# [Partners #13 - 1890 Land-Grant Universities]{.underline}

Web Script, 8/1/05

**Announcer**

This time on Partners, it's the 1890 universities of America's
land-grant system...

From Alabama A&Ms unique watershed project on the Flint River...

To Prairie View A&Ms 4-H efforts in creating the next generation of
entrepreneurs...

To North Carolina A&T's cutting-edge work with farm field biosensors...

These historically black colleges and universities are shaping the
future of American agriculture.

**Juan Williams**

*These are institutions that are willing to serve people - to allow
people, who otherwise might be denied education, accessibility to that
education.*

**Announcer**

Number range CHAPTERWelcome to Partners! In the next half-hour, we'll
travel the nation and see breakthrough work in research, education and
Extension.

That's what CSREES is all about - helping universities generate valuable
knowledge for those who need it and educating our next generation of
Americans. And now, it's time for Partners!

**Narrator**

In the terror and chaos of America's civil war, a surprising revolution
in higher education began. In 1862, Congress passed legislation called
the Morrill Act. It granted each state public lands to help establish
and endow - in the words of Vermont congressman Justin Smith Morrill -
"colleges for the benefit of agriculture and Mechanic Arts".

These institutions of higher learning came to be known as land-grant
schools and the Morrill Act was responsible for laying the foundation
for public education through a national system of state colleges and
universities. Its intent was to provide education to American children
who could never hope to attend private schools. But in post-Civil War
America, the system did not benefit all.

**Juan Williams**

*It doesn't initially benefit the freed slaves because the schools that
are established are segregationist schools and only whites attend those
schools. So while blacks might have thought they were going to benefit,
it was the whites, and in specific, working class-lower class whites who
benefit from the establishment of these schools that made higher
education more accessible.* *There was only one school created to serve
the freed slaves, the blacks, and that was Alcorn State in Mississippi.*

*Then you really see that the majority of the schools, the land-grant
schools, are servicing a white population and there has to be a second
Morrill Act and that comes in 1890.*

**Narrator**

Since African Americans were denied admission to the 1862 land-grants,
Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1890. That resulted in additional
land-grant colleges located primarily in the South.

**Juan Williams**

*What you see there is that 18 historically black colleges and
universities are created with the passage of the second act -- which is
really is an attempt to address a remedy- the failings of the first
Morrill Act.*

**Thelma Thompson**

*When they were founded with the focus on agriculture, people assumed
tractors and hoes and land. But nowadays, agriculture has become
high-tech. We are involved in robotics. We are involved in research, in
food science. We are involved in issues of health. We are involved in
environmental science.* *It's not education in a vacuum. It's education
with a purpose -- a national purpose in mind.*

**Narrator**

In the next half hour, Partners explores the efforts of these unique
universities. And with funding from the Cooperative State Research,
Education and Extension Service, the 1890 land-grant schools are making
a difference in communities across the country.

**Narrator**

Today, this group is preparing for a trip on the Flint River. The
waterway runs through scenic Northeast Alabama and the bustling city of
Huntsville.

These folks are members of the Flint River Conservation Association.
Their mission is to safeguard these waters and its valuable watershed,
the surrounding lands that form the local drainage area.

**Susan Weber**

*The Flint is a wonderful river. I like it because it is so close, It is
a wilderness area close to an urban site. We actually get most of our
drinking water from this river.*

**Narrator**

Susan Weber is the association's special projects chairman. At her day
job, she's the city ecologist for Huntsville.

Susan Weber

*We had a study done and NASA has said that by 2020, the county of
Madison will be at 50% build-out which is going to be disastrous for
water quality of all our streams in Madison County, the Flint River
being the largest.*

**Narrator**

While the group enjoys the journey today, their work is never really far
away. Picking up trash is an expected part of the trip, a duty they
practice in mass during their annual river clean-up.

