SOMETIMES HURRICANES CAN BE A GOOD THING

After heading up the UF/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center for almost four years, Dr. Brian Scully is finally seeing the home stretch for improvements being made to the facility. And he has a couple of hurricanes to thank.

Dr. Brian Scully, head of the IFAS research center in Fort Pierce, checks out progress in the construction of a new 9,000-square-foot laboratory building.

"Both Frances and Jeanne pushed the old building closer to the brink of disaster," Scully said. IFAS administration had been trying to replace a 1940s-era laboratory building since the mid-1980s. It had been patched up time and again, but the facility really needed to be replaced. Then Frances and Jeanne came along and the situation reached the point of no return.

"We put some money into i, thinking we could patch it up a little more, but it just didn't work. Just prior to the hurricanes, I had submitted a community budget initiative request to our legislative delegation to bulldoze the building and put a new one in," said Scully. The request was turned down.

"And then Frances and Jeanne came along and it helped us out where we were able to get about $4.89 million from the state via the hurricane appropriations for repair and remodeling," Scully said, adding that the money was given to them to build a replacement building and repair other hurricane damage. "We have about five building or repair projects going on," he said. "This may be where we're finishing off. It started during my predecessor Calvin Arnold's time."

The old building has been razed and a new 9,000-square-foot research facility is going up. Scully hopes it will open this fall. It will house many of the younger faculty and offer them the tools to do their job for the next decade or two. "We're very excited. By having certain kinds of labs, and a certain kind of facility, it allows those people to position themselves to get more grants to get more work done. They are able to have a greater impact on science and agriculture," said Scully.

And ultimately, having those superb facilities allows the Fort Pierce faculty to attract more graduate students and post-doctorate researchers as well. "Good facilities attract good people," said Scully.

Construction on the new research facility in Fort Pierce is expected to be completed in late summer or fall.

The new complex will house several programs including ornamental horticulture, water quality/water toxicology, and alternative crops such as aquaculture. One researcher is particularly happy; the post-harvest physiology program will finally have a lab and greenhouse befitting its assignment, Scully says. "Dr. Mark Ritenour, our post-harvest physiologist, has been in a glorified garage for the better part of eight years. He's probably the most excited person around here. Not only is he getting a new lab, he's also getting a new research assignment. Must be Christmas!"

Scully says the center will focus on the concerns of today's and tomorrow's citrus and vegetable growers. Those include citrus canker, citrus greening and development pressures. "Although selling can benefit the individual grower who might receive a lot of money for his property, from an industry standpoint, it reduces the amount of acreage we have in citrus," Scully said. "And some of us are worried because the Indian River produces some of the highest quality grapefruit in the world. In St. Lucie County, we're now down to about 50,000 acres."

Besides the lab facilities, the new construction at the center will include greenhouses, a breezeway, offices and storage areas. Other recent projects include new graduate student dorms, a level-two biochemical quarantine facility, and aquaculture projects. Also in the works is the purchase of additional land from the St. Lucie School District for more field research and a visitor's center.

Aquaculture is one alternative crop being researched at the IFAS center.

The IFAS facility and USDA's 170,000-square-foot Horticultural Research Laboratory next door serve as anchors for St. Lucie County's Education and Research Park. The master plan for the Research Park calls for over 800 developed acres to house the education and research components, and 850 acres for agriculture fields and future growth. Scully said the Research Park Authority recently requested $7.4 million in funding to make those goals become reality.

The official mission of the IFAS center is to provide research programs to help growers of citrus, vegetable and ornamental crops battle invasive pests and diseases and to develop new programs to keep them in business. "One of our tasks here is to begin to look at other alternative industries or alternative crops like aquaculture, for example," Scully said. By teaming up with a grower advisory committee, the research team can solve problems that come with new ventures. "Certain growers have certain interests in certain areas and they advise us as to what are some of the alternatives are that are out there," he said. "We see alternate food crops like peaches, plums, lychees and other minor food crops. We see aquaculture as a possibility, and clearly the easiest one for citrus growers to make a transition to would be tree crops. Some people are even interested in landscaping and turf, plus there's the whole area of growing crops for ethanol production."

Scully said the center is about halfway through with all the projects that will make the facility all it can be. "We have five separate projects in the works on top of about five that we've already completed," he said. "We want to be a vital part of the Research Park. And not only that, we want to be the research facility of choice for our growers. They're the only reason why we're here."