshops in Marion, Sangamon and Winnebago counties to educate participants about online climate tools and provide hands-on instruction for ag-related uses.
Duane Friend, University of Illinois climate specialist, told FarmWeek many in the ag industry are unaware of the tools available to them.
“I think a lot of times when they hear the term ‘climate tools,’ they think we’re talking about tools that will tell them what’s going on 10 years from now,” he said. “All of these things we’re talking about can be done within this growing season.”
The workshop took a deep dive into easily accessible and free online tools such as drought and freeze risk maps from Purdue University and soil temperature maps and growing degree day calculators from the Illinois State Water Survey.
“These tools are better refined than ChatGPT is,” Ford said. “We have climate scientists who have experience working with data who are cultivating these tools, who are making it so that it’s pulling in the best information. Whereas right now our AI tools just grab everything off the internet, and anything that looks relevant based on the algorithm is thrown in. So, there’s a lot of quality control that’s needed and happening behind the scenes
Putting this kind of power into the hands of people that don’t know how to use it may allow them to draw conclusions based upon its output that are just not founded in real science or real understanding. Some folks might make a story up that is based off of their analysis using something like ChatGPT that actually has no fundamental reason to happen.
Eric Snodgrass,
Senior Science Fellow for Nutrient Ag Solutions
with these tools.”
During the Grain and Feed Association of Illinois’ annual convention in February, Senior Science Fellow for Nutrient Ag Solutions Eric Snodgrass echoed that growers need to be savvy consumers of artificial intelligence in the climate space.
“Putting this kind of power into the hands of people who don’t know how to use it may allow them to draw conclusions based upon its output that are just not founded in real science or real understanding,” he told FarmWeek. “Some folks might make a story up that is based off of their analysis using something like ChatGPT that actually has no fundamental reason to happen.”
Snodgrass urges growers not to abandon institutional knowledge.
“If you are already working with someone who historically has done a great job helping you market a crop, continue to lean heavily on those people,” he said. “Then ask them if they are using ChatGPT and AI to enhance their abilities and does it make sense what they’re doing?”
Nonetheless, Snodgrass and Ford both expressed excitement about how AI is revolutionizing weather prediction techniques by processing data faster.
“You can do these machine learning techniques on the processing power of a cellphone versus a supercomputer,” Snodgrass said. “So, this is going to be one area that’s going to be a major beneficiary of AI.”
Ford expects to see expansion of AI-supported weather foresting in the next decade.
“Now what we’re seeing is that if people are using a long enough and good enough historical data record, they can train AI-based models and get similar kinds of forecast scores as the big physics-based models,” he said.
But for now, he recommends producers confide in proven maps, calculators and other tools backed by trusted sources. Ford and Friend collected feedback from the climate tools workshops that they plan to incorporate when considering new and updated resources to help farmers improve their bottom line.
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association.
For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
TODAY’S FARM
Getting crops to change their spots
Genetic research could give farmers something other than fungicide to battle tar spot
By RHIANNON BRANCH FarmWeek
Tar spot was first discovered in the U.S. in 2015, making this the 10th season farmers and researchers have battled the corn disease.
In the beginning, there were a lot of unknowns, Jim Donnelly, technical agronomist with the Lee County-based DeKalb/Asgrow, told the RFD Radio Network
“One thing that we’ve learned and researched is that fungicides work. They work very well and especially some of the newer fungicides with multiple modes of action,” Donnelly said.
Fast forward to today, Bayer researchers can artificially inoculate tar spot in field test plots, which will advance research in both crop protection and genetic tolerance.
“We need the disease in our trials so that we know which ones are good and which ones are bad and to date it’s been hard to get that consistent disease level,” he said.
“With this we can consistently deliver it where we want it and that essentially speeds up our ability to characterize and deliver new products to the market.”
He said while there is good potential for genetic tolerance, farmers are still reliant on fungicides.
“If we find ourselves in very heavy pressure, there
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really isn’t the level of resistance out there that we need that allows us to not have to spray.”
But this development is a step in the right direction.
“I think that it will allow us to select products that are close to commercial availability and allow us to prioritize those,” he said. “Then, ultimately, the long-term benefit is developing products earlier on in the pipeline, picking out that parent germplasm that’s really strong and being able to work with that all the way through our pipeline so that we have even better tolerance several years out.”
He said genetic tools for tar spot management are in the works. “Some of them are a lot closer than others; there are genetic tools and better products with better tolerance that will be coming soon to the market and some very soon,” he said.
Tar spot is a big deal some years, but isn’t an annual problem, he said, so researchers aren’t putting all their eggs in one basket.
“We want to make sure that we’re not just focusing on one thing, and we don’t get tunnel vision,” he said. “We have to remember several other things that are important to corn farmers when we’re making product selections.”
This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association. For more food and farming news, visit FarmWeekNow.com.
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TODAY’S FARM
The new Illinois FFA officers take the stage at the 96th Illinois FFA State Convention.
From left: Trenton Payne, president; Brody Will, vice president; Sidney Stiers, reporter; Owen Torrance, secretary; and Emma Dinges, treasurer.
photo/Martha Blum
Amboy FFA member looks forward to ‘incredible experience’
Dinges among officers elected at state convention
By MARTHA BLUM mblum@shawmedia.com
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Five new officers elected by the delegates during the 96th Illinois FFA State Convention will be traveling throughout the state during the upcoming year, engaging with members to help inspire them to achieve their goals — and among them will be a member of the Amboy FFA.
Emma Dinges was elected Treasurers at the convention, held June 11-13 in Springfield.
Dinges is excited about the upcoming year.
“This is insane — I feel like I’m waiting for it to hit me,” said the daughter of Nick and Stacey Dinges. “I’m excited to meet members and help them achieve big things.”
Dinges said she heard stories about being a state officer from her mom.
“But during chapter visits as a section president, I realized I could impact FFA members and that would be an incredible experience,” the Amboy FFA member said. “I want to show FFA
members they can achieve their goals and grow in this organization.”
Advised by Joe Heavner, Dinges raises, breeds and sells pygmy goats and myotonic or fainting goats.
“I show market lambs during the summer,” she said. “And I have a food project where I scoop ice cream at the Woodhaven Lakes campground.”
Following her officer year, the FFA treasurer will attend Iowa State University to major in animal science and prevet, with the goal to become a large animal veterinarian.
“I’ve always had a love for animals and I’ve raised a lot of different animals,” she said. “I love helping others and I love animals so being a veterinarian is perfect because you help others by helping animals.”
Other FFA officers elected at the convention were: President Trenton Payne, a member of the Olney FFA Chapter; Vice President Brody Will, from the Dieterich FFA Chapter; Reporter Sidney Stiers of the Williamsfield FFA Chapter; and Secretary Owen Torrance, of the West Prairie FFA.
MORE ABOUT EMMA
Editor’s note: Below is a Q&A that ran in the Gazette and Telegraph on Jan. 19, when Emma was named Amboy High School’s January Student of the Month.
AMBOY — Emma Dinges, a senior, is Amboy High School’s January Student of the Month. The daughter of Stacey and Nick Dinges, she has a brother, Jake. What class do you find really engaging and why?
One class I find very engaging is calculus. It is taught by Mrs. Cynthia Carlson, and has nine students who are all seniors. I really enjoy this class because Mrs. Carlson is a very engaging teacher and has fun phrases that help us memorize things. It’s also a plus that we get snacks. I love calculus because Mrs. Carlson has helped me better understand math, which has been incredibly useful to me now and will be in the future.
Dinges
What are your career and post-graduation plans? What school(s) or other instruction, travel or endeavors do you have planned?
After high school, I plan to attend Iowa State in the fall to major in animal science/pre-vet.
What are your two favorite extracurricular, volunteer or community activities you participate in?
My two favorite activities that I participate in are FFA and 4-H. FFA has taught me so much in the four years I have been involved. I have learned many personal and professional skills that I will be able to take with me into my next stage of life. 4-H has also been a big part of my life, and I have been a member since I was 6. 4-H has really fueled my passion for livestock and has helped me realize my love for animals and veterinary medicine. Both of these organizations hold a special place in my heart, and I will keep these lessons forever.
AgriNews