**Susan Weber**

*Our mission is to improve the quality of the Flint River. But also in
more of a large picture, we're trying to make people more & more aware
of our own roles in non-point source pollution. We all have a role in
that. But we are seeing some impacts from agriculture and from
development-mostly in the form of sediment.*

*Where people are not doing no-till farming and where we are getting new
developments that aren't following best management practices, we do have
a serious problem with sediment. And along with the sediment, we get
heavy metals and chemicals that are attached to the clay particles.*

**Narrator**

It is the unseen, non-point source pollution that is currently the
biggest threat to the Flint's future. To get a handle on the current
state of the Flint, Dr. Teferi Tsegaye from Alabama A&M University, the
1890 land-grant school in Huntsville, is monitoring the river's water
quality. He and his staff have placed remote sensing stations in aquatic
environments throughout the watershed. Today, however, Teferi and his
students are gathering data with a hand held device.

This tube, called a sonde, is carefully submerged into the Flint. Inside
are sensors that measure a number of factors including temperature,
dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and chlorophyll.

Teferi-*What's the PH?*

Carnita-*Seven-point-six.*

**Teferi Tsegaye**

*Part of my job is to train students, especially African American
students.*

*Besides USGS, no one is monitoring the water quality in the Flint River
watershed. In general, we see a lot of pollution in this watershed. The
nutrient level is low, relatively, in the last two years when we did
this research. But there are some high levels of lead and other heavy
metals. You see high levels of fecal coli form*.

**Susan Weber**

*His research, and what we've gotten from the USGS and the TVA and from
research from our own water monitors, we have an idea where the problem
areas are and what needs to be done about them. And we've established
all this information in the Flint River Water Management Plan.*

**Narrator**

Teferi and crew return to the Alabama A&M campus. At the labs, the data
gathered from the Flint is downloaded into a computer. This is the home
of the Center for Hydrology, Soil Climatology and Remote Sensing. The
staff here is working on a number of projects beyond the Flint River.

**Teferi Tsegaye**

*Remote sensing will allow you to see things where you could not see
before.*

*If there is drought, we can clearly see where the drought is
originating. And we can quickly take some action. By estimating soil
moisture where it is and how much it is in the soil, that will allow us
when to irrigate a field or when, you know, to drain a field.*

*We are unique because we are the only African American institution
advancing the soil moisture work in this field. So that makes Alabama
A&M unique and our center unique. I'm getting good support from CSREES
in terms of getting additional grants to continue this research.*

*The farmers can benefit how to do the precision farming. That means
that they can precisely apply chemicals, precisely apply water or
irrigate a field. That means that they are going to cut down their
costs.*

**Narrator**

One of those farmers benefiting from Alabama A&M's research efforts is
David Hodges. He runs a farm in Guntersville, some 40 miles away from
campus.

**David Hodges**

*Environmental rules and regulations have come into play more prevalent
than they were in the past. We're trying to be good stewards here of the
land. And with those challenges here, it requires a lot more day to day
management and a lot more tweaking of operational decisions.*

**Narrator**

To help David and other area farmers, Teferi and staff have installed
weather stations in five counties in Alabama and three in Tennessee.
This one here is actually located on Hodges' farmland. The system,
called Alabama Mesonet, collects data on soil moisture, air & soil
temperature, rainfall and wind & speed direction. USDA, the Natural
Resource Conservation Service National Water and Climate Center and NASA
have partnered with Alabama A&M in the project. Continuous data,
recorded at 15-minute intervals, gives farmers valuable *local*
environmental information.

**David Hodges**

*Huntsville, Alabama has some great weather stations. But they are in
Huntsville, Alabama with 2 mountains between us. And we also have a
lake. We may get an inch of rain here and Huntsville may be high and
dry. So by having a weather station here located on this farm, we're
able to get exact data and an exact time. Without it, it's a hit or
miss. With this data, we have our soil temperature-it's right to plant.
We have our moisture-it's dry enough to get into the field. It takes a
lot of the guess work out.*

*Without institutions like A&M.... the new technologies would never be
able to make it to the farm.*

**Narrator**

Back on the Flint, the group is finishing the last of the day's cleanup.
Alabama A&M's remote sensing technology will help them plan for proper
watershed development in the future. For Teferi Tsegaye, his work has
just begun -- on the Flint River, and on the weather station project.

