Research

The faculty and staff at the Southern Research and Outreach Center (SROC) pride themselves on their ability to provide exemplary service, effective outreach and extension, and research programs that span the spectrum from basic to applied and from agricultural production to human health. The seven resident faculty members represent six Twin Cities campus departments: Agronomy and Plant Genetics, Animal Science, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, Horticultural Science, Plant Pathology and Soil, Water and Climate. Daily informal interaction, coupled with formal visioning and programmatic sessions, provides cross-disciplinary understanding, interdisciplinary collaborations and multidisciplinary approaches to developing viable solutions to enhance the value of the rural landscape now and into the future.

Research and outreach through recent years focused primarily on many aspects of enhancing crop and animal production efficiencies. While that focus remains today, it has expanded to include added values such as human disease prevention and therapy, bio-based products and renewable energy, environmental health, ecological service, and other opportunities for empowering the landscape in a viable and strong bio-based economy.

A fundamental philosophy that guides SROC research principles today is that land use and research programs must be properly balanced between food and value-added production systems, and integrated with enhanced economic and social values across the landscape. As an era of change with new challenges is ushered into today’s agricultural industry, stacking value on the landscape by developing multiple uses for plants and animals, while maintaining a focus on a balanced agricultural system, becomes socially and economically desirable. Hence, SROC faculty are actively engaged in programs across the spectrum, ranging from swine and dairy calf production systems, soil fertility, pest management, grain and vegetable production systems to nutraceuticals, biomass crops, development of processes for converting animal waste and plants to renewable energy, enhancing chemopreventive foods, using animals as delivery mechanisms for phytonutrients to humans, mitigating environmental issues and growing swine for harvesting cures for human disease.

View faculty research in the following areas: