Former Congressman Sam Farr, third from right, cuts the ribbon on the new Sam Farr United States Crop Improvement and Protection Research Center in Salinas on Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, as Agriculture Research Services Director of the Pacific West Area Tara McHugh, former Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, USDA Chief Scientist Chavonda Jacobs-Young, ARS Administrator Simon Liu, and Research Leader and Location Coordinator William Wintermantel look on.
SALINAS – A new cutting-edge agriculture research facility named for a long-serving Central Coast politician was ceremoniously opened with a ribbon-cutting on Friday.
The Sam Farr United States Crop Improvement and Protection Research Center in Salinas is a 117,000-square-foot structure that builds on the existing agricultural research services lab that it replaces. The facility, which sits on 20 acres at 1636 E. Alisal St., will make it possible to advance research on the sustainable production of vegetable and fruit crops which is crucial to the success of California’s agricultural sector. It will also enable the expansion of collaborations with partners at UC Davis as well as others around the world.
The building was named for longtime politician Sam Farr who was the U.S. Representative for California’s 17th and 20th congressional districts on the Central Coast. He served in Congress for more than 23 years before retiring after the 2016 elections.
“It’s not that ARS is a first, it’s what this building is going to do for the first time, and that’s being able to expand opportunities for learning, for jobs, because this is a labor-intensive industry building,” said Farr at the ceremony.
The Research Center houses the Agricultural Research Services, USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and UC Davis. It provides cutting-edge infrastructure and equipment that facilitate research collaborations on improving lettuce, spinach and melon germplasm, and studying the basic biology, epidemiology, and management of viral, fungal and bacterial diseases affecting these crops. Other work conducted at the Agricultural Research Services building includes developing alternatives to methyl bromide as a soil fumigant for controlling soilborne pests, reducing post-harvest losses of lettuce, developing scientifically-based organic crop production practices, and developing methods for weed control.
“This building is big. It’s going to have a lot of jobs but it’s going provide more jobs outside, so it’s going to be a job-producing enterprise,” said Farr. “It also joins a network of all the intellectual capital that is around Monterey Bay with the University of California Santa Cruz, California State University Monterey Bay, all the marine labs, the community colleges … we are a plethora of centers of excellence and this is just another jewel in that necklace around the bay of centers of excellence and the results from the work here helps the whole world.”
On a tour of the new building, Research Leader and Location Coordinator William Wintermantel showed a typical lab, one of 25 in the facility, which “allows a contained area to do research on a particular disease situation. In this case (research entomologist Daniel Hasegawa is) working on a virus vector situation. He rears the insects he works with here in the facility and then can use those to study that for example in the greenhouse complexes under construction outside.”
Wintermantel said that with the new facility, researchers now have the equipment needed to do the work, and the facility to do it in.
“The old facility we had before, we had to do a lot of retrofitting to try to make things work,” he said.
Hasegawa is working with the western flower thrip, the insect that transmits the impatiens necrotic spot virus that affects lettuce. The virus was first documented in lettuce in 2006 but in 2018-2019 it started to have an economic impact.
Thrips are a major pest of many agricultural crops and damage plants by sucking their juices and transmitting viruses, in this case the necrotic spot virus. In lettuce, the leaves of infected plants develop brown to dark brown spots and dead (necrotic) areas. As necrosis spreads, much of the leaf browns, dries out and dies, leaving the lettuce not able to be harvested for human consumption.
It is this type of research work on one of the major crops of the Salinas Valley and elsewhere that the Sam Farr United States Crop Improvement and Protection Research Center provides.
At the ceremony, Farr was lauded for his work in government over the years championing agriculture and agriculture workers, and his relentless pursuit of actions and policies that would benefit his constituents.
Each speaker at the standing-room-only ribbon-cutting ceremony voiced their support in the naming of the building after Farr. Those speakers included Jack Kingston, former Congressman from Georgia, Leon Panetta, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Rivas, current California State Assembly Speaker, District 29, Simon Liu, Agriculture Research Services Administrator, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture and Chavonda Jacobs-Young, Research, Education and Economics Under Secretary and USDA Chief Scientist.
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