Project Highlights

The Bridgestone Research Farm in Eloy welcomed a large group of growers on Tuesday, November 1st for a Guayule Grower Field Day. Speakers included researchers and extension agents from both the University of Arizona and Bridgestone. Dr. Dave Dierig welcomed the group with an overview of Bridgestone’s ongoing investment in guayule. Will Thelander offered a grower’s perspective on the experience of growing guayule for 4 years. Detailed presentations covered weed and pest management practices, irrigation, using the BENCO model to forecast new crop adoption, and more.

The June edition of the SBAR Extension and Outreach Newsletter is now available. The SBAR team continues to expand outreach activities. Read about our youth development focus, Excel for Agribusiness curriculum, and linking rural students to university faculty. Growers will find details of our recent guayule research on planting dates as well as processing details.

The first 2022 edition of the SBAR Extension and Outreach Newsletter is now available. The SBAR team continues to be busy with activities and synthesizing research results from field trials. Included are synopses of the latest guar and guayule research with a focus on the role of fertilizers. The newest highlights from New Mexico include details of their successful Public Speaking Workshop as well as a call for serving on a statewide Agricultural Science Advisory Committee.

You can also read about our latest lesson plan, Indigenous Agriculture and Plant Cultivation in the Southwest. And consider following the links to sign up for an SBAR 4-H STEM workshop scheduled to take place in Yavapai County, Arizona.  Reach out to our team with your questions and let us know what you’d like to learn about in the next quarter.

The SBAR Youth Development team hosted the second of three SBAR/4-H STEM Exploration Workshops on Saturday, February 26th in Navajo County. The workshops are designed to provide youth development professionals hands-on experience with SBAR-designed curricula and activities while learning how to incorporate sustainability and engineering topics into existing activity plans. Taking experiential learning opportunities to rural areas of Arizona will help to foster the creation of a sustainable bioeconomy.

A number of people from the SBAR research and operations team at the University of Arizona, along with future partners at the UA’s College of Agriculture visited the Bridgestone Agro Operations Guayule Farm in Eloy and the Bridgestone Biorubber Process Research Center in Mesa this week. The group included: Jacqueline Bruhn, Program Coordinator for SBAR; José Carvalho de Souza Dias, Assistant Specialist in Weed Science in the School of Plant Sciences and with SBAR; Matthew Jenks, Director and Professor, School of Plant Sciences; and Alex Strong, Director of Development for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The December 2021 issue of the SBAR Extension and Outreach Newsletter is now available for download and sharing. The team hosted a multitude of workshops in Arizona and New Mexico this fall, and you can read all about the latest addition to the SBAR Curriculum: SBAR Lotería. Future dates for upcoming 4-H STEM workshops in Arizona are also included. Get your calendar out to see if you can join us!

Guayule has been grown under various conditions since at least the 1940s in the United States, and it is still a plant that generates a lot of questions and research hypotheses.

SBAR Researchers (Mark Von Cruz, David Dierig, Sam Wang, Amber Lynch, and Theresa Sullivan) and SBAR Intern (Jocelyn Zhu) worked collaboratively to evaluate phenotypic and morphological diversity of the guayule seed collection within the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System. The analysis was completed on historical breeding lines and wild genetic resources from the 1950’s to 1990’s. Variation among germplasm on seed weight and germination was determined along with leaf traits and trichomes using image analyses.

The SBAR Center has just released new Briefing Papers on a variety of relevant topics related to SBAR research and future directions. As with any large endeavor, there are questions answered and new questions generated for future work. The Briefing Papers provide a synopsis of accomplishments and easy explanations for important bio-economy topics, while also looking to possibilities for the future.

As SBAR research continues – aiming toward our mission of creating a sustainable bioeconomy in the Southwest, we want to take a moment to celebrate with our recent SBAR Graduates. These students worked very hard over the last few years and showed tenacity and perseverance to complete their degrees under COVID-19 restrictions and in novel circumstances. The whole SBAR Team cannot be more proud of their achievements.