**Teferi Tsegaye**

*This is a challenge.... Everyday we are facing new things. I'm
ambitious. I'm trying to expand this network of weather stations
throughout the state. So I'm hoping with support from USDA and other
agencies that this can happen and we can reach other people in the state
of Alabama.*

**Announcer**

Tuskegee University, an 1890 land-grant, started an agricultural
experiment station in 1897. Its director? Dr. George Washington Carver.

**Samantha Pimpedly**

*Our business, Arcade Stop, has been going on for about 2 years already.
We made some pretty good money*

*Hi! Welcome to Arcade Stop. We have plenty of games...*

**Narrator**

Samantha Pimpedly attends Horace Mann Junior High School. She and her
partners have started a business called Arcade Stop. Students can choose
from a number of video games and, for a fee, play them on the game
consoles.

**Samantha Pimpedly**

*Our first step was thinking of like how many consoles do we need and
what type of games people would be interested in and what age group we
would like to attract. I learned partnership and how to run a business
and the targeting and everything. It was great.*

**Jonell Westerberg**

*We're trying to teach them how to work cooperatively together, but they
don't know the importance of it being a team member. And when they get
into the business world now, everything now is a team. They've learned
how to work out problems. Problem solving-lots of problem solving.*

*Patrice has been there for us the whole 5 years. She's helped us with
our materials. She's helped us by training. We got the computers that we
were able to use in our business plans.*

**Narrator**

Patrice Barnes heads the 4-H Youth Development Program in San Antonio
for Prairie View A&M University, Texas's 1890 land-grant school.

Since 1998, she has focused on T-Teems, the Texas Teens Exploring
Entrepreneurial Minds project. In the past five years, T-Teems has
reached over 1000 students in inner-city schools. Annually, the young
entrepreneurs strut their stuff at the 4-H Youth Trade Show. Here they
set up booths, sell products and services, and are awarded prizes.

**Patrice Barnes**

*T-Teems offers the kids a positive outlook on life from what they're
accustomed to in their poverty stricken neighborhoods. It provides with
another avenue, another chance, another positive door they can open and
also shows them a way to make money in a positive way.* *The students
that we work with... they are ethnic students... the Hispanic and black
students.*

*They come from economically challenged neighborhoods and some of them
live in what we know as the projects. Some live with their aunts or
uncles. Neighborhoods are really poor... you may see graffiti on the
walls or you may see kids in gangs and those kinds of things.*

**Narrator**

T-Teems businesses are as diverse as the project's participants. They
range from hair braiding to lawn care, from t-shirt shops to candle
making. In the process, the kids learn fundamental business skills of
organization, marketing, and economics. One recent project was started
by two students from Sam Houston High School.

**Justin Lowery**

*The name of our business is Jus-Wes-Lo. It's a card business. We just
like trading cards with our friends and stuff. So we just decided to
make a business out of it. This is our business plan right here. We have
company name. Our benefits is just having fun and our products. And our
target is young people and old sports fans. We just had a lot of fun,
just us being together. It's always a lot of fun so. Sometimes he gets
on my nerves, but it's all right though.*

**Patrice Barnes**

*I see them walking away with self-esteem, a knowledge about what they
had no clue of. I see them gaining reading skills, organizational
skills, management skills. And these are skills that they learned
managing their own businesses, but these are also skills that they can
take into their future careers and their lives.*

*There's one student in particular, and his name is Clifford Jefferson.
He was a very shy student, had a monotone voice, always had his head
down when I saw him. It was about three years into the program that I
got a chance to observe him being interviewed by Channel 9 News here in
San Antonio at one of the trade show events.*

*If you could see him. He was just holding his hand in his pocket. He
had a nice suit on. He was talking to the newscaster with so much
confidence. To see a child go from one area and to develop him to
something you could not possibly imagine, is really worthwhile.*

**Announcer**

Since CSREES began in 1994, the agency has granted nearly one-billion
dollars to the 1890 Land-Grant universities.

