Delta Center has front-row seat on agricultural progress

PORTAGEVILLE, Mo.

Close to the Mississippi River and boasting the state's richest soil, the Bootheel produces a bounty of rice, soybeans and corn to feed the world plus cotton to clothe it.

For more than four decades the University of Missouri's Delta Research Center has advised Bootheel farmers about boosting harvests and battling pests, while overseeing research with global implications, including developing six kinds of cotton and a dozen new soybean varieties.

The center even has a weed nursery -- the better to know threats to crops.

Its tasks aren't just about helping farmers smack bugs, choke weeds and coax more bushels per acre, although those missions are critical in this capital of Missouri row-cropping.

"Our research looks 15 years down the road, and we have a big job ahead," said Jake Fisher, superintendent of the center, which is spread among a modern brick-and-glass headquarters south of Portageville and four outlying farms covering 1,024 acres.

High-tech, low-tech

New farming technology and life sciences figure more than ever in the Delta Center's work. That was evident during the center's recent public field day, a social, cultural and learning event for this part of Missouri where the flatlands more closely resemble Arkansas and Mississippi.

Low-tech: More than 1,000 visitors boarded tractor-drawn trailers with bench seats that rumbled along the edges of experimental fields, stopping for up-close demonstrations of irrigation, soybean breeding and insect management in crops.

High-tech: The Delta Center has a special plot of corn not meant for human consumption, but which could hold keys to human health. This "pharmaceutical corn" is implanted with an animal gene to find new human immune system treatments. The Delta Center is ideal for these tests because of its abundant fields of other crops, which help isolate the special corn plot for studies of cross-pollination by wind.

Visitors heard lectures about which types of beans are more tolerant of flooding, strategies for harvesting late crops and methods for scheduling irrigation. Charles Kruse, a farmer from Dexter, Mo., and president of Missouri Farm Bureau, attended the field day and reminisced about his own experiences working there as a young research agronomist in the early 1970s.

"This center is a resource for farmers, and I dare say there are not many farmers in the Missouri Bootheel who don't turn to the Delta Center for answers and information. It can make a cash difference for them to have the best advice," Kruse said.

Fisher, the superintendent, has worked at the center for 41 years, since its start. He is a Bootheel native -- his family settled in the region in 1853 -- who chuckles that he does not hold a college degree but has the equivalent farm knowledge of several advanced degrees.

"I know and love this land and it excites me to be able to be of service to agriculture here," Fisher said.

Of the center's 50-person staff, about half hold advanced degrees, including several doctorates. About two dozen University of Missouri agricultural and science students are assigned to the farm at a time.

All of these people work with local farmers, such as in the weed nursery, where a plot on the center's Lee Farm grows 42 kinds of weeds in neat rows.

"The farmers simply bring us a sample of the weeds they are finding and we just head out to the weed nursery and identify it, and advise them accordingly," Fisher said. "It's real day-to-day help for farmers."

Tribute to history

The center pays tribute to Bootheel agricultural history and rural life with various displays. The Rone family, longtime agribusiness leaders in the region, financed construction of an exhibit hall that the center makes available for community doings. It includes a small museum with a horse-drawn mail carriage that the late G.W. "Son" Rone used to run Rural Free Delivery around Portageville in the early 20th century.

"This center helps remind us what was great about Bootheel life and the history we should remember, about where we came from," said George Lewis Rone, the postman's grandson.

The museum has an exhibit about pesticides past and present, with displays including old, empty canisters of nasty stuff that has been banned.

It's not all so grim. A whimsical display has shelves of toys based on bugs found in the Delta, from grinning spiders to cartoon ladybugs.