New Director for UF/IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center

Clint Thompson Cattle, Florida

Photo by UF/IFAS: Shows Brent Sellers speaking at a field day at the Range Cattle Research and Education Center (RCREC) at facility in Ona, Florida on Thursday, October 25th, 2019.

The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) recently announced that Brent Sellers, a UF/IFAS agronomy professor, has been named director of the UF/IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center in Ona, Florida. In 2004, Sellers started as an assistant professor of agronomy at the Center and for the past year served as interim center director. He told Southeast AgNet’s Randall Weiseman it’s been a great experience over the past year.

Sellers said he would eventually like to hire more faculty for the Range Cattle REC. In a UF/IFAS release, he noted his goals for the Center over the next five years:

  • Three months: Access to better Internet and phone capabilities.
  • Six months: Update the center’s strategic plan. “In order to do that, I want our faculty to come together and outline our goals and potential faculty positions that we feel would benefit the center as well as our clientele.”
  • 1 year: Finalize the strategic plan and begin to design improvements to infrastructure and equipment on the farm side of the research center. “These upgrades are necessary for cattle welfare as well as employee safety, and they bring us up to the state-of-the-art center that we need to be.” To do this, Sellers said he needs to start working with IFAS Advancement to promote a fundraising campaign for facility upgrades.
  • 5 years: “I’m hopeful we will have been able to raise the funds for the upgrades that I feel need to happen for us to reach the next level. If so, I hope to have begun construction on our cattle handling facility and other improvements at the center.”