YUMA — The Arizona Board of Regents, which governs the state’s three public universities, held a special meeting at Arizona Western College in Yuma last Thursday.
Why? To pass a $3 million research grant launching the Arizona Hub for Agriculture Innovation. The three-year grant will bring together Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona.
Centered in Yuma, the grant aims to transform ag research into industry-ready solutions for farmers and ranchers statewide.
At the meeting, Regent Fred Duval explained more about the purpose of regents grants, also known as Technology and Research Initiative Funds .
"So this is TRIF money; TRIF money was passed by the voters in 2000," he said. "It's a sales tax. It's the most public investment that our consumers make. The idea behind the regents’ grant—of which this is a fantastic example—is to reverse engineer. Instead of starting with curiosity or a topic, start with a beneficiary. What problem does our public, does our state and our communities need to solve? Do we have the tools to be of service in that regard?"
According to Duval, TRIF grants have gone through three phases in terms of what they aim to serve, and this new one is what he considers 3.0, which looks at what economic drivers in the state of Arizona could use help in order to further drive opportunity to drive wages, growth and success in key industries.
"Yuma was the right place to do it. Ag is the right place to do it. You knew exactly what you needed. You knew how to use us. You had trusted relationships with us," he said. "This is everything we've set out to do in regents' grants in by way of serving the public. We are doing our job. Our customers are not just our students—our customers are our communities, it is our taxpayers, and I could not be more enthusiastic.”
The board unanimously voted to approve the grant.
The proposal for the grant as approved notes that its research efforts will focus on the following four critical areas.
- Soil Health Improvement: Quantifying and enhancing soil microbial diversity, carbon sequestration, and nutrient cycling to improve fertility and water retention.
- Climate Resilience in Crops: Developing and testing drought-, heat-, and salttolerant crop varieties and management systems suited to Arizona’s extreme environments.
- Precision Production Efficiency: Integrating real-time monitoring, automation, and edge computing for optimized input use and labor productivity.
- Food Safety Solutions: Advancing field and supply chain-level contaminant detection, traceability tools, and risk reduction practices that ensure the safety and competitiveness of Arizona’s fresh produce industry.
Arizona Department of Agriculture Director Paul Brierly spoke with KAWC after the special board meeting on Thursday.
He shared that the board had approached his department explaining that they had some funding to provide state agencies with university support.
"It's a substantial investment by our board of regents to support the universities supporting our Arizona agriculture industries," he said.
AZDA put out an opportunity statement and ultimately chose the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture’s proposal, making it a public and private effort.
When asked about what makes the initiative special, Brierly replied that it's the fact all three public universities are working together.
"... they all bring their own specialties, whether it's dealing with the soil or whether it's dealing with logistics or whether it's the actual crop varieties themselves. There's all these different things in it; it's not just ag research," he said. "One thing we learned is, almost every discipline can be applied to ag. So engineering—we need engineering to do the self-driving, the automated equipment. There's all sorts of biological things. There's, you know just, you can run through the spectrum, and they need to be applied to agriculture.
"So this brings all the universities together to bring their strong points and it positions Arizona as a state to be the leader in climate resilient agriculture."
The big point, however, is that this is anchored in Yuma, but it will have a far-reaching effect.
"This is focused on Yuma, but it's not just about Yuma agriculture," Brierly said. "Yuma is a place where this can happen because all three universities are here, terrific community college, great growers. There's the new broadband infrastructure, the fiber, the middle mile fiber that the county has. And then there's a wireless network being devoted just to agriculture so that every field in Yuma will have wireless broadband capabilities so when you have automated equipment or remote sensors or all these things, that can be done here in Yuma."
He concluded that all of these new technologies can be used and developed in Yuma.
"... Lots and lots of potential but once solutions are found to some of these problems, they can be applied not just here in Yuma, but they can be applied statewide, they can be applied nationwide and frankly, all over the world where we have arid land agriculture," he said.
Results from the hub's pilot projects will be disseminated through the Cooperative Extension system and presented yearly at the Arizona Ag Innovation Summit.
Reporting for this article is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
