 This time on Partners, it's the 1890 universities of America's land-grant system. From Alabama A&M's unique watershed project on the Flint River, to Prairie View A&M's 4-H efforts in creating the next generation of entrepreneurs, to North Carolina A&T's cutting-edge work with farm-fueled biosensors. These historically black colleges and universities are shaping the future of American agriculture. These are institutions that are willing to serve people, to allow people who otherwise might be denied education, accessibility to that education. Welcome to Partners! In the next half hour, we'll travel the nation and see breakthrough work in research, education and extension. That's what CSR EES is all about, helping universities generate valuable knowledge for those who need it and educating our next generation of Americans. And now it's time for Partners! In the terror and chaos of America's civil war, a surprising revolution in higher education began. In 1862, Congress passed legislation called the Morrill Act. It granted each state public lands to help establish and endow, in the words of Vermont Congressman Justin Smith Morrill, colleges for the benefit of agriculture and mechanic arts. These institutions of higher learning came to be known as land grant schools, and the Morrill Act was responsible for laying the foundation for public education through a national system of state colleges and universities. Its intent was to provide education to American children who could never hope to attend private schools. But in post-civil war America, the system did not benefit all. It doesn't initially benefit the freed slaves because the schools that are established are segregationist schools and only whites attend those schools. So while blacks might have thought they were going to benefit, it was the whites and in specific working class to lower class whites who benefit from the establishment of these schools that made higher education more accessible. There was only one school created to serve the freed slaves, the blacks, and that was Alcorn State in Mississippi. Then you really see that the majority of the schools at that time that are created the land grant schools are servicing a white population and there has to be a second Morrill Act and that comes in 1890. Since African Americans were denied admission to the 1862 land grants, Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1890. That resulted in additional land grant colleges located primarily in the south. What you see there is that 18 historically black colleges and universities are created with the passage of the second act, which is really an attempt to redress a remedy, the failings of the first Morrill Act. When they were founded with the focus on agriculture, people assumed tractors and holes and land, but nowadays agriculture has become high-tech. We are involved in robotics, we are involved in research and food science, we are involved in issues of health, we are involved in environmental science. So it's not education in a vacuum, it's education with a purpose, a national purpose in mind. In the next half hour, partners explores the efforts of these unique universities and with funding from the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, the 1890 land grant schools are making a difference in communities across the country. Today, this group is preparing for a trip on the Flint River. The waterway runs through scenic northeast Alabama and the bustling city of Huntsville. These folks are members of the Flint River Conservation Association. Their mission is to safeguard these waters and its valuable watershed, the surrounding lands that form the local drainage area. The Flint is a wonderful river. I like it because it is so close, it's a wilderness area close to an urban site. We actually get most of our drinking water from this river. Susan Weber is the Association's special projects chairman. At her day job, she's the city ecologist for Huntsville. We had a study done, NASA has said that by 2020, the county of Madison will be at 50% build out, which is going to be disastrous for water quality of all our streams in Madison County, the Flint River being the largest. While the group enjoys the journey today, their work is never really far away. Picking up trash is an expected part of the trip, a duty they practice en masse during their annual river cleanup. Our mission is to improve the water quality of the Flint River, but also in more of a large picture. We're trying to make people more and more aware of our own roles in non-point source pollution. We all have a role in that. But we are seeing some impacts from agriculture and from development, mostly in the form of sediment. So where people are not doing no-till farming and where we are getting new developments that aren't following best management practices, we do have a serious problem with sediment. And along with the sediment, of course, we get heavy metals and other things that are attached to the clay particles. It is the unseen non-point source pollution that is currently the biggest threat to the Flint's future. To get a handle on the current state of the Flint, Dr. Teferi Sagai from Alabama A&M University, the 1890 land grant school in Huntsville, is monitoring the river's water quality. He and his staff have placed remote sensing stations in aquatic environments throughout the watershed. Today, however, Teferi and his students are gathering data with a handheld device. This tube, called a sown, is carefully submerged into the Flint. Inside are sensors that measure a number of factors, including temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity and chlorophyll. Part of my job is to train students, especially African-American students. Besides USGS, no one is monitoring the water quality in the Flint River watershed. In general, we see a lot of pollution in this watershed. The nutrient level is low, relatively, in the last two years when we did this research, but there are some high level of lead and some other heavy metals. You see high level of free alcohol reform depending on what season. His research and what we've gotten from the USGS and from TVA and from research from our own water monitors, we have an idea of where the problem areas are and what needs to be done about them, and we've established all this information in the Flint River Watershed Management Plan. Teferi and crew return to the Alabama A&M campus. At the labs, the data gathered from the Flint is downloaded into a computer. This is the home of the Center for Hydrology, Soil Climatology and Remote Sensing. The staff here is working on a number of projects beyond the Flint River. Remote sensing will allow you to see things where you cannot see before. If there is drought, we can clearly see where the drought is originating, you know, and we can quickly take some action and we can, by estimating soil moisture qualities and how much it is in the soil, that will allow us to interrogate a field or when to drain a field. We are unique because we are the only African-American institution advancing the soil moisture work in this field. So that makes Alabama A&M unique and our center unique, and I'm getting good support from CSRES in terms of getting additional grants to continue this research. The farmers, they can benefit, you know, how to do precision farming. That means they can precisely apply chemicals, precisely apply water or irrigate a field. That means they are going to cut down their cost. One of those farmers benefitting from Alabama A&M's research is David Hodges. He runs a farm in Guntersville, some 40 miles away from campus. Environmental rules and regulations have come into play more prevalent than they were in the past, and we're trying to be good stewards here at the land. And with those challenges here, it requires a lot more day-to-day management and a lot more tweaking of operational decisions. To help David and other area farmers, Teferi and staff have installed weather stations in five counties in Alabama and three in Tennessee. This one here is actually located on Hodges farmland. The system, called Alabama Mesonet, collects data on soil moisture, air and soil temperature, rainfall and wind and speed direction. USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service National Water and Climate Center and NASA have partnered with Alabama A&M in the project. Continuous data recorded at 15-minute intervals gives farmers valuable local environmental information. Huntsville, Alabama has some great weather stations, but they are in Huntsville, Alabama with two mountains between us. And we also have a lake. We may get an each-of-brain here and Huntsville may be high and dry. So by having a weather station right here located on this farm, we're able to get exact data at exact time. Without it, it's a hit or miss. With this data, we have our soil temperature, it's right to plant, we have our moisture, it's dry enough to get into the fields. It takes a lot of the guesswork out and without institutions like A&M, the new technologies would never be able to make it to the farm. Back on the Flint, the group is finishing the last of the day's cleanup. Alabama A&M's remote sensing technology will help them plan for proper watershed development in the future. For Teferi Sagai, his work has just begun on the Flint River and on the weather station project. This is a challenge. Every day we are facing new things. I'm ambitious and I am trying to expand this network of weather stations throughout the state. So I'm hoping with the support from USDA and other agencies, this can happen and we can reach other people in the state of Alabama. Tuskegee University, an 1890 land grant started an agricultural experiment station in 1897. Its director, Dr. George Washington Carver. Our business arcade stop has been going on for about two years already and we made some pretty good money. Samantha Pimpedli attends Horace Mann Junior High School. She and her partners have started a business called Arcade Stop. Students can choose from a number of video games and for a fee, play them on the game consoles. Our first step was thinking of like how many consoles do we need and what type of games would people be interested in and what type of age group would we want to attract. I learned partnership and how to run a business and the targeting and everything, it was great. We're trying to teach them how to work cooperatively together, but they don't know the importance of it being a team member and when they get into the business world everything now is a team. They've learned how to work out problems, problem solving, lots of problem solving. Patrice Barnes heads the 4-H Youth Development Program in San Antonio for Prairie View A&M University, Texas' 1890 land grant school. Since 1998, she has focused on T-Teams, the Texas teens exploring entrepreneurial minds project. In the past five years, T-Teams has reached over 1,000 students in inner city schools. Annually, the young entrepreneurs strut their stuff at the 4-H Youth Trade Show. Here they set up booths, sell products and services, and are awarded prizes. T-Team offers the kids a positive outlook on life from what they're accustomed to in their poverty stricter neighborhoods. It provides them with another avenue, another chance, another positive door that they can open and also shows them a way to make money in a positive way. The students that we work with, they are ethnic students, Hispanic and black students. They come from economically challenged neighborhoods and some of them live in what we as known as the projects and some live with their aunts or uncles. Neighborhoods are really poor. You may see graffiti on the walls or you may see kids in gangs and those kinds of things. T-Teams businesses are as diverse as the project's participants. They range from hair braiding to lawn care, from t-shirt shops to candle making. In the process, the kids learn fundamental business skills of organization, marketing and economics. One recent project was started by two students from Sam Houston High School. The name of our business is Just Westlow and it's a car business and we just like trading cars with our friends and stuff so we just decided to make a business out of it. It's our business plan right here. We have our company name. Our benefits is just having fun and our products and our target is young people and old sports fans. We just had a lot of fun. Just us being together, it's always a lot of fun so sometimes you get on my nerve but it's alright though. I see them walking away with self-esteem, a knowledge about a career option they had no clue of. I see them gaining reading skills, organizational skills, management skills and these are skills that they've learned in managing their own businesses but these are also skills that they can take with them into their future careers in their lives. There's one student in particular and his name is Clifford Jefferson. He was a very shy student, had a monotone voice, always had his head down every time I saw him. It was about three years into the program that I got a chance to observe him being interviewed by Channel 9 News here in San Antonio at one of the trade show events and if you could see him, he had a nice suit on. He was talking to the newscaster with so much confidence and to see a child go from one area and develop into something that you could not possibly imagine is really worthwhile singing in a time of career. Since CSR EES began in 1994, the agency has granted nearly $1 billion to the 1890 land grant universities. The Delta country is a beautiful land in a natural state. We have a lot of water, it's a flat land. We don't see a lot of mountains, but we have a lot of river and lakes where we can do a lot of hunting and fishing. Fishing is really part of the culture here in Arkansas. We have also a lot of agriculture, we have cotton, we have rice, soybean, corn. Steve Palmer-Lew is a research assistant with the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, or UAPB. Most of his time is spent in the field working on the 1890 land grants Date Fish Verification Program. The project's goal is to verify the recommendations for effective aquaculture based on the university's research findings. Most of the research conducted at UAPB is done in small research funds of about 10th or quarter acres as opposed to commercial ponds that are over 10 acres. So we want to apply the results of the research conducted at the university into commercial scale ponds. One of the producers that Steve is working with is Harold Saul, a second-generation fish farmer. Together, they've tackled some difficult problems, helping Harold stay profitable in the competitive world of baitfish production. I love the personal interaction with the farmers and really being able to help farmers and keeping them in business, and this is all what it's all about. What they've done for us is took out a lot of guesswork. With the verification program, what they've done, they've got us more accuracy. Coming up with better feeds, better formulas for feeds for us to feed our fish and grow our fish more economically. Naturally, if we can grow, the production out of less feed, the better. They are the only research center in Arkansas that we can get a verification on our fish to be safe to ship out of state. And if we can't ship out of state, we're out of business. It's that simple. The baitfish verification program that Harold and others are involved with is based on the work of Nathan Stone and others at UAPB. The team has done extensive research with a fish called the Golden Shiner. Nathan is now turning his attention to the rosy red minnow. The rosy reds are an orange color with a little pinky tones to them. They have a white to a silvery underbelly. We'd like to have nutritionally sound brooders. And then that would translate into larger eggs, higher quality eggs, and better fry. Fry is the little baby fish, the one that just hatches from the egg. We're hoping that it'll reduce their costs and make them more efficient. I mean, really, the spawning rearing pond method, it's a mix of sizes and it's fairly inefficient. With jar hatching, we could turn out even-aged fish and then go into the feeder market or it'd be a lot more predictable for producers. Hi, John. How are ya? For some, this exceptional effort may appear disproportionate for simply meeting the leisurely needs of Arkansas's anglers. But the economic impact goes way beyond the fish farms and river banks of the state. Arkansas is the leading producer of this baitfish in the United States. About 23 million by the census of aquaculture. But there's a multiplier effect of six to seven fold here in the local community. It creates a lot of jobs. The feeds that go into baitfish, things like soybean meal and cottonseed meal are products raised here in Arkansas. And of course, there's a 10 to 15 fold economic multiplier when you go to the retail markets. So it generates a lot of income. There's been very fast adoption of the practices from our research recommendations and also the farms are very progressive. And so I think some of the yields and survivals have been excellent. We really depend on USDA and CSREES for the funding and the research support. It's matched by state dollars here in Arkansas. And that's really enabled us to support our stakeholders, the fish farmers here in Arkansas. It's really what the purpose of a land grant is and that's what we believe we're doing. In addition to the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff, these 1890 land grants have active aquaculture research centers. Salmonella was our focus along with another bacteria. And those two are foodborne bacteria commonly found in poultry. And North Carolina is a major poultry producer in the nation. Mohammed Ahmedna is a food scientist at North Carolina A&T State University. He and his research team are working on ways to detect contamination early so that the public can avoid foodborne illness. And the stakes are high. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that salmonella infections are responsible for nearly 1.5 million illnesses annually. This has resulted in more than 16,000 hospitalizations and nearly 600 deaths. The economic repercussions are in the billions of dollars due to lost productivity. North Carolina A&T was well positioned to work with the poultry industry to solve this problem, considering the University's long history helping local farmers. Speed through technology might just prove to be the answer. In short, a biosensor is basically a device that detects biological organisms such as salmonella or any other bacteria, living things. The biosensor is basically enabling you to have the speed that you don't have with traditional methods. So speed is an issue and also portability and costs. This instrumentation may look simple, but tests to date have shown that it can rapidly detect salmonella. Currently, industry methods for foodborne bacteria detection can take several days. This biosensor unit, once refined, may deliver results in just a few hours. The payoff for consumers is a safer food supply because of early detection and CSRES has been instrumental in getting this line of research going. We have gotten a grant that started this research and our ultimate aim is to have it licensed to a company. The university has filed for a patent for the technology and we have had some interest from a couple of companies. In the meantime, Mohammed and his staff are looking at other aspects of biosensor technology that may have impact far beyond the poultry farm. The work that Mohammed is doing is looking at pathogens and other kinds of disease organisms that may affect our food supply and other kinds of projects related to primarily minority farm workers and their health concerns. It's geared towards populations that have been underserved and their health and safety concerns have often not been considered enough. So in that sense, it's extremely important. It is here at a field station of the North Carolina Agro Medicine Institute that Mohammed plans to test remote biosensors in actual farm field conditions. This instrument platform, now being tested by the Institute, will allow for real-time transmission of data through GPS satellite communications. It is self-sufficient with all instrumentation being powered by batteries charged by the sun and it has potential for agro-terrorism applications. They're working a lot on making sure that our food supply is safe, non-contaminated, either from an induced terrorist activity or from natural pathogens that can occur. Ten miles away at the Institute's office center, Mohammed is received real-time. Mostly weather conditions are now being transmitted. But when North Carolina A&T's biosensors are added to the platform, critical biological detection will also be available. What the machine now is ready for is real-life applications and for either researchers like Mohammed to utilize in their research or for commercial or governmental or what-a-have-you applications in the field. Your happy day is the day where you feel like, yes, I think I'm on to something and hopefully that's what I am right now. I feel that our job as scientists is to give back to the community and then play a role in making the lives of our citizens better. From remote sensing research at Alabama A&M to youth entrepreneur programs at Prairie View A&M from the aquaculture endeavors at the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff to food safety experiments at North Carolina A&T, 1890 institutions are making their mark across the country and CSREES is determined to continue support of these historically black colleges and universities. On the next partners, it's the National Research Initiative. In California, UC Davis scientists are unlocking the secrets of wheat by mapping its complex genomes. It's vital information that promises benefits for both farmers and consumers. And in Mississippi, researchers are exploring the medicinal wonders of the May Apple, a wild plant that produces critical chemicals used in today's anti-cancer medicines. That's all next time on Partners. Information on 1890 land grants and other partners' episodes, log on to this website.