Interview: Improving Inland PNW Year By Year With CBARC

This June, PNW Ag went to the OSU and USDA-ARS Field Day at the Pendleton Station. In this interview, we talked with Francisco Calderon, director of Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center.

Francisco Calderon: Today is kind of our biggest day of the year because we are lucky enough that we are visited by dozens and hundreds of growers and stakeholders, and they come because they are eager to see what kind of research results we're getting. Our main focus in terms of the research team is working on dryland wheat and we have a really great and diverse team of scientists both on the Oregon State University side and on the USDA side addressing all kinds of questions pertaining to wheat production. Everything from water use, diseases, wheat quality, genetics, wheat variety trials, and soil fertility, soil health, plant physiology.  I guess the one thing that I would like to convey to the public is that you have right here in Eastern Oregon a really good resource for studying and finding solutions that affect wheat production in the region, not just Oregon, but in the tri-state region and the inland Pacific Northwest.

PNW Ag: How long have you been putting these tours on?

Francisco Calderon: You know, that's a great question. I know that this station in Pendleton has been around since 1928, right? And I want to imagine that they were having field days from the get-go, right? Because that's our bread and butter and how we communicate our results to the stakeholders.  I would imagine that we've had field days since the first year, so that amounts to a long track record of field days. And to tell you the truth, we almost need to, right? Because it's the day that we use to showcase our research to the local folk and our supporters. You know, going beyond the usual ways to communicate science, like journal articles, etc., the nice thing about this venue is that we are face-to-face. People come up to us, we give our presentations, and then we get to socialize and network and mingle.  I don't know that we could ever do away with a field day. In fact, it's my favorite day of the year because I can just relax and then just visit with everybody. So it's a really positive thing for everybody.

PNW Ag: It's very nice to come out and be able to see everything you did and ask questions, and not have to read some of the science. When you guys give presentations, you feel like you're speaking to everyone so they can understand it, even if they're not a wheat person.

Francisco Calderon: That's very true.It's important to understand that a lot of the problems that we are addressing here with our research, it's an advancing field of science, right? So there's no definite answers yet. Perhaps one of the things that get communicated here very effectively is what we know, but also what we don't know, which you don't often get from a short magazine article, etc. It becomes more of a conversation about where the gaps in knowledge are. It's very useful for the scientists, too, because growers will walk to us and tell us about what's going on in their fields, which might be something we're not familiar with. And we learn as much from the growers as the growers learn from us. So it's kind of this symbiosis where we grow together and we advance the field together.

PNW Ag: So the growers here then kind of potentially help direct you in what they need as far as research.

Francisco Calderon: Yeah, this station more than anywhere else. So I'm kind of an older senior level scientist, right? I've worked at many places. And this place is special because our mission is fairly simple. We serve the wheat growers. We are in constant communication with our wheat growers. And our research, while we do a lot of basic research, we also have to have applied research, find solutions. So, for example, today we were talking about big problems like soil acidification, residual management, cereal variety breeding, and all that stuff. And that's all 100% driven by the wheat growers through the coordinated effort from the Oregon Wheat Growers League, because they really galvanize the growers. And they are great for the station, too, because of their advocacy. So they make sure that as much as they can, we stay well funded and on point to addressing the things that they need. Which, to me, makes the job a lot more fun because we go home every night knowing that we try to help. Day by day, maybe we don't do much, but year by year, things are getting solved. It's a really close partnership with the local growers and beyond the growers, just the local communities, because as you know, northeast Oregon and southeast Washington, it's wheat country, and the local economies need healthy wheat production. This station becomes central to the local society and economy.