New Jornada Experimental Range Building Dedicated

Suggested Anchor Introduction

The Jornada Experimental Range, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, has a new home on the New Mexico State University campus. Anna María Pérez-Wright has the story.

Story

Click to Listen:

A new 8-million-dollar facility at New Mexico State University is designed to help lay the foundation for better understanding of arid lands. The new headquarters for the U-S Department of Agriculture's Jornada Experimental Range was dedicated on the campus with dignitaries including U-S Representative Joe Skeen and N-M-S-U president Jay Gogue taking part in the ceremony. Supervisory scientist Kris Havstad says Jornada scientists complement, but don't duplicate, research done at N-M-S-U.

"Our focus is to develop new knowledge for the management and the remediation of deserts. Not only here in New Mexico but as part of the Agricultural Research Service which is part of the USDA, we have a regional and national scope. So it's not just New Mexico but the Southwest and then, of course, 30 percent of the globe is desert rangeland."

Jornada advisory board member Felicia Thal has been a cattle producer for more than 30 years. She says the research done at the Jornada Experimental Range is invaluable, especially during a time when producers like her face drought and economic pressures.

"It has to be the promise of this building and this institution that the scientists and the scientific community herein dedicate themselves with new ideas, with innovation, ingenuity and imagination to fulfill the really desperate needs of our industry."

The 29-thousand-square-foot building houses offices and laboratories. The Jornada Experimental Range was established in 1912 and includes 193-thousand acres in southern New Mexico. For N-M-S-U's College of Agriculture and Home Economics, I'm Anna María Pérez-Wright.