Deal Lecture to Focus on Importance of Innovation in Agriculture

Sep 12, 2023

Al Tank, ag and food entrepreneur, investor and consultant based in Bethesda, Maryland, will present the 2023 William K. Deal Leadership Lecture Sept. 27, at Iowa State University.

His presentation, “Innovating Ag Innovation,” will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Dolezal Auditorium, 0127 Curtiss Hall, on Iowa State’s campus. The event is free and open to the public.

According to Tank, innovation in agriculture is omnipresent. Yet the agricultural sector in the United States and the rest of the world faces unprecedented challenges and risks to meet the global demand for food, fiber and energy. Tank will address how we can:

innovate the innovation required to address these challenges in our supply chain infrastructure;
meaningfully mitigate climate change;
enhance productivity;
improve water quality, water use and water availability;
increase biodiversity; and
mitigate labor shortages while ensuring food security.

Tank earned his bachelor’s degree in animal science from Iowa State in 1981. He has held several positions within the agricultural field over the years, serving in Iowa and Washington, D.C. He also founded and was chief executive officer of two companies – AgCert International Plc and Revolution Energy Solutions LLC. AgCert has become a leader in producing and selling agriculturally derived greenhouse gas emission reductions used to meet Kyoto Protocol and European Union Emission Trading Scheme requirements. Revolution Energy Solutions LLC developed, owned and operated renewable energy projects on agricultural platforms in the United States.

Tank serves on several boards and advisory panels, including Blue Sea Capital LLC, Victory Hemp Foods, LLC, Harvard Kennedy School Private and Public, Scientific, Academic and Consumer. Previously, he was the CEO of the National Pork Producers Council. He also co-owns and manages his family’s farm in eastern Iowa, Tank Brothers Farm / Tank Customs, LLC.

The William K. Deal Leadership Lecture is made possible by its namesake, the late William K. Deal, who earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural education from Iowa State in 1958. The lecture is organized by the Department of Agricultural Education and Studies in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-sponsored by the Committee on Lectures funded by the Government of the Student Body.

Source : iastate.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids