Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Closes Three Research Farms

Contact: Dave Mayes, (979) 8445-2803; email: d-mayes@tamu.edu
Kathleen Phillips (979) 845-2872; email: ka-phillips@tamu.edu

COLLEGE STATION -- Three small agricultural research stations will be closed as a result of  mandatory
state budget cuts, officials with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station announced Tuesday.

“This is a cost-cutting measure that we must take to meet the requirements of the 7 percent budget recision
for the current fiscal year,” said Dr. Ed Hiler, Experiment Station director and vice chancellor and dean for
agriculture and life sciences at Texas A&M University.

The stations that are closing are:
     •    The plant disease research station at Yoakum in Lavaca County, effective April 4;
     •    The forage and vegetable research station at Angleton in Brazoria County, effective Aug. 31; and
     •    The research station at Munday in Knox County, effective in April.

For the most part, the research work at these facilities is being transferred to stations elsewhere, Hiler
explained. In all, 17 positions are affected, and 10 of them will be eliminated while the rest will move with
the research.

The oldest site, at Angleton, was established in 1909 and was a major center for forage and vegetable
research early in its history. Angleton Grass, a warm-season bunchgrass from India was introduced to the
United States from that center in 1915. Its seed is still sold as a hay and pasture grass.

Scientists there also developed a control method for liver flukes in cattle in the early 1940s.

For the past 13 years, the Angleton center has housed many of the cattle used in genomics research by the
department of animal science.

Dr. John McNeill, head of the department of animal science at Texas A&M, said the three technician
positions will be terminated.

The cattle -- approximately 150 head -- will be moved to the Experiment Station in McGregor, and
research programs in genetics will continue, he said.

“We had to look for alternatives, and we had the infrastructure at McGregor to do research there without
extra labor or overhead,” McNeill said.

The Yoakum station, established in 1937, has focused much of its recent research on forages and peanuts,
said Dr. Bobby Eddleman, resident research director of the Texas A&M University System Agricultural
Research and Extension Center in Corpus Christi.

Most of this research will continue at the experiment station in Beeville, and six of the Yoakum station’s
eight employees will be transferred there. Two support staff positions were terminated, he said.

The forage research at the station focused on grassland management and weed control, which served well
the region’s major concentration of cow-calf operations, Eddleman said. Much of the peanut research,
however, has shifted to the South Plains, where most of the state’’s peanuts are now grown. Research on
peanut diseases will be moved to Beeville, with some small test plots still maintained at Yoakum.

The station’s 88 acres will be divided between the city of Yoakum and a private estate, both of which
provided the land for the facility years ago, Eddleman said.

Six employees are affected by the Munday closure. One will transfer to the Experiment Station in Vernon,
but the other five positions are being eliminated, according to Dr. Donald Robinson, resident director of the
Experiment Station at Vernon -- which oversaw the Munday facility.

Established in 1971 on about 60 acres, the station originally was meant to study the feasibility of
increasing vegetable production in that area and often included as many as 250 acres on owned and leased
land. But it gradually turned toward seeking ways to improve the standard Rolling Plains crops -- cotton
and grain -- under irrigation.

The Munday farm also had been used to grow seed for new varieties of crops after they were bred by the
Experiment Station elsewhere in the state. Among the new variety seeds grown at Munday were cowpea,
mungbean, forage-type pearl millet, jalapeno peppers, okra and turf grass.