A world-renowned scientist and the new director of Clemson’s Pee Dee Research and Education Center (REC) will be the guest speaker for the Dillon County Farm-City Week banquet and awards on Tuesday, November 19th, at 6:00 p.m. at the City of Dillon Wellness Center, 1647 Commerce Drive, Dillon.
Jane Dever was a professor, cotton breeder and Regents Service Fellow at Texas A&M AgriLife Research at Lubbock in her most recent post prior to coming aboard April 1 at Clemson, where she leads its research facility in Florence and Darlington Counties.
Dr. Dever has an extensive record of national and international scholarly productivity and service. She is a proactive leader for initiatives relating to cotton breeding and genetics and maintains a critical and extensive cotton cultivar testing program.
Dr. Dever grew up on a 160-acre cotton and small grains farm near Abernathy, Texas,and working in agriculture was in her blood. After she garnered a scholarship from Southwest Textiles Inc., a mill in her tiny hometown, Dever earned her bachelor’s degree in Textile Engineering, master’s in Crop Science and Ph.D. in Agronomy, with a focus on plant breeding, from Texas Tech University.
As associate director of the Lubbock Research and Extension Center — the largest of Texas A&M AgriLife’s 13 research centers — Dever led partnerships and collaborations among the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, Texas Tech University and the Texas A&M University System Agriculture Program and interacted with commodity boards representing underground water districts, cotton, corn, grain sorghum, peanuts, cattle feeders and wine grapes.
Before joining Texas A&M AgriLife, Dever managed global cotton breeding operations with Bayer CropScience. Under her leadership, more than 50 new varieties were successfully intellectual property-protected and released, including conventional varieties in Greece, Spain, Turkey and Brazil, varieties with biotechnology traits in the U.S. and Brazil, and hybrids in India.
The Dillon County Farm-City Week committee is excited that she will be joining them for this event. Awards will also be presented to the Farmer of the Year, Businessman of the Year, Industry of the Year, and outstanding students.
The public is invited to attend, but please RSVP to Johnnie Daniels at jd@dillonnews.org or by calling 843-230-4653.
