Brent Rowell,
Professor

After 12 years as state Extension specialist for vegetable crops at the University of Kentucky, Brent Rowell has returned to international work in Myanmar (Burma) where he is currently training 120 field staff of the non-profit organization IDE (http://www.ideorg.org) in low-cost drip irrigation technologies, pest management, and sustainable vegetable production. This project is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Vegetable Crops at Cornell University (1984) with minors in Plant Pathology and Plant Breeding. After working as a vegetable specialist in Bangladesh, he lived for seven more years in Southeast Asia, working for an agricultural university on pest management and biological control in vegetable seed crops (northern Thailand) and for the Ministry of Agriculture in Cambodia to establish the first Cambodian national research and seed multiplication station for vegetable crops.

After coming to the University of Kentucky in 1994, Brent worked closely with the Department of Agricultural Economics, the Commodity Growers Cooperative (subsidiary of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative), the Kentucky Horticulture Council, and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture to address vegetable marketing and production infrastructure needs in the state. He emphasized opportunities in commercial vegetable production for tobacco growers and supervised a statewide vegetable crops demonstration program designed for tobacco growers seeking to diversify. He has special interests in adapting new and existing technology to the resources and special constraints facing small farmers. Research included collaborative projects with the Departments of Plant Pathology and Entomology on disease resistance and biological pest control in vegetable crops.

Prior to joining IDE Myanmar in 2006, he was a Fulbright scholar with the National Biological Control Research Center in Thailand in 2003-04.