February 16, 2010

A new cropping systems specialist has joined the staff at the West Central Research and Extension Center at North Platte.

Greg Kruger will be focusing on sustainable crop production and management systems as they relate to biotechnology, dryland production, pest management, and other production factors. He’ll also be helping to continue the strong research and extension programs already established in the West Central District, a 20-county area stretching from the Kansas border up to Arthur County on the west and Buffalo and Custer counties on the east.

Kruger grew up on a corn-soybean farm in central Ohio where the annual rainfall is twice what it is in west central Nebraska where water is often a yield-limiting factor for dryland farmers.

“In this area, one of the biggest factors in crop production is water management,” Kruger said. “With a systems approach, we can minimize the effects of drought and improve yields.”

“I’ve been told that every 25 miles you travel west in Nebraska, you lose an inch of annual precipitation, which makes a huge difference in how you farm from one end of the state to the other,” he said. As commercial companies develop and release more drought-resistant hybrids, it will be important to test them in different management systems to provide growers information on how to incorporate these technologies into their systems.

Kruger will be working with the variety and hybrid testing program and in his research, will be testing row spacing, seeding density, new biotechnologies, and general agronomic practices. He said he looks forward to working with local producers, consultants, and the ag industry to address area production issues. Other areas of research and extension will include:

• Interaction between pest management strategies (when treatments are combined, may have an additive effect while others are synergistic or antagonistic).
• How new crop technologies offering herbicide resistance, insect resistance, disease resistance can best be utilized for conditions in west central Nebraska.

As with many faculty appointments in UNL’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Kruger has a joint appointment. His is in the Extension and Agricultural Research divisions.

Education

Kruger’s education extends across several agricultural science disciplines. He earned his B.S. degree from Ohio State University where he majored in agricultural and applied economics. He went on to Purdue University where he studied resistance in soybean to root-knot nematodes and received an M.S. degree in plant pathology.

Kruger’s Ph.D. work at Purdue focused on herbicide resistance in marestail (horseweed), a problem in Nebraska as well. He looked at potential glyphosate, ALS-inhibiting, dicamba, and 2-4,D resistance. He found that plants evolved resistance to either glyphosate or ALS-inhibitors, but usually not both, even though many plants have been exposed to both. The introduction of dicamba-resistant crops, which are currently under development, would provide growers a weed control option later into the growing season for managing marestail populations with resistance to both glyphosate and ALS-inhibitors.

Outside the Office

Kruger and his wife, Melissa, moved to North Platte in mid-January, when he started the new position. Along with them came Roman, a half black Labrador Retriever and half Great Dane that Kruger describes as the world’s largest lap dog.