(03/03/25) BATON ROUGE, La. — For the past two decades, dozens of researchers and scientists have come through the LSU AgCenter as a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s collaborative research programs, including its Scientific Exchange Program. The program brings in scholars from around the world to become acclimated to agriculture research in the United States.

Recently, three AgCenter professors completed these programs, which also requires that the host professor visit the home country of the visiting scholar.

Another professor conducted a training program for three Barbadian technicians supported by their country’s ministry of agriculture. The research included cover cropping, virus-induced gene silencing and implementing conservation methods.

Programs like this allow for international collaboration that can promote future research and cooperation.

“We have something already started to establish research collaboration down the road,” said researcher Brenda Tubaña.

Tubaña, a professor in the school of Plant, Environmental and Soil Sciences, hosted Cornelia Gwatidzo. Gwatidzo is an instructor from the Botswanan University of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

During her 12 weeks at LSU, Gwatidzo focused much of her time on research into cover cropping, a technique that allows soil to stay healthy even while a farmer’s main crop is not in the ground. This practice is not used frequently in Botswana, so Gwatidzo wanted to find crops that could be effective in her home country, even though the research will take years to complete.

“It's not an overnight process. You don’t see the effect just doing it for two or three years,” Tubaña said of implementing cover cropping. “It should be years and years of work.”

Gwatidzo also got to visit a few of the different AgCenter research stations around the state, where she was taught how to fly a drone and use basic remote sensing. Another opportunity that Gwatidzo was able to take advantage of was attending the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa.

For this event, Gwatidzio was joined by Moises Neil Seriño, another SEP scholar that was on LSU’s campus last year. Seriño is a professor at Visayas State University in the Philippines.

He was mentored by Naveen Adusumilli, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness. Their research focused on conservation practices that farmers should implement to mitigate damage from severe weather, specifically on the island of Leyte.

Their work was supported by a USDA program that helps developing countries implement conservation methods.

“The U.S. interest in supporting countries is part of its commitment to cooperate on the big climate agenda and its impact on food security, which is helping farmers become more resilient in nations that are more vulnerable to these extreme weather events,” Adusumilli said. “The Philippines is one of those countries because it has a lot of typhoons hitting those lands.”

On his return to the Philippines, Seriño and his team along with Adusumilli investigated what would be the best way to get these practices adopted and which ones could most easily be implemented. This was done through collaborating on a national program in the Philippines that Seriño leads on the island of Leyte.

“We looked at the spatial aspects, meaning where farmer decision making could be influenced by their neighbor with regards to conservation or adaptive strategies to become more resilient,” Adusumilli said. “Because they have the data at a national scale, we were able to analyze those spatial impacts.”

In the Department of Plant Pathology and Crop Physiology, professor Raghuwinder Singh hosted Marcos Gonçalves from the São Paulo Biological Institute in Brazil. Gonçalves and Singh focused their research on controlling pathogens in corn.

The method they focused on was a process called virus-induced gene silencing. This method alters the genetics of a corn plant to make it less attractive for insects that may infect the plant with viruses, in this case maize dwarf mosaic virus. Gene silencing may lead to improved crop production through the reduction of the insect’s population and viruses spread within the field and across different fields.

While Gonçalves was not able to fully complete his research, the connections that Singh was able to make with the researcher and his school were important to the program.

“One of the outcomes of this follow-up trip was that there is a great possibility or potential for a student exchange program. The director general of the Institute of Biology was very interested in sending their master’s and Ph.D. students to LSU for a three-to-four-month internship to learn new skills and techniques,” Singh said.

Also in the Department of Plant Pathology and Crop Physiology, an international program was implemented this past year. Assistant professor Imana Power hosted four trainees from Barbados to teach them methods to detect and control viruses in sweet potatoes.

Unlike the previous three SEP exchanges, this program was set up to educate the four trainees on research techniques and virus detection methods. Power wanted to teach the researchers, who varied in age and experience, methods established through the National Clean Plant Network on obtaining and maintaining virus-tested sweet potatoes, in particular because of the importance the plant has in Barbados.

While both Barbados and Louisiana grow sweet potatoes, there are significant differences in farming practices in the two countries. For one, and maybe most significantly, Barbados can grow sweet potatoes almost year-round, changing how sweet potatoes are stored and cared for. This is important for Power because of the impact a virus can have on this setup.

“It’s nice to see different systems so postharvest diseases are not really an issue for Barbados because they do not store their sweet potatoes. But with viruses, they can have the accumulation throughout the year,” Power said. “All sweet potatoes can be infected with all major viruses in one season.”

This program had a goal at creating collaborative relationship between the AgCenter and Barbados. It also had a similar goal to Adusumilli’s, which was to take information to an area that may not have yet adopted efficient farming techniques.

“Improvement through collaboration will always be a win-win,” Power said.

Programmatic support for the three exchanges and the Barbadian training program was provided by Jonathan Hubchen, an instructor in the AgCenter Department of Agricultural and Extension Education and Evaluation.

Hubchen sees these programs as benefiting agriculture in Louisiana as well as in other countries. Not only do the AgCenter professors improve their professional capacity through these programs, he said, but they find solutions to problems such as plant diseases and conservation methods that are as relevant here as in other countries.

The four scholars from Barbados outside of the Sweet Potato Research Station in Chase, Louisiana. Photo provided by Imana Power

Raghuwinder Singh, top right, and Marcos Gonçalves, top center, with other students and faculty at the Institute of Agronomy Sugarcane Research Station in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. Photo provided by Raghuwinder Singh