Linking Arizona Farmers With Researchers: The Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture UA researchers and students use a customized drone to perform thermal imaging of a Yuma, Arizona, broccoli crop. This remote sensing will be used to ground-truth satellite data.
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he Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture (YCEDA) is a research center at the University of Arizona (UA) that links farmers, researchers, and students. Its mission is to identify the needs of Arizona farmers, find researchers to work on meeting those needs, fund them with money donated by the agricultural industry and other sources, and then diffuse the results of their research among the farmers. In this interview, YCEDA Executive Director Paul Brierley speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the exciting research his center is coordinating. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Paul Brierley: I grew up on a small farm in California, went to college, and became a computer scientist. I spent about 5 years in telecommunications research. Because I missed the rural lifestyle, I went back to production agriculture in Arizona in 1993. After about a dozen years, I ended up going to the Arizona Farm Bureau and working on grassroots issues advocacy. I got to know the state’s agriculture well. That led to my being selected as the first executive director of this center when it was started. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about YCEDA and its history.
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Joshua Dill: What is the relation between YCEDA and the university today? Paul Brierley: YCEDA is an organization within the university. I am a university employee and work directly for the vice president of agriculture, life and veterinary sciences, and cooperative extension. The way the industry partners with us is that individual investors commit to fund our center via tax-deductible donations to the University of Arizona Foundation. Eight donors and UA’s vice president for ag, life and veterinary sciences, and cooperative extension sit on YCEDA’s advisory council, which gives me some guidance on the issues it would like worked on. YCEDA does not do research itself. It tries to be a bridge that makes sure that research occurs on the issues that are important to our stakeholders. We get advice from our stakeholders, pull together researchers, try to get funding, and
PHOTO COURTESY OF YCEDA.
Paul Brierley: There was a new dean of the UA College of Agriculture who toured the state of Arizona to learn about its agriculture and saw that Yuma was a real gem, with worldclass agriculture, huge productivity, and a good relationship with the university. At the same time, the university and the cooperative extension were undergoing all sorts of budget cuts. His question was how the university could support this
industry at the needed level. He worked with the industry and came up with the idea of a public-private partnership. The industry agreed to fund the center if it was allowed some influence over research topics and if the center’s results were useful. That is how it worked out. The industry funds the center and sits on the advisory council. If the center provides good results that contribute to resolving the industry’s urgent issues, the industry will continue to fund it. In the last 4 years, we’ve gone from just me to five of us now. Our most recent hire, who came on last fall, is Stephanie Slinski, our associate director for applied research and development. She’s a PhD plant pathologist who understands the issues and the research networks. She’s really taken us to the next level of capability.
