County agent Bruce Dunlap, in describing the early days of cooperative extension, attests to the ever-present challenges presented by new situations. His words, though they refer to the early years of the 20th century, still ring true today, as Penn State’s 150-year-old College of Agricultural Sciences faces new horizons in research and teaching. The world is a very different place than it was in 1855, when the college was founded. And scientists and teachers are continually facing “the newness of each road and each project.” Although many of the problems and challenges of agriculture remain the same, solutions evolve with the times. “We’re approaching issues differently because we continue to add to our knowledge base,” says Robert Steele, dean of the college. “Someone gave me a copy of a journal called The Cultivator. This journal was published in 1855—the year Penn State was founded. If you read through it, going back 150 years, you see articles about managing barnyard manure. What are we talking about today? Odors from farms. There’s an article that says, ‘Farmers are no different from other businessmen. They need accurate records of what their input costs are so they will know whether they’re making a profit.’ What are we saying today? The same thing—the importance of farm management methods. So a lot has remained the same, but our focus has shifted. Today, it’s not just about maximizing production—it’s about efficiency, protecting the environment, and integrating our research efforts. As science progresses, some of the really interesting things going on are at the interface.”

Helping to create and sustain that interface is Bruce McPheron, associate dean for research and graduate education for the college. One of McPheron’s primary responsibilities is to find ways for researchers to share ideas. Calling himself a “traffic director,” he looks across disciplines, colleges, and even universities for collaboration opportunities, striving to ensure that information flows freely from ground level to policy makers and vice versa. McPheron meets with a group of his counterparts across the university to identify opportunities for uniting researchers across disciplines—chemistry and plant pathology, engineering and food science—to solve common problems.

“ At the faculty level,” he says, “you’re focused on your work. Every once in a while you look up and notice that some other people might be doing similar things. And you interact with them, but you don’t have time to look across the landscape. That’s part of my role—to sit back and say, ‘You know, the people over in vet science are interested in the movement of animal diseases. And the people in plant pathology are interested in the movement of plant diseases. And the people in entomology are interested in the movement of plant pests.’ The common theme there is not what’s being damaged or what’s doing the damaging—it is predicting where the next problem might lie.”

Disease modeling, or predicting where diseases are likely to appear and move, is critical to responding effectively. To study disease modeling, the college supports the intercollege Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. College researchers work with scientists from the university’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Penn State Institutes of the Environment, and the Eberly College of Science to develop new approaches for modeling the movement of diseases. One team is looking at soybean rust, a pathogen native to Asia that moved from South America to Central America before being found in the United States in late 2004. To assess the threat to U.S. soybean crops, the researchers use an integrated approach that includes computer models and studies of weather, the pathogen, the organism affected, and economics (see Penn State Contributes to Unprecedented USDA Soybean Rust Effort).