UNIVERSITY PARK — Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences graduate students received more predoctoral fellowships from the U.S. Department of Agriculture than any other institution over the last five years. This year, five of the 11 recipients worked in the college’s long-term cover crop cocktails experiment.
Cover crops are planted to improve the soils in an agricultural area rather than to produce a harvest. The experiment was established in 2011 to determine whether diverse cover crop mixtures — as opposed to single-species cover cropping — can enhance ecosystem functions in a corn-soybean-wheat cash crop rotation that produces organic feed and forage, explained Jason Kaye, Distinguished Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry, who has led the research for nearly two decades.
The students are Madeline Luthard, advised by Kaye and Armen Kemanian, professor of plant science; Emma Rice, advised by Carolyn Lowry, assistant professor of plant science; Jennifer Harris, advised by Liana Burghardt, assistant professor of plant science, and Estelle Couradeau, assistant professor in ecosystem science and management; Olivia Trace, advised by Jared Ali, associate professor of entomology; and Sarah Richards, advised by Couradeau and Terrance Bell, who was previously faculty at Penn State and is now an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.
The predoctoral fellowship program, part of USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, helps new scientists and professionals enter food and agricultural sciences research, education and extension fields in the private sector, government or academia. The fellowships aim to support future leaders who are working to solve current agricultural challenges.
“These are the most prestigious awards given by USDA to graduate students,” said Kaye, who chairs the Ecology Intercollege Graduate Degree Program at Penn State. “To have five fellowships going to students who have at least part of their degree work at the cover crop cocktails experiment really says a lot about the impact of the site on graduate education.”
Working with farmer advisers, the cover crop cocktail experiment researchers designed cover crop mixtures that target nutrient supply, nutrient retention, weed suppression and management ease, he explained, and they tested the idea that diverse mixtures provide more of these functions simultaneously than cover crops in monoculture.
“Over the last decade, work at the site has led to new decision-support tools to help farmers select cover crops and manage nitrogen fertility while at the same time supporting fundamental breakthroughs connecting cover crop choices to weed proliferation, disease and pest resistance in cash crops, as well as nitrogen losses from the fields that affect water and air quality,” Kaye said. “The team has expanded over time and includes a farmer advisory board, nine faculty, 12 graduate students and a cadre of four to six undergraduate researchers.”
Also, the project has greatly benefitted from the support of research technician Brosi Bradley, Kaye noted, adding that she has held the experiment together and creates the cohesion and team dynamics for the graduate students.
According to Burghardt, who co-led a Huck Institute-sponsored workshop series that helped four of the five students prepare their predoctoral fellowships proposals to USDA, the project has become a fertile training ground for graduate students. Bell and Jill Hamilton, associate professor of ecosystem science and management and director of the Schatz Center, co-led the series with Burghardt.
“The long-term cover crops cocktail experiment provides a fantastic resource for graduate students writing fellowship proposals because it provides a common field resource, peer and faculty mentoring network, and clear connections with farmers,” she said. “That provides a scaffold upon which students can find their research niche from biogeochemical cycling and microbial dynamics to plant growth allocation and insect-plant-soil interactions.”
The predoctoral fellowship applications require months of sustained commitment from students and are powerful professional development experiences because they are in the same format as the full USDA grant proposals, Burghardt noted.
“I and the other faculty leaders of the workshop — Dr. Terrence Bell and Dr. Jill Hamilton — could not be prouder of all the students who put in applications last fall,” Burghardt said.
