Just last week, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Haley Oliver speak about food safety and the land grant mission as she was selected to deliver the 2018 Justin Smith Morrill Lecture at the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities Conference.  Dr. Oliver is trained in microbiology and molecular biology and she talked about the importance of safe food and its role in the US and internationally.  In the US alone, 1 in 6 persons will have a food borne illness each year.  I don’t need to go into the details—we all know what the results of eating something that does not agree with us can be!

Dr. Oliver focused on the importance of food safety in developing countries and the work that a team of scientists at Purdue is doing with funding from the US Agency for International Development.  Dr. Oliver and her multi-disciplinary team—Drs. Ebner (Animal Science), Deering (Food Science) and McNamara (Agricultural Economics)—have built a food technology program at Herat University in Afghanistan.  Why Afghanistan?  Because having safe, reliable food to eat is one of the first lines of defense against political instability. To build the program, Dr. Oliver and her colleagues started by listening to the needs of the people, developing a curriculum specific for Afghanistan and getting it approved by the government. They are training both teachers who are pursuing a master’s degree (training is conducted in India) and undergraduate students. Their first cohort of students have just earned their bachelor’s degrees from Herat University.  These students conducted studies on water quality throughout the region showing that while there is little contamination of lead or mercury, 43% of the water is contaminated with bacteria, which explains in part the fact that 20% of the children under age five are sick or die each year.  The students and their instructors investigated the source of contamination and found that water wells were often dug very close to latrines.  The education these students received will now enable them to help others in their communities to change what they do and prevent more sickness and death.

In her lecture, Dr. Oliver stressed that in designing the Afghanistan project, she and her team always kept in mind the need to bring the right solutions to the right problems.  While she can bring many advanced molecular biology tools to the question, this is not a sustainable solution in Afghanistan. Dr. Oliver discussed some of the necessary elements and the importance of integration that is the heart of the land grant mission.  She talked about listening to determine the need, building trust, creating sustainable solutions, empowering women and youth, building partnerships and being resilient. These are qualities she developed throughout her career (which started when she was in 4-H) and that she continues to build upon today.  Dr. Oliver integrated all aspects of the land grant mission, from Extension efforts that start with listening, to teaching in the classroom, to publishing research on water quality that she conducted with the class, to using the knowledge gained to drive behavior change.  It was clear from Dr. Oliver’s talk that all aspects of the land grant mission will be needed to build a sustainable economy and planet for the next 150 years.