The University Division of Agriculture Research and Extension Southwest Research and Extension Center Director Daniel Rivera is fifth from the left, surrounded by staff at the Center's offices for this morning's Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce Coffee.

This week's Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce Coffee took place at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Southwest Research and Extension Center, otherwise known as The Experiment Station, this morning starting about 9:30 and extending until 11:00 a.m.

Nine members of the Center's administrative team attended, as seen in our photo above. The assortment of breakfast foods included Baked Potato Stuffed Mushrooms, Spinach Quiche and many other items pictured below.

Director of the Southwest Center, Daniel Rivera, appointed in April of last year, spoke about what the Center does and the particular problems the Center is working to solve every day for farmers locally and around the world:

"We're part of the experiment station, the overall experiment station throughout the state of Arkansas. And so what we focus on here is going to be horticulture, plant pathology, nematodes and beef cattle. Those are the prevalent industries here. Forestry at one time was. It seems to be waning a little bit. But we do have some research plots out there.

"A lot of what we focus on is, rather than benchtop science, we're doing a lot of things that affect management, more so than anything else. You know, [University of Arkansas System Horticulturist] Aaron [Cato]'s talking about things out there with the horticulture crops where he looks at pest management and alternatives. And ways to mitigate some of those losses that we see. And stuff we do on the cattle side is we looked at things to maybe enhance productivity, better manage our forages, better manage our hay base, things of that nature, just to kind of allow people to be a little bit more efficient, because anymore, with a lot of the technologies that have already been developed, it's more more of issue of trying to get people to implement these technologies and become comfortable with these in their management system."

Asked about what the Center's personnel are doing in the way of teaching farmers to use these advances on their own farms, Rivera said, "That's the mission, the land grant mission, when [the Research and Extension Center] was established, to conduct agricultural research, and then disseminate that knowledge to the public, which we try to do. Social media has been a big boost for that. We can get people, you know, seeing what we're doing pretty quickly."

But, as Rivera said, the Center also teaches in person. "We still rely on our traditional venues, though, our field days, because some folks just like that one-to-one interaction. Sometimes those are better teaching moments, because somebody will pull you aside and talk to you about something--they may not feel comfortable raising their hand in the group or typing it out on Facebook. So those are great opportunities. ... You'd be surprised the questions that we get, but it's just being accessible to other producers."

Rivera was appointed director of the center in April 2021. He is a New Mexico native, having collected his bachelor's and doctorate degrees from New Mexico State, his master's from West Texas A&M, worked in private industry and then for the Mississippi State. His specialty is beef cattle production and nutrition.