Modern Challenges Make Agronomist Jeff Hill’s Work Exciting

Jeff Hill helps direct staffing, training and performance for sales and service programs, while lending his experience to establishing price schedules and discounts, both for field producers and wineries.   Through his experience and knowledge with products and services, Hill is able to make sales projections and establish profitability margins.  Hill helped negotiate contracts with buyers and managed significant numbers of workers in a large vine operation.

Jeff Hill’s studies at Fresno State University in Fresno, California specialized in the science and technology of plant usage in a variety of applications, including food, fuel, fibers and land reclamation.  Called agronomy, this study encompasses plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science.  A variety of sciences are applied in agronomy, including biology, chemistry, economics, ecology, earth science, and genetics.  

Jeff Hill’s agronomist specialty brings him in contact with the complex issues involved in producing healthy food, managing environmental impacts of agriculture, and mining plants for energy.  Hill was able to choose a specialty, or specialties, within the field, such as crop rotation, irrigation and drainage, plant breeding, plant physiology, soil classification, soil fertility, weed control, and insect and pest control.  Hill has worked extensively in irrigation, pesticides and plant health.

Agronomists have made ground breaking strides in the selective breeding of plants, increasing crop yields and improving nutritional value in such diverse crops as corn, soybeans and wheat.  New types of plants, such as triticale produced from rye and wheat crossbreeding, have resulted in a breed with more usable protein than the original plants.  These types of research results have also come from fruit and vegetable experimentation, resulting in improved yields from well-known crops such as the grape vines developed specifically for raisin production overseen by Jeff Hill.

The agronomical work of agricultural specialists like Jeff Hill has utilized biotechnology to not only increase crop yields but to modify known agricultural commodities for use in substitute fuels, oil based chemicals and detergents.  Agronomists study and research environmentally friendly ways to increase productivity and profitability, by analyzing soils for nutrient content, percentage of organic matter content, pH levels and ability to hold nutrients for maximum use.   The preservation of the soil and controlling erosion through specialty tilling techniques, and using the soil more effectively to dispose of manure, pollution and pesticides are all the business of the agronomist.  Techniques such as no-till crops, soil binding grasses on contoured slopes and the use of depth contour drains have come from agronomists’ agricultural research.

Jeff Hill has studied through his specialty of agronomy the important emphasis on ecological and environmental perspectives when managing agricultural systems to produce sustainable yields, organic specialty farming, alternative foods and cropping.  The need to ensure that soils and plant life are ecology sound for future generations will inform the future work of agronomists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agronomy