FMSM Design Group

Even scientists who try to unravel the mysteries of the desert by studying outdoors in a huge, 192,000-acre research range have to come inside once in a while.

A new $7.4 million headquarters for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jornada Experimental Range on the NMSU campus will offer welcome office and laboratory space for Jornada Director Kris Havstad and his staff. The experimental range is part of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The funds were part of federal appropriations, and the result of efforts by New Mexico's congressional delegation, especially Joe Skeen, House agricultural appropriations subcommittee chairman.

NMSU Executive Vice President John Owens says the university was delighted to place a high priority on securing this facility, because the USDA's research facilities on campus were "woefully inadequate."

"My original intention was to have the Jornada facility as a major part of the new agriculture building, but the funding became too complex at both the state and federal levels," Owens says. "After the agriculture building was fully funded, I and other NMSU officials were able to successfully champion the Jornada USDA/ARS unit's cause at the federal level and to achieve the highest priority for the new building."

Construction of the 29,000-square-foot facility is set to begin this summer and is expected to take a year. Located south of Gerald Thomas Hall, the headquarters will include modern equipment to help solve problems related to sustaining arid lands. NMSU's Board of Regents approved a long-term lease of the site for the USDA.

"We always talk about the Jornada as this wonderful laboratory without walls located north of Las Cruces," Havstad says. "But at some point after you've collected your information, whether it's soil samples, plant material or climate data, you have to process it."

The new building will provide the lab space necessary to analyze the data in a more controlled setting, Havstad says.

The Jornada's mission, since it was established in 1912, has been to provide information for the management and remediation or repair of desert rangelands.

Havstad says that mission is carried out in four different areas of study: understanding the basic ecology of the desert, discovering new ways to monitor the desert's health, developing new technologies to repair the desert, and looking for new techniques to manage livestock grazing in the Southwest.

The building will house not only Havstad's staff of 45 and scientists with the USDA's Natural Resource Conservation Service, but also NMSU scientists involved with the National Science Foundation's Long-term Ecological Research program, which focuses on basic ecological questions.

Work in the Jornada headquarters will build on the interdisciplinary research that takes place in NMSU's new Center for Sustainable Development of Arid Lands.

"The whole purpose of the new center is to get people from different disciplines together, and that's what the Jornada's about as well," Havstad says.

"Today's resource management problems are complex. In solving these problems, we know that we have to deal with many different kinds of questions and disciplines and capabilities, and so we need to put people together. This building is really about people."