Kenneth Vogel
2012 Hall of Fame Inductee 

I'm Ken Vogel and I'm a research geneticist and I'm located at Lincoln, Nebraska at the University of Nebraska. I grew up on an irrigated farm in the extreme western part of Nebraska. The city was Scotts Bluff it's about 20 miles ... our farm was about 20 miles from the Wyoming  border. My father's farm the main crop was sugarbeets we also grew dry beans, alfalfa, corn and we also feed cattle and sheep up to a thousand lands a year.  

There was a very strong emphasis on science and science education when I was finishing high school and getting ready to go to college, the Russians had bet the U.S. to space. They had launched Sputnik and they also had the first man in space and so it was the viewpoint that the U.S. was behind in science and young people were very much encouraged to go into science. 

I had a high school vocational agricultural, or FFA, teacher who was a very good teacher and he used a lot of science in his agriculture instruction then I had a couple of other very good high school teachers, even though it was a small high school, so when I went to college I was pretty much going to be focused on some type of science and agriculture and I went to Colorado State University which was the nearest 4 year land grant college to where my father's farm was at and went into, initially pre-vet and then I decided I liked agronomy or crop science better and I  transferred after my sophomore year. 

I did my MS work on dry bean breeding so I finished up a Masters and then I went into the military for almost 4 years. I was an officer in the Navy for almost 4 years and when I got out of the Navy that's when I had become very interested in plant breeding and then I got an assistanceship or fellowship at the University of Nebraska to do a PhD program. 

My advisor at the University of Nebraska was actually an ARS scientist. His name was Virgil Johnson and he is a Hall of Fame member and he was a wheat breeder and geneticist and he at that time, and still true at the University of Nebraska, the ARS scientists are integrated into the Department of Agronomy and he was, he advised several graduate students and he worked very closely with University of Nebraska professor John Schmidt. So, I interacted with them a lot and I became aware that the way Johnson ... he operated within a within ARS ... he had 100% research assignment and he was able to do a lot more then all the university professors who had teaching responsibilities. So, I was very interested in an ARS type of career. 

One of the ARS research leaders there at Lincoln, Herman Goors, stopped in at my graduates'  office and he said, "We're gonna have this ARS grass breeding position opening up" and asked he asked if I would be interested in it. I told him ... I thought about it ... and went a day and looked up read about what this person had been doing and he was working on perennial grasses including a bunch of native grasses. So, I told him yes I would be interested. So, I applied, and then I was interviewed and I got the job. 

My main job is supposed to be plant breeding and genetics of perennial grasses. But what I've done is I ... in about the early 80s I developed what I call a long term strategy and I decided what my main job really was in soil conservation. But what I really my main job was to make, develop  perennial grasses that were competitive with grain crops on marginal land or land that was really had high erosion risk and the way I need to do that was I needed to develop perennial grasses that had high productivity as used as a pasture grass so that they would be ecologically competitive  with the grain crop. And then in 1990, the Department of Energy became interested in one of the grasses, switchgrass, it's a perennial grass and I was one of the few breeders in the United States who was doing anything with this species and so I got started in biomass and it was for the same thing it was a crop that could be grown on this marginal land, and that could be used as a profitable crop. And so I'm a plant breeder but some of the things I've done work on--how to get plants established, the seeding rates, herbicides controlling weeds during establishment, fertility-- the whole management package and so that's kind of what I've worked on is putting together complete packages for use by production agriculture. 

We did the first comprehensive study on the net energy balance of growing switchgrass as a biomass energy crop and so we had ... the Department of Energy was interested in some of the economic costs of producing this on ... using actual farmer production fields. So, what we did was we contracted with farmers to grow, three different states, to grow switchgrass as a bioenergy crop and we had collected a lot of data but basically we went ahead then and stretched ... we went ahead and used this for comprehensive net energy analysis. So this is something that we did that the Department of Energy ... it was more than what they expected us to do and it was more than what ARS expected us to do and so that turned out to be some of our most highly cited publications.

In 1990, USDA put out a plant hardiness zone map and recently a new hardiness zone map was put out and if you compare those two maps you can see that the plant hardiness zones have shifted north. For example, in the older map the state of Nebraska, the northern half of the state was in plant hardiness zone 4 which is a cooler hardiness zone and the southern half was in hardiness zone 5 and in the new map the entire state is now plant hardiness zone 5 which means that the plant hardiness zones have shifted north about 200-250 miles. And this basically is reflected on what farmers are doing now. Throughout the Midwest, farmers are planting corn about 3 weeks earlier than they did 30 years ago. And, so every farmer in the Midwest knows that things are warming up sooner and so basically they know that things have warmed up and so global warming is occurring and  farmers in the Midwest, they know it. 

Global warming is going to affect pathogens, plant discases, its going to affect insects, it's going to change everything. And so, the scientists coming on now they are going to be in an era where everything is changing and so they are going to have to be very flexible and they are going to have to be looking forward to not what is going on now but what is likely going to be happening 10 years from now. 

Biofuels, the advantage of them is, one of the problems why we are getting global warming is because we are putting fossil carbon up into the atmosphere and with biofuels basically what you are doing is you are cycling carbon instead of putting fossil carbon up in the air. And, the other things is the perennial grasses such as  switchgrass sequester a lot of carbon in to the soil. And that's one of the things that I've done is that we've been working on--and all of these studies that we've been doing on multiple farms and long-term studies--we've demonstrated pretty conclusively that switchgrass is sequestering about a ton of carbon per year in the soil. So that's actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the soil and it's putting it in the soil deep. It's going down up to about 4-5 feet it's putting carbon through out the soil profile. So, it benefits has positive environmental effects in terms of global warming greenhouse gasses and it's also you can get fuel from the land and also you can take land that's erosion prone and put it into something where it's going to stabilize the soil. So, it's all good. 

Right now we are working on some very interesting stuff on how to convert perennial grass, biomass, into liquid fuels and so we are working with a bunch of chemists. We're also doing some working with molecular biologists and I'm actually a field plant breeder and so I get to interact with all of these people and it's always on the boundaries some of this area where the interesting stuff is.  

Well, I have several perennial grass cultivars that I am finishing up. Getting them ready for release. One of them is switchgrass which will be ARS' first bioenergy-type switchgrass release. There's also a smooth brome grass and a western wheat grass plus one other grass cultivar that I've spent about 20 years involved in developing. So, I'm going to make sure those are finished and released to seed producers and farmers before I retire. So, that's my main goal is when I get that work done that's well pretty much well that will be it. A nice way to end a career.