New UC Agriculture Center May Help Research Bear Better Fruit

It was often worthless trying to use microscopes in some of the old laboratories because the floors shook when people walked on them, but the floors are sturdy in Kearney Agricultural Center’s modernistic new building.

That’s one reason Ted DeJong and his fellow scientists are thrilled at finally having new facilities for the center’s research in fruits and nuts.

“We’ve had five or six researchers working out of portable trailers,” bDeJong said in an interview during dedication of the new University of California research building. “They just really were not of much value as labs. You couldn’t use microscopes because someone would walk in and there would be so much vibration you couldn’t see” the material being studied under the microscope.

DeJong, who teaches at UC Davis and does research in stone fruit physiology at the UC Kearney center, said that he didn’t have to work in a portable building but that there was lot of traffic through the office he was in, and it was hard to keep things clean.

“You couldn’t do analytical work,” DeJong said.

Such problems should be solved with the new $5-million, 30,000-square-foot building that opened last month.

It includes state-of-the-art laboratories, flexible auditorium space and “a recommitment on the part of the university to work with you to solve problems of agriculture and natural resources,” Dr. Kenneth R. Farrell, UC’s vice president of agricultural and natural resources, said at the dedication.

“Important is the instrumentation in the labs which allows researchers to do more exacting and more sophisticated types of research,” Farrell said. “Rather than have to send materials to Davis for testing, we’ll be able to do more here ourselves in our laboratory, so it opens up a new spectrum of scientific research.”

Because of that increased sophistication and space to do research, the university is recruiting more scientists to work at Kearney, located at the edge of southern Fresno County town of Parlier.

The research center is named after M. Theo Kearney, who donated land at Fresno to the university for research in 1909. That property was sold after World War II, and the revenue was placed in trust for research, mainly into soil and water problems, Farrell said.

The Kearney station was revived at Parlier in 1962 and is one of nine UC agricultural research stations throughout the state, three times the number that were opened when the system began in 1888. Farrell said those original three research facilities--at Jackson, Paso Robles and Tulare--concentrated mainly on grain and wheat.

The main focus of research at Kearney is enhancing productivity of fruits and nuts through such techniques as improved varieties and irrigation.

But Farrell said the center hopes to expand its research on such environmental issues as the effects of air pollution on crops and biological pest control methods to reduce use of pesticides.

“We have to do those gradually as resources become available,” he said.