Sdsu Extension Welcomes New Specialty Crop Expert

Aug 14, 2025

South Dakota State University Extension is pleased to welcome Nick Volesky as a new Horticulture and Specialty Crop Field Specialist.

In his role, Volesky will work with the SDSU Extension horticulture team to address South Dakota’s consumer needs, including home landscape plantings and specialty crop production in farms, homes, schools and community gardens. He will be based in Rapid City at West River Research and Extension.

Volesky joins Cody Molnar, SDSU Extension Horticulture Plant Pathology Field Specialist, as the newest members of the SDSU Extension horticulture team, which includes experts in gardening, lawn care, trees and shrubs, water management, soil health, Master Gardener training, and more.

“Horticulture questions include everything from gardens, lawns, trees and crops. The addition of Cody and Nick to the horticulture team will ensure SDSU Extension is able to answer those questions promptly and by an expert in that area,” said Heather Gessner, interim Agriculture and Natural Resources Program Director and SDSU Extension Livestock Business Management Field Specialist. “We encourage everyone to reach out to any SDSU Extension staff with questions or concerns, and we will do our best to get them answered.”

Source : sdstate.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