Center part of federal initiative to find solutions in food security

On Oct. 28, UC Davis launched a $17 million U.S.-Pakistan Food and Agriculture Center. The five-year project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, will help faculty and graduate students to study and perform research at UC Davis and the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (UAF) in Pakistan.

UC Davis will receive $10 million of the funding, and during its first year, the project will consist of workshops to help Faisalabad build relationships both through technology and entrepreneurship.

“UC Davis has been partnering with colleagues in Pakistan since 2009, sharing expertise in agriculture from crop production to post-harvest handling,” said James Hill, associate dean emeritus of International Programs for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in a press release. “Establishment of this new center will allow us to build on those efforts, with a renewed emphasis on an exchange of faculty and graduate students.”

Present at the event was a list of speakers, including Joanna Regulska, vice provost and associate chancellor of Global Affairs, Alan Van Egmond, senior policy advisor for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Ashfaq Ahmad Chattha, a thematic leader for the Center of Advanced studies at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.

Also among the speakers was Marwa Zafarullah, a UC Davis graduate student studying genetics and genomics. Zafarullah, who is Pakistani and whose parents currently reside in Pakistan, praised the collaboration as a unique partnership between two of the world’s leading universities in agricultural research.

“[The project] is a symbol of change and beginning of promising friendship between Pakistan’s best and the world’s best agricultural school for the betterment of [Pakistan’s] agricultural community,” Zafarullah said in an interview for the Daily Democrat.

The program, which is being built through a $127 million investment from the United States Agency for International Development, is part of a larger initiative between the U.S. and Pakistan, which includes research from other universities across the country including the University of Utah and Arizona State University. The initiative includes solving issues regarding water, energy and food security. UC Davis helps with food security while The University of Utah and Arizona State University focus on water and energy security.

The plan also includes the construction of libraries, laboratories and research facilities in Pakistan. The new facilities will help with the program’s themes of  biotechnology, outreach, agricultural policy and climate change.

Thomas L. Rost, professor emeritus at the department of plant biology within the College of Biological Sciences, discussed why UC Davis was picked to help with the program.

“The program focuses on agriculture and food security. UAF is the leading agriculture university in Pakistan and UC Davis is the number-one ranked college of agriculture in the whole world, and we have lots of people working on aspects of food security,” Rost said. “Davis is just one of the best in the world so we’re a perfect fit.”

Agriculture is Pakistan’s largest economic sector and provides work for over half of the country. Throughout the five years, the program will focus on crops such as wheat, cotton, rice, sugarcane and maize, specifically on their abilities to adapt to climate change and to become more drought-resistant.

Rost hopes the graduate students and faculty who will travel between the two countries will build strong relationships and learn new technology that can be applied in the field.   

“Some of the benefits are intangible. You’re establishing relationships with faculty members, administrators and students who have the common interests that you have so we’re establishing partnerships so that we can work with them on joint projects,” Rost said. “They can come to us and learn new technology and techniques and find out about things that we’re doing, and it’s reciprocal. We go there and find out things that we didn’t know either.”

Written by: Ivan Valenzuela – campus@theaggie.org

New farm houses 150 chickens, completely student-built ‘Eggmobile’

On Nov. 19, UC Davis unveiled a new 4.5-acre pastured poultry farm that will act as a living laboratory for students and researchers to develop innovations for pasture-based poultry farms, integrative crop-and-poultry farms and backyard chicken flocks.

The pasture also contains overnight housing for the chickens with a student-built mobile chicken coop that has been appropriately dubbed “Eggmobile.” For overnight protection, the farm also uses a portable electric fence to keep predators away from the chickens.

The research team hopes to eventually construct multiple Eggmobiles with different designs in order to optimize cost, ergonomics and sustainability. In time, the researchers are looking to expand the project to include broiler chickens, a subspecies of chickens raised specifically for meat production, as well as cropping systems that integrate poultry, in order to fully maximize the potential of land for food production.

The project was made possible by a $40,000 grant from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, along with an additional $20,000 from several other stakeholder organizations.

The funding enabled the researchers to obtain 4.5 acres of farm land one mile west of the central UC Davis campus that will house 150 young chickens.

According to Maurice Pitesky, a veterinary medicine professor and the project’s co-leader, allowing chickens to roam through existing farmland provides farmers with an opportunity to explore non-traditional methods of poultry farming. Pitesky believes that having chickens present on farmland with crops will allow the farmers to provide natural fertilizer to the land.

Pitesky stated his belief on how these different methods of poultry farming are important to explore.

“It’s also a way for crop farmers to move into poultry production without expanding their land or adding nitrogen fertilizer to their farming system,” Pitesky said.

Pitesky mentioned the wide array of solutions that may be found from this project and emphasized the variety of fields of research that will be positively affected.

“This is a unique innovation, research and outreach resource for the Western United States,” Pitesky said. “The project includes faculty and students with expertise in veterinary medicine, husbandry, welfare, pasture management and engineering, which allows us to address issues related to predator control, welfare, food safety and food efficiency.”

Participating students have been drawn from the School of Veterinary Medicine, College of Engineering and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The student and faculty research teams have been looking into the issues involving diseases and chicken health, predation by wildlife and occupational health for workers.

“It’s an area of research that no one has really studied and no one is really sure about disease transition issues or what kind of worker occupation health hazards there are,” said Naomi Dailey, a graduate student in the geography department.

Mitchell McCarthy, a fourth-year biological engineering student who helped design the mobile chicken coop, discussed his own contributions to the pasture as an example of how student-driven the project was.

“My focus on this project for the last couple years was one building the coop and designing a system for the pasture,” McCarthy said.

The students involved with the project showed enthusiasm for what they have accomplished so far and look forward to learning more from having their own farm as time goes on.

“It’s a great opportunity to learn what farmers are looking for on their own properties and try to grapple with them and fix them on our own farm,” Dailey said.

Pitesky encourages community members to stop by the poultry farm and view the project.

“We really want this to be a local and regional demonstration project,” Pitesky said.

Written by: Nick Griffen – campus@theaggie.org

Center part of pending sister city agreement between Sacramento and Ho Chi Minh City

In the next three years, UC Davis is expecting to launch the Center for New Viet Nam Studies that will work in conjunction with the pending sister city agreement between Ho Chi Minh City and Sacramento. Proposed by Asian American studies professor Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, the center intends to serve as the educational component of the relationship between the two cities.

Earlier this year, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Sacramento and Ho Chi Minh City was signed by representatives from the two cities. Although not legally binding, the document is an agreement for the two cities to increase their cultural, educational, social and economic relations. The document will be valid for five years.

The MOU is a preliminary step toward the establishment of a sister city between the two locations. A sister city relationship is an agreement for economic, cultural and educational exchange between two cities from different countries. Sacramento contains the 11th largest Vietnamese community in the United States and currently holds 11 sister city relationships.

A sister city will be established should the Sacramento City Council vote on it based on the voices of constituents, such as members of the Vietnamese community. The sister city relationship will be finalized once representatives from the two cities each sign a second MOU.

The proposed center will be a site for social science research on contemporary Vietnam and its diaspora population, with a focus on areas of economic and political development, as well as arts and culture. The center intends to move away from known literature about the Vietnam War and instead emphasizes the country’s current global relevance. Valverde envisions the center to be a site for international scholars to research what Vietnam is as a nation and a culture, and what it can become.

“The production of knowledge will not just be useful for academics,” Valverde said. “It will also offer practical strategies for governing bodies to consider […] Vietnam continues to garner global interest from major powers such as the U.S., China, Japan, Russia, Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries.”

  The proposed center plans to feature an online journal, published in Vietnamese and English, edited by undergraduate and graduate students, as well as symposia with guests speakers and artists. If funding continues as expected, the center will be established over the course of three years, requiring an estimated $96,000. During this time, Valverde plans on incorporating more features like the online journal and symposia as the center approaches its completion. The first events are planned for winter 2016.

Darrell Hamamoto, a professor of Asian American studies, sees the center’s social science research as beneficial toward economic relations between the two countries by providing a cultural context and mutual understanding.

“Let’s say a business person, or someone who is majoring in economics or management, they have to know the cultural, the people, the history, the society,” Hamamoto said. “That’s what we’ll provide: the cultural context, cross-cultural comparisons and communications.”

Austina Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese Student Association, expressed interest in the academic and cultural aspects of the proposed Center.

“I think it’s a really good idea that [the center] wants to talk about how Vietnam has changed and what modern-day Vietnam is like outside of the war aspects that most people know,” Nguyen said. “I would like to know more about how the research is going to be done because the sources that the research come from are very important. But I definitely want people to know more about Vietnamese culture, especially modern-day Vietnamese culture.”

Written by: Viet Tran – campus@theaggie.org