UNL Emeriti Professor of soil science, Richard Ferguson from the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture will be the speaker for our October 5th Agriculture Lunch & Learn. Professor Ferguson retired earlier this year after a 41-year career at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Richard’s goals at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln were straightforward: help Nebraska farmers become more productive and profitable while safeguarding soil and water resources; help students understand soil variability and manage crop nutrient inputs accordingly; and support faculty and staff he supervised in reaching their fullest potential and making an impact. In those decades of service, through countless interactions with producers, colleagues, students, and the people of Nebraska and Rwanda — those seemingly simple goals came to define a lifetime of service and a genuine care for everyone around him.
Ferguson studies and teaching of soils and farming knowledge took him outside of Nebraska and the Midwest for five years as the inaugural vice chancellor of the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) https://www.rica.rw/, helping establish a new, land-grant modeled agricultural university for East Africa. Back in 2018, after serving 34 years at Nebraska, he stepped into this new role to help develop RICA, an English-language institution dedicated to educating and inspiring a new generation of agricultural innovators in Rwanda. Among his many accomplishments, Ferguson is especially proud of seeing the institution’s first class of students graduate in 2023.
Richard will talk about his time at the University of Nebraska in the department and how that led him to working on international projects including leading RICA in Rwanda. He will also talk about the impact of RICA on Rwanda as he sees it so far after 11 years of UNL starting the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources Undergraduate Scholarship Program (CUSP). It was created back in 2015 to provides a 4-year, 120-credit-hour full scholarship for Rwandan students to study integrated science, in exchange for them to return back to Rwanda and serve for 5 years working in and to improve agriculture in Rwanda.
The NABC Lunch-n-Learn will be held at the Lancaster Extension Education Center, 444 Cherrycreek Road, Lincoln, NE 68528. Lunch will begin at 11:30 a.m., with the program starting at 12:10 PM until 1:00 PM. Lunch is free for all paid members and guests for individual lunches are $20 cash at the door.
RSVP to Doug.Carr@NUFoundation.org by Wednesday, September 30th to help us with our meal count for the meeting.
