
Bob Whitney, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service state organics specialist, in organic corn field at Stephenville (Sam Craft/Texas A&M AgriLife Marketing and Communications)
Organic Agriculture and AgriLife Extension

Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Stephenville (Laura McKenzie/Texas A&M AgriLife Marketing and Communications)
Texas organics blog

A blog curated by Whitney covers news and updates related to organics across Texas. The Texas organics blog is available at https://agrilifeorganic.org
Organic agriculture and AgriLife Research
The Stephenville Center is one of four AgriLife centers that are USDA organic certified. The others are at Lubbock, Vernon and Uvalde. The Texas A&M AgriLife Center at Vernon also houses a 99-acre research farm that is in transition to becoming certified organic. These organic certified research facilities breed new organic varieties of peanuts, cotton, milo, vegetables, corn, wheat, forage crops and specialty crops like cowpeas, guar, and hemp. Waltram Ravelombola, Ph.D., AgriLife Research organic specialty crop breeder, is now located at the Vernon center, where he conducts numerous organic projects in process and grant applications for many more. In addition to Ravelombola, research and extension faculty working to build the state’s organic agriculture sector across Texas A&M AgriLife include:- Curtis Adams, Ph.D., assistant professor
- Juan Anciso, Ph.D., professor and extension vegetable specialist
- John Cason, Ph.D., assistant professor
- Jane Dever, Ph.D., professor
- Emi Kimura, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension agronomist
- Fugen Dou, Ph.D., associate professor
- Jourdan Bell, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension agronomist
- Katie Lewis, Ph.D., associate professor
- Luis Ribera, Ph.D., associate professor and extension economist
- Samuel D. Zapata, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension economist
- Francisco “Pancho” Abello, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension specialist
- Peter Dotray, Ph.D., professor and extension specialist
- Reagan Noland, Ph.D., assistant professor and extension agronomist
- Ronnie W. Schnell, Ph.D., associate professor and extension specialist
- Russell Wallace, Ph.D., professor and extension vegetable specialist
- Xin-Gen “Shane” Zhou, Ph.D., associate professor
- Vijay Joshi, Ph.D., assistant professor