A Citizen of the World: UGA Grand Farm Director Lenin Rodriguez Cultivating Fertile Future for Farming

Jul 08, 2026

By David Mitchell

It was about 90 years ago when Lenin Rodriguez’s grandfather put down roots in a small village in Choluteca, Honduras. He had been working as a cattleman, moving cows from Nicaragua through Honduras and into El Salvador, where they were sold to ranchers.

Along each trip, he would break in El Banquito, a small village in the southern portion of the country, where he met a woman who would one day be his wife.

“It’s a good reason to stay,” Rodriguez said with a smile.

There, surrounded by sprawling farmland and rolling hills, they established in the nearby village of Sabana Larga the family farm upon which Rodriguez spent his childhood and developed an early interest in agriculture. Like the crops in the field, it nourished an ever-expanding desire to grow beyond his humble beginnings.

Now the inaugural director of the University of Georgia Grand Farm, a proving ground for agricultural research and technology in Perry, Georgia, Rodriguez is using that background to fuel innovation that could shift paradigms for farms like the one on which he grew up.

From one farm to another

Rodriguez remembers fondly those early days on his family’s farm. Each day, he would attend school in the morning and spend the afternoon handling daily chores alongside his older brother and sister.

Source : uga.edu

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