Mitchel McClaran has been the director of the Arizona Experiment Station since 2000 and a professor of Range Management (since 1986) at the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences.

 

He obtained his doctorate in Wildland Resource Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. Since 2004, he has served as director for Research at the 50,000-acre Santa Rita Experimental Range and has received an Outstanding Teaching Award from the Range Science and Education Council.

 

McClaran, in 2014, and was named a Fellow in the Society for Range Management and has authored over 115 scientific publications.

 

The Arizona Experiment Station (AES) provides a diverse set of world-class infrastructure essential to generating and disseminating critical knowledge and technologies for Arizona and the world. The Arizona Experiment Station offers 2,600 acres of irrigable land, 122,000 acres of rangeland, 73,600 square feet of greenhouse space, 450 range cattle, 21,000 square feet of shop space, and 17 meeting rooms and 49 dorm beds for use by private and public researchers and educators. In 2023, this set of infrastructure and AES staff supported nearly 950 projects led by UA faculty across 5 UA colleges and over 100 projects for private organizations. The trend has been increasing for the past 5+ years.

Mitchel McClaran has been the director of the Arizona Experiment Station since 2000 and a professor of Range Management (since 1986) at the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences.


Arizona Agriculture: What sets research and experimentation efforts at UArizona apart from other land-grant universities? Maybe a better way to say this is what are the UArizona’s Experiment Station Network differentiators?

McClaran: Our Cyber Experiment Station is the most unique among our peers in other states. I don’t know of any other state that has expertise in information technology within their organization, and as a result, most must rely on generic university resources for that support. Instead, at the Arizona Experiment Station, the staff and infrastructure are finely tuned to the challenges and needs of the AES and the stakeholders across the state. The staff includes web app developers and data scientists and the infrastructure includes high-speed data portals, sensors, data science and data management, and decision support tools that are web-based applications such as Desert AgWise, are made available to as many users as possible.

 

Arizona Agriculture: What current projects should really be noted to my farm and ranch readers right now, including the ones that excite you?

 

McClaran: Researchers from the Ecology, Management, and Restoration of Rangelands Program in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment are using the 50,000-acre Santa Rita Experimental Range to study the efficacy of a satellite-based system that uses collars on cattle that are equipped with GPS and low voltage output. These collars record the location of animals every 15 minutes and will send a low-voltage shock to dissuade cattle from approaching a virtual fence. 

 

The virtual fences can be located anywhere that the satellite signal can be obtained. In essence, because the collar reports the location of the animal, then as that collar approaches the location of the virtual fence, a small shocking stimulus dissuades the animal from moving closer to it.   This could be a game changer to support more precise grazing practices without having to build actual fences. Building new fences is very expensive, and once built, a fence is typically not moved for decades or centuries.

 

Irrigation efficiency research is being performed at Maricopa and Yuma Agricultural Centers by Cooperative Extension faculty in the Department of Biosystem Engineering. This growing effort, combined with new dedicated dripping irrigation systems at the Yuma Agricultural Center are addressing the increasing value of water as demands increase, and the supplies of water become less certain. Understanding and prescribing the best practices of drip irrigation systems is not simple because there are issues of salt build-up that emerge when too little water is applied.

 

The Cooperative Extension 4-H group in Pima County is using the Campus Agricultural Center for their Tucson Village Farm where they “connect kids to where food comes from, teach them how to grow and prepare it, and empower them to make healthy life choices. For the last 10 years, they have delivered the program to as many as 20,000 K-12 students annually.

 

 

Arizona Agriculture: Are there any expansion plans and if so, where?

McClaran: We have a conceptual plan for new lab and meeting buildings at the Yuma Agricultural Center.  It is only conceptual now because we are in search of funding, but we already have a need to increase lab and meeting space because we have been hiring new faculty researchers, and more industry scientists and researchers from outside the University of Arizona have been coming to do research. These researchers are attracted to the Yuma Agricultural Center because of 1) the overall importance of leafy greens and winter vegetable production that supplies 90% of US demand from November to April, 2) access to our fields and staff who can put the experiments in the ground, 3) collaborations with UA faculty and the Yuma Center for Excellence in Desert Agriculture (YCEDA), and 4) the new high-speed 10 GB per second internet connection. Essentially, we have many pieces of an innovation hub for research and development, except we need more space to house the researchers and their labs.

 

We have a growing partnership with the new College of Veterinary Medicine, which graduated its first class in 2024. They have been delivering courses and performing research on the Campus Agricultural Center since 2019.  They expanded to include use of the Al-Marah Equine Center in 2023 to assist with animal care and they plan to perform research and instruction in the near future. Together, the AES and the College of Veterinary Medicine will begin a planning process to build new teaching, research, and animal handling facilities at the V Bar V Ranch near Camp Verde, AZ. With that plan in hand, we will search for financial support. 

 

We are pursuing a designation as a Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) site in the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The designation would provide financial support for equipment, data management, and personnel to perform and measure the long-term (5+ years) changes in productivity, soil conditions, and pests among different practices such as drip versus flood irrigation, levels of fertilization, and seasonal cropping mixtures. We are exploring partnerships with the University of California and USDA ARS units in California to create more than one LTAR site.  There is considerable interest at the USDA in our efforts because only one of the 19 existing LTAR sites has irrigation (rather than rainfed crops or rangelands), and that site is in Nebraska. Establishing LTAR sites in Arizona and California where irrigation is practiced throughout would fill the void in the LTAR network.

 

Arizona Agriculture: Everyone is looking at AI, not artificial insemination but artificial intelligence. What role do you see it serving within the Experiment Station network if any? What are the sideboards that need to be established to make it truly valuable in agriculture?

McClaran: At the AES, artificial intelligence is largely synonymous with precision agriculture, where large amounts of data are collected and processed in “real-time”, and it is used to apply practices that are precisely applied only where and when they are needed. For example, imagine the use of drones that are equipped with sensors that detect the presence of plants that are stressed by too little nitrogen in the soil, and within 2 seconds the drone applies nitrogen only where those plants are suffering, rather than the entire field. That kind of real-time data collection and processing, and eventual treatment response, requires high-speed data processing without wires. Fortunately, the Cyber Experiment Station group was part of a large National Science Foundation-funded proposal that is bringing a high-speed 10 GB per second connection to the Yuma Agricultural Center to support this type of research and development. 

 

Arizona Agriculture: You’ve spoken on the importance of UArizona becoming a global leader in arid land agriculture and climate resilience and certainly we know it’s important in a desert state like ours. But explain how critical this research is on a global scale and what it means for the future of the network and the future of agriculture?

McClaran: Human populations are continuing to increase, 30% of the world’s population is in dry environments that are getting hotter and dryer, and these environments produce 60% of our food. In short, the demand for healthy and dependable food is increasing, much of that increase in production will occur in dry areas, but issues of uncertainty in precipitation and water supplies, unintended consequences of increasing water use efficiency such as salt build-up, and increasing temperatures leading to challenges for plant growth and increases in pest and disease will require innovations that include precision agricultural practices. These challenges apply to the lettuce and vegetable production in the Yuma area, as well as range livestock production on the arid rangelands. But, the research in precision at the Yuma and Maricopa Agricultural Centers, and the virtual fence technology at the Santa Rita Experimental Range are at the cutting edge of science and innovation in dryland agriculture.

 

Arizona Agriculture: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities to ensuring our experiment stations in the UArizona network operate at their highest level?

McClaran: Good and important research is taking place on across our 11 locations in the AES, but we need 1) to improve the quality of our infrastructure, including new equipment and new buildings to keep up with the changing needs of science like precision agriculture, 2) to address the challenges of water uncertainty, and 3) to provide space for people to work. 

Given the lean financial times at the University of Arizona, we need to look to other sources of funds, including the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research program (described earlier) and the State of Arizona to help us improve in these areas.

 

Arizona Agriculture: With this forum to speak to a great majority of Arizona’s farmers and ranchers, what do you think they need to hear from you and the Experiment Station Network you represent? 

McClaran: Important research and development activities are taking place at the Arizona Experiment Station. The scientists using our facilities are developing technologies to address challenges in Arizona and other dryland regions globally, but we need better infrastructure and the support from our community to obtain that infrastructure.


Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in our Arizona Agriculture publication.