Charles City Press, United States
06-20-07
Donations first step towards research farm learning center
By Matt Barnes, Staff writer
Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 8:44 AM CDTASHUA — Nearly $60,000
in checks and pledges were presented to officials representing the Iowa State
University Northeast Iowa Research Farm on Tuesday, which will be used for
the construction of a learning center on the research farm.
Groundbreaking is scheduled to commence on Sept. 6. The center will be named
for a Nobel Prize winner from Northeast Iowa — Norman Borlaug, who is
scheduled to attend the groundbreaking.
The Cresco native has been credited by some as saving over a billion people
from starvation through his work engineering disease-resistant, high-yield wheat
crops in the 1940’s.
“It was very easy to name it after Norman Borlaug,” said Mark Mueller, president
of the Northeast Iowa Research Farm Association.
The learning center will be located directly east of the existing main building on
the farm and will house “educationally-related” offices and classrooms.
The new building will represent a significant improvement over all of the existing
buildings in terms of comfort and technological capability. Due to budget
cutbacks at other farms, more work is being directed to the Northeast Iowa farm.
“It’s time to upgrade, we have growing pains,” Mueller remarked. “We’re going to
be doing more work here and we wanted a better facility.”
Although agricultural education is the building’s main purpose, the Borlaug
Learning Center will also have a research role and serve to increase public
visibility at the farm.
“Our overall vision is to continue to educate the public, while moving forward with
research, which is important because we need to set our policies on sound
science. And an opportunity like this presents a setting for continued education
through scientific research,” said Todd Kalkwark, the President of the Butler
County Farm Bureau.
Six county Farm Bureaus presented checks on Tuesday evening: Black Hawk,
Bremer, Butler, Chickasaw, Floyd and Mitchell.