Achievements by the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) College of Agriculture and Food Sciences (CAFS) were presented to key members of the Florida Legislature earlier this month.
President Elmira Mangum, Ph.D., and Timothy Moore, Ph.D., FAMU’s vice president of Research shared the long list of accomplishments with the Florida Senate’s Committee on Agriculture during a well-received presentation on Jan. 11.
While speaking to the group of lawmakers, Mangum detailed several accomplishments and reasons why FAMU is truly Florida’s agricultural university. President Mangum also informed the group that the 3,800 acres in Brooksville donated to the University by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will help transform agricultural research in Florida.
“We will use these resources to expand our teaching and to service the increasing needs of the local communities in Florida,” Mangum said.
Mangum added that the land acquisition will enhance her vision of making FAMU a best-in-class, land-grant, doctoral research University with a global presence.
“By partnering with public and private funders to support our research and our outreach initiatives, we can lead the effort in developing solutions for our food security and safety. We can improve local economies by training small ranchers and farmers and provide nutritional training by growing healthy foods in our garden,” she said.
During the highly informative briefing, which included a CAFS video presentation, Moore elaborated on his role as a vice president at FAMU.
“One of the benefits of being here at Florida A&M as vice president of Research is interacting with all of the great students we have. We have wonderful young minds that we are now beginning to shape to make impacts globally,” Moore said.
Moore also reiterated the importance of the 3,800-acre transfer to FAMU, saying that because of the acquisition, FAMU is now the second-largest 1890 land-grant University in terms of property in the nation, second only to Tuskegee University, which has most of its property in the form of a national forest.
“This gives us an actual educational research base unlike any HBCU in the nation. This is important because this strengthens our ability to work closely with the industry in order to develop precision agricultural practices with biological control measures and begin work on a new generation of beginning farmers and ranchers,” Moore said.
Perhaps the highlight of the presentation was the revelation that FAMU was recently notified that it has been moved from a Carnegie level three research University to a Carnegie level two designation.
“We are now a research University with high research activity. We’re now in the same category as Auburn University and Old Dominion University with half of the faculty. We have half the faculty and are generating just as much research as these schools, which means we’re taking the state’s resources and the federal resources and doing more with it,” Moore said.