For more than 130 years, research has been a top priority for LSU agriculture.

Since the 1880s, agricultural experiment stations have provided researchers fertile ground to work to improve the agricultural production and economy of Louisiana.

What began with three agricultural research outposts staffed by 15 employees more than a century ago has evolved into 14 LSU AgCenter research stations statewide staffed by dozens of world-renowned scientists.

This issue of Louisiana Agriculture includes a look into two research stations and three historical figures who helped build the agricultural research and extension organization known today as the LSU AgCenter.

One of the original LSU research stations began as a modest farm scratched from a worn-out field, but its dedicated employees helped lay a foundation for today’s diverse research program.

Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College benefitted from the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave federal lands to state universities that taught farming and mechanical skills. In 1887, the Hatch Act strengthened these “land-grant” schools by funding agricultural experiment stations affiliated with the institutions.

In the early 1880s, the agricultural department of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College was deemed “worse than nothing,” according to Walter L. Fleming’s history of the early years of the university published in 1936.

In 1886, the university took over a 210-acre federal military site on the north side of Baton Rouge. Work began in January 1888 to establish a state experiment station on 110 acres there, a difficult task described by experiment station assistant director David N. Barrow in the station’s first research bulletin published the next year.

“When the station was established here in January of that year, there was nothing but an old field,” Barrow wrote.

The land had been used as a commons where the townspeople’s cattle and horses fed on its grass, leaving it in a “depastured” state. A “sinuous bayou” ran through the tract and limited the station’s useful land.

“This turf had to be transformed into a station, and the work accomplishing it has been of a Herculean kind,” Barrow wrote.

The staff built a “neat and substantial dwelling,” a stable, a large barn and poultry houses that were all whitewashed and enclosed by a wire-and-plank fence. Inside the barn was a custom cotton gin built by the Gullett Gin Company of Tangipahoa Parish.

Here the nine staff members raised dairy cattle, planted a garden and orchard, and raised cash crops to investigate the best practices for Louisiana producers. This farm joined the two other original stations: the Sugar Research Station, which was started by sugarcane planters in Kenner in 1885 and then moved to New Orleans, and a station in Ouachita Parish.

Along with the university, the Baton Rouge experiment station’s work grew and improved. A photo from the early 1900s shows a neat farm.

By 1924, the staff numbered 24, and the researchers were preparing to move to the expansive new campus — “the Greater University” — being built to the south, according to the station bulletin published in 1924. The Sugar Research Station also moved to the new campus and in 1968 was relocated to St. Gabriel, where it remains.

By the 1920s, the number of experiment stations had grown to represent the diverse crops and livestock raised by Louisiana producers. Today, researchers at 14 branches of the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station continue the work across the state, building on the foundation established long ago.

Kyle Peveto is the editor of Louisiana Agriculture.

This article appears in the summer 2024 edition of Louisiana Agriculture magazine.

The Baton Rouge experiment station appears in this photo from the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of Andrew D. Lytle Collection, Mss. 2600, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge.