Legacy and Opportunity

Terry E. Acree - 11/7/94 edited 5/3/95
In order to understand how the Food Science & Technology Department in Geneva will relate to Cornell University, the State of New York and the Experiment Station in the future it is necessary to focus on two unavoidable trends that will shape the the College of Agriculture at Cornell University: a new mission and new educational tools.

I. New Educational Mission: Sustainable Land Stewardship.

Perched on the infertile edge of a glacial moraine, Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in Ithaca looks at a future in which few of its undergraduates will ever work in agriculture or related businesses. Closer to Appalachian poverty than the urban life that constitutes the origin and the future of most of its students, CALS is in the process of defining a mission different from the goals that founded the land grant colleges a century ago. That goal was to enhance the competitiveness of New York production agriculture in a national commodities market. Today, however, it is clear that the competitiveness of New York farm products in a global commodities market is doomed by ever increasing trade liberalization and the consumer's rising weariness with price supports and other market restraints. The future of this College will no longer rest on the support of production agriculture and related businesses.

Although the State of New York will continue to urbanize at the expense of agricultural land, it is very likely that an equilibrium will be reached between residential, commercial and multiple land uses. Agriculture will become just one of many multiple land uses encouraged to the extent that they are sustainable and demonstrate appropriate land stewardship. The new mission of the college will become: To foster sustainable land stewardship through research, extension and teaching. Land stewardship includes grape farming near Lake Erie, apple orchards on the shore of Lake Ontario, farm wineries in the Finger Lakes, dairies in Albany, golf courses in the Hudson Valley, parks in Manhattan, meadows in the Adirondaks, and bicycle trails on Long Island. Public interest and funding for research, extension and teaching to foster sustainable land use can increase willingly if the public is convinced that their investment enhances the quality of life for the entire population and not just a rural minority or an industrial elite.

Although agricultural research is now a substantial part of CALS' mission it is no longer the centerpiece of its teaching program. Even today the name could be changed to the College of Life Sciences and more accurately reflect its present undergraduate teaching program. Something like that will certainly be more appropriate for the future. Further, the curriculum we provide students in the future will not be visible in the names of the existing departments. The possibility that an undergraduate student will major in Plant Breeding is as likely as the establishment of a Department of Flavor Chemistry. Surely the nature and function of "department" will change as they already have at places like Bennington College, to more accurately reflect mission and, most important at CALS, our public responsibility.

II. Role of Geneva in Promoting Sustainable Land Stewardship.

Keys to land stewardship in the 21st century are sustainability and value-added production. Sustainability includes profitability, environmental sensitivity, public accessibility, health promotion and safety assurances. The value-added can include three of these components: environmental sensitivity, health promotion and safety if New York consumers "buy New York" at a value-added premium because it is clear the extra cost goes to promote sustainability. To promote this kind of value is simply a matter of marketing, to put it in business terms, or public education, to put it in policy terms. However, the value added premium most consumers will pay for, is premium quality. Quality they can see, touch, taste and smell!

New York State fosters the development of new value-added fruit and vegetable products primarily through its support of the Experiment Station in Geneva. During the 60 plus year history of the association of the Experiment Station in Geneva with Cornell University 80% of the farm land in Thompkins county has reverted to woodland. However, the land surrounding Geneva has not shown this change. In fact the removal of hedge rows and the construction of new vineyards have resulted in localized increases in productive farm land. Although these trends have reduced the ability of scientists in Ithaca to conduct meaningful horticultural research, it has allowed Ithaca to remain a world class center in animal, veterinary, and dairy science. The two institutions, CALS and NYSAES, complement each other today more than they ever have in history.

Is it possible for scientists trained in horticulture, entomology and plant pathology to develop horticultural products with enhanced quality the consumer can see, touch, taste and smell?
Not anymore! Further, the Experiment Station in Geneva was one of the first institutions in the world to recognize this limitation and established the second Food Science Department in US history. Staffed with a multidisciplinary faculty of chemists, microbiologists and engineers the Food Science & Technology department has been copied in all the major horticultural research institutes in the world. It is no longer possible to improve quality just by increasing soluble solids or modifying pH. The subtle visual, textural and chemosensory properties that create perceptions of quality by the consumer are caused by multivariant properties that cannot be measured with off-the-shelf black-boxes. They require instead the scientists and research tools found only in world class Food Science laboratories such as Geneva.

One example that demonstrates the importance of supporting a "critical mass" of leading edge food science research at the Experiment Station is in the area of sensory analysis. In their quest to extract new measures of quality in foods, sensory scientists have pioneered the use of new statistical techniques, (Procrustes, response surface methodologies, principal component analysis) in places like Long Ashton, Geneva, Wageningen, Davis and Dijon. These and other techniques that measure sensory perception are best applied to new problems by the scientists who actively contribute to their development. The recent hiring of an extension horticulturist in Geneva who for his Ph.D. did research in cooperation with Food Scientists to develop new grades for tomato cultivars that score their sensory quality more accurately than do soluble solids and pH is encouraging.

The development of new quality grades that can justify value-added pricing is probably the most effective way to develop sustainable fruit and vegetable production in New York. However, equally compelling examples in the areas of food safety, health, and sustainable processing can be found that requires the presence of a critical mass of Food Scientists working in Geneva. Furthermore, Geneva where "students and opportunities for multidisciplinary collaborations abound" is the most effective environment to develop sustainable fruit and vegetable production in New York.

III. A New Educational Environment: the Digital Classroom

The combination of computers, communications hardware and new graphics software has ushered into the University a new teaching environment that will drastically alter the classroom as we have known it for three centuries. To put it simply, many classrooms will vaporize into the digital web of a global classroom. I do not think most educators really understand how drastic the digital classroom will change the personnel, the physical plant and the methods of learning at the University or how soon they will occur. To use a remote but real example, consider this question: is there any reason for Cornell to pay a poet in residence or better yet a non-poet to teach poetry when Andrei Codrescu could teach at 100 Universities at the same time? Each one will just pay him $100 / month to be in the digital classroom. An amount so trivial that Cornell could, for the price of one poet in residence bring 100 to the same class? Where will the student be? In a room full of other students starring at a screen? In the dorm? Hum....and where will the teacher be? Some will be in Geneva where the plants grow.

Further, the poet will not be just a talking head standing in front of a camera. Instead he will want to use talking hands pointing to words or even images that invoke the words to teach his poetry. Indeed the talking heads will become exploded views, cartoons, and sounds. I was once impressed with a story about the response Johnney von Neumann made when he saw a photograph of an artillery shell explosion. He said: "I can see the second derivative go to zero." When I saw the graphics program Mathematica I realized so could we all. I know there are those who insist in such quaint notions as "going to the library", a collegial environment, one-on-one human contact. In fact Andrei Codrescu recently commented that E-mail was just "an illusion of human contact and that in some cases it was no better than the thin connections we have with that gray blob next to us on the sofa when we watch television". I would venture that no matter how hard Andre tried to hide his talent from his E-mail readers he would fail. The magic of his personal vision would shine through the restrictions of the ASCII channel. Indeed it is his unique ability to reduce his visions to just words that is his special talent and the products of that will move easily into electronic data bases that can be accessed from any where in the world.

As the need for classrooms shrinks, the need for laboratories will increase. Although the letters can dissolve almost entirely into the digital classroom, the need for laboratories, sand boxes or skunk works will become the most important consumer of public resources in education. No matter how fast the digital highway changes the educational, work and entertainment landscape, the physical landscape will not shrink. New York will be as large in a thousand years from now as it is today. I am sure that in the future the public concern for land stewardship will be expressed in funding for those institutions with the vision to focus on sustainability. (A democracy enhanced by communication will quarantee this.) Clearly agriculture will not be the most important segment of this system but it will surely consume large amounts of public funds because it requires the most complex stewardship. All research, teaching and production activities that occupy real-estate will require sustainable land stewardship to be tolerated mush less funded by the public.

IV. The role of Geneva in the Digital Classroom.

Because the faculty at Geneva complement those in Ithaca, are separated by just 1 hr from each other and have a well developed digital communication environment, the Geneva-Ithaca complex is an excellent platform for the development of both products and tools for the digital classroom. Investing in personel, infrastructure and curriculum focused on a Geneva-Ithaca learning environment should bring CALS a sustainable source of public and private support as we focus on our mission of the 21st century. The FS&T department in Geneva is both a legacy of the best kind of public investment in sustainablity and a rare opprtunity for the creation and testing of the learning environments crutial to future generations.