**Steeve Pomerleau**

*The Delta country is a beautiful land in a natural state. We have a lot
of water. It's a flat land. We don't see a lot of mountains but we have
a lot of river and lakes where we can do a lot of hunting and fishing.
Fishing is really part of the culture here in Arkansas. We also have a
lot of agriculture-cotton...rice...soybeans, corn*

**Narrator**

Steeve Pomerleau is a research assistant with the University of
Arkansas-Pine Bluff or UAPB. Most of his time in spent in the field
working on the 1890 land-grant's bait fish verification program. The
project's goal is to verify the recommendations for effective
aquaculture based on the university's research findings.

**Steeve Pomerleau**

*Most of the research conducted at UAPB is done in small research ponds
of about a tenth or quarter acres as opposed to commercial farms which
are over ten acres. So we want to apply the results of the research
conducted at the university, and apply those results to commercial scale
ponds.*

**Narrator**

One of the producers that Steeve is working with is Harold Saul, a
second generation fish farmer. Together, they have tackled some
difficult problems, helping Harold stay profitable in the competitive
world of bait fish production.

**Harold Saul**

*Looks like fifty!*

**Steeve Pomerleau**

*I love the personal interaction with the farmers and really being able
to help farmers and keeping them in business. This is all what it's
about.*

**Harold Saul**

*What they've done for us is to take out a lot of the guesswork. With
the verification program, what they've done-they've got us more
accuracy. Coming up with better feeds, better formulas for feeds for us
to feed our fish, and grow our fish more economically. Naturally, if we
can get more production out of less feed-the better.*

*They are the only research center in Arkansas that we can get a
verification on our fish to be safe to ship out of state. And if we
can't ship out of state, we're out of business. It's that simple.*

**Narrator**

The bait fish verification program that Harold and others are involved
with is based on the work of Nathan Stone and others at UAPB. The team
has done extensive research with a fish called the Golden Shiner. Nathan
is now turning his attention to the Rosy Red minnow.

**Nathan Stone**

*The rosy reds are an orange color with little pinky tones to them. They
have a white to a silvery underbelly. We'd like to have nutritionally
sound brooders and then that would transfer into larger eggs, harder
quality eggs and better fry*. *A fry is the little baby fish, the one
that just hatches from the egg.*

*We're hoping that it will reduce their costs and make it more
efficient. The spawning-rearing pond method-you get a mix of sizes and
it's fairly inefficient. With a jar-hatching, we can turn out even
aged-fish that go into the feeder market or be a lot more predictable
for producers.*

**Narrator**

For some, this exceptional effort may appear disproportionate for simply
meeting the leisurely needs of Arkansas's anglers. But the economic
impact goes way beyond the fish farms and riverbanks of the state.

**Nathan Stone**

*Arkansas is the leading producer of farm-raised bait fish in the United
States - about \$23 million dollars by the census of aquaculture. But
there's a multiplier effect of 6-7 fold here in the local community. It
creates a lot of jobs. The feeds that go into baitfish like soybean meal
and cottonseed meal are products that are raised here in Arkansas. And
of course there's a 10-15 fold economic multiplier when you go to retail
markets. So it generates a lot of income.*

*There's been very fast adoption of the practices from our research
recommendations. And also the farms are very progressive. And so some of
the yields and some of the survivals have been excellent and we really
depend on USDA and CSREES for the funding and the research support. It's
matched by state dollars here in Arkansas.* **A***nd that's really
enabled us to support our stakeholders of fish farmers here in Arkansas.
It's really what the purpose of a land-grant is and that's what we're
doing.*

**Announcer**

In addition to the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, these 1890
land-grants have active aquaculture research centers.

**Mohamed Ahmedna**

*Salmonella was our focus along with another bacteria. Those 2 are
food-borne bacteria commonly found in poultry. And North Carolina is a
major poultry producer in the nation.*

**Narrator**

Mohamed Ahmedna is a food scientist at North Carolina A&T State
University. He and his research team are working on ways to detect
contamination early so that the public can avoid food-borne illness.

And the stakes are high. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
has estimated that salmonella infections are responsible for nearly 1.5
million illnesses annually. This has resulted in more than 16,000
hospitalizations and nearly 600 deaths. The economic repercussions are
in the billions of dollars due to lost productivity.

North Carolina A&T was well positioned to work with the poultry industry
to solve this problem, considering the university's long history helping
local farmers. Speed through technology might just prove to be the
answer.

**Mohamed Ahmedna**

*In short, a biosensor is basically a device that detects biological
organisms such as salmonella or any other bacteria - living things. The
biosensors have the speed that you don't have with traditional methods.
Speed is an issue and also portability and cost.*

**Narrator**

This instrumentation may look simple, but tests to date, have shown that
it can rapidly detect salmonella. Currently, industry methods for
food-borne bacteria detection can take several days. This biosensor
unit, once refined, may deliver results in just a few hours.

**Mohamed Ahmedna**

*The payoff for consumers is a safer food supply because of early
detection.*

*CSREES has been instrumental in getting this line of research going. We
have gotten a grant that started this research. Our ultimate aim is to
have it licensed to a company. The university has filed for a patent for
the technology. And we have had some interest from a couple of
companies.*

**Narrator**

In the meantime, Mohamed and his staff are looking at other aspects of
biosensor technology that may have impact far beyond the poultry farm.

**John Sabella**

*The work that Mohamed is doing is looking at pathogens and other kinds
of disease organisms that may affect our food supply and other kinds of
projects related to primarily minority farm workers and their health
concerns. It's geared to populations that have been underserved and
their health & safety concerns have often not been considered enough...
In that sense, it's extremely important.*

**Narrator**

It is here at a field station of the North Carolina Agromedicine
Institute that Mohamed plans to test remote biosensors in actual farm
field conditions. This instrument platform, now being tested by the
Institute, will allow for real-time transmission of data through GPS
satellite communications. It is self-sufficient with all instrumentation
being powered by batteries charged by the sun. And, it has potential for
agro-terrorism applications.

**John Sabella**

*They're working a lot on... making sure our food supply is safe,
non-contaminated either from an induced terrorist activity or from
natural pathogens that can occur.*

**Narrator**

Ten miles away at the Institute's office center, the data is received
real time. Mostly weather conditions are now being transmitted. But when
North Carolina A&T's biosensors are added to the platform, critical
biological detection will also be available.

**John Sabella**

*What the machine now is ready for is real life applications for either
researchers like Mohamed to utilize in their research, or for commercial
or government applications in the field.*

**Mohamed Ahmedna**

*Your happy day is the day where you feel like, "yes, I think I'm on to
something". And hopefully that's where I'm at right now. I feel that our
job as scientists is to give back to the community and play a role in
making the lives of our citizens better.*

**Narrator**

From remote sensing research at Alabama A&M....

To youth entrepreneur programs of Prairie View A&M...

From the aquaculture endeavors at the University of Arkansas-Pine
Bluff...

To food safety experiments at North Carolina A&T...

1890 institutions are making their mark across the country. And CSREES
is determined to continue support of these historically black colleges
and universities.

**Announcer**

On the next Partners, it's the National Research Initiative. In
California, UC-Davis scientists are unlocking the secrets of wheat by
mapping its complex genomes. It's vital information that promises
benefits for both farmers and consumers. And in Mississippi, researchers
are exploring the medicinal wonders of the Mayapple -- a wild plant that
produces critical chemicals used in today's anti-cancer medicines. All
this & more, next time on Partners.

For more information on 1890 land- grants and other Partners episodes,
log on to this web site.