The University Of Arizona


College of Agriculture and Life Sciences


2006 Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station Research Report

2006 Agricultural Experiment Station Research Report

Director's Letter

Table of Contents

A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

Dear Readers,

Selecting the subject matter for our annual report each year is always an interesting activity as there seems to be an endless number of interesting topics from which to choose. We try to give you a sampling of our ongoing efforts. I believe we have succeeded this year as we have covered many things, from squirrels to dairy cows, vegetables to rangeland, plus a bit on cancer-?ghting compounds and bene?cial fungi, an almost mandatory story involving water and a touch of economics and marketing to wrap it up. These articles again illustrate that our research efforts reach from the very fundamental to the very applied.

We are pleased to be able to highlight the new Thomas W. Keating BIO5 facility which was made possible in part by a generous donation from Tom Keating (and family), an alumnus of the College. This magni?cent new structure was built to facilitate interactions and collaborative research among faculty in the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Science, Engineering, Medicine and Pharmacy. It is very satisfying that agriculture will play a pivotal role in this effort. Our success is fully dependent on our people but new facilities such as this and others that we have highlighted over the past several years, including the William J. Parker Agricultural Research Complex mentioned in this issue, certainly make us more productive, and the determined effort it takes, more enjoyable.

We are proud that the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences ranked number one in the nation among large universities for scholarly activity in agricultural sciences, according to the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index released in January 2007. (Please see the article in this issue for details on individual departmental rankings.)

My thanks to our very capable production staff who have once again produced a high quality publication and to our excellent research faculty and staff, who generate the necessary information.

We hope you will bene?t from reading this issue and take advantage of the opportunity to contact our scientists if you have questions about their work, or notify us if you have issues of any kind.

Enjoy,

Colin Kaltenbach
Vice Dean and Director,
Agricultural Experiment Station
(520) 621-7201
kltnbch@ag.arizona.edu
cals.arizona.edu/aes