A half-century of impact for the Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center

We are serving 23 counties in the Piedmont region of Virginia established in 1974. I'm Arash Rashed, Director of Virginia Tech Southern Piedmont AREC. It's been 50 years of service. We have been working with our producers, supporting our community, helping our community by doing applied research, by educating next generation professionals, educators, researchers and practitioners by providing science based information to better practices to maximize productivity in our community. Our center is not just focused on one crop, one area of research. Our center is focused on a variety of crops that are grown in the region. That includes soybean, includes wheat, barley, tobacco, and corn. We are the only center in Virginia that supports our tobacco producers providing with latest information on best management practices. So there's no one else that does exactly what we do in Virginia cooperative extension, the link between the research at our universities, at our agriculture research and extension centers. Here, you get the hands on. You get to see where the research actually comes into play, how it affects the growers, how you can use that data to, you know, take care of pest or improve the yield. To have information that actually pertains to them, and also to have this available here where they can come and visit and see it happening, see how the research is done, better understand what that data means, and also just having that resource for extension agents to have a specialist that's not 3 hours away that you can drop by and work with. Not only the data that comes out of here, but the people, the students that come out. As a part of our land grant mission, we are focused on educating next generation professionals, faculty, next generation researchers, educators to maintain the sustainability of the service that we're providing. I think the connections I make here will help me a lot throughout my years, especially when I graduate and come back and start working on the farm. You come here and you get to know people and they really care about the students, and it gives them a leg up, and I think that's what is really outstanding about this place.