If you or your company would be interested in cooperating and partnering with NTCC Farm to conduct research on various agriculture projects contact Director of Agriculture, Rene’ McCracken at 903-434-8267 or rmccracken@ntcc.edu.
In the spring of 2012, the installation of compost tea production equipment and initial start-up of Serengeti-style grazing using our NTCC mix of compost tea injected into an irrigation system began one of the farm’s primary, long term research projects. The main objective of this project is to utilize pasture irrigation system (K-Line) and management of soil health to intensively manage small acres and dramatically increase the unit per acre production rate for cattle with a target goal of 40 head on 5 acres of Bermuda grass pasture.
Over the years, the NTCC farm has grown in size until today it consists of approximately 250 acres of primarily improved Bermuda pasture and hay meadows. For the last 15 years the program (and the Farm) has primarily focused on beef cattle managed as a cow-calf operation (initially Santa Gertrudis but today Black Angus). As the NTCC Agriculture Program has expanded, the farm operation has become more diversified and a shift to more sustainable agriculture practices began.
Agriculture today is an exciting field within which many career paths can be pursued. The diversity of agriculture as a sector of our market economy is astounding. Careers in the basic sciences, biotechnology, animal science, agronomy, horticulture, dairy, poultry, beef, hay production, animal management, sales and marketing, viticulture and enology, food services, equipment sales and service, production agriculture, environmental science, organic production of foodstuffs, plant and animal breeding, and all types of further processing of raw agricultural food and fiber products
