Texas A&M AgriLife Research is the agricultural and life sciences research agency of the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

and a part of the

Texas A&M University System The Texas A&M University System is a state university system in Texas and is one of the state's six independent university systems. The Texas A&M University System is one of the largest systems of higher education in the United States, with a bu ...

. Formerly named Texas Agricultural Research Service, the agency's name was changed January 1, 2008, as part of a rebranding of

Texas A&M AgriLife Texas A&M AgriLife is the organization the connects agriculture and life sciences programs at Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M University System The Texas A&M University System is a state university system in Texas and is one of the state ...

(formerly Texas A&M Agriculture). The A&M was formally added to the agency's name on September 1, 2012, as part of a branding effort by the Texas A&M University System to strengthen the association between the agencies and Texas A&M University. The

agricultural experiment station An agricultural experiment station (AES) or agricultural research station (ARS) is a scientific research center that investigates difficulties and potential improvements to food production and agribusiness. Experiment station scientists work with f ...

division is headquartered at Texas A&M's flagship campus in

College Station, Texas College Station is a city in Brazos County, Texas, Brazos County, Texas, situated in East-Central Texas in the heart of the Brazos Valley, towards the eastern edge of the region known as the Texas Triangle. It is northwest of Houston and east-n ...

. Texas A&M AgriLife Research serves all 254 Texas counties and operates 15 research centers throughout the state. Texas A&M AgriLife Research specialists in beef cattle have produced the world's largest set of gene-mapping resources for beef cattle and have

cloned Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical or virtually identical DNA, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction. In the field of biotechnology, ...

what is believed to be the first animal—a calf—specifically cloned for disease resistance.

History

The history of Texas A&M AgriLife Research began with the founding of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (Texas A.M.C.) in 1871, the state's first public institute of higher education. Initially, the university did not offer any agricultural classes, leading to protests by farmer groups and much of college's leadership being replaced. Despite the new curriculum in agriculture and engineering, the college's enrollment continued to drop. The land-grant colleges around the country were struggling. With the ample land available in the West, most farmers had little incentive to adopt

intensive farming Intensive agriculture, also known as intensive farming (as opposed to extensive farming), conventional, or industrial agriculture, is a type of agriculture, both of crop plants and of animals, with higher levels of input and output per unit of ...

methods and other advanced agricultural technologies. As with Texas A.M.C., the agricultural colleges were being criticized for not actually giving their students the training that would enable them to return to their family farms, and instead the graduates were leaving the farm life altogether. For most observers, however, the biggest issue was that no solid agricultural research on which to base the practical teaching was being attempted, so to fill this need, Congress passed the Hatch Experiment Station Act of 1887, which provided funding for agricultural experiment stations in each state. This led to the founding of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in 1887 at Texas A.M.C. This new organization was given the task of conducting research in all aspects of

crop A crop is a plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence. When the plants of the same kind are cultivated at one place on a large scale, it is called a crop. Most crops are cultivated in agriculture or hydropon ...

and

livestock Livestock are the domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to provide labor and produce diversified products for consumption such as meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool. The term is sometimes used to refer solely to animal ...

operations. In 1948, Texas A&M formed the

, incorporating Texas A&M AgriLife Research and six related agencies which are still part of the system today.TAMU System Agency Overview FAQ
In 2007, Elsa Murano, who was overseeing Texas A&M Agriculture as a whole, hired a consulting firm to evaluate the name of Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, as well as other Texas A&M Agriculture organizations. On January 1, 2008, the Experiment Stations' name was changed to Texas AgriLife Research. Murano felt that "AgriLife" better reflected the agency's foundational message that "agriculture is life", while Research better reflected what the organization did. The A&M was formally added to the agency's name on September 1, 2012, as part of a branding effort by the Texas A&M University System to strengthen the association between the agencies and Texas A&M University.

Research highlights

Through its research, the organization helped eradicate Texas fever, a

bovine Bovines (subfamily Bovinae) comprise a diverse group of 10 genera of medium to large-sized ungulates, including cattle, bison, African buffalo, water buffalos, and the four-horned and spiral-horned antelopes. The evolutionary relationship betwe ...

disease spread by

tick Ticks (order Ixodida) are parasitic arachnids that are part of the mite superorder Parasitiformes. Adult ticks are approximately 3 to 5 mm in length depending on age, sex, species, and "fullness". Ticks are external parasites, living by ...

s that threatened the state's cattle industry. In the 1920s, it conducted the first known studies on the crossbreeding of cattle, which went on to become a national practice still in use by the cattle industry. In 1931, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station developed the first mechanical cotton stripper, a machine that would become widely adopted by cotton farmers within a decade. The organization is a world leader in sorghum research, having begun with its developing the first known sorghum hybrid in 1955. In the 1950s, it also again came to the aid of the cattle industry by developing techniques for destroying

screwworm ''Cochliomyia'' is a genus in the family Calliphoridae, known as blowflies, in the order Diptera. ''Cochliomyia'' is commonly referred to as the New World screwworm flies, as distinct from Old World screwworm flies. Four species are in this genu ...

s which were plaguing cattle in Texas and Central America. It also developed the '1015Y'

onion An onion (''Allium cepa'' L., from Latin ''cepa'' meaning "onion"), also known as the bulb onion or common onion, is a vegetable that is the most widely cultivated species of the genus ''Allium''. The shallot is a botanical variety of the onio ...

, opening the way for Texas to become the leading producer of fresh market onions in America. It helped produce a mild

jalapeño The jalapeño ( , , ) is a medium-sized chili pepper pod type cultivar of the species ''Capsicum annuum''. A mature jalapeño chili is long and hangs down with a round, firm, smooth flesh of wide. It can have a range of pungency, with Scovi ...

pepper ('TAM'), increasing the sales of

salsa Salsa most often refers to: * Salsa (Mexican cuisine), a variety of sauces used as condiments * Salsa music, a popular style of Latin American music * Salsa (dance), a Latin dance associated with Salsa music Salsa or SALSA may also refer to: ...

, and 'BetaSweet' carrots which have higher levels of

beta carotene Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labio ...

. Its animal researchers helped produce

gene mapping Gene mapping describes the methods used to identify the locus of a gene and the distances between genes. Gene mapping can also describe the distances between different sites within a gene. The essence of all genome mapping is to place a c ...

resources for cattle, and lead to the cloning of the first calf.

Center locations

*Amarillo *Beaumont *Corpus Christi *Dallas *El Paso *Fort Stockton *Lubbock *Overton *Pecos *San Angelo *Stephenville *Temple *Uvalde *Vernon *Weslaco

References

External links

* Texas A&M University System Organizations established in 1887 AgriLife Research, Texas AandM {{DEFAULTSORT:Texas AandM AgriLife Research