Scientist of the Year Awards

Patrick G. Hunt, Senior Research Scientist of the Year, interviewed 2006

The Scientist of the Year Award means multiple things to me and it's rather humbling. For the agency, we're about the business of solving problems with the use of science and technologies and it just has been a natural fit with who I am. My wife says you know it ought to be against the law for somebody to get up and go to work whistling, that happy every day.

But it really it is a marvelous opportunity to see things and to use the imagine and to have colleagues around that value you, your unique things, and together we are really moving things forward and I say we because almost everything I have done has been in cooperation with others throughout my career.  

The three really big things that impacted my career were the overflow treatment of wetlands. It was a major accomplishment when we figured out the theory of that system allowed us to do things with municipal waste treatment and it really revolved around the theory of wetland science which thirty years later came back as to see what we're doing with constructing wetlands and riparian buffers and those sorts of interactions. The constructed wetlands allow us to process pretty heavy loads of waste and a small footprint before they go out to agricultural lands. The advantage of that is it gives the producers the ability to process that with less land or in case they want to go with more animals process that on the same land that they have.

Nitrogen has been a thread through my whole career from when I was trying to get rid of it with denitrification with overflow to when I was trying to obtain it with nitrogen fixation.

Photobiology allowed us come up with the idea of reflective colors of the soil changing the plant growth and then the idea to invent colored mulch. Of course the plant is responding to specific wavelengths that overtime it has adapted physiologically to and it responds in growth that way. We then add specific colors of light particularly red and far red that we were controlling to reflect back on the plant and particularly very high value crops such as tomatoes and strawberry and now it stands out there as a product on the market. That was really one of the fun things to do in my career. 

But then most recently this presidential water quality initiative which we worked closely with 
a multitude of sister agencies and the private sector as well to show that we can in fact do some important things for improving water quality on a watershed basis right now with livestock whether it's some of the problems we have with concentrated dairy, concentrated swine, concentrated poultry, we have problems with nutrient and water quality, we have problems with odor. 

A goal that I have is to make growing livestock, particularly with swine, to be no more of a problem for the neighbors then growing peaches or pecans and not only that but to do it where it is not a financial burden and in fact using this waste as an energy source we can turn this problem area into a resource profit center. 

We received a US patent on the process that removes solids which are a valuable resource that can be composted where as they are no longer limited by pumping distance of the liquid. 

Here with this system we can treat the dense agricultural waste in an effective manner. The solids are taken off to be used for potentially profitable things such as energy production and the remaining soluble fraction, which is much less, can be economically treated to remove the nutrients and kill the pathogens and produce a clean water can then go back into the lagoon and this really does then take care of the off site problems with the odors, any potential spill problems and it is, I think, a very important step in modern livestock production. It is environmentally compatible and resource sustainable for the future.

 Well the work I think is has been something that is a great honor to have received considering the people that had done that before. It's not possible to make advances without interaction or very significant interactions. You have to have the government involved like ours, research agencies, policies, our land grant university system has worked marvelous ways and the interest of both here in the United States and aboard. 

And, I like to think that the things that we shared, the ideas and the philosophies we put together are affecting across the agency. Advances are being made almost daily and that's the way science is right now today. It makes me really wish in my career that I was about twenty years younger to follow up on some stuff but hey I'll take it a day at a time. 

My daughter Christie has a little three year old daughter, Dana Elisabeth Dietrich and she is absolutely the delight of my life and I hope that she's in the audience today and I think maybe that she will be able to remember this day. I remember the day my father returned from World War II and I'm hoping that Dana will be able to remember